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The Forum > Article Comments > Zero immigration and sustainable populations > Comments

Zero immigration and sustainable populations : Comments

By Eric Claus, published 5/11/2008

A high immigration intake does not benefit the average Australian.

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it's like this, mate: for graziers, more sheep means more fleece.

so too with politicians.

if the sheep ran the station there'd be fewer sheep, deeper grass, and no fleecing, because no fleece. in politics, this is called 'democracy', but you don't need to know about democracy, because it beyond the capacity of ozzies to participate in democracy. they heard "4 legs good" and believed it. so i can't get them to stand up.

yes, as i've been saying for years now, parliamentary rule is not good for ordinary ozzies. but it's too good for them too: people who think they cannot rule themselves must take the rule of others. if you don't get a mugabe, be humbly grateful. and be patient, someone like him will be along soon.
Posted by DEMOS, Wednesday, 5 November 2008 9:31:59 AM
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Excellent article Eric. Surely one of the most important articles ever posted on this forum.

Now let’s see…can I find anything in there to disagree with.

Mmmm, search…..search…seeearch…

Oh wait…yes…possibly…..or maybe its just a matter of interpretation….

“It would be easy to blame business for lowering our standard of living and politicians for being their accomplices, but that is wrong….It is up to the citizens of Australia to vote in the politicians who will best serve their interests.”

I don’t think it is that black and white. What big business does and what governments do reflects very strongly on what the common person does and how they vote. It is a circular momentum.

All elements of the circle need to take on much more responsibility if we are to direct our society onto a sustainable basis in time to make it happen before a whole kaboodle crashes in an almighty heap. It is not good enough for businesses to be only interested in their balance sheets and rely on governments to keep them in line. And it is not good enough for governments to only pander to what their big biz buddies want or what their constituency appears to want. They’ve got to show leadership as well. All sectors have got to embrace the move away from the continuous growth paradigm and strongly towards genuine sustainability.

But in the first instance, what we desperately need is more people like Eric Claus to get out there and really spread the message that the achievement of a sustainable society is the most important thing of all and that reducing immigration down to net zero or close to it is of the highest priority….and that things like climate change, peak oil and the financial crunch are at best only subsets of the big sustainability picture and at worst horrible distractions from what we really should be concentrating on.
Posted by Ludwig, Wednesday, 5 November 2008 9:52:00 AM
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Every line in the article was ringing true, up until he Eric said:

"What really mattered to her, and to all politicians, is what the majority of voters think."

No Eric. That is patiently not true for euthanasia, where some 80% of the population supports it, yet it is still doggedly opposed by our politicians. And as far as I can tell it is not true for population growth either - although unlike euthanasia I have not seen the results of polling on the subject. Anyone got a link to a poll on the subject?

I don't know why a larger population is almost universally supported by our pollies. I do wish I had more of an insight into their thinking. Your pointing our it has short term negative economic consequences just makes it more perplexing.
Posted by rstuart, Wednesday, 5 November 2008 10:02:22 AM
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Immigration to Australia should have ceased years ago. There was a time when there was not much effect to be seen in immigration, but now the effect is all to the bad, with governments in thrall to the growth lunacy actually increasing the numbers of unneeded people coming here.

These same dumb governments, manipulated by economists and big business, have made no attempt to enlarge infrastructure, have blithely ignored the fact that most of the country does not have enough water for the existing population, and have put aside the fact that two thirds of Australia in uninhabitable desert!

In supposedly intelligent country, we are committing suicide by steadily increasing the population.

The authors deals with the ‘skill shortage’ well; and let’s not forget that successive governments have taken the easy way out and imported labour rather than trained our own. The Howard Government was notorious for this, and the Rudd Government is shaping up to be even worse, with 200,000 migrants threatened for this year.

The ‘need’ for growth and our ‘ageing population’ are just two more mantras which have been repeated often enough and long enough to sucker our not-very-interested-in-anything-but-their-own-dunghills population into believing immigration is good. The author’s: “What really mattered to her, and to all politicians, is what the majority of voters think” hits the nail on the head. The dopes are indoctrinated into ‘thinking’ what the spin doctors want them to think, and all politicians want is most of the votes – no responsibility to work for the good of the country and its people for them! The votes are all they are interested in.

Well, immigration is bad, and it will have done its damage well before the average drone wakes up to the fact. But, as the author says, politicians will be kept in power by doing the bidding of big business, and the drones seem to be happy with that.

There is not much hope for us
Posted by Mr. Right, Wednesday, 5 November 2008 10:21:01 AM
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The author seems to be on a different planet from those running the country - Why?

It leads me to suspect that he believes the current crop of politicians aren’t statesmen; that he thinks our politicians, guided by the democratic expression of the electorate, have little regard for the welfare of the nation.

Sadly, he seems to have piled up enough points to backup his thesis to suggest he is right. Could that be the reason Australia’s social, economic, and environmental amenity is steadily nosing downhill at a fast clip?

However, I quibble about “Politicians don’t need to clutter their minds with logical arguments, as long as they are on the same page as the electorate”. Political parties running election campaigns don’t clutter their cerebral processes with what the electorate would like. It is the dominant pressure groups influencing electorates with funds, advertising, and media exposure, which occupy the echoing corridors of their minds.

Voters have Hobson’s Choice: Howard gloried in the escalation of housing assets during his tenure; Kim Beazley, as leader of the opposition, was persuaded to exhort Australians to be as populous as Java, to merit significance in world affairs – could he be so ignorant of the constraints upon his native land?; politicians on both sides almost wet themselves with enthusiasm, repeating disinformation from their favoured pressure groups that immigration is needed to address an ageing population – totally contrary to demographers of all persuasions.

Politicians have been on the same page as those favoured pressure groups for quite a while. In 1992 Professor Russell Matthews, as the most respected man in his field, published “Immigration and State Budgets” for the Bureau of Immigration Research. His finding - each immigrant was a total cost to state and federal governments of the order of 26,000 dollars for the first five years. An unwelcome result, its findings were not publicized. Later, less comphrehensive, studies with more “favourable” results have been released by concerned authorities. But, even the findings of the Productivity Commission have not been all that “favourable”.
Posted by colinsett, Wednesday, 5 November 2008 10:36:20 AM
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"Woe unto us for we are undone."

David
Posted by VK3AUU, Wednesday, 5 November 2008 11:48:37 AM
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