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The Forum > Article Comments > Population growth, consumers and our ecological ruin > Comments

Population growth, consumers and our ecological ruin : Comments

By Tim Murray, published 26/5/2009

The new economy of real estate growthism relies on an immigration fix and birth incentives for its energy.

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Sorry people - can't see the problem.. if there is a problem the author has made no useful suggestions for fixing it. Property does drive a surprising amount of investment and politics in Australia, but hardly in the way the author suggests.
Population in and of itself does not present a problem. Agriculture is much more of a strain on land use, but that has arguably passed its peak in advanced countries. The reasons for this are complex but Australia (the US and the UK) is regenerating forest growth. Don't believe this? Look at the ABS stats on forest cover and cleared land. Admittedly the stuff regrowing might be plantations but it shows that the actual trends are far more complex than the author would have us believe.
Posted by Curmudgeon, Tuesday, 26 May 2009 12:04:12 PM
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Curmy old boy, I suggest you look at the balance sheets of all these dodgy companies involved in plantations. Almost without exception they are going to the wall and their plantations will end up being a wasteland.

David
Posted by VK3AUU, Tuesday, 26 May 2009 1:22:22 PM
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A demographic pyramid scam. That’s exactly what our growthist economy that is based on rapid continuous population growth is.

It is benefiting a few rich and powerful people. But apart from that it is just providing the same average quality of life for ever-more people. Or actually, a now steadily declining average quality of life.

And it is all going to come to an almighty crunching halt sooner or later…probably sooner.

A very good article Tim Murray. And pertinent comments from Leigh and others.

.
So what do we do about it?

How on earth do we escape the trap engendered by the donations regime from the building industry and their associated big business buddies in various fields, to governments?

How do we make governments independent of the enormously powerful big business lobby?

How do we restore the baseline responsibility of governments?

These are the most important questions of our time
Posted by Ludwig, Tuesday, 26 May 2009 1:56:41 PM
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"We knew that the environmental NGOs were myopic, hypocritical, soft, politically correct and cowardly, but how many of us thought that they were so fundamentally corrupt?"

Damn those NGOs! And I thought they were feeding people. Now we're being fed rubbish the Unsustainable Unspeakable People put out.

This is anti-intellectual drivel. I thought King's article had knocked the wind out of their bio-sociological sails.

Of course real estate agents want you to buy land. That's what they do. By the logical of the Unsustainables everything we do is unsustainable, including NGOs, capitalism and having babies.

This smells like ratbaggery coming out of Adelaide Uni - is it Prosh Day? I'd better check the Unsustainables website. I wonder ...
Posted by Cheryl, Tuesday, 26 May 2009 3:14:15 PM
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Lugwig, the answer to your last three questions isn't an easy one. One Nation tried to address some of these problems and were soon quashed by big business who exploited the racist card. Lets not go back there!

Maybe what we need is an entirely new Australian political party. Lets call it the Australian People's Party. The APP would be answerable only to those who elected it, the Australian people. One of the first items on their agenda would be to make all political donations fully transparent so we can see who is paying the current parties huge bribes. I could go on with this all day long, but both time and space make that impossible.

Unfortunately, the APP would be extremely difficult to organise and expand. The current crop of politicians have been well and truly bought and sold and it wouldn't be easy to shift them from power. The APP would need to start slowly and build up a solid foundation, but it would take many years to become viable. As a planet, we don't have years to play around forming new parties to defeat those that are corrupt.

We're fast approaching the limits of the world's resources and without them, our future generations can only look forward to a miserable existence, if they survive at all! Oil has undoubtedly peaked and with it will come the peak of agricultural production. Since alternative means of energy is currently patchy at best, we'll fall back on dirty coal to keep the elites in comfort. Meanwhile, the general population will starve. As Leigh so eloquently put it..... Australia's stuffed!
Posted by Aime, Tuesday, 26 May 2009 3:23:56 PM
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A key part of the problem is that our culure has unconciously rejected the idea that "The economy was made for man, not man for the economy." So we run the country in a way that means that means that unemployment and all its associated ills will rise unless the economy keeps on growing above about 3%. In a "man made for the economy society" it doesn't really matter where the growth comes from. Sure, sometimes it comes from the growth of goods and services that really do improve quality of life. However, too often it comes from the growth of goods and services that only get sold because large swags of effort have been diverted to advertising this rubbish.

So can we go back to a society where the economy is made for man? For starters, it might help if we challenged the idea that unemployment has to rise if the economy fails to grow fast enough. What would happen, for example, if we shared the available work and all accepted a reduction in pay and hours worked as the correct response to reduced economic growth?

The business council will, of course say that sharing the work will cost a fortune, be impossible blah blah blah. However, I have managed workforces of over a hundred people in the mining indusry. When I thought about it, my conclusion was that it would have had little effect on my section, or the mine I worked at,if the government had insisted that we increase our workforce by 10% provided that pay per hour didn't change and management was allowed the flexibility to reduce average hours by 10% in ways that were appropriate to our situation. In reality we may actually have been better off since the flexibility would have allowed some efficiency gains and the workforce would have been less tired and jaded.

We need to discuss what we might do to get the economy back to serving man.
Posted by John D, Tuesday, 26 May 2009 3:29:11 PM
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