My objection to the cabal theory isn’t that I don’t think the Property Council wants high immigration and is willing to bribe politicians to get high immigration. I do think that the Property Council wants high immigration and are willing to bribe politicians to get it. My objection is the thinking that the Property Council is the end of the story. The Property Council has a lot of support from people who don’t get any profits out of it at all. People who just think humans should run roughshod over the earth and do whatever we like.

The story that I see being told is that there are 100 evil property developers in Australia and they have bought off 900 corrupt politicians and those 1000 people are the only ones in Australia who think there should be high immigration. People like Cheryl and rpg who have commented in this thread, probably are not among the evil 1000. They genuinely believe that Australia is better off with a lot more people. If 99.9% of the voting public was against high immigration there wouldn’t be high immigration. Peter Garrett isn’t in the Property Council and he won’t even mention population, even though he says he supports the notion of environmental sustainability.

I personally believe that a majority of Australians would rather see low immigration than high immigration. I’m not sure if a majority would like net zero immigration. The implication that a tiny evil cabal controls population policy in Australia against the wishes of an overwhelming majority, avoids the truth. It is better that we recognise that there is a significant part of the voting public that doesn’t agree that sustainability is important and doesn’t agree that high immigration makes sustainability harder to achieve, than make the Property Council into an all-controlling demon

Eric,

The growth lobby isn't just property developers, upstream it is the banks that finance them, the mines and building materials suppliers; downstream: the construction industries, the conveyancers ,real-estate agents, universities looking for students with cash who will pay for a ticket to citizenry, independent migration agents, home and garden retail outlets, home and garden tv shows (which market property and furniture etc). It is a huge anti-social industry. And this industry is marketed by the major media which invests in the price of land and land-transactions and has fingers in all the other pies; we have a corporatised media. One of our major media owners is or was the richest man in the world. If he goes bust, banks go bust. The media is a part of this corporate lobby and its mouthpiece. It constantly brainwashes people that the economy will die without growth and we will all be poor, or poorer without jobs. And people have been sucked into ridiculously high mortgages, so they believe this like so many serfs listening to bishops thundering from pulpits.

In reality, of course, the higher the price of land, the higher the cost of manufacture and any production, which is why Australia cannot 'compete' with manufactures from countries where the cost of land is relatively cheap, such as France, where it isn't easy to speculate and the government regards population growth as a cost to the state, which it is.

The people benefiting from population growth are able to recognise each other and organise. The people who don't like population growth have a very hard time raising the issue because the mainstream press and business lobbies aren't working for them; they are working for the growthists.

Perhaps there are ordinary people who believe, spontaneously, that we need population growth, but I doubt that they would push this issue hard if they were not making a quid or something else out of it.

I know people who work at banks, construction companies and garden retail outlets who have no opinion about population. They are just trying to earn a quid. I know lots of people at Universities opposed to population growth.

How many of your friends have been brainwashed into consuming more than they really want to? None of my friends have.

If people interested in sustainability want to succeed, we can’t keep living in a dream world where some evil group that brainwashes everybody is controlling everything. It’s just an excuse to explain our failure to make sustainability a priority. Certainly groups with a vested interest and lots of cash use their influence to promote high immigration. Certainly governments want to be able to say the GDP increased by 2%, and making 1.5% of that increase due to population increase is a clever manoeuvre. I am not saying ignore them. What I am saying is that there are lots of people with no vested interests, who just think bigger is better and population stabilisation or population control is a bad idea. Lots of people who don’t make a link between higher housing prices and environmental deterioration and high immigration.

We can’t continue to put all the blame on the property developers and associated industries. We need to reach out to regular people who have not really thought about the long term future or who think some technological miracle will save us. Reaching out to those people isn’t easy.

It’s ironic that several commentators are saying that the Greens are responsible for the Victorian bushfires because they have too much power over local government efforts to clear bushland. I guess whichever side of the debate you are on, your opposition has too much power.

There are less than 1000 members in Sustainable Population Australia and probably less than 100 who are “active.” James Sinnamon is one of them and he is working hard to get the message out. I don’t have to agree with every word he says to appreciate his every effort. I wish there were more like him

James Sinnamon’s ideas are spot on. But they don’t go far enough. The problems are world wide: too many people consuming fewer remaining resources as we all strive for a better living standard. Practical measures to reduce the world’s population in the long run (it will take more than several decades) can be found at http://newpop.spawa.org/images/stories/Documents/gpr_spa_2007.pdf and the current economic woes point to the sanity of a no-growth steady-state economy. The upshot is that globally we need to develop and support a no-growth steady-state economy for a low-consumption smaller global population in a globally sustainable environment. I do not think that human kind can accomplish this. I think that we will inevitably continue along our self-destructive paths. Whether climate change, accompanied by economic and social chaos in the wake of oil depletion, resource wars and similar catastrophes will get us before this century is over is a real question.

erricc,

It seems to me that you haven't taken full account of the evidence in my article, in contributions and in linked articles, that the reason that governments routinely make decisions which are harmful to the best inters ts of this.

How do you think it was decided that it would be good idea for John Howard to increase the rate of immigration to record levels after won the 2001 elections for supposedly being a staunch protector of Australia's borders?

Do you think the idea fell out of sky?

So, if it didn't fall out of the sky, where do you think that decision was made?

I certainly don't remember it being discussed out in the open, with arguments for and against being put forward an fairly considered.

Clearly that it was a good idea to increase immigration was arrived at behind closed doors in discussions to which the wider public were not privy.

The same must also be true of innumerable other policy decisions harmful to that have been made in recent decades - the privatisation of Telstra, the Commonwealth Bank, the state banks, government owned insurance companies, railways, prisons, electricity generators, government owned buildings, etc, etc, the decision to invade Iraq, decisions to forcibly amalgamate local governments, etc.

In the case of the forced Queensland local government amalgamations of 2007, strenuously opposed by the affected communities, former State Labor MP Cate Molly has attested to the fact that they were enacted by Beattie by then Premier Beattie at the behest of the Property Council of Australia (see "Cate Molloy : Forced council amalgamations planned by Property Council of Australia" at http://candobetter.org/node/169).

The fact that, in the case of population growth, some people have been manipulated by relentless media propaganda into supporting policies that are against their own best interests doesn't alter the underlying dynamic.

High immigration and unsustainable economic growth are a direct result of GST, in its direct forms as here and in Britain and in its indirect forms as in the US and other first world nations.

Once people understand the concept, finding a solution is relatively easy and as I am fond of saying:

Scrapping the GST will be to the corrupt in our society like tipping salt on swanny snails and ruddy slugs.