Time To STOP What?

The future of Sydney is now in the hands of the Planning Department, councils and developers, who, in the next year or so, will roll out the detailed plans of just how - and where - this city will grow.
The State Government has set out the facts and figures in its blueprint for Sydney's expansion over 25 years. The Metropolitan Strategy, released in December, tells how the city needs to cater for an extra 1.1 million people by 2031.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/nearer-thy-neighbours/2006/03/16/1142098602874.html?page=1

In an enormous logistics exercise, the Metropolitan Strategy taskforce will be fitting 1.1 million more people into limited Ghetto space, and in the coming months a lot of planning bureaucrats in the State Government and councils will devote their attention to the detail of carrying it out.

The Department of Planning would not allow the Herald to interview the strategy's executive director, Gail Connolly, or the urban renewal executive director, Chris Johnson.

It just seems like Morris Dilemma is backflipping up, up, up and over his other backflips crying "You can't see me I'm hiding behing my little finger. I WILL get my Desal plant, Frank's Botany Vegas and my post ministerial Mac-Job. The rest of you can eat road rage and I hope you get rammed by an unlicensed P-Plater"

Pity about that election next March. But Morris knows there is ALWAYS TIME for one last Backflip.

Sydney does not have to grow at all to be economically viable. In fact by placing a ban on new housing developments in the Sydney basin, developers will be forced to focus attention on country towns where new jobs to service Sydney's economy are NEEDED. And more importantly, environmental and sociological issues can be redressed in Sydney that will force clowns like Johnson and Connolly to focus on COMMUNITIES and not profit margins for Macforeign developers.

peakro, it may have escaped your notice, but this thread advocates population reduction, not simply stabilization.

This will entail somewhat more stringent "rules" than those you outline for us.

Sorry, that should read, more stringent rules than those you outline for other people.

"We", after all, are already well along the path of non-replacement.

It is becoming clearer by the day that this thread is actually all about restricting immigration. After all, if the non-immigrant population is already reproducing at a rate lower than replacement, there is no need to rave on about population stabilization in Australia, it has already arrived. As indeed it has in Europe, amongst Europeans.

Why not be more open and honest about the fact that we are talking about immigration policy, rather than pretending that we are talking about "global" population issues? But of course, "management of the planet's resources" is so much more PC than "close the borders".

KAEP, meanwhile, still seems to believe that economic management is all about governments telling you what you can and can't do, where you can and can't build, and where you can and can't set up a business.

Businesses don't just happen because a government says they must. They happen because there is a market. If you try to create new markets by force, they will quickly go bankrupt.

There is, after all, a reason why cities grow and why country towns do not, and it has to do with the fact that our primary-industry based economy has changed over the years, and doesn't need the same infrastructure as it used to. Everybody gets excited when the Bank in a small town closes - but for what reason was it put there in the first place, and does that need still exist?

And just for fun, what do you think would be the result, KAEP, of a ban on housing development in Sydney? Mass migration to country towns, where there isn't enough work for their existing inhabitants? Or simply faster price increases in the existing market?

I know which one I would bet on.

As others have said here…

Pericles, oh Peeeericleeeeeeees,
Have you read the SPA policy document yet? The questions you keep raising as ‘unanswered’ have been repeatedly answered by my repeatedly referring to that policy. I gave up waiting for you to download it yourself and emailed it to you. Have you bothered to read it, or are you truly trolling?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll

You still have not apologized for purposely misquoting Wikipedia. Also the article actually said “is a ratio: population over resources.” When are you going to admit to this?

Immigration — you attack us for not having a global solution. You said:

>>>"What incentives do you consider would be helpful in persuading i) the USA ii) Iraq iii) Nigeria iv) Indonesia and v) China to join your programme? What would be your fallback position if some, or none, came to the party? Do you believe that i) bribery or ii) threats would be more effective in getting your message across?"<<<

So if, as you suggest, it is too hard to implement a worldwide solution right now, why can’t we at least clean up our own backyard first? Why do you think the population experts, with the hardest campaign of all to sell, then risk making their campaign even MORE difficult by focusing on immigration — with the potential charges of Xenophobia?

Because it is the only thing that we have control over, at least for now.
Because we can set an example that other nations might follow.

Does not controlling domestic immigration policy answer all your objections above? Is it not the ultimate fallback position? You asked!

Pericles, once again you have demonstrated incoherent thinking. You cannot attack us for the impossibility of implementing a workable international solution, and then also attack us for proposing a domestic one! You can’t have it both ways.

So this whole list is waiting for:-
1/ An apology for deliberately misquoting Wikipedia
2/ You to read the SPA document
3/ You to concede the immigration argument
4/ You to propose your solution. (sigh)

Peri-Cleese,

If a restaurant is full, people have to queue. That is not telling anyone to go there or what to do. It is free market not autocracy. If the government builds street stalls to handle the overflow and these stalls cause disruption for local residents then that is GREED. It is an autocratic response to market conditions that gives unfair advantage to the government Mac-stall holders at the expense of the local residents.

And just for fun, what do you think would be the result, KAEP, of a ban-on-NEW-housing-developmentS in Sydney?

Well Peri-one-eye, I KNOW it would shift development to country towns and the 500,000 support jobs autocratically slated for Sydney's outer west will go to those country towns and decentralise population growth around NSW where it is NEEDED.

The problem is that you do not understand economics and foist a PRETENSE on people who do. We can only laugh, but you give us a platform with which to educate citizens. They need to understand the denigrating effects that government Macprivate-corruptionships will have on their ordinary day-to-day-lives as they have 1-million-strong new neighbours stuck in boxes near their railway-stations. These 1-million-new-residents will autocratically be denied garages and parking facilities and thus cars. This will cause boredom and frustration that will fester into rage-and-resentment of those who were here first.
And guess what? NSW LABOR will have forced unreasonable state taxes and funnelling operatives on we the existing citizens to kickstart the infrastucture needed to build these railway-station boxes in the first place. NSW LABOR will be making the rod for our own backs and to make matters worse forcing us to pay for the bloody thing. All this in order to keep Mac-profits in the black and beautiful.

NSW be warned. Morris, Bob and Frank are not your friends. They are merely proxies for profiteers who want an airtight-contract to funnel our lives into their tidy offshore bank accounts. This is what we get for blindly accepting branch stacked government in NSW and allowing politicians to do what they like with proprietry NSW State knowledge after they leave office.

Pericles, yes immigration should be reduced. Is this UN-PC? It can be spun that way but it is not. If Australia's current population is naturally falling without immigration, then we have an effective and PC way to manage a reduction in numbers. It would be impossible to implement a "one child policy" here, besides, we both know this is unnecessary.

We don't need to "close the borders", we should just reduce the amount of skilled migrants entering Australia. This group is the largest by far of people migrating to Australia. There may be no need to reduce humanitarian migration or family migration for that matter, so your hinted accusations of xenophobia or racism are unfounded.

Peak oil will drastically remake the economic landscape of Australia and the world. How bad (or if bad at all) will naturally vary between locations. Governments will need to analyze the subsidies and market distortion that will cause serious problems down the road. The obvious examples are the electricity market and logistics in Australia. Renewable energy production will need government intervention to provide a foot hold in the market.

This has been achieved with great success in Germany, (read economist Herman Scheer for details), with the creation of 160,000 jobs in the renewable energy sector since 1990. Most of the rhetoric against renewables is simply wrong, the economic arguments are against them are pure propaganda. We need to break the stranglehold fossil fuels have on this market. Rail is a no-brainer, the current state of affairs is an out right scandal but I believe this problem will be solved by economic forces as the cost of trucking rises.

The economic pressures that have driven people and work out of regional Australia may turn. We have the largest area of organic farming in the world (12.1 million hectares) this trend will intensify down the slope of peak oil and will require more rural labour.

Since I am the only one who refuses to be bullied by the single-issue fanatics on this thread, it behoves me to keep going.

eclipse, however much you squeal "look at the policy, look at the policy", it answers precisely none of my questions.

It is couched in the same "wouldn't it be nice if...." terms that you have used on this thread. There isn't a single specific suggestion that has a direct impact on the problems that it describes, so even if you believe the disaster scenario put forward, by the time you get to the end of the document you are no wiser as to how it might be prevented or alleviated.

Which at least explains why you haven't been able to answer either.

KAEP has his head firmly... in the sand too.

>>I KNOW it would shift development to country towns and the 500,000 support jobs autocratically slated for Sydney's outer west will go to those country towns<<

I'm afraid you need to visit some of these places and see how the most of them are slowly dying, and understand the reasons why. Perhaps you can explain why you think "autocratically slating" jobs for rural NSW is more likely to succeed than doing the same in Sydney's outer west.

peakro, one of the puzzles here is why we don't start the process very simply, by doubling or trebling the government excise on fossil fuels. Compared to Europe, we have extremely cheap petrol for our cars, and it would send the "right" message to the people.

If the situation is as dire as you say it is, then there could not be a simpler and more effective way to achieve two goals. One, to set aside funds which the government could then deploy to generate energy from alternative sources - uranium springs to mind immediately, but that is horribly non-PC too. Two, it would establish in the minds of the entire population, at a single stroke, the depth of the problems we face.

Now that's a campaign that would have some honesty.

Any volunteers?