@Lucy Montgomery: I think the point was that some people could use the population debate to advance another agenda.

They could, I guess. The real point is they don't, yet they are regularly accused of doing it. As Forrest Gumpp noted, Cheryl in particular is fond of using it as trolling technique. At least it appears that way, as she makes exactly the same statements every time an article on this subject is posted, and gets bites every time.

Manorina comments were possibly the most extreme I have seen here on the subject. They were unfortunate, as they are so easily shot down. Australia could easily reduce its population by just reducing its immigration intake. No other measures are necessary. Then again, perhaps Manorina was trolling too.

good work Jane,

I wonder whether Governments, State and federal, have come to the same conclusions, but suppressed their findings?

One useful addition would be a graph of total developer financial contributions to parties and individuals at all levels of Government, against immigration numbers. I suspect there would be a very strong correlation.

@Ruth1,

Lucy Montgomery could have been less equivocal than her statement of "I don't think they were calling you a racist." She could justifiably have said "They [Cheryl and David Jennings] most definitely WERE NOT calling you a racist". I thought I had already made that point very clearly in my post of several hours ago in response to Lucy, but on checking I realise that I had only excused them of saying anything that could be described as 'racist'. I had not excused them from claiming that any other poster had said anything racist, a thing which they also certainly did not do.

To the extent that 'rednecking' may be occurring in any given context, the target is the debate itself, not any individual or grouping of participants therein. The latter would be 'flaming', and that hasn't happened so far on this thread.

Lucy's next two sentences in her commendably brief post of Thursday, 11 March 2010 at 9:57:30 AM,

"I think the point was that some people could use
the population debate to advance another agenda. Maybe that
possibility does scare some people away from the debate?"

made me think.

Could it not rather be that some people fear that having a population debate may result in the unmasking to the public at large of some hitherto unrecognised, or erstwhile unprovable, transcendent OTHER agenda? Could it be that the purpose of the insinuation of implications of 'racism' into the debate is to scare people off from participating in the POPULATION debate?

In 'rednecking', the idea is to empower a likely unknowing factotum having initially some public appeal on some as yet not well articulated issue, but who will also be easy in due course to paint up with smears like that of 'racism', and be dependably (embarrassingly) inarticulate come the crunch, and then pull the rug from under that factotum's artificially inflated cause. That way, as yet not ventilated, or even articulated, issues that may in truth surround the cause being rednecked will never get to be discussable in 'respectable' company.

Reality check:

In 2009, capital spending by all levels of government for all purposes was $66b, represented 5.2% of GDP of $1,260b.

http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/5206.0Dec%202009?OpenDocument table 3

The 25% figure is not plausible

From this morning's Sydney Morning Herald:

'THE state government is rushing to prepare laws to create a development authority with sweeping powers to compulsorily acquire and rezone privately owned land for resale to developers.

With Sydney's population set to grow 40 per cent to 6 million in the next 25 years, the government has decided it needs a metropolitan development authority to buy privately owned land near rail and bus routes for medium- and high-density housing.'

Reality check Number 2:

Rhian, all that shows is how successive governments are letting our infrastructure run down by not spending as much as they should have. We are living a low tax fool's paradise.

David