You didn't read the article, did you Ludwig.

>>Oh how depressing!... What a load of cods!... Aaaaah haaaa hahahaaaa!...<<

Never mind.

Please feel free to have another, more relevant, swipe at me once you have done so.

Quite right Pericles, I didn’t read all of it. It is more of a book than an article, it is off to the side of our discussion, and you quoted the bits you thought were most relevant.

Your point of bringing this article to my attention is to:

<< …give you some idea of the scale of the real challenges that exist, and put the issue of Australia's penny-number immigration statistics into some perspective. >>

This I addressed in my last post.

It is rather strange that you have quoted Reinhold Niebuhr here:

Niebuhr put it...

"...grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference... that I may be reasonably happy in this life".

Surely this goes with my side of the debate a whole lot better than with yours. As I said, Australia’s population growth issue could be taken care of very easily indeed.

It is just completely crackers to imply that because of massive and very difficult population issues around the world, we should just sit back and accept RAPID population growth in Australia with no end in sight, and just forget all about achieving a sustainable future.

This IS what you are implying, isn’t it?

True, it is somewhat longer than usual, Ludwig.

>>Quite right Pericles, I didn’t read all of it. It is more of a book than an article, it is off to the side of our discussion, and you quoted the bits you thought were most relevant.<<

But I really would like to understand the mentality that refuses to read an article (because it has too many words), but still is able to categorically assert that the information in it has nothing to add to the discussion. You go on to assume that all its relevant sentences can be summarized in a couple of sound-bites.

That would strike even a casual observer as somewhat lazy.

If you were tempted at some point to read the piece in its entirety, you would realize how sadly inadequate are these responses of yours:

>>And in Australia the issue could be dealt with very easily indeed, with one decision to lower immigration to net zero... Australia should be doing what it can to help on the global stage... one very significant part of this would be to demonstrate that we have got our own house in order.<<

Australia "putting its house in order", as you describe it, would have absolutely no impact or effect on the problem, any more than would applying ointment to plague buboes. Worse, it would actually provide an excuse for failing to address or attack the real issue, based on your "I'm all right, Jack" moral stance.

But keep dreaming.

And for goodness sake, for your own peace of mind, avoid reading anything at all that might cause you to think just a little less superficially about the challenges facing our world. It isn't all about you, you know.

Pericles you are getting sillier and sillier in your old age.

You have introduced the most ridiculous straw-man argument: that because of the magnitude of the global population issue, we shouldn’t be concerned about or be trying to reduce our level of growth in Australia.

Who are you trying to kid?? Remember, you and I are not the only ones reading this blather. What do you think others would make of such obvious bunkum?

Where do you get some of these ideas? Your excellent skills with written expression imply an above-average level of intelligence, but your now quite numerous absurd assertions contradict that notion entirely!

Let's get back on track....

Three posts back I said:

>> GDP has indeed risen all along with population growth. But, wait a minute; all the economic activity generated by population growth, both good and bad, adds to GDP. So all the work needed to maintain or improve services and infrastructure that is stressed out by ever-increasing demand, which is one of the big negatives of high population growth, actually gets counted as positive within that stupid measurement called GDP! <<

And……

>> then there's another bizarre offering – the notion that we have needed record high immigration in order to extract our mineral wealth and make the mining boom a boom, is a complete wallop in the cods!

We needed a tiny fraction of that level of influx. Something around net zero immigration would have been good!

And if we’d had this, we could have slowed down and stretched out the scale of mining activity AND provided a considerably better return to the average citizen as well, instead of spending a great deal of it to duplicate all the services and infrastructure for ever-more people. <<

What have you got to say about these points, which are central to our discussion?

Sorry, Ludwig, but it needs to be said.

>>Where do you get some of these ideas? Your excellent skills with written expression imply an above-average level of intelligence, but your now quite numerous absurd assertions contradict that notion entirely!<<

Patronising old git.

Now where were we.

Oh, yes. You have just confirmed that you consider the comfort of the tiniest portion of the world's population - those living in North Queensland, next to the beach, enjoying a government pension that the rest of us are paying for - as being far more important than the fate of billions of people who have little or nothing to eat, and face many decades of the same unless you get off your sanctimonious, dog-in-the-manger hobby-horse, where you moan endlessly about the impact of a few thousand new immigrants on the future of one of the richest, most livable countries in the world.

However much you blather on, it remains the case that your conjectures, estimations, prognostications and forecasts do not, at all, in any way whatsoever, stack up against the facts of the situation as we know them to be, and have known them to be for many years.

If you feel the need to close your ears and eyes to the future of the planet, that is entirely your concern. But to create a fortress Australia mentality - sorry, you already have one - to suggest to others that a fortress Australia strategy will do anything but harm to us, and in doing so delude yourself that the world outside somehow operates entirely independently of the decisions we make here, is pure folly.

Your attitude adds to my view that we should drastically cut all the non-performing, uneconomic components of the Public Service, and make them all work for a living instead. If, by any chance, they might somehow be employable.

Have a great day.

Pericles,

You have been arguing that mass migration is somehow of benefit to the nation as a whole. The Productivity Commission, John Stone, the former Secretary of the Treasury, and Ross Gittins, the Economics Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, all say that there is no significant net benefit, even in narrowly economic terms. This is also consistent with a number of studies from overseas. There is also a mismatch between a migrant's immediate need for the full complement of infrastructure and the time it will take before he has contributed enough to pay for his share. Your only answer is that everyone knows that there is a benefit. Pick up a history of science, and you will soon find that there have been a great many things that everyone knew that are now known to be false. You and your friends may indeed personally benefit from the population growth, but it is at the expense of your fellow citizens, who have to put up with more crowding and congestion, more inequality, a more degraded environment, more gouging on their housing costs, more casualisation, etc.

Now you are saying that we owe it to the starving billions to keep taking in people, even if it makes us worse off. The starving billions are starving because they have chosen to stay in the Malthusian trap. Even the refugee crises are mostly due to conflict over resources with increasing population. The Haber-Bosch process and the Green Revolution in the last century increased food production several times over. Some countries used the opportunity to develop and eliminate poverty. Others just put the gains into more babies. No one forced them to do this, or forced large numbers of them to support corrupt and incompetent leaders, or made them hang on to cultural patterns that have become dysfunctional. Shielding them from the consequences of bad decisions and giving the more capable among them a personal solution via emigration is no way to get these problems addressed, and there is no way to help them until they are addressed.

(cont'd)