As someone who escaped Sydney a decade or so ago, let me say that the stress involved in living in Australia's large cities is extraordinary. To consider jamming more and more people into them borders on insanity.

Australia has, during my lifetime always played a game of catch-up. When it builds a freeway, by the time it is finished, the freeway is already out of date and has too few lanes. The road widening over the Blue Mountains is still continuing surely making it the slowest road improvement in world history. Various bits of toll road are built and people don't use them or they become car parks each morning and afternoon.

How Australia would ever handle almost double the population is beyond me.

It can't even handle the population it has!

Shouldn't that read Populate AND perish ?

"The onus of proof should be on those who wish to see our population burgeon to make the case for it."

How true. At present the media is awash with Chicken Littles proclaiming unprecedented calamity should the brakes be put on immigration. As with global warming, what is needed is sound reasoning, not mindless scaremongering.

Two words.........Infrastructure, Infrastructure! To make a garden, you need a field to plant in.

I just love philosophy. Recycle and retrain our present peoples we have. It costs more, but what will be the out-comes?

When I mow the backyard, every detail of its land-scape is well taken into care and noted.

Build up for the future, not burn it out.

TT

A little table for you to think on. TT.

TTM

Australian Government sources:
On 19 April 2010 at 09:06:00 (Canberra time), the resident population of Australia is projected to be:
22,313,743
This projection is based on the estimated resident population at 30 September 2009 and assumes growth since then of:
· one birth every 1 minute and 46 seconds,
· one death every 3 minutes and 42 seconds,
· a net gain of one international migrant every 1 minute and 46 seconds leading to
· an overall total population increase of one person every 1 minute and 10 seconds.

WHY MUST THE WORLD POPULATION INCREASE AT ALL? In 1955 it was two billion. Now it is seven billion and people are silly enough to ask, why have we got pollution?
At the present rate of increase, seven billion now, becomes 21 billion in another 55 years.
There will be no fish, no forests, no Orang-utans, etc.
Moving people from 'A to B' (India to Australia for example)will not solve anything, indeed it will increase carbon footprints.
Is it because no adult making decisions today will be alive in 55 years? We need another Charles Dickens's version of "A Christmas Carol."