thinkabit I am curious as to your idea of a world / society that we should aim for. Business as usual leaves the rich very nicely off and the poor with very little and little chance of getting a good life. Is that okay with you? Do you think it will be easier to feed 10 billion than 9 billion or 8 billion? Do you think that abillion people living on less than $2 a day is okay and if there are more in the future that is okay too? Do you think that encouraging governments around the world to encourage stable population is a bad idea?

Peter Hume from reading the links it seems like your focus is unrestricted capitalism? Why does low immigration mean governments interfering with capitalism? It seems to me that high immigration is government intervention.

Dick Smith's bit on TV about Australia's population growth problem was helpful as was David Attenborough's discussion of world population. We need to bring it home to the politicians that workg needs to be done to halt Australia's population increase.
While we should have compassion for refugees, we should not mistake migrants from 3rd world countries as us being compassionate. The brains of these people are a loss to their country as they exacerbate the population problems in this country.

"the answer in my view lies with finding efficient ways to reuse water, rather than the current practice of wasting it.

Remember, we collect water, we treat it, we shower and wash our cloths in 'A grade' drinking water, we then collect it again, treat it again and then dump it.

It clearly is a 'no brainer', don't you think."

rehctub, you need to understand the efficiency driver. Were you to travel back thirty years and spout about efficient water use to Brisbane residents, you would rightly be regarded as a nutter. Water wasn't even metered then, and water tanks were banned because of their potential to harbour disease carrying mozzies.

Water, like any commodity, has a value which reflects the balance between supply and demand. When it is plentiful there is no economic basis for recycling, but add enough consumers and that changes.

And you might also think about what rainfall does. Far from being wasted, the flow of water from land to see is a basis for many natural ecosystems and life cycles. How would repeated recycling of water affect this life?

I think that it was better with unmetered water. Three decades of high immigration has changed that.