Australian Financial Review

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

Who's afraid of Julia Gillard?

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

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

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

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

Silly numbers

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

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

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

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

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

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

ABS MEDIA RELEASE September 24, 2007

"Largest population increase ever: ABS

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

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

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

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

"Population growth

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

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

Growth Lobby scapegoats PM to avoid its own responsibility

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

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

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

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

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

NOTES

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

A short article in the The Australian Financial Review of 24 September 2008 leaves the reader wondering what exactly was the point of NSW's extensive program of privatisations going back to the 1980's.

The article, "Bits and pieces won't fetch $1 billion" by Tracey Ong purports to show what options are available to the NSW government in its planned mini-budget to cover the claimed $1 billion-plus shortfall in its budget.

The article states, "The problem for Mr Rees is that the once-rich government asset portfolio has been depleted after two decades of reform." This 'reform' left, according to the article, apart from the electricity assets, the sale of which is now politically impossible, "only a handful of assets... worth offloading."

This surely begs a question from those who have held out privatisation to us as the panacea for all of our economic ills: Exactly what of enduring benefit has been achieved by past waves of privatisation?

Two of the principle justifications given for privatisation have been:

1. It would free up government money in order that it could be spent on 'core' government responsibilities; and
2. It would make the whole economy run more efficiently.

So what then happened to all the money 'freed up' from past privatisations? Why is it, as we are told, that NSW faces a financial crisis? If privatisation is supposed to make economies run more efficiently, how is it that NSW's economy has contracted?

The article lists the "prize assets" already sold: "TAB, State Bank and the Government Insurance Office (GIO)". Other assets that the article failed to mention are the Government Printing Office Printing, the Homebush abbattoir and the State brickworks, privatised by Greiner and FreightCorp privatised by Carr in 2002. In addition, large numbers of government buildings, housing stock and land were sold off, beginning from the time of the Wran Labor Government. That process was accelerated by the Greiner Liberal Government which came to power in 1988.

Much of NSW's roads have also been privatised and turned into toll-ways since the time of Unsworth under the different guise of "Public Private Partnerships", including the infamous Cross-City Tunnel that Carr inflicted upon the Sydney public.

This all begs further questions: How much longer can the process of privatisation continue, and what should the NSW government do to balance its budget once all the remaining assets are gone?

Typically, the article only proposes further privatisation to solve NSW's financial crisis. Other possible measures such as raising loans or obtaining additional revenue are not even contemplated.

Ong gives a list of assets which she tells us could be sold off immediately:

Others ruled out as politically too difficult include: Ports, Landcom, the four water corporations and, of course, electricity.

The article points out, even if any of the assets were sold, they would be sold at firesale prices.

Canadian Ronald Wright in A short history of progress (2004) wrote of economic neo-liberalism which demands privatisation of publicly owned assets:

"After the Second World War, a consensus emerged to deal with the roots of violence by creating international institutions and democratically managed forms of capitalism based on Keynesian economics and America's New Deal. This policy, although far from perfect, succeeded in Europe, Japan and some parts of the Third World. ...

"To undermine that post-war consensus and return to to archaic political patterns is to walk back into the bloody past. Yet that is exactly what the New Right has achieved since the late 1970s, rewrapping the old ideas as new and using them to transfer the levers of power from elected governments to unelected corporations -- a project sold as 'tax-cutting' and 'deregulation' by the Right's courtiers in the media, ... The conceit of laissez-faire economics -- that if you let the horses guzzle enough oats, something will go through for the sparrows -- has been tried many times, leaving ruin and social wreckage."(pp126-127)

NSW's record seems to confirm that privatisation is, indeed, just old-fashioned plunder as practised by the Conquistadores, Vikings, Mongols, etc. Revenue generating assets paid for over previous decades by taxpayers have apparently been sold off for no better reason than to line the pockets of private investors, bankers and stockbrokers.

The rightful owners of these assets are the public of NSW, who have paid for them through taxes and hefty bills, and no Government has the right to "offload" these assets without their informed consent. Whenever they have been consulted they have rejected it overwhelmingly. This, and not the failure to get the Labor Party's support, as the article implies, is the principle reason why electricity privatisation was stopped.

Whilst it is true that "domestic and overseas players lining up to get a slice of the action" were disappointed, given the harm already done to NSW by these parasites the NSW public surely owes them no more favours.

To the extent that the alleged NSW financial crisis (as opposed to the global financial crisis) is real it should be fixed by the raising of loans or by finding other fair and equitable means to raise revenue. It should not be "fixed" by selling off yet more family silver.

This article was originally posted on 20 Sep 2008

. It was revised on 1 Oct with the help of Sheila Newman, editor of The Final Energy Crisis (2nd edition).

See also: "Media contempt for facts in NSW electricity privatisation debate" of 19 Sep 08.