Most water in Australia is used by agricultural industries, not urban populations, so population is not the major component in water usage. Whether Australia's population is 15 or 20 million doesn't make much difference, as long as the population is living in cities.

In addition, if the government took Yobbo's rather sensible suggestion, all the people planting crops that are stupid to plant in Australia, like rice, would soon go out of business. In addition, water would be saved from the smaller component of water usage that city people are responsible for, as people might start planting less water intensive gardens and so forth -- as already happens in Perth where water is much more expensive.

Excellent article Tom

Top responses from Stuart, Peter Ridd and Leigh.

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“Her(e) we go again with the usual litany of half truths and falsehoods.”

Perseus is wrong on each of his points:

1. He is the chronic exaggerator with his c60 000 per annum emigration rate. It is more like 35 000.

2. Decentralisation is not the answer, especially while the immigration rate remains absurdly high. If immigration was reduced to net zero or close to it, then some decentralisation might be appropriate. But at the moment, there is merit in keeping the issues of massive population growth, overcrowding and resultant resource stress confined to a few centres, instead of spreading it to many.

3. Shortage of water in our cities is due to chronically bad planning, the worst aspect of which is the facilitation of continuous rapid population growth. Lack of sufficient encouragement for improvements in efficient usage and home-collection and storage are also part of this bad planning, but are certainly secondary factors.

4. Ha haaaaa! Population Nazis! Now that’s funny! Perseus has personally called me a veg Nazi about 20 times on this forum. Now I can proudly announce that I am also a Perseus-approved pop Nazi as well! So what if our overall GDP had been about half of what it is today with a population half as big? Per-capita economic turnover is what really counts. GDP is a terrible measure of any sort of well-being. Anyway, with a much smaller population, the per-capita GDP would have been much larger and the ability for our resource base to keep supplying that level of wealth would have been a whole lot greater.

5. The defence argument doesn’t stack up either. What earthly difference would it make if we had 10 million or 50 million, when you consider the population of Indonesia – about 300 million? With a smaller and much richer population, the defence budget could well have been similar to what it is now, if need be. High tech defence is what counts, not the number of foot-soldiers

“In short, history would repeat itself. A small, inward looking local culture would merely mind the continent until a much more aggressive and populous culture decided it was time to take the opportunity presented to them on a platter”, writes Perseus.

I appreciate this concern. But my main fear is that if we keep stressing our society the way we are, we will become much more vulnerable. The greatest stress factor of all is our ridiculously high population growth rate.

I push sustainability on this forum all the time. It is as relevant to defence as it is to just about every other Australian domestic issue discussed on OLO.

We need to maintain a healthy society in order to maintain an effective defence system.

Let’s face it, if we stress our resource base by continuing to increase the demands placed up on it, then we are going to see lots of already existing simmering divisions really open up. When things get tight, it will happen in a very uneven manner. Some will really feel it, while others will be pretty well immune. This will lead to chronic disillusionment and the promulgation of the ‘us-and-them mentality’….. and more people expressing real hatred for governments, bureaucrats and various others, such as Perseus with his “population Nazi” and “veg Nazi” type quips (and a considerable array of others in his 225 posts on OLO to date).

He is a prime example of what happens when people feel highly disaffected, in his case by genuine efforts to reign in massive tree-clearing and environmental destruction. We really have to prevent people feeling this aggrieved…. by addressing sustainability with all our effort. One of the major prerequisites is to lower immigration to net zero, if not put a moratorium on it for ?five years.

We must with the greatest of urgency reduce population growth as much as we possibly can, so that we may save our society and hence maintain a half-decent defence system.

As usually, my suggested solution is diametrically opposite to that of Perseus.

Not that long ago one Pauline Hanson proposed tighter immigration quotas under the banner "Australia for Australians".
Her intent was to restrict immigration to english language proficient candidates and to reduce the overall intake. This proposal was put into the wacky extreme right please ignore bin.
Now I read these comments and find those arguing for tighter immigration (sans racist overtones) are labelled leftist whackos and, not withstanding this, 'population nazis'.
I'm confused.
If you argue for lower immigration these days, are you on the left or the right?

Leigh/KAEP,
Agree with your posts, Winston Smith, yea another Communist plot, to all other posters, I see your arguements, however don't agree with them, maybe someone will post something convincing.

Yes big business and their large donations to Governments tend to make Governments make decisions which is not in the interests of the majority of voters, which is why I think all donations to Political Parties and individual Politicians should be banned seeing how we are there employers and are paying them from the taxes they take from us.

Ultimately it boils down to the fact that Governments have been taking taxes, and increasing taxes over the years and more so in the last 10 years or so, from us to provide the essential infastructure that is and will be required in the future, yet as we are starting to see nowdays we are not getting what we have paid for.
We now have kids leaving school who can not read or write properly, we have people dying while waiting for life saving surgery, we have electricity problems, water shortages etc, etc.

What we really have to ask is where has all the money that they kept taking from our pockets gone to, as it quite obviously seems it has not gone in to the essential services that it was suppossed to go to.

Most of all if Governments are not able to forward plan and provide what will be needed with the ever increasing amounts of money they take from us maybe we need to look at the whole system of Government and change it to ensure that they will be able to provide the services they are suppossed to, rather than them constantly giving us lies and excuses they currently feed us in bucketloads to cover up their mistakes.

Then we might actually get a proper standard of accountablity from our employees and maybe get the services we pay for.

Just think how accountable our politicians have been in the last few years when their mistakes have been made public, especially when they claim the buck stops with them.

I say bring back the Westminster System of Government we are suppossed to have in the first place and stop the politicians from hijacking the system in the future.