Peter,

For the obvious reasons that we are going broke ( selling assets, borrowing and still going backwards ), massive habitat loss growing real unemployment, education and research decline.......we must move to balanced migration.

That is, outflow equals inflow. Around 80,000 people a year.

The property development and banking industries have taken over Labour and Liberal parties.

Australians are asleep at the wheel. Google " Sustainable Population Party".

Best,

Ralph

What the pro population growth brigade needs to understand is that the more people we have the less a quality of life we'll have.
Which do you prefer ?

Rhrosty,

Trickle-drip irrigation has its advantages and has been around for a long time. You can even set up such a system in your home garden. You blithely talk about osmosis, but it takes lots of energy to force sea water through a membrane and leave the salt behind. Desalinated water is 4 to 6 times as expensive as dam water, OK for coastal cities, but much too expensive for agriculture, except maybe for growing vegetables in greenhouses near the city. There are also enormous costs if the water has to be pumped for any distance -- water is heavy. Most of the interior has ferocious evaporation rates and poor soil quality, as well as lack of rainfall. See these maps from Dr Chris Dixon of the CSIRO:

http://www.australianpoet.com/boundless.html

Then there are the rising real costs of agricultural inputs as we run out of cheap oil and phosphate.

http://www.infomine.com/investment/metal-prices/crude-oil/all/

http://www.infomine.com/investment/metal-prices/phosphate-rock/all/

http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/

What is wrong with the precautionary principle? Your technologies haven't been proven until they are found to work cost-effectively on a wide scale. This needs to be done before there is any talk of a bigger population. Otherwise, you are likely to just make Australia as poor, populous, and environmentally degraded as the places that people are currently risking their lives to escape. Not to mention the defence issues as people start turning on each other, especially seeing that our politicians have put in so many ethnic and sectarian fracture lines.

But right now, today as you read, the most pressing & urgent issue consuming all sapient beings in Caaanbra is ISIS, yes the ISIS Crisis ! PS: Don't mention the War ...ssshh !

Let's share our abundant plains with all who sail to our shores, and what a great set of words for an anthem for those desiring to live here, either as compliant assimilating future Aussies or those who wish to decapitate, rape and have us submit to their way of life !

In any event, if we don't say NO to the proposed changes to the common law rights (already seriously eroded under Fuhrer Howard) by acceptance of Herr Brandis's proposed laws, then we have lost to ISIS already.

The creeping fascism I feared 10 years ago, is about to visit us all.

Rhosty said;
roll out of rapid rail, which would pay for itself, when some of the
resumed and rezoned land, were later sold as urban housing development.

So who would want to live next to a fast rail line ?
Then have the all night diesels thundering through.

In other words it is the biological imperatives, or lack of--{land
and resources etc, and overpopulation) also recognised as economic hardship or poverty.
that drive war,genicide,starvation,and disease.

Not intolerance as is taught in our universities.

On this planet nature still rules in the final analysis.