Right on ShazzBazz,

You're the voice of reason amongst some pretty whacky posts here.

I'm with Pericles here. The prob with the Unsustainable Unpeoples is that to realise their ZPG, V for Vendetta, Charlton Heston 'Omega Men dream, of Australia as a urban desert, there's going to have to be a lot of old fashioned reduction of freedom and liberty.

The anti pops or 'ants' as I've taken to calling them think people are, well, ants. We're all just eating machines to them. Their propaganda has all the substance of a Youtube presentation.

I don't doubt that they believe we're all going to hell in a handbasket and that after the apocalypse, they will rise up and create a kinder and wiser world.

But until that happens, they will have to put up with people such as Mil Ob, Pericles, Shazzbