Shockadelic,

Your comments re censorship neatly describe my underlying theme.

Look, if I can be frank. The whole anti-population push is a sideshow. In fact, it's a sideshow of a sideshow. It lacks evidence, it lacks research and most of what you read here from the SPA and its sucker fish, is self-referential quoting. They parrot each other. When they don't like something or can't defeat it, they scream censorship.

I have only a cursory interest in population. Most of my articles have been on ageing population, fiscal gap, generational change and the importance of higher education. I used to work for a large government department where we looked at labour market statistics, population, participation and productivity.

When ever Mark O'Connor and others started using ABS figures to say the apocalypse is coming - which showed a fundamental lack of understanding of how an economy worked - we used to wonder about the psychology behind this and how you can get people to believe stuff which is wrong on first principles.

I do write on the anti-pops because they are a new right wing phenomenon with totalitarian aspects passing themselves off as greenies trying to 'save us'. Hasbeen wrote an excellent piece sometime ago about the cultic nature of these groups.

You see, on first blush, their message of less people equals a happy, harmonious world, sounds appealing. But once you scratch the surface, you'll find a morass of contraindicated data and simple fantasy which, implementation-wise, has jackboot written all over it.

Try defeat the arguments instead of crying censorship.

Malcolm

Let's deal with each point in your latest rant, shall we?

1) "The whole anti-population push is a sideshow". No it isn't. It was World Food Day yesterday and Lester Brown from the Earth Policy Institute noted "There will be 219,000 people at the dinner table tonight who were not there last night—many of them with empty plates... In India some 190 million people are being fed with grain produced by overpumping groundwater. For China, there are 130 million in the same boat... In Nigeria, 27 percent of families experience foodless days. In India it is 24 percent, in Peru 14 percent...At no time since agriculture began has the world faced such a predictably massive threat to food production as that posed by the melting mountain glaciers of Asia...After several decades of raising grain yields, farmers in the more agriculturally advanced countries have recently hit a glass ceiling, one imposed by the limits of photosynthesis itself...To state the obvious, we are in a situation both difficult and dangerous."

If you have some magic bullet to solve the looming food crisis, please share it with us. It may win you the Nobel Prize.

2)"When they don't like something or can't defeat it, they scream censorship." Sorry, I think this applies to you, not to us. The problem with you is that you make baseless allegations and when we try and make a rational reply, you're the one that gets hysterical, not us.

3)"I have only a cursory interest in population". That's the problem, isn't it? You're ignorant of the wealth of population literature. It's more than ageing, education, fiscal gaps etc. You're an economist (aren't you?), not a scientist. The population question is inherently a matter of science, of balancing resources and population.(cont. next post...)

(continued from previous post)

4) "When ever Mark O'Connor and others started using ABS figures to say the apocalypse is coming..." Not sure that Mark ever used the word 'apocalypse' but the ABS projections are indeed very worrying. If this growth rate of 1.8 per cent continues then we will have doubled the population in 39 years,that is, 46 million people by 2052, and doubled again by the end of the century. We might just know a bit more about maths than you do Malcolm.

5)"I do write on the anti-pops because they are a new right wing phenomenon with totalitarian aspects..." I think you just breached the guidelines there. But it's laughable. People in Sustainable Population Australia are a broad church but virtually all SPA presidents have been left of centre. Many SPA leaders come out of the Australian Democrats which are about as democratic as you can get. No-one I know of in the movement has totalitarian inclinations.

6) "...you'll find a morass of contraindicated data and simple fantasy which, implementation-wise, has jackboot written all over it." Once again, you've breached the guidelines. But it's not us you're talking about. We're evidence-based.

Perhaps I shall now breach the guidelines by saying you are a paid PR hack doing the bidding of your developer masters who have a vested interest in continued population growth. You have nothing of substance to say.

you are a paid PR hack doing the bidding of your developer masters who have a vested interest in continued population growth. You have nothing of substance to say.

hear hear.

The New World Order needs to reduce population so their fascist world Govt can be more easily control the planet.

I am not "anti-pop" or "anti-people". I am anti-immigration.

Nor am I "totalitarian", I'm a classical liberal.
I actually want Australians to have *large* families, as I think having siblings is highly beneficial to children.
They can't do this while immigration continues on its current scale.

I am opposed to eugenics and forced sterilisations.
Yet I'm presumed to be a Nazi ("lebensraum", "jackboot") simply because I dissent from the multicultural/multiracial utopian agenda.

That is the fantasy with "a morass of contraindicated data" (e.g. crime/unemployment rates).