Malcolm Cheryl:
When we have two parties vying for power and they use the carrot of giving huge amounts to parents to have babies ( as in $75,000 for the wife's maternity leave) the end result can only be chaos.
This propaganda to increase the population at all costs is pushed by the vested interests of various business groups who hope to make more profits for example real estate agents.
It has no bearing at all on the future of Australia and is detrimental.
We know that you operate a propaganda business to push whatever your clients want advertised and you are using this and other forums as platforms for this.
Please stop and allow the sensible people who wish to debate seriously not to have this rubbish take up valuable time and space.

Gee Pop goes the Anti-pop,

some nice florid posting there.

1. "People .... breathe and a lot of them eat meat of ruminants that emit methane when they burp. Are you serious? Not say an aluminium smelter? Burping." Didn't you write a book on population which is the bible for the anti-people movement? "Moonlight Misanthropes."

2. "In Australia, population growth contributes 84 per cent to our growth in emissions. Not burning coal/electricity generation? You know ABARE has records on exactly how much energy is used for domestic purposes. Last year it was 29 per cent. About the same as domestically grown food consumption.

3. You know the ERP is derived from the Census and that they recently subtracted 200,000 people due to an overcount. You'd also know that the NOM includes 140,000 new international students about 60,000 Kiwis and long term holiday makers. Please consider taking a degree in demography before writing any more about population. See my comments re anti-immigration and Numbers USA.

4. "Dr Jane O'Sullivan might have got it wrong when she said each extra person costs $200,000 in infrastructure costs, but at the Fenner Conference last week the figure of $340,000 per person was used, based on the original CSIRO report." Oh dear. See Dept Infrastructure report re 11 per cent spend as a total of GDP. It's about $12K per person. But you'd be an idiot to try put a per capita figure on it. We live in a capitalist system you know. Google 'Bonds' and find out more about capital raising.

5. As Australia is 16th in the world re per capita income, who cares about population. It was never factor.

6. "Sandra Kanck, like Paul Ehrlich, may in the end be proved to be right when she says a one-child policy may be necessary." and here is the crux, the rub. At the sinister root of all of the ridiculous figures and non-sensical rants, we get to the social engineering. One child family enforced by bearded gnomes.

Malcolm King,

<Yet to believe as the Sustainable Population Australia(SPA)and SPGN do, that having babies equates to boosting carbon emissions, then God help us all.>

So where are these babies who are never going to consume? Bob Birrell has estimated that 83% of the additional emissions in greenhouse gases that the Treasury predicts by 2020 will be due to population growth.

http://arrow.monash.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/monash:64185?letter=H&collection=monash%3A63642

Our fertility rate in Australia is slightly below replacement level (as you yourself admit) and has been since 1976. It is not a problem, not even if a relatively few Australians choose to have large families. They are more than balanced by all the people who don’t have children or only have one. You are implying that the population would immediately go into decline without net migration. Nonsense. Two thirds of our natural increase (40% of total annual population increase) is due to babies born to Australian born people. Our population would go on growing until some time in the 2030s, even if net migration stopped tomorrow. The population of South Australia is growing at 1.0%, according to the ABS, a 69 year doubling time, so hardly stagnation.

You and your politician and property developer mates are doing a far more effective job of keeping Australian fertility rates low than SPA, SPGN, etc. could ever dream of. The cost of housing has more than doubled since the early 1970s and nearly tripled in some cities in terms of the median wage, mostly due to the rising cost of residential land, leading to mortgage payments and rents that can only be serviced with two incomes. The demographer Joel Kotkin has called high density living (increasingly forced on people because they are priced out of anything else) a more effective means of bringing down fertility rates than China’s one child policy.

“High-density environments such as Manhattan, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C., or Boston invariably have the lowest percentages of children in the country, with Japan-like fertility rates…”

“Due largely to crowding and high housing prices, 45 percent of couples in Hong Kong say they have given up having children.”

http://www.joelkotkin.com/content/00806-city-leaders-are-love-density-most-city-dwellers-disagree

<The SPA and the SPGN are anti-immigration lobbyists. That's why their sister political faction, the Stable Population Party (SPP) preferenced Pauline Hanson above the Greens at the last Federal election. No government in the world will enforce a whacko social engineering program based on a 'one in one out' immigration system…>

Since natural increase is a temporary phenomenon, assuming that the fertility rate stays at or slightly below replacement level, 60% of our population growth is due to immigration, and about another 13% due to births to migrant mothers, please explain how the population can be stabilised without reducing immigration. Do you really think that we can go on doubling our numbers every 38 years ad infinitum?

Given its objectives, why shouldn’t SPP put growthist parties last. The Greens had the balance of power, but they didn’t say a word when Kevin Rudd concealed his intention of massively boosting immigration until after the 2007 election. Julia Gillard said that she didn’t believe in “hurtling down the track to a Big Australia” and then did the exact opposite once she was elected without a murmur from the Greens. Their asylum seeker policy would quickly lead to enormous numbers, as happened in Europe.

A number of European countries, such as Germany and Finland, have approximately stable populations, i.e. they have instituted your “whacko social engineering”. Why are they performing well instead of being economic basket cases at the bottom of the UN Human Development Index?

<Much of their thinking comes from UK Population Matters ('babies are carbon bombs') and NumbersUSA in America. The right wing of the Republican Party slammed NumbersUSA for using racist dog whistles, which cost them the Chicano vote at the last election.>

If these organisations really are racist, it will be easy to go to their websites and find a racist article or policy. You can then link to it and condemn them out of their own mouths. I have challenged you to do this with NumbersUSA, but you were apparently unable to find anything. Phony hysteria about racism is just a ploy to shut down debate. What exactly is this “racist dog whistling”? The Republicans are caught between their Big Business donors, who want high immigration, and their voter base, which wants just the opposite because mass migration greatly increases competition for jobs, housing, public services, and amenities. The Chicanos vote overwhelmingly for the Democrats and always have. The Republicans’ real problem is that a lot of their natural supporters have been disillusioned with them and unwilling to turn out and vote.

<Compared with other nations of in the developed world, and the available cultivated landmass we inhabit, Australia has a small population. We have two medium sized cities and a Federal system, which has failed to take responsibility for urban design.>

Australia is really a small to medium sized country wrapped around a big desert, an example of what demographers call a “big little country” – lots of territory, but most of it uninhabitable. The arable land tends to be of low quality compared to Europe and North America, and has far less reliable rainfall. That is why the Australian Academy of Science (which also sponsored the recent Fenner Conference) recommended back in 1994 that we stabilize our population at 23 million. Of course, PR flacks understand these matters far better than natural scientists writing in their areas of expertise.

http://www.science.org.au/events/sats/sats1994/Population2040-section8.pdf

Ah Divergence,

No more quotes from the Productivity Commission? Fancy one of the authors actually replying and making you look damn foolish.

NOM has been relatively high (since Federation) since 2005. Why? International students. How so? More of them but also change in methodology in counting them over 12/16 months so more are captured in the 'survey'.

How does that translate for the SPA and fifth column loonies? Asians eating us out of house and home. We're doomed. And carbon producing burps apparently.