lifestyle

Long term Aussie Residents, including many who have constructed their own park cabins, and are exemplary for living a sustainable lifestyle on limited means, now face the full onslaught of Chinese demographic and economic imperialism acquiesced to by Liberal, Labor and Green politicians. (This article comes from a member of Australia First and Candobetter.net is publishing it because Australia First is attempting to represent these Wantirna Caravan Park residents in its program to support relocalisation and a small population in Australia.)

Chinese purchasers, apparently lacking feeling for the caravan park, or its natural outlook which enhances the local area, want to exploit the land for building and $$$$ speculating on 294 dogbox houses. On current trends they are likely to be sold to prospective Chinese immigrants in the continuation of the large stream we are already experiencing. In this way incoming immigrants will displace the caravan park residents.

Stiff luck to Aussie Residents who are to be booted out to make way!

This abysmal treatment of dispossession results from the politicians opening the floodgates for foreign “investments.”
It is even rumoured that a Liberal Party Chinese Branch for local Deakin Electorate is likely to be formed to enhance support from Chinese money.

Australia First says Stand up for Aussies - No Exceptions! And, no dispossession of Caravan Park residents.

Support the Australia First Petition directing political representatives to
[I] refrain from any redevelopment permits, and
[ii] for Legislation to compulsory acquire the Wantirna Caravan Park for Public Housing Land, under co-operative management including by existing Residents, and
[iii] close down foreign money buying out our Australia.

Download and sign the petition

In a piece in The Australian[1] Dec 24, 2015, entitled "Honey, we shrank the backyard," population growth promoter for the property investment sector, Bernard Salt, observes that the block size of ordinary Australian houses has shrunk due to lifestyle changes such as after school organised sport and other after school activities and women working. The backyard, Salt acknowledges, was a “wondrous place” where children used to play in a relatively unstructured space, unobserved by parents, during an unsophisticated era devoid of today's patios and outdoor eating. The conclusion is that, after all, shrinking backyards come with bigger cities, and and a “leaner, cleaner more efficient way of living”.

Why has Bernard Salt written this article?

One must bear in mind that it is the 1950s brick veneer villa that Bernard Salt targets. It appears to be his job to do this and to "evict" the ordinary Australians who live in these houses. He does not target houses such as the luxurious older style mansion where he lives in the comfortable suburb of Camberwell.

I heard him in person, as an invited speaker at a public meeting in Hawthorn about 4 years ago, derisively referring to widows in these houses "rattling around" and that they should move out, or words to this effect. This latest piece specifically refers to the back yards of brick veneer houses.

A.V. Jennings brick veneers with backyards

Many of the Post WW2 brick veneer houses in Melbourne were built by A.V.Jennings when there was an acute housing shortage. According to Jennings, one of the key design features of them was that children could be observed through the kitchen window playing in the backyard. I know this because a friend of mine was related to Jennings by marriage and she reports this is what he used to say about his creations. (This contrasts with Salt's memory or description of children being unobserved.)

The apparent purpose of the middle paragraphs of Salt's article are to paint an unattractive, unsophisticated rather bogan picture of what is being snatched from us, so that we won't want to try to hang on or to grieve too much. In this, Salt appears to draw heavily on Barry Humphries' work so - easy money for him.

Why do families now need two incomes and still can't afford housing?

Regarding Salt's pronouncement that "Mum's at work" and kids are in after-school activities, I would have thought the first would be the cause of the second. They are not independent of each other. Why is Mum at work? Or should I ask, "Why are both parents working and paying others to look after their children after school?" (After school care is not a free service.) Did people suddenly realise what great fun it was to be at work, so much fun that they would deny themselves the ONLY, chance that they would ever get in their lives to spend time with their offspring in the brief period called childhood? I somehow doubt it.

I would suggest that the design of low maintenance outdoor living areas probably reflects time poverty in households where both parents go to work. The trend to smaller blocks for people raising children is not a reflection of lifestyle choice but of economic imperative as housing prices and rents have risen. Both parents working instead of one amounts to a loss to the home of about 10 hours per day, 5 days per week. That is time lost to such activities as maintaining a garden.

Faux evolutionary approach to normalising land confiscation

Salt makes the loss of the backyard sound like an evolutionary process as we find more enticing pursuits outside the home but he doesn't say what those pursuits are. In rubbishing the old back yard, he singles out the incinerator. The incinerator has recently acquired very unattractive connotations both aesthetically and in terms of air pollution and carbon emissions. People are now very sensitive to these issues and Salt's reference to incinerators provides a great example of a way to turn everyone off the notion of ordinary Australians having a bit of land for themselves. I don't think incinerators then were universal, anyway and now we have paper and cardboard recycling. But is this a fair exchange for losing "the back yard" ? Should we be thus punished for past incinerator follies?

Society's gain is expressed as a "leaner, cleaner more efficient way of living." This is, however, unconvincing, as there is nothing in this description that alludes to quality of life or to any actual purpose for our lives, apart from "work".

