"But if you are fleeing something as banal as poverty, economic hardship, low wages, a lack of opportunity or jobs, or if you're just looking for a better life for you and your family - then the door to Australia is closed". Australia is not the escape valve for all the problems in the world, and our carrying capacity is limited. Already South Australia, like other States, has an unemployment crisis, especially with the young people. Australia can't keep offering a "better life" if already there are many people living here also seeking the same!
Australia's population growth has been controlled and manipulated politically for too long. South Australia has low fertility levels, and there's no organic justification for more growth. The great majority of Australia's growth is due to net overseas migration, about 60%. We once celebrated and benefited from high growth, but now it's hurting - and time for governments to turn off the immigration tap and stop making policies for a few elite such as corporations and property developers.

Well I am most surprised! The SA Greens have actually developed the fundamentally CORRECT policy regarding population! http://greens.org.au/sa/policies/sustainable-population

This is wonderful. This is precisely what has been terribly lacking in the Australian Greens. It might have been there in writing amongst their policies but it certainly hasn’t been there in their actions.

Let’s hope that it is more than just words for the SA Greens.

I mean, how obvious is it that we need to consider population size and growth rate, and to advocate a slowing down of the growth rate if not a stabilisation of population, when there are huge problems with basic resource provision, infrastructure and services?

How absurd would it be for us to just blunder forth, as Malcolm King would have us do, with rapid population growth, when the life-support and quality-of-life support mechanisms are not in place?

I would like to thank Malcolm, yet again, for bringing this Greens policy and that of the Sustainable Population Party and Stop Population Growth Now Party to our attention here on OLO. He is certainly doing a great service for the country and for the prospects of essential political reform.

My pleasure Luddy, old mate. I certainly helped your cause in Penrith and Griffith. Who would have thunk it that the SPP candidate in Griffith actually made software for the electronic gambling industry?

Any more visits from Roy Beck and Numbers USA? Little Bindy needs his help big time.

Hey Malcolm, could you answer this question:

>> How absurd would it be for us to just blunder forth, as Malcolm King would have us do, with rapid population growth, when the life-support and quality-of-life support mechanisms are not in place? <<

And adjunct to that:

Don’t you think it might be a good idea to address the demand for resources, goods, services and infrastructure instead of forever only looking at the supply side, and to strive to balance demand and supply, instead of simply endlessly increasing supply to feed the endlessly increasing demand?

As one can see from some of the other posters, the SA greens are not the only greens with this particular wish list.
Personally I have to agree with them, and would remediate any local over population outcome, by introducing their almost exclusively preferred Euthanasia; and then selecting them as the very first conscripted candidates?
I promise you, this policy selection, would not only shrink the green ranks faster then any other policy paradigm, but quite dramatically improve the intellectual quotient of the remaining population, into the bargain?
Maybe they'd all become reds overnight, or just very red faced?
(RED, retired and extremely dangerous?) Ha, ha.
Rhrosty

The usual garbage from Malcolm King who seems unaware that South Australia is the driest state in the driest inhabited continent. Congratulations to the SA Greens for coming up with their far-sighted policy on stabilising population. Perhaps Malcolm King could drive around the state one day. Nice in the Adelaide Hills but the state is mostly flat and arid. You can grow a bit of wheat on the Eyre and Yorke Peninsulars and wine around Clare and the Barossa, but it's all pretty marginal, especially if climate change bites any harder. Did MK not notice the summer time temperatures in Adelaide? The city will be uninhabitable if this keeps up. Why is this an ideological debate anyway? Surely it's just a matter of achieving a resources/population balance. What's wrong with that? And don't tell me if they just developed the Olympic Dam things would be alright. BHP couldn't afford the diesel to remove the overlay! We've reached the end of the cheap oil era and things are different now. We're entering a time of contraction. These debates about population are increasingly anachronistic. We live in a carbon-constrained and increasingly resource-constrained world. The real issue is how we get back humanely to a population size that is sustainable in the long-term before nature does it for us - inhumanely probably.