spendocrat and PK might consider an encore. A flash appearance describing immigration critics as selfish, greedy, soulless, vacuous morons, and then disappearing in a puff of dust, defies my understanding of the purpose of OLO. Even a reappearance to describe immigration critics as shameless racists would be a big improvement, though I would suggest forming an argument. For without an argument, what would all the selfish, greedy, soulless, shameless, racist vacuous morons have to stand on?

Justin W wrote;

“However, the more relevant argument is not about population growth per se, but what is the sustainable footprint of a city like Brisbane?”

How can we possibly address the issue of the city’s footprint if the number of consumers and waste-producers is going to continue to rapidly increase?

Even if we are hugely successful in addressing the per-capita resource-consumption aspect, to the point of reducing it by say 25%, and the population increases by 33%, then we have gained nothing. With the current mindset of our political masters, the population is set to increase by an amount that will cancel out and completely overwhelm even the best improvements in the average personal footprint, and in a pretty short timeframe, after which it will of course just keep on increasing.

So the population growth factor really is of the utmost importance, far ahead of anything else. But of course all sorts of other measures have to be taken as well in order to address genuine sustainability in a holistic manner.

The “visionary” SEQ plan, along with the Integrated Planning Act amount do little more than improve organisation of rapid and unending human expansion.

As you say, “the future is not promising”.

Justin, you seem to have it together in terms of the basics of sustainability.

Please tell us more about ‘Sustainable Brisbane’.

To Fester and others, I read your diatribes and did not recognise in them a response to anything I had written. You, Fester, in particular have put words in my mouth and argued against those words. I'm not going to engage with that. For example, I made it clear that I believe that Australian immigration , while I am in favour of it, is not a solution to world poverty. Nor did I suggest that we should forgo our right to decide who migrates to Australia.

To the xenophobe who suggested that I might like migrants living next to me with 'lots of mosques and quite a few interesting other cultural sorts.' (not to mention cannibals and headhunters), that's very funny. Is that the sort of argument you want me to engage with, Fester? To Plersdus - I don't believe that I or anyone here has said that it was wrong for the first fleeters to come here - don't bother setting up straw men so you can knock them down, it might be entertaining for you, but not for most of us.

In fact all you anti-immigration xenophobes, there are plenty of other threads for you to parade your ugly prejudices on, this happens to be about urban sustainability. Do you have anything interesting to say on that matter?

There is a case for debating what Australia's future population should be and how it should be achieved, but that is only one aspect of the urban sustainability issue and would be better dealt with in other threads as I seem to recall it already has been. Certainly the origin of the migrants is not relevant to this topic.

Justin, I have seen arguments that the concepts of green belt and limiting city footprints do not work, they create big increases in land prices. I think that it was tried in London and Sydney post WW2 and more recently in Seattle, with limited success in achieving objectives and with the unintended negative consequences I refer to. I would like to hear more about it from you, though.

Some people on this forum might profit from a short math lesson. At any given time, growth in population numbers is proportional to the population size P: dP/dt = rP, where r is the fractional (percentage) population growth rate. If the annual growth rate is 1% and you start with 100 people you will have 101 at the end of the year and 101,000 if you start with 100,000. Equations like this are first order differential equations, and any differential equations textbook will explain how to solve them. In this case the solution is P(t) = P(0)exp(rt), where P(0) is the population at the arbitrary starting time, t is the time since the start, and P(t) is the population at time t. For a constant r, if you know the population at some time you can also calculate the future population at any point. With this equation plus a basic scientific calculator and the CIA World Factbook (on the Web), you can now do all sorts of interesting calculations.

You can work out how long it will take the Solomon Islanders to reach standing room only at current growth rates (a little over 400 years) or the doubling time of Australia's population at its 1.3% annual growth rate (53 years). You can calculate that at the current global growth rate (1.3%) the population is increasing at 85 million people a year (and more every year after that), with most of the increase in poor third world countries. The idea that wrecking our environment and the quality of life in our cities by taking in huge numbers of people (even if all the developed countries did it) is a solution to global poverty is ludicrous, as is the idea that there is any humane solution to world poverty that does not involve a lot fewer babies. It would currently take 3 Earths to give everyone a modest European standard of living, even if all the resources were divided equally (see the Redefining Progress website).

PK,

It is good that you are backing off from an open borders position, which seemed to be implied in your earlier post. However, I still object to your smear of xenophobia, unless someone has really given evidence that they object to foreigners as such, and not just to environmental damage and the way our cities are becoming less livable as they get more and more crowded. I am reminded of the American joke that a racist is a person who is winning an argument with a liberal or neoconservative. Personally, if I could choose between a multiracial, multiethnic Australia with a stable population of 13 million or a lily white Australia with a growing population of 50 million, I would take the former in a heartbeat.

People have not evolved as hive animals like ants or naked mole rats. They differ in their tolerance to crowding, noise, pollution, being cut off from nature, etc. To me, forcing people to endure such conditions (as effectively happens in such a highly urbanised country) so that more of them can be packed in is every bit as immoral as racism. I refer you to an article in the Dec. 6 Sydney Morning Herald reporting on a new study by Prof. Bill Randolph 'Children in the Compact City', detailing the damage that is done to children's development of social and motor skills by high density living. I also reject the view that only people matter, that we have the right to exterminate other species by denying them adequate habitat to accommodate more people.

Spendocrat might consider that politicians who put mental patients out on the streets and deny poor people dental care can hardly be humanitarians. They ignore our views because high population growth is making their corporate backers richer: bigger markets, easy profits from land speculation, an oversupply of labour to keep their workers cheap and compliant, savings on training costs, etc., etc.

PK

It is fine for you to use this forum to abuse people who have a different opinion to you, but surely you could do better by responding with your own views? You dont seem held back in hurling abuse at anti-immigration xenophobes, yet you seem very reluctant to provide justification for your own position, other than a few vague statements. Are you afraid to advance arguments? You consider it inappropriate to discuss immigration in relation to sustainability in this thread. I would point out that the reason immigration keeps getting mentioned is because torrents of abuse from enlightened folk like yourself does not constitute a refutation.