Who might this article convince? People who have very limited time for reading, the actual victims who are fast losing space and amenity as the population soars and for whom a no regrets article like this might be somewhat comforting.

NOTES

[1] Note that Murdoch's Australian is one face of Murdoch's property dot com, www.realestate.com.au, so it is not surprising that Mr Salt writes for the Australian and for the Herald Sun.

[This article was initially posted as a comment in response to Brian McGavin's article 'Report on conference to find 10 best of 20 climate solutions'].

A 'Queenslander' style family home in Brisbane

If "Australia was a big country well able to absorb a bigger population" [Ed Miliband, UK Climate and Energy Secretary], then we would have full employment, public infrastructure and services would have excess capacity ready to cope, federal and state governments would be in surplus and there would be no undue pressures on our economy, society or ecology. But this is clearly not the case - just read any newspaper in Australia. It's obvious when commuting to work. Try getting a job. Try getting elective surgery. Try booking children into a school or toddlers into childcare. Try buying a house.

Edward Miliband, an economist and now somehow qualified to be UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change in Britain's Labor Party, and somehow qualified to be an authority on Australia and its population capacity and ecological footprint - or else really an ambitious UK polly who will say anything before checking his facts, and who has no expertise on Australia or in population sociology?

Demand stress upon all resources is worsening and at its root, this demand is driven by the growth of human population and its proportionate demand for scarce resources.

What is needed to clarify the problem is to establish measures and benchmarks. The ‘best or most favourable’ population for Australia and each of its cities and regions will be its 'optimum population'. This is one key benchmark. It is a more appropriate measure than 'sustainable population', because 'sustainable' implies the maximum possible, which is a less than ideal outcome. If Australians want to live in congestion akin to Bangkok or Hong Kong, then even if our resources could be pushed further to the sustainable limit, Australia's 'sustainable population' would be a scary number!

Bangkok

But how do we measure the benchmark of 'optimum population'? The Optimum Population Trust (OPT) approaches this measurement by applying the test of ecological footprinting (or eco-footprinting) This seeks to measure the ecological carrying capacity of a district, province, country, global region and even the whole planet. Carrying capacity is defined by OPT as "the size of human population that can be supported in a given territory, in a specified life-style (for example 'Modest European'), without degrading its physical and ecological environment, and without imposing wastes on the global environment beyond a specified limit." OPT Research Co-ordinator Andrew Ferguson defines eco-footprinting as "the process of determining the bioproductive area that a person or a population needs in order to sustain a specified lifestyle."

So the test then comes down to one of lifestyle. Lifestyle is a familiar term but one worth defining at this point. Dictionary .com defines lifestyle as "the habits, attitudes, tastes, moral standards, economic level, etc., that together constitute the mode of living of an individual or group." Perhaps Australians should reflect on this definition -'room to move', 'low cost of living', health, individual freedoms, access to opportunities, access to resources, etc. In Australia, we apparently have one of the best lifestyles on the planet. Australian lifestyle is made up of a set of values that should not be taken for granted.

So if eco-footprinting is about the relationship between a bioproductive area of a person or population to sustain a specified lifestyle, then this assumes lifestyle is inversely proportional to population - where the larger the population and faster the growth of that population the lower the standard of lifestyle - 'room to move', lower costs, opportunities, resource access, reduced competition, etc. In Australia, we apparently have one of the best lifestyles on the planet.

But this is relative and these days it depends on where one lives in Australia and one's socio-economic status. Back in the 1960's Australia was arguably a classless society. These days not so. In 1960 Australia's population was 10 million. In 1970 it was 12 million. In 1980 it was 14 million. In 1990 it was 17 million. In 2009 it is 21.8 million and increasing exponentially currently at 300,000 per year and could reach $23 million by 2010. So in 50 years, Australia's population has more than doubled. With current government policy at both federal and state levels our population will likely double again to 50 million in less than 50 years. Based on policies and historical trends to concentrate population in Australia's capital cities, this means Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane and other major cities will be twice the size they are now. Imagine that for a moment! This is the real risk. It is frankly the biggest problem facing Australia.

Some other useful measures to better define the population growth problem are:

'Ecological footprint' is defined by the World Wildlife Fund as "an ecological footprint compares countries' consumption of natural resources with the Earth's biological capacity to regenerate them," or "a measure of humanity's use of renewable resources."

'Ecological space' is "the biologically productive space available to each person on the planet. Divided into equal shares (i.e. divided by world population) it was 5 - 6 hectares per person in 1900 and decreased to 1.5 hectares per person by 2000. Ecological space can expand or shrink depending on resource consumption, technological innovation, population growth and other factors."

Hectare, global (gha) "In eco-footprinting, 1 hectare (10,000m2, or 100m x 100m) of biologically productive space with world-average productivity. In 2002 the biosphere had 11.4 billion hectares of biologically productive space corresponding to roughly one quarter of the planet's surface. These 11.4 billion hectares include 2 billion hectares of cropland, 3.5 billion hectares of grazing land, 3.8 billion hectares of forest land, 0.3 billion hectares of inland waters and 0.3 hectares of built-up land. One global hectare is therefore a hectare representing the average capacity of one of these 11.4 billion hectares. Thus a hectare of highly productive land represents more 'global hectares' than the same surface of less productive land. Global hectares allow the meaningful comparison of the ecological footprints of different countries, which use different qualities and mixes of cropland, grazing land, and forest."

Becoming familiar with these measures and benchmarks will enable us to have a clearer understanding about what population numbers and growth Australia and Auatralians can indeed 'absorb'.

Moama Beach, South Australia...with many hectares per person (and seagull).

Illustration adapted from original at http://www.lowbird.com/data/images/2008/02/george-w-bush.jpg

Uncharitable

I think you have all been most unappreciative of President Bush's achievements. Not just uncharitable but lacking in insight about the way the world works and what has to be done to maintain our way of life. President Bush has done a great job here in very difficult circumstances, and he does not get due credit.

The basics

Let's sketch the basics. We 1.5 billion in rich countries could not have anything like our affluent living standards, our good health standards, our security, indeed our cultural life if we were not getting far more than our fair share of the world's resources. We consume something like 17 times the per capita amount of things like oil that the poorest half of the world's people average. Now that doesn't happen automatically. It has to be organised, and that takes a lot of difficult work. Billions of poor people in the Third World would rather not see their resources and their own labour used to produce wealth to ship out to enrich the corporations and the supermarket shoppers in the rich countries.

Realpolitix

So the first task is to make sure they don't see the situation as illegitimate. This is fairly easily done by the economists who explain that the only and the right way for things to be produced and allocated is by allowing the market to make the decisions. Or course markets always let the rich take everything, because they can outbid the poor. If there's ever any grumbling about this the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO are on hand to let them know that if any government was silly enough to depart from sound market principles then they would get no loans, or assistance with their impossible debt, and they would be banned from exporting anything. They usually get the message and shape up.

Ah, but unfortunately there are always a few knucklehead governments and rebel groups which persist in wanting to devote their nation's resources directly to the improvement of their people's welfare rather than see them flow out to enrich others. These people often call themselves "nationalists" but of course we identify them as subversives, insurgents, communists and/or terrorists. They do things like cut oil pipelines, wage civil war, sell drugs, and try to depose legitimate governments, and cause refugees and famines. Nice people in orderly rich countries despair at these silly people who don't understand proper economics and seem to delight in beating each other up and disrupting sensible development.

Good old-fashioned approach

So from time to time we have to take on the burden of straightening things out, banging a few heads together, supporting the correct faction with money and arms and getting rid of "uncooperative" governments, so that peace can be restored under governments that will rule properly. Sometimes we have to act pretty decisively to restore order, in fact sometimes we have to smash the country to shreds and kill several hundred thousand people in the process, but as US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said when our sanctions killed an estimated 500,000 people in Iraq, it's worth it.

More basics

Look, people at the supermarket checkout counter don't understand how serious the situation is. If we can't go on getting oil at the rate we have become accustomed to those shelves will be bare. The stuff's getting scarce now. The Chinese are after it; that's why they're supporting murderous regimes in Africa without asking any questions. Now you can't secure the stuff just by being nice and asking to buy some; you have to go after it strenuously and sometimes you have to throw a little weight around, or some other bastard will get it first. That's what geopolitics is about. It's dog eat dog and devil take the hindmost out there. Most wars in history have been about grabs for resources. That's what The Great game in central Asia has been about and is about now. We have to secure our oil fields and we have to get safe routes for those long pipelines to sea ports, through foreign countries, some of which don't like us much. We can't build them and we can't protect them unless we have military bases and unless we bribe or bully some of those regimes into doing what we want.

Securing the Empire

So can't you see that we had to take Iraq and Afghanistan. And what if Saddam had decided to stop trading oil in US dollars! GW and the team bit the bullet; they did what was necessary. And GW has been a great front man; he's taken the flak for a tough and dirty but crucial job. When everyone's criticising and you can't tell them what you are really doing its best if the mess looks like a mistake made by a buffoon.

Yes of course they were clumsy. In the past they have pulled off most of the coups and assassinations and invasions neatly and quietly - got rid of Noriega, Lumumba, the Sandinistas, put in the Shah, supported our kleptocrat Suharto in Indonesia for 30 years, eliminated deviance in Haiti and Grenada (especially important that, can't let the little ones get away with deviatingŠsets a bad example the rest might see they can follow)Šwith not a grumble at home. Mind you they did stuff up a bit on Cuba and Venezuela.

So yes they did miscalculate in Iraq and Afghanistan but securing the empire is a difficult job, and it's a vital job. You cannot live in the way you have become accustomed, let alone have the 3% p. growth you insist on, unless we go on getting control of most of the dwindling resources an that means running those countries to our benefit not theirs. George and the Neo-cons have done it for you, in difficult circumstances. I think their critics should just be a bit more understanding and appreciative. If you want to go on living with your too-big houses and your plasmas and your jet-away vacations just quit the backchat and support your empire and those who secure it for you.