Cheryl.
The Anti Pops are wrong and so are the Anti Racists, they're as bad as each other but the fact remains, Indian and Chinese immigration is driving down wages and working conditions as well as ruining the small business prospects of all Australians.
Chinese immigration is also destroying our diverse communities, where I live, Preston, Chinese have all but taken over the retail spaces,I've done the legwork and counted the number of Chinese owned businesses, it's approaching 90% along High St and 40-50% in Preston Market. It would be decades since one ethnic group dominated that precinct and this is happening everywhere, all suburban shopping strips are becoming Chinatowns, so where are the Anti Racists on this issue?
As we know Chinese businesses exploit their workers and they import all their stock at a fraction of the price of a locally made equivalent. They also price fix, all Preston's Chinese groceries charge the same for their product lines, all the Chinese Cafes charge the same prices for a plate of noodles, they never have sales, they simply don't compete with each other. The result of this is that High St Preston will be a Chinatown forever, the lack of competition, low wages and price fixing means that they will be impossible to dislodge and local people wanting to open a shopfront will never be able to find an open space in a high traffic area.

This is an exact repeat of the events of the late 19th century, everything that was said against Chinese immigration was as true then as it is today and the same caste of Anglo Saxon criminals are facilitating and profiting from the arrangement at the expense of the working classes.

I am a white racist. I don't particularly like chinese so I must be a racist. They are rude, pushy, arrogant and all they think about is money and how to relieve you of yours. The central tenet of chinese 'culture' (which I think is just a word invented by western liberals to justify non white racism) is that chinese are superior to other people. Why the hell are we importing them?

Rhian,

Here are the 10 top-ranking countries on the latest World Economic Forum Competitiveness Index. In parentheses, I have listed the population growth rate, the population, and the rank on the UN Human Development Index (HDI). Where there are 4 numbers, the last is the HDI rank adjusted for inequality (not available for all countries):

Switzerland (0.199%, 7.7 million, 11, 11)
Singapore (2.0%, 5.3 million, 26)
Finland (0.065%, 5.3 million, 22, 15)
Sweden (0.168%, 9.1 million, 10, 5)
Netherlands (0.452%, 16.7 million, 3, 4)
Germany (-0.2%, 81.3 million, 9, 9)
United States (0.9%, 313.8 million, 4, 23)
United Kingdom (0.533%, 63.0 million, 28, 24)
Hong Kong (0.421%, 7.2 million, 13)
Japan (-0.077%, 127.4 million, 12)

Where is the benefit from population growth? Note that Australia's population growth rate of 1.6% is well above any of them, apart from Singapore, which is a city state and thus a special case. {Melbourne is also growing at 2.0%.)

The Productivity Commission in its 2006 report into immigration modelled the economic effects of a 50% increase in skilled migration. They showed a gain in GNP per capita of less than $400 by 2024/5 (p. 154):

"Most of the economic benefits associated with an increase in skilled migration accrues to the immigrants themselves. For existing residents, capital owners receive additional income, with owners of capital in those sectors experiencing the largest output gains enjoying the largest gains in capital income. On the other hand, the real average annual incomes of existing resident workers grows more slowly than in the base-case, as additional immigrants place downward pressure on real wages.The economic impact of skilled migration is small when compared with other drivers of productivity and income per capita." p. 154 (see also graphs on p. 147 and p. 155)

You talk about economies of scale, but ignore diseconomies of scale such as traffic congestion and the cost of desalinisation (4 to 6 times the cost of dam water). The Productivity Commission report says that evidence for a net benefit is inconclusive.

Malcolm King (together with his alter ego Cheryl) is doing his best to obfuscate the issue of population growth. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) is concerned about how many people are living in Australia, so they don't distinguish between a returning expatriate and an overseas migrant. Expatriates are Australian citizens, so they have a right to live here. It is easy to pick a year when more of them come home than leave (due to the global financial crisis), but that situation can't continue indefinitely. Our expatriate ratio is only about 2.8%.

Last I heard, New Zealand is an independent country. Why should New Zealanders have open borders with Australia and not be considered migrants? If Malcolm King is saying that they should be somehow special because of our shared history, this indicates the very racism that he is trying to smear on others.

Why is there such a discrepancy between Malcolm King's 18% of 457 visa holders who get permanent residence and what Senator Ellison was told in Parliament?

How exactly do ordinary people (as opposed to the rich and those with jobs in the immigration industry) benefit from the population growth?
Per capita benefit is trivial, and very little of it is distributed to them. Their wages are depressed. Most of the diseconomies of scale fall on them. The average house in 1973 cost 3.5 times the median wage (with the land about 30%), now it is 7-10 times, depending on the location (with the land more than 70%, even though block sizes are much smaller). Utility bills are skyrocketing. We have a $770 billion infrastructure backlog, according to Infrastructure Australia. (Migrants need the full complement of infrastructure right away, but will take many years on average to contribute enough to pay for their share of it.)

Despite what Malcolm King says, negative effects on the environment are all too real. The Australian Conservation Foundation has applied to have population growth considered a key threatening process under the Environmental Protection Act.

http://www.acfonline.org.au/sites/default/files/resources/EPBC_nomination_22-3-10.pdf

Look at it this way. Australia is importing racism faster than it can grow it here. So, when all the racists outnumber us what are they going to do ? Well, what they always do, they'll have dictatorships which promote the killing of it's decent citizens by child soldiers.

Divergence
We have had this discussion before. The competitiveness indexes measure how business-friendly an economy is. They consider things like business taxes and regulation. They do not measure standard of living or quality of life.

The human development index is, however, a real quality of life measure. Australia has faster population growth than any of the countries you listed, and also ranks higher on the HDI than any of the countries you listed. Australia’s HDI is second in the world,
behind only Norway:
http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/

perhaps that is why you omitted it from your list?

In fact, if you look at the Human Development Index, six of the top 7 countries have population growth ahead of the rich-country average of about 0.7% growth, and the top 2 – Australia and Norway – have population growth about twice the average for rich developed economies.

HDI Rank – population growth – country

01 - 1.3% - Norway
02 - 1.4% - Australia
03 - 0.5% - Netherlands
04 - 0.7% - United States
05 - 0.9% - New Zealand
06 – 1.0% - Canada
07 - 0.3% - Ireland
08 - 0.8% - Liechtenstein
09 - -0.1% - Germany
10 - 0.8% - Sweden

Population data from here:
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.GROW

looks to me like Australia's population growth is about optimum