Dempografix
It is true that women are having babies at a later age, there are less marriages occurring, and the divorce rate is high, and all three decrease the overall fertility rate.

The baby bonus is just an expensive bandaid to fix more fundamental problems.

However “87,000 aussies left permanently last year”. I am wondering why there are so many emigrants, but we still invite in immigrants.

Immigration may be another expensive bandaid.

I would think Australia is already getting close to full occupancy.

A satellite picture of Australia taken at night shows most of the lights in Australia occur in a thin sliver of land along the east coast, with very little west of the Great Dividing Range.

http://geology.com/articles/satellite-photo-earth-at-night.shtml

To make the area west of Great Dividing Range more habitable, there would have to be quite considerable changes made to the natural environment, and the disaster of the Murray-Darling river system is testimony to the dangers of too much interference with the natural environment of arid areas of a country.

The anti-pops can't sustain their anti-people arguments when faced with the facts. The prime offender is tricky Dicky. Their arguments are based on 'feelings' and a cultural pessimism born from misanthropy on the one hand and mysoginist thinking on the other.

Their instrumentalism is summed up well by Vanna's comment "I would think Australia is already getting close to full occupancy." They want to run an ideological tape measure over every conceivable aspect of our lives, including what we do in our bedrooms.

They really must do more work on how economies operate and especially markets and benefits of trade as their comments in these areas are embarrassing.

The bottom line for the anti-pops and Sustainable People Australia is that they are anti-capitalists. With the fall of communism they have moved like head lice, over to the environment movement and are traducing the best efforts of more rational people to create policies which will protect the environment and not kill off the economy in the process.

They consistently ignore creating new ideas for urban design. This is one area they should really be hammering.

I'm curious why someone with the alias of Dempografix would quote such misleading statistics? Everyone in the business knows that the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) - not the Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) - are the authoritative source for our demographic data. Here's a link to the latest ABS Australian Demographic Statistics, September 2010 Pub no. 3101.0
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/3101.0

For the record, ABS report that for the year ended 30 Sept 2010, net overseas migration was 185,800 persons (comprising 441,600 long term arrivals less 255,800 long term departures). Natural increase was 159,800 (301,500 births less 141,700 deaths). So total increase was about 345,500 people.

DIAC are notorious for selective use of their own obscure categories, which understate net migration (they omit long term residents). Which leads me to wonder - if high immigration is so good - why does DIAC go to such lengths to hide it?

Cheryl,

due I fear to some dreadful offence Pericles inferred some time since, it appears, to be his policy to ignore me, even when I've politely addressed a question specifically to him--remarkable sensitivity in one who is often insensitive; and remarkable incivility in one who professes himself gregarious. But no matter.

Perhaps you will address my question above:
"Is there any other good reason [apart from "for profit and for keeping up with the rest of the world"] for not being mindful of the stresses we are putting on Australia's fragile ecology, and the world's [via the growth obsession]?"

You say "The anti-pops can't sustain their anti-people arguments when faced with the facts. The prime offender is tricky Dicky. Their arguments are based on 'feelings' and a cultural pessimism born from misanthropy on the one hand and mysoginist (sic) thinking on the other".

But this is nonsense. I'm neither misanthropist nor misogynist nor pessimist (nor hypersensitive!), and my foreboding at the plague proportions being attained by humankind, and the effects, are based on historical precedent and demonstrable negative impacts in real time: environmental degradation, third-world famine, rampant species extinction and destruction of habitats, resource depletion etc. These are not "feelings", they are raw data of what is underway within our closed biosphere.

I don't deny that I'm an anti-capitalist, but this is based on research and hopefully rigour. I cleave to no doctrine and I don't allow the compelling nature (as I find it) of my critique to pre-empt a critical evaluation of topics at hand. Ergo I welcome, indeed crave, contradictory reasoning.

I have been critical of the "anti-pops", as you call them, above for not identifying the "root" of the problem; for thinking they can have their cake and eat it. Indeed in this thread so-far I think I'm the only one who identifies as "anti-capitalist", most seem to think they can have stable population within a global-capitalist dispensation.

I put it to you then that "you" are being irrational, and I ask again, what is to be gained, qualitatively, from human population growth, apart from growing capital?

Cheryl,
Most of the countries in the world are in debt, because there is less and less to make money from.

Just how much do people need until people start going around in circles like a dog chasing their tail.

While $1 billion is being spent on the baby bonus to tempt women to have children, $3.7 billion is now being spent on daycare centers to enrol those children into after they are born.

So why have children in this society. It is becoming senseless.

After working 60 hours per week for weeks on end, many people are now fleeing to the coast for a long weekend, but there are few coastal areas left that anyone can go to to “get away from it all”.

Areas of bush and sand dunes I used to camp in at Noosa and Agnes Waters are now high rise development or suburban housing estates.

Once we used to worry about not taking enough ice to keep the fish cool. Now someone has to worry about catching any fish at all.

Unless someone thinks sitting around watching DVD’s in a high rise apartment is a quality life, there will be little quality of life in the future.

Ruth,

Thank God - another woman.

I believe the ABS now counts international students as migrants.

"In 2007, to better measure the changes in traveller behaviour and in particular to more accurately capture and measure temporary migration, the ABS introduced improved methods for calculating NOM. The key improvement was the introduction of the '12/16 month rule', whereby a traveller is included in the resident population if they are in Australia for a total of 12 months or more over a 16 month period, or conversely, subtracted from the population if they are away for a total of 12 months or more over a 16 month period."

That mucks up your figures for net long term 'stayers'.

I'd say that Pericles has proven his point.

To answer Squeers question - population is a generic for people. From both a socialist and humanist perspective, people are the generators of innovation, science and technology. The reason why Marx didn't recommend in Das Capital cutting population (Stalin did that for him) was he thought human happiness was THE goal and reducing the number of people contradicted that goal.

There are limits to population from a socio-biological perspective and that's what the anti-pops are on about. I don't believe we can transcend our biological roots (plenty would disagree with me) but we are at an acute period in human evolution we are at the threshold of amazing discoveries in food generation and new energy sources.

Australia doesn't have a population problem. It has an urban design problem.

I'm not hard and fast about the baby bonus. It seems like middle class welfare.

Mark my words though, the anti-population movement has a very nasty social engineering aspect which most Australians would abhor.