<< Australia can continue to be compassionate AND resolve our population growth predicament with a balanced, flexible and sustainable migration program >>

Absolutely!

Excellent article William. Very good to see you on OLO.

"Boat people" and asylum seekers have consumed the immigration debate, but only actually constitute a tiny proportion of our immigration numbers. They are being used as a convenient smokescreen to hide the real source of non-citizens entering Australia - legal, "skilled" economic migration. Asylum seekers are used to give the public assurances that our borders are under control, but the reality is that our booming population is not from refugees but our silent, government-decided, economic immigration. With both mainstream political parties supporting high population growth, there is no democratic input, or open discussion. Numbers are decided in favour of big businesses and corporations, to supply a constant supply of new customers for housing, white-goods, land sales and home renovations. The costs of settlement are ignored, and the fall-outs in housing affordability, congestion, costs of living and environmental threats from demands on natural resources.

The drama of new boat arrivals, tragedies at sea, detention centres, people smuggling etc all focus on asylum seekers. An orderly arrival of selected refugees from the refugee camps would take away the drama, the news-worthiness and the focus on these displaced people. While the immigration attention and debates safely stays on boat-people and asylum seekers, there's little attention to all the students, uncapped "temporary" workers applying for PR, skilled imports and family reunions - all happening under the radar.
Without our high economic immigration rate, and the drive for "big Australia", we could be a life-support "boat" for the Pacific Islanders likely to lose their lands to climate change. However, they aren't wealthy or skilled enough!

Excellent article thanks William and likewise the posts from Ludwig and VivKay. We need to be compassionate towards people in need but also compassionate towards all the other species that inhabit this land, some of whom are being driven to extinction by loss of habitat, one of the many results of human population growth.

Equating new babies born to Australians as equivalent to new 'migrants' is an irritating, illogical nonsense.

The whole premise of the 'Stable Population Party' is wrong. Their ideas prove the Malthusian concept of population growth persists and resurfaces every now and then and here they are back again. In the 70's it was ZPG and we were supposedly in a population crisis. Now we have many more people now with a higher standard of living than ever before.

Apparently the only thing we are not running out of is stupidity.

Well done, William. Boat people are 2% of immigration and 90% of the news about immigration.

The media and politicians avoid discussing quantities in assessing just about every part of public policy. Why let the facts cloud an emotional story? The carbon tax is 2% of overall federal tax revenue, is being offset by lowering other taxes, but Tony Abbott implies that it will ruin the economy and it is getting 90% of the news about tax policy.

If you went to a business meeting and said "This new 2% cost is going to kill this company and is more important than the other 98%," you would be laughed out of the room.

So much of the population debate doesn't want to talk about numbers either, but the people promoting high immigration know that they will make big numbers of dollars while the average punter pays for it with lower wages, less services, more pollution and more congestion.