<< Have you checked the register, Ludwig? Is there anything there amiss, do you think? >>

Yes Alan: http://periodicdisclosures.aec.gov.au/SummaryDonor.aspx

There are plenty of big donors to the major parties, and a few to the minor parties.

And yes there is plenty wrong with this.

From Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_donations_in_Australia ):

< The Australian Shareholders Association has called for political donating to end, arguing that the donations are a gift and a form of bribery. >

< Former Qantas chief, John Menadue, said; "Corporate donations are a major threat to our political and democratic system, whether it be state governments fawning before property developers, the Prime Minister providing ethanol subsidies to a party donor, or the immigration minister using his visa clientele to tap into ethnic money." >

Labor is just as critically influenced by the donations regime as the Coalition.

I'll address immigration tomorrow.

<< I’m not completely sure why you think the [immigration] rate in Australia is excessive. Are the problems economic, social, racial, environmental, or other? >>

Alan I have expressed my major concerns in our correspondence on your three most recent article threads. But to outline them again:

1. We are forever struggling to build ‘much-needed’ infrastructure and improve services. No matter how much effort goes into this over the years, the need remains. We are not catching up! All we are doing is chasing the tail of the very rapidly increasing demand that is created by rapid population growth. If were to head towards a stable population, we would be able to divert a great deal of this effort from duplicating I&S for evermore people into improving it for the existing population.

2. All the economic analysis that we are forever hearing seems to totally miss the most basic economic premise – that supply and demand should be balanced, and that it is just completely crackers to forever work on only the supply side, if the demand side is continuously increasing with no end in sight! Of course we should be increasing supply AND striving to stabilise demand!

3. There is something fundamentally wrong with the way we measure economic prosperity if we can say that the economy is healthy and has been for years, while we struggle to maintain half-decent I&S! Our supposed wonderful economy is NOT translating into wonderful improvements for the average citizen! What it is doing is providing more of the same for ever more people!

continued

4. We need an ever-greater rate of mineral exploitation, agricultural produce and all the other resources, just to stand still in terms of average per-capita provisions for as long as we have a rapidly increasing domestic demand for all of this stuff.

5. How on earth can we possibly achieve a balanced budget with rapid immigration? There will always be enormous pressures on government to spend big on I&S for the new residents and to deal with existing I&S that gets overburdened by ever-more people utilising it. There will always be a great deal of pressure to borrow more and go further into debt.

6. The environment continues to be degraded by continuous population growth in all sorts of ways.

7. The carbon tax / ETS, is supposed to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. But even if it is quite successful in lowering the average per-person output, the rapidly increasing number of people in this country would considerably lessen this gain, or cancel it out, or most likely completely overwhelm it and make sure that our national emissions keep rising at a significant rate. Hence I label Rudd’s immigration and climate change policies as highly contradictory.

Alan, it’s got nothing to do with the race, religion, nationality or ethnicity of immigrants. But it certainly does have a great deal to do with economic, social and environmental concerns.

The never-ending facilitation of high immigration by both major parties has everything to do with the donations regime and other aspects of the unholy alliance between powerful vested interests and out national decision-makers.

I seem to recall a recent study, which amazingly enough received a fair bit of media coverage – which concluded that there are no net gains from high immigration.

Indeed, this was all looked at exhaustively with Australia’s Population Carrying Capacity Inquiry in 1994, headed by Barry Jones, in which the CSIRO and the vast majority of submissions were in favour of stabilising our population at the lowest easily achievable level.

Alan, re your article I wish to add I was appalled to see the headlines (front pages) of the newspapers on display for sale at Woolworths supermarket. Not surprised by the negativity but it was all one-sided. Anti Rudd & pro Abbott. Then I realised they were all Murdoch papers, not a single Fairfax paper in sight. I asked the employee on the counter & she said 'we're always being asked for the Herald (SMH) but we don't stock it.
So Murdoch has bought Woolworths Australia-wide to reinforce his bias against Labor. The rest of us merely get one vote on Saturday. Money talks! This is NOT journalism it is corruption & manipulation of the highest order. Woolworths should be ashamed. Your article was spot on.

Alan, you remain confused. Murdoch has made money from tabloid journalism, which is common in Europe. He's done the same with Fox TV. That does not mean that all his papers have a page 3 girl. Some of his journalists, including some of his Australian journalists, do in fact publish informed comment. That is quite a different market to the redneck market which Fox appeals to.

Your next mistake is to claim that the Australian economy is so healthy. It is in fact quite unbalanced, with a continuing current account deficit, meaning we borrow more and more each month to bankroll our lifestyle, unlike healthy economies. Our economy depends on iron ore and digging it up as fast as we can, at frightening rates. 1.5 million tonnes per DAY! Meantime farming is stuffed and on the ropes, manufacturing continues to shut up shop and city Australia relies on building and trading ever more expensive houses with each other, which the Economist has long noted is completely unsustainable. The ASX is meantime propped up by the ever increasing value of bank shares, which prop up that housing bubble market.

Alan

Your original comments quoted four exporters you claimed had significant exports to China. Using your source of the CIA world fact book, and EU data (as the factbook does not give EU estimates), this is China’s share of their exports:

New Zealand: 15%
Russia: 15.5%
Japan: 21.3%
EU*: 8.5%

*Source: http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/docs/2006/september/tradoc_113366.pdf
Note the EU data greatly overstate China’s importance, as they include only trade with non-EU countries; most EU countries’ exports are to other EU countries.

Brazil, which you have also often quoted as an economy comparable to Australia, sends 17% of its exports to China.

None of these comes close to Australia’s estimated 29.5% of exports to China.

So now you shift the goalposts again, introducing Taiwan and South Korea as comparators. Taiwan did indeed suffer a contraction in GDP when the GFC hit, of 1.8%, but its economy rebounded with 10.8% growth in 2010, hardly a “disaster”. In the five years from 2007 to 2012, Taiwan’s economic growth has averaged 3.4% a year, and South Korea 3.0% a year. Both are better than Australia’s 2.5% a year. (IMF annual average data).

Your use of debt data in national currencies was clearly selected to imply Australia’s debt was comparatively small. The data are meaningless, as you concede. And do you seriously think that ‘No-one in any of these countries thinks their debt is “staggering”’? Have you not followed the anguished debates on the negative effects of high and rising debt in Japan and the USA?

Do you accept that you are wrong to allege that Henry Ergas’s statements about structural deficits were “untrue”?