Hasbeen:

http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/1301.0~2012~Main%20Features~Value%20of%20goods%20and%20services%20produced%20by%20Australian%20Industry~240

There's not a lot in there that is NOT "urban". What a pathetic waste of land mass, farming stuff to contribute around 4% to total GDP, while restricting urban land coverage to 0.6% when urban economies are something like 80% of the total economy.

But in exports, it is a different story:

http://www.dfat.gov.au/publications/trade/trade-at-a-glance-2011.html

I suggest this has a lot to do with the effects of growth-containment urban planning on the KINDS of urban businesses that WOULD be exporters. Read "Driving Productivity and Growth in the UK Economy", McKinsey Institute 1998, and "The Flow of Money and Its Impact on Local Economies" by William Fruth. Australia's policy makers should wake up about this.

Read “Foreign Industrial Investment is Reshaping America” by Joel Kotkin. This COULD be Australia too if it got its policies right, i.e. closer to those of the regions in the USA that are attracting international manufacturing and high tech. Goodness knows Australia has the land to burn, to make it competitive with other manufacturing powerhouses around the world, at least on urban land costs and the many flow-on costs involved.

McKinsey suggests in the reference above that powerful cutting edge economic agglomerations like Silicon Valley cannot possibly happen in the UK because of its urban planning system. The same thing is a problem in Australia.

Stupid, Australia, stupid. Even New Zealand manages to export manufactures as a much higher proportion of its total exports. As I already quoted, if NZ had 100 more manufacturing exporters as good as its current top 40, it would be wealthier than Germany and Japan and Sweden. But exporting more mutton, beef, milk, butter, wool, etc would just result in more LOWER income jobs.

But NZ too needs to reform its urban planning system if it is ever to have anything like Silicon Valley

<< Somebody could be rightfully concerned about city congestion, and at the same time support a low-population-growth scenario for the exact same city. >>

YES!!

Hey Pericles, you are not going like this, but you have AGREED WITH ME!

Erm…. you have inadvertently agreed with me, while at the same trying vehemently to oppose everything I say! ( :> /

Yes we can support a LOW population-growth scenario while genuinely working towards improving congestion.

The key point here of course is that a low pop-gr scenario is very different to what we now have in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, etc… and that the switch from the current high pop-gr imposition to a growth rate that could be called low is of vital importance in attempts to address congestion.

Well done. You’ve seen the light at last!

Oh uh….

No you haven’t. You consider our current near-record-high rate of population growth to be a ‘low-population-growth scenario’, don’t you!

Well, once again, here in the real world, considering our current growth rate compared to the growth rate throughout the history of this country, comparing it to that of other developed countries around the world (but not to third-world countries), looking in a realistic way at congestion in our major cities and what we can do about it…

…in other words, looking at it all in holistic manner…

…there is no way in the world that you can say that we currently have a low pop-gr rate or that our major cities with the worst congestion have low pop-gr rates….. or that the current pop-gr rate in these cities isn’t the biggest factor of all in worsening congestion and in countering our efforts to deal with it.

How about supporting what you say and coming on board with us poppos and sustainabilityists and start lobbying for a much-reduced immigration intake so that we can achieve a low population growth rate for our congested cities!

Cmawwwn!

Phil, you really are dwelling in a world of theory and NOT in the real world!

Yes sure, urban economic growth has the POTENTIAL to achieve great things! Just like a full-on decentralisation effort has the potential to alleviate congestion, even within a rapid-growth scenario.

But in the real world, they just ain’t gunna happen!

The best we could hope for is to achieve a small fraction of the maximum potential for these things.

We’ve got to do what is achievable. And one of the most achievable, politically tenable and significant things that can be done towards addressing congestion is….

….wait for it….

….to reduce immigration to bet zero or at least to a much lower level.

You shouldn’t be talking about starry-eyed maximum potential. Realistic potential is what you need to work on!

If you did this, you’d have an entirely different outlook. You wouldn’t be talking about decentralisation as being THE solution to congestion, you’d be talking about it as being one factor within an entirely different approach to the problem. And you certainly wouldn’t be espousing an urban-based economy as being the answer to our economic woes.

You're a veritable bundle of contradictions, Ludwig.

>>Yes we can support a LOW population-growth scenario while genuinely working towards improving congestion<<

Shortly before this, you were saying...

>>...it IS INDEED a matter of being either genuinely concerned about congestion or being a high-population-growth advocate<<

Forget about whether or not I agree with you.

Try and work out how you might "INDEED" be able to agree with yourself.

This single-issue fanaticism is not allowing you to think straight any longer. Time to reassess whether you really should drag every single topic into the black hole of your obsession.

Pericles, when you get around to it, could you point out the apparent contradiction. Either this, or admit that there is NO contradiction here, if you would be so kind.

No rush. Take the whole weekend if you like.

Here’s a clue – I mention low population growth in the first quote and high population growth in the second quote. They are very different things, especially when we go from high pop growth to low pop growth as part of a strategy to deal with congestion (and all sorts of other population-pressure issues).

So find a contradiction somewhere there if you can. Good hunting!

Oh, and if you can come up with any contradictions in anything that I have written on this thread, or on this forum over the last seven years for that matter, then throw them up in your next post too if you would. Cheers.

Phil from NZ,

You assume that we can just go on with business as usual, that the future will be like the present. At first you supported Julian Simon, who was famous for saying that there effectively are no limits to growth. You then admitted, on seeing the evidence, that limits to growth do exist, but claimed they are effectively so far in the future that we don't have to worry about them. Have another look at that Global Footprint Network atlas, the parts where they talk about us being in 40% environmental overshoot, even with the present global population. This refers to the fact that we are using up renewable resources faster than they can be replenished. You might feel great while you are running through an inheritance or lottery winnings, but eventually the money will be gone. There aren't enough resources to give everyone in even the present global population a decent quality of life, and several billion extra people are in the pipeline, just from demographic momentum, even if the fertility rate drops down to replacement level tomorrow, everywhere on earth.

With reference to greenhouse gas emissions, if there were a cheap, safe. easy solution, we would already be applying it, as we did with the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer from damage by chlorofluorocarbons. This article from Nature (with an open link below it) on a safe operating space for humanity identifies 9 separate thresholds representing different resource/environment threats. We have already crossed 3 of them and another 4 are approaching fast.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7263/full/461472a.html
http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss2/art32/

Note that this is from Nature, probably the foremost peer-reviewed science journal in the world, not a fringe Greenie website. A lot of the past societies that collapsed did so because they damaged their environmental resource base, often in the interests of raising production in the short term (as with Pacific Islanders who dynamite reefs to catch more fish) or let safety margins get too thin. Populating up to the maximum we can feed with a relatively favourable climate and cheap, easily available fertisers is just plain stupid.

(cont'd)