Ludwig, I entirely agree with you and reinforce one of your points.

Polititians are not the slightest bit interested in "whats best for Australia". Gaining power is their game and big business helps to achieve this by contributing greatly to the two major parties.

'He who pays the Piper calls the tune' is a trueism and big business wants high immigration because it garrantees increased sales of consumer goods. BB could not care less about our standard of living or how long it takes us to get to and from work or how long ques are or the costs of education, etc. Their goal is to sell more consumer goods and bringing more people into Aus is easier and cheaper for them than competing against each other for a bigger market share.

High immigration is negative on enviromental grounds and negative on social grounds and borderline economicly. But it puts big bucks in the pockets of big business.

While I have the floor. I say we should be training our own skilled workers and not poaching them from other countries that need them far more than we do. I recall the NSW Government boasting about the number of apprentices the put on each year. Not now.

Hendo (Saturday, 1 July 2006 10:46:06 AM) mentioned France's huge worker immigration program, but he neglected to add that that program was stopped after the first oil shock in 1973, as were all those worker immigration programs of western continental Europe. Thenceforth the policy in the EU (with the exception of Britain) has been zero net immigration. Family reunion is harder to stop because of European conventions, but a policy of not building much new housing gets round this one to a large degree, since the European conventions require adequate housing and income for family reunion.

What really contributed mightily to 'rebuilding economies' was oil.

We have no need to grow or even to maintain our populations which are the largest the earth has ever seen and which are themselves a reflection of available cheap energy - oil and coal.

Those days of cheap energy and big populations are over - thank heavens. Perhaps the environment will be able to recover if human populations shrink from attrition in time.

By the way Australia's population is currently growing at the world population growth rate 1.2% per annum, so we are in no danger soon of population decline. You must have been listening to the Treasurer, who gets it wrong all the time. Try reading the ABS population Statistics.

Japan is set, as is Western Europe, for a relatively gentle decline in energy and materials demand. It has also preserved its forests. This is the way to go. The English speaking economies have set their high consuming, low democracy populations up for some really bad times in the near future. They seem to be the worst in the world.

Suggesting that we can all beat Maddison avenue by consuming less is to pretend we don't live in an economy that convinces most people by every method that they must produce more and therefore consume more.

I cannot understand why your 'logic' doesn't produce cognitive dissonance in your own head. It certainly does in mine.

To KAEP:

Military force can only be one part of a more comprehensive strategy: if some big country was eager to conquer Australia at any cost, yes, they could have done so and Australia could never obtain the military means to stop them, but war has a cost and that cost increases with higher population and a lower standard of living. It is cheaper and more realistic for an enemy to first coerce Australia to give them our coal and gas willingly before actually invading, so if we have nuclear electricity we can at least survive once mankind exhausts the planet's fossil-fuels and most of the world is starving and desperate.

In other words, the whole world is connected and it will not pay to bury our head in the sand as if the storm is not passing also over us.

As for your specific concern about SydMelBane, a simple solution could be to tax migration to those areas, for example no welfare and 10% income-tax surcharge on those living there (migrants or otherwise) who have not been already living there before a given date.

A desert island? people have conquered deserts before (in Israel for example) and Australia has overall plenty of water to do so if it uses it intelligently and innovatively - but that of course will not happen when the standard of living is so high that people are not willing to go out to the bush and work hard.

To W:

Well written.
Just one comment: Hendo is not "the only one here who has grasped the problem with Claus’ article" - I did so 22 hours earlier.

w – In response to the 4 items you raise:

1) For the 3rd time; reducing immigration by itself won’t be enough. We must also learn to live sustainably. Reducing immigration is just the easiest step.

2) Are you saying that because other countries have not controlled their populations and Australia has, we have a moral obligation to take migrants even if it will mean a lower standard of living and harm to our environment? I disagree. I believe we can send a message to other countries about responsible care for the environment in our country and hopefully they will follow suit and manage their environments more sustainably.

3) Are you saying that carbon emissions now being generated by a Vietnamese, Latvian, New Zealander, American or Sudanese person are the responsibility of Australians, if those people are thinking of migrating to Australia? I can't understand this. Perhaps you could explain in more detail.

4) see 1) and please lay out your proposals for limiting our output of greenhouse gases. I agree we need to make other efforts besides reducing immigration to limit greenhouse emissions, but I have not seen any proposals that are less painful than reducing immigration.

Yuyutsu

So you understand the problem with Claus' article? From your post though, you comment that the world is headed for a bleak future with a large population and the exhaustion of fossil fuels. You also seem to imply that a country in need of resources is more likely to engage in acts of coercion or aggression against weaker countries. (This was the case for Germany and Japan last century, but I have not seen this argument used to explain the conflict in the Middle East.) Surely though, these two claims are strong arguments for reducing population and consumption?

Controlling population growth in Australia might not fix the world's problems, but it could set an example.

Australia cannot solve the world's population problems by allowing in more immigration. Even if Australia doubled its immigration intake, it would barely make a dent in the world's annual population growth (about 75 million annually!).

Therefore the real answer is to encourage birth control. Allowing high immigration only encourages more population growth.