Malcolm 'Paddy' King "which I have torn to shreds here and on half a dozen other occasions."

So you're done now.
We don't need yet *another* article a month from now.

"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."

It's absurd to think it can increase *forever*.

Over a million immigrants every decade and their subsequent descendants.
Additional people who need never have set foot on this continent.

Water is finite.
Land is finite.
Natural habitats for wildlife are finite.
Railway tracks and roads are finite.

We live in a world of finite resources.
We cannot have an ever-growing population in Australia or the world at large.

We have little control over what happens in the world at large.
But the government has *absolute control* over the artificial increase from immigration.

It can stop or reduce that with a signature on paper Monday morning.

Pericles

The excuse that bringing in mass numbers of immigrants will reduce the older population problem is the greatest “kick the can down the road” exercise currently occurring in Australia.

Much of immigration starts with universities bringing in foreign students who then stay.

This is compounded by “family reunion” schemes, where an immigrant can also bring in their parents, brothers and sisters, and even their cousins in some instances.

So many of these people are middle aged or older when they get here, and eventually they want to retire, which only adds to the older population problem.

But by then, Australia has a much, much worse problem, because it is well over-populated

And I have not seen any data to suggest Australia is not already over-populated.

As for countries finding their own population balance, nature finds a balance, and the countries you have mentioned such as Japan and Germany are in ecological overshoot, with a natural resource demand greater than what their natural environments can provide.

Those countries only survive by feeding off the natural environments of other countries.

http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/trends/japan/

Pericles,

This graph shows GDP per capita for Japan and a number of other countries from World Bank figures

http://snbchf.com/global-macro/gdp-growth-per-capita/

Japan's GDP per capita is still growing just fine. Evidently, they are compensating for the problems of a large aged cohort despite having a slowly declining population, which will most likely stabilize when people see that they can have more space and cheaper housing along with decent economic opportunity. Countries like Japan and Germany have stabilized their populations quite naturally without any need for organisations like SPA or parties like SPP. Australia would have done likewise. Our fertility rate has been slightly below replacement level since 1976, although we still have a small amount of demographic momentum. The difference between us and the Germans and Japanese is that we have a grasping sociopathic elite that is determined to impose massive population growth through a bipartisan immigration policy. That is why organisations like SPP and SPA can serve a useful purpose. The alternative is to shut up and let our rulers turn Australia into an overpopulated, environmentally degraded, massively unequal, conflict-ridden Third World hellhole.

At http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16485#287805, Pericles writes, of people who are worried about the rapid population growth in Australia that, "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".

Yes it is true that populations grow to a certain point then manage themselves naturally, but not if you keep stimulating growth with mass immigration under the aegis of the Property Council of Australia et al and its Government minions. That is the point!

The demographic transition ideology is not only a myth favoured by growthist economists, but it never takes into account the huge immigration quotients of the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada. Europe, which is on track to stablise massively reduced immigration after the first oil shock and, apart from difficult to manage family reunion and illegal immigrants, has not resiled from this program. That is why it is on track to reduce its population post baby-boomers. With its high immigration Australia is on track to more than double and redouble quickly.

Your homily about lack of imagination is rooted in a poor grasp of the facts.

The problem in Australia is that the government and big business are seriously interfering in our population numbers, just as Mennilik II did in Ethiopia. That is the reality - and it's scary.

Population control associations formed in France in the 19th and 20th century to combat government pronatalism and populationism in competition with Germany. However the EU governments in 1973 decided not to continue population growth policy, so the problem is no longer pressing - unless the USA gets more control over the EU and changes the land-tenure laws and the Civil Code to make property speculation via high immigration profitable in Europe. Hopefully that won't happen.

Japan ceased a big population policy at the same time as Europe and does not encourage high immigration.

No, Sustainable Population Australia is not a depopulationist group. SPA just wants Australia's population to level out, not to go on growing. You see, the capital cities have outgrown the available natural water supply, and are sucking it up from underground at an unsustainable rate. Underground water ought to be used only during droughts, not sucked up every year all the year round. Many farmers are also using unsustainable amounts of artesian water, and making ridiculously-large exports of food. While this is going on, the Aussies are importing huge amounts of food! The waste of fuel is obvious.
Sensible people know that creatures like elephants, orangotangs, and pandas will be only zoo and museum exhibits in the next 50 or 100 years if people-pressure keeps destroying the jungles and woodlands where they live.
Superstition stopped the proper spread of contraceptives to India and China, let along Europe, the Americas, and Africa. But Western medical and other advances meant that more babies survived to adulthood, so an unnaturally-high birthrate was likely as the generations went on.
The world survive quite well when there was only half a billion people. It will not survive happily with 7, 9 and 10 billion.

It's not an issue of right or left, it's about deep seated beliefs and prejudices held by too many ageing white males and females in the Anglo world.

Rockefeller Foundation started funding eugenics institute in Nazi Germany, and allegedly funded much later Bob Carr's mate Paul Ehrlich of Zero Population Growth ZPG, who in turn was a close collaborator of John Tanton (whose network has received funding from Scaife Foundation/Colcom), according to the Southern Povery Legal Center (SPLC) the 'racist founder of the modern anti immigration movement (not just in the USA but the Anglo world). http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/profiles/john-tanton

Tanton's network includes CIS, FAIR, NumbersUSA, Progressives for Immigration Reform (PFIR), The Social Contract Press (TSCP) etc., and in the UK Population Matters and Migration Watch, with direct links being hidden... but underlying philosophy remains consistent, i.e. 'white nativists', non Europeans being on par with germs.

In Australia, claims that the ABC is biased towards the left can be countered by the fact that SPA, Bob Birrell et all have carte blanche access to the ABC, whether it's RN's Late Night Live, Science Show, AM etc.. and recently Population Matter's Prof. Guillebaud who unnoticed managed to quote the infamous Garrett Harding at length on Ockham's Razor. http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/profiles/Garrett-Hardin

Question, who are the mainstream journalists and poiticians in Australia who prefer quoting the 'research' of Australia's best demographer Dr. Bob Birrell, according to Dick Smith?