The old hoary 'Malcolm King works for big business'. Ha! As if business, large or small gives a fat rats about the SPA/SPP. I spend most of my time getting people jobs.

Collectively, you are not much above a university club. If I can demolish your little tryst in 1000 words, and show that the anti-pop forces are up to their necks in covert campaigns including obtaining grant monies to run god only knows what re women's right to abortion and sexual health, then that's a good days work.

My interest, apart from tearing down your crypto-fascist facade before you get started, is the psychopathology of groups such as the SPP/SPA. On the one hand you are timid to the point of being introverted yet on the other hand, censor all comments from your membership which dares to question the 'official line' - which I have torn to shreds here and on half a dozen other occasions. The SPP's Facebook page is a shocker. I will certainly notify the AG's department about it. You cannot write those things about migrants and expect to get away with it.

I have no doubt that you sincerely believe that it is necessary to drop Australia's population to 7 million by hook or by crook. It's absurd but I will leave that with you.

The 'far right' are the big business people who, in league with unrepresentative government, are artificially engineering Australia's population upwards by constantly increasing mass immigration, as well as conning people into thinking they should have more babies, and suppressing dissent by attacking honest comment as 'racist'. These are the centrally controlling population engineers and they boast they have governments by the tail. See http://candobetter.net/node/2830 . All that small population advocates ask is for democracy to prevail, i.e. for the government to stop engineering overpopulation which is driving up all costs of living, making society more repressive, overruling local government, disorganising local networks, removing our contact with nature and destroying the environment, both established built and natural. Invited permanent economic Immigration has now gone from an average of around 80,000 pa from the 1960s to the late 1990s to 240,000 pa, which is bigger than the population of Hobart and only 40,000 less than the populations of Wollongong or the Sunshine Coast. The floating populations of non-permanent immigrants with work permits is estimated at around 600,000, half the population of Adelaide. In every city there governments are steamrolling citizens with public asset privatisation to fund adverse changes to their habitats with the excuse of accommodating a growing population.

Malcolm King, in my view, is an advocate for that despotic far right. That is, the big business network who have bought up resources like water, agricultural land, land for development and housing and the associated downstream service industries which include mortgage finance and big real-estate marketing, such as realestate.com.au and domain.com.au, owned by Fairfax and Murdoch press and their hangers on (sundry immigration lawyers, realtors and migration agents for universities, hospitals, construction firms and mines) .

The only defense the growth lobby cowards can find to cloak their evil motives is calling people who oppose undemocratic economic mass migration racists. Its a pretty pathetic rag to cover their unbridled greed, but it's the only clothing they have

Both the article and many of the comments disqualify themselves as unworthy of any adult consideration from the moment they try to frame their discussion in the tired old dogwhistle non-categories of “far-right”, “left”, “lefties” (under the second and third of which they even categorise the Nazis!). Truly relevant categories would include “Malthusian” (the belief that there are too many other people in the world), “social engineering” (elites or wannabe elites structuring the lives of the plebs as objects rather than subjects), “theocracy” (rule by “faith” charlatans consigned to history in the Enlightenment and specifically downgraded though not decisively enough in our Constitution), “misanthropy” (a hatred of the human species). Malthusianism, social engineering and misanthropy are categories under which I would question elements of both the depopulation and the big Australia lobbies. The reasons are pretty clear from the meanings of the terms.

Much depends on whether the focus of the depopulation lobby is on Australia or global. If it’s global it is misanthropic as its proponents go coy at requests for specifics of what measures they have in mind which would actually achieve this apocalyptic aim. If it’s related only to Australia it relates especially to what we are importing along with our imported immigrants. Primarily are we bringing a commitment to promote and defend the basic secular-democratic values that make Australia, Europe, Britain and North America worth seeking refuge in rather than refuge from? For those who hate our democratic secular values, or who would abridge the human rights (including freedom from religious coercion) of other citizens including their co-religionists: outsky. For those intending to be mere colonists in ghettos, you can stay but you’re not really welcome till you become part of us.

Social engineers calling for artificial expansion need active education to the effect that Australia is a nation, not a mere market or a source of factory fodder at cheap rates, and about the limits to physical resources

Good post, BiancaDog

Malcolm King has a public relations company and hasn't denied to that it is being paid to rubbish people who want to stabilize the population.

The Australian Conservation Foundation is so concerned about the environmental impacts that it has nominated human population growth in Australia as a Key Threatening Process under the Environmental Protection Act.

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

According to the Productivity Commission, there is now no evidence for significant per capita economic benefits from mass migration (see their 2006 report on immigration p. 154 and the graphs on p. 155 and p. 147). We are having high population growth rammed down our throats because the distributional effects are siphoning a larger share of our nation's wealth up to the top. Big Business benefits beyond the sectors mentioned by BiancaDog, through bigger domestic markets and a cheap, compliant workforce. All that the rest of us get are unremitting assaults on our environment, security, social cohesion, personal freedom, and quality of life.

If SPA or SPP really are promoting eugenics or coercive family planning (pointless with our fertility rate slightly below replacement level since 1976), or are really racist, it ought to be easy to go to their websites, link to some racist or eugenicist rants, and let them convict themselves out of their own mouths. Malcolm King hasn't done this, because there are no such materials. He has made it all up. Nor can he do it for Numbers USA. No organisation can be held responsible for the comments of lone individuals on their websites unless they ban comments altogether.

Here is some testimony to the US Congress opposing mass migration by T. Willard Fair who was speaking as President and CEO, Urban League of Greater Miami, and as a Center for Immigration Studies Board Member. (Center for Immigration Studies is another organization that Malcolm King attacks as racist.)

https://www.numbersusa.com/content/learn/issues/american-workers/congressional-testimony-how-mass-immigra.html

Why would this Black man, working for the advancement of Black Americans, serve on the board of an organization that is simply a front for White racism?

He isn't alone

https://www.facebook.com/AfricanAmericansAgainstIllegalImmigration

In http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16485#287773 Jay writes what a lot of people think Africa, but he is wrong.

Africa existed for thousands of years without overpopulation. People lived in many different villages and tribes in steady state economies. For instance, in the late 19th century Ethiopia's population was only 4 or 5 million. After Mennilik II's modernisation programs, which included massive land 'reforms', electricity and cities, Ethiopia's population climbed to 10 million. In 1950, as development continued, the population climbed to 18.3 million. In 2010 it is 83 million and climbing rapidly still.

What changed?

In the late 19th century there were massive land 'reforms':

The land 'reforms' coincided with dispossession and 'integration' of tribes with Mennelik II who was influenced by Russian imperialists. Thrown off their land - particularly those on the plains, the people drifted to the cities, which were growing as agriculture was industrialised and roads and electricity were installed. Immigrants in cities have far more fertility opportunities than in stable clan-based societies.

In the 1950s land was irrigated and former grazing ranges were intensively cultivated, which required dispossessing the peoples that had led sustainable lives there for millenia, without overpopulation.

In the 1970s there were more huge land 'reforms'.
In the 1980s there were mass government resettlements.

Immigrants also came from nearby countries where wars, colonisation and siimilar dispossession was happening.

These processes destroyed local self-government and sustainable local economies where there was probably still men's and women's land and fertility opportunities would have been kept low through the Westermarck effect (codified in kinship rules). As happened in the Netherlands 17th capitalist revolution and in 18th Britain, local populations were disorganised and, lacking the land that had once brought them independence, they were obliged to move to cities, with only their labour to sell. With no laws against child labour, their only opportunity for getting more money is having more children. See https://www.academia.edu/2328154/Demography_Territory_and_Law_The_Rules_of_Animal_and_Human_populations for the land-tenure and demographic theory.

Something similar is happening to Australia with our new 'land reforms'.

I can understand some people being nervous about population increase. But it's usually because they have bought the idea that there are only two alternatives: unlimited (and therefore, by definition, unsustainable) growth on the one hand; and enforced population control on the other. Pure scaremongering.

They lack the necessary imagination to see that populations grow to a certain point, then manage themselves naturally. Japan, Germany and a whole slew of Central European countries are already in negative population-growth territory. With a prosperous and well-educated populace, at no time did they see the need for a "Population Control Association".

Nor indeed a "Population Control Party". The reasons are fairly obvious - a political grouping based upon such muddle-headed paranoia can have no cogent, rational policies. A quick glance at the SPP "policies" on sustainability is proof enough.

http://www.populationparty.org.au/attachments/db/pop/68.pdf

Not a single actual, actionable policy is articulated, just a succession of woolly-wafty words about what Australia "should" do.

Total cobblers.

What also hasn't penetrated their thinking is that both steady-state and negative-growth populations have their own brand of economic issues to contend with. Principal among these is the necessity for the entire population to accept a lower standard of living for a period of time, as a result of the inevitable two-to-three generation timeframe required to rebalance the working/non-working population. Think of our own situation; until the baby-boomer generation starts falling off the twig at a substantial rate (which will happen, of course), we will have an ever-smaller workforce supporting an ever-increasing bunch of oldies. Including me.

Japan already recognizes this inevitability; their problem is including it within a workable political platform that the current generation will accept. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has already seen the writing on the wall.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/05/18/national/success-abenomics-hinges-immigration-policy/

http://www.cnbc.com/id/101828016

The idea that all - or even some, or even any - of our economic challenges can be overcome by population control is daft. Simplistic, naive, and... daft.