Backdoor visa manipulation and shortcuts to permanent residency have to stop. And, there are too many incentives for immigrants to latch onto permanent welfare they have contributed nothing to.

Toni Lavis

Sustainable Australia (Check out the website - https://www.sustainableaustralia.org.au/) seems to be the one party that doesn't put the focus on Muslims or Asians like One Nation, but the pro-pop-growth groups cleverly lump them together so that people will continue to think that anybody against high immigration is a racist.

Dick Smith got really mad when the ABC essentially did this last year and went to the ABC studios to comment but was turned away. Later he was shouted down on Media Watch (who defended the ABC of course) who said they've given a lot of coverage to population issues, but they didn't address Dick's comment that the coverage always implies that opposition to immigration means you are a racist.

ericc,

Agreed.

Sustainable Australia is in the process of attempting to register as a party with the Electoral Commission. I'm a member btw.

Australia, down at the bottom of the world and the trade chain, needs at least 50 million people. In order to create a domestic market large enough to create the very economies of scale essential to an exporting economy in a globalized competing free market.

That is why the thrust must be on quite massive decentralization and a move away from the counterproductive tribalism, that puts state against state! When our cause is only really served when it is Aussie old and new, against the rest of a, competing for their economic survival, world.

Every western style economy rests solely on just two support pillars Capital and energy. Before these were fully privatized or corporatised, we went through a post-war period of unprecedented prosperity. And due to visionary leadership and visionary ideas.

Ideas in practice quite massively grew the economy and demanded the highest migration numbers of that day. This nation as it exists today was built by waves of migration, some of it forced and some of it voluntary.

And stands almost alone as the very source of that period of unprecedented prosperity. that changed a backwater basket case economy into the first world trading nation of today.

We've always had a cohort of die-hard fundamentalists who blame the new chum for every bad or sad episode in their life.

Even those of their own doing or making!
As they support with their thoughtless, asinine, obtuse election-winning votes, the very cause of our economic doldrums or lack of leadership/future vision.

Future vision doesn't talk about itself, push itself off into the 12th of never or discover all the reasons it can't be done or won't work?

People, if you can't or won't help build this nation and its newest period of unprecedented prosperity?

Then get yourself and your moribund mindset or corrupt motives, the f#&K out of the way.
Alan B.

What is often overlooked is that since 1788 people living in Australia
always had the facilities, technology and development of other developed countries.
Looking at the 19th century Australia had railways, shipping and
at the end of that century telephones and telegraph around the world
and the start of electrification.
I never thought much about it until at a meeting I attended about 1954
a visiting Dutch Engineer commented that "Australians must be hard workers"
We nearly all laughed, but he protested
"They must be hard workers to build a country like this in 160 years !".

So my point on this is that large populations are not needed to have it all.

Dead wrong Alan B.

Australia has one of the highest standards of living in the world. That high standard of living for the average citizen is now being eroded by high immigration and high population growth that makes the rich richer and the average Aussie poorer. Corporate profits climb but average wages stay flat as more workers mean wages can be depressed.

Increasing the population to 50 million would take 36 years at 2% growth. Less than 2% growth is currently making Sydney and Melbourne less and less liveable every year. You want to hark back to the high immigration of the 50's and 60's and say it was all great. I'm thinking of the last 15 years where we have failed to keep up with the demand for infrastructure because there isn't enough money to pay for all the additional infrastructure that the high population demands need.

The notion that we need migration to make the country great implies that the current population is full of turds that can't do anything right. I completely disagree. The people that are here now can build a great country and build it sustainably.

We don't need additional people to make thorium energy technology work. We don't need additional people to make any new technologies work. When we concentrate on the existing population we can improve technology which improves productivity and improves living standards.