(cont'd)

Ludwig and I actually do like people. We want all of them, not just the rich, to have good, free lives in a healthy environment where the other species can live too, not a factory farm for people. There is not even any problem with taking a few tens of thousands of immigrants a year, as they add some variety, but why head for a billion people by 2165? It would be nice to build such societies all over the world, but why not start here? Long live Fortress Japan, Fortress Finland, Fortress Switzerland, and Fortress Austalia! Even if we believed your silly Yellow Peril argument, it would make more sense to go for nuclear armed submarines like Israel than open the borders.

Actually, no, Divergence.

>>Pericles, You have been arguing that mass migration is somehow of benefit to the nation as a whole.<<

Terms like "mass migration", phrases like "RAPID population growth in Australia with no end in sight", "high-population-growth advocacy", "growth obsession", "ongoing rapid rate of immigration" etc., all of which have been written by others and attributed to me, are obscuring the issue unnecessarily.

I have been consistently maintaining that the current level of population growth, and the immigration policies that underpin it, are in tune with our current economic needs and our future requirements, and the numbers involved are easily absorbed into our buoyant economy. This stance is supported by all the economic indicators available.

And this, frankly, is either bizarre or insulting, I haven't determined which.

>>You and your friends may indeed personally benefit from the population growth<<

Me and my friends? What the blazes was going through your mind when you wrote that? What possible value does it add to your argument, which as far as I have been able to determine is just another bunch of opinions that happen to agree with yours when they, too, look into their crystal ball?

>>Now you are saying that we owe it to the starving billions to keep taking in people, even if it makes us worse off.<<

There you go again, putting words into my mouth. Where have I said "even if it makes us worse off"? The only thing we "owe to the starving billions" is to take a rational approach to helping them solve their problems. And we will not be able to do that if we slowly impoverish ourselves by deliberately stagnating our own economy through thoughtless population strategies.

Fortress Australia will be no place for bold and innovative thinking, I'm afraid, just the opposite.

We'll descend into a morass of self-indulgent, bureaucratic mediocrity.

That's my forecast. Which, for a change, is completely unsupported by facts.

>>Even if we believed your silly Yellow Peril argument<<

If that is all you took away from that particular flight of imagination, I feel genuinely sorry for you.

Let's see if I've understood the logical consistency correctly…

Population growth "…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."

"Economists still find it hard to focus on the infrastructure costs of population growth. These amount to at least $200,000 per extra person."

Though,

"Worse still, the real infrastructure costs per extra Australian may well be more than double Jane O'Sullivan's conservative figure of $200,000."

So, to maintain stable population levels does this require state intervention of a 'baby levy' of at least $200,000 per child above a couple's replacement level of two, and/or preventative sterilisation?

What if they haven't got the money? Do they get nine months to do so, or else?

Could a childless person or couple with only one baby 'trade' their replacement redemption coupon? At a nominal $200,000 this could be quite useful to those considerate citizens not producing an excess of 'more babies'.

Fortress Australia requires such bold and innovative thinking.

So do the koalas and numbats.

HAAAA hahahaaaa!!

Ahh Pericles, you can be very entertaining!!

<< Patronising old git >>

Hehehe. The last time I complimented you on your writing skills, you were only too happy about it, saying that you were always a sucker for a compliment, or words to that effect.

This time….. ooow….. it’s a little bit different.

Hit a sore point did I?

You know what they say; hit a sore point, hit a raw nerve, cut too close to the truth…

And um, there’s nothing patronising about it. I said it as it is – you do indeed have very good writing skills and a good brain behind them. But you are making a whole procession of absurd assertions! You do have a high level of intelligence. So why is this happening!

<< 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. >>

Alright, well you’re obviously very angry and not thinking straight at the moment. I’m sorry for offending you. It was not my intention.

BTW, I did have an excellent day. Thankyou.

Perilces says

"I have been consistently maintaining that the current level of population growth, and the immigration policies that underpin it, are in tune with our current economic needs and our future requirements, and the numbers involved are easily absorbed into our buoyant economy. This stance is supported by all the economic indicators available."

You just don’t get it do you Pericles. We are already growing too big and too fast

And it might help you to see it if you took a look outside FORTRESS NORTHSHORE.

Unlike you who gets to lounge in airconditioned trains reading the MX, during your short trip from your modern northshore station to your office in Surry Hills. Many Australian have to sweat it out in peak hour traffic jams, or pack like sardines into transport services that run late and hot

Take a look at the huge amounts of bush country and good farming land being lost to urban sprawl.

Take a look at the overcrowded schools. Admittedly not in your leafy abode but further out west

Take a look at the overcrowded hospital emergency wards. Admittedly not in your leafy abode but further out west

I am genuinely sorry for you Pericles.But I am even more sorry for the rest of Australia who you are willing to shaft.

I'm not sure that is their main concern, Wm Trevor.

>>So, to maintain stable population levels does this require state intervention of a 'baby levy' of at least $200,000 per child above a couple's replacement level of two, and/or preventative sterilisation?<<

This is all about immigration.

We have already debugged the contentious issue of a despotic government operating an enforced bonk-limitation strategy, and the little-Australians have been forced to concede that this would be a political strategy decidedly unhelpful at the polls.

However, the opposite is the case when they target the dusky infiltrators. There will always be like-minded folk - fellow little-Australians - who exhibit their fear of "otherness" through a desire to lock and bolt the door, before cowering under the bed.

One aspect that amuses me, though, is the disparity between their use of statistics, and their understanding of what they tell us. Divergence gave us this one...

>>...the contribution of immigration (i.e., population growth) to growth in per capita GNP was miniscule (see graph on page 155), with most of the benefit from this contribution going to the owners of capital and the migrants themselves<<

Which, mathematically speaking, given that we all agree that GNP-per-head continues to increase, indicates that these migrants are contributing more than existing residents to the GNP growth, n'est-ce pas?

And this, from a historical perspective, is precisely what migrants do. In every century since the twelfth, the history of Europe is bursting with examples of migrants fleeing from one place, settling in another, and working their collective butts off. Huguenots, Jews, the twelve million who filed through Ellis Island, etc. etc. Our own post-war immigrants share the same characteristics, in every generation, from Greeks and Italians to the wave of Vietnamese boat-people and beyond.

Pseudo-nationalism is never far from the surface, unfortunately, as is also evident, as the homelanders conveniently forget their history, and move to "reclaim their birthright".

Which, although slightly more politely phrased, and frequently vehemently denied, is what we are witnessing here.