(continuedfromabove)

After that war Australia helped to found the United Nations, which could have become a vehicle to establish an enduring and just peace which would have made the enormous effort by Australia following the First World War to become capable of defending itself less necessary. So, given these substatial achievements in both war and peace, the view that Australia would have remained irrelvant if t had not massively increased its population hardly stacks up.

I posed the question in that thread: Why did Australia choose to give up the technological edge that it had gained in the 1940's and why has that proud history been disowned today by almost the whole political spectrum including John Howard himself, who perpetuates the myth that Australia was saved from certain invasion by the US at the Battle of the Coral Sea?

It appears that denigrating or disregarding altogether Australia's past proud achievements (other than the odd token episode on various battlefields) seems to suit the purposes of Australia's current elite.

Rather than putting in the hard work necessary to preserve Australia's technological edge, they, instead, seem to have preferred the easier path to short term wealth at the expense of the rest of the country and of future generations. That path included using immigration to force up the value of real estate (for further information, see "The growth lobby and its absence", Sheila Newman's Masters thesis of 2002, at http://candobetter.org/sheila) and, more recently, digging up and exporting, at an accelerating rate, our finite endowment of mineral wealth.

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On wizofaus's points about immigration and multiculturalism in the US, the UK and Canada, see http://www.immigrationwatchcanada.org http://www.migrationwatchuk.com http://www.fairus.org http://www.cis.org

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Ginx,

Before I answer the question you have put to me, could you tell me specifically what you object to in any of my posts in this forum?

Daggett, I take it you didn’t notice the prefix "it wouldn't be unreasonable to suppose...", before jumping down my throat.

Of course there is no way anyone can say for sure what sort of nation Australia would be now if we had never adopted a policy of open borders. But I know my own life would be much poorer for it - my wife is South American, I regularly attend Spanish language classes with my son (run by a Taiwanese lady), most years we attend or participate in various international festivals, our favourite restaurants are Japanese and Indian, my longest-lasting friends are Chinese, Malay, Greek and Sri Lankan, etc. etc. I don't believe my perspective is unusual in this regard, so yes, I think there is good reason to claim that Australia would be a far less interesting place today without our migrants. As I've said before, I allow that we have been accepting them at an unsustainable rate, and at times have been insufficiently diligent at keeping out those whose values and beliefs threaten to undermine modern Western liberal society, but the net effect of immigration thus far has been largely positive.

Regarding the issue of military vulnerability - who's talking about 1940? Today we have nearly 300 million Indonesians sitting at our doorstep with sufficient wealth and technology to invade Australia and take advantage of what it has to offer. Similar could be said of 1.3 billion Chinese. If Australia had adopted an isolationist position 50 years ago and today had a population of just 14 instead of 21 million, with ties only to the UK and the US, I don't think it would be unreasonable to be concerned how our neighbours might view us.

BTW, I too am concerned about Australia losing its technological edge, but how is this to do with immigration? Re: your links, where exactly is the suggestion multi-culturalism has been a failure? All those sites suggest is “current levels of immigration are too high”, which I largely agree with.
And redneck - how are those countries examples of failed multiculturalism?

Oh and redneck, re: black violence and prison population in the U.S. - *poor* people are generally more prone to violence and more likely to end up in prison, regardless of skin colour. Indeed, if you looked only at middle- and upper- class crime, I would highly surprised if blacks were over-represented. So I don't accept that this is good evidence that blacks are inherently more violent, just evidence that they are inherently less likely to succeed in the U.S.'s white-dominated economy. Perhaps there really is a genetic reason for this, and it is unfortunate that it would be basically impossible to get funding to perform serious scientific research in an attempt to determine whether this might be the case, but even if there were, the solution wouldn't be any clearer: the best option is to ensure that every man, woman and child is well-educated, well-fed, and in a position to be economically successful, regardless of skin-colour. BTW, for a different perspective on causes of black violence/prison overrepresentation:
http://www.gibbsmagazine.com/violence.htm

Oops, hadn't finished writing that last (dnicholson) post...meant to say that the second two pages of that article are mostly psychobabble, but the first makes some worthwhile points. Another article about the situation in the UK, where among the poor, it's whites that are struggling the most: http://www.economist.com/research/backgrounders/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8089315

(on behalf of daggett):

wizofaus,

When I wrote, "Thank you for having so succinctly put together in one post so many of the fallacious arguments ..."

... it wasn't meant to be purely sarcastic and I wasn't meaning to jump down your throat. I was truly grateful that you were prepared to state your views openly, rather than resorting to various ploys to avoid discussion of the issues at hand.

If you had better taken account of my point about Australia having helped to found the United Nations, then I think you might have understood that I wasn't advocating isolationism as the solution either.

(more later)

A conversation between two sock puppets - this thread's getting more like Sesame Street every day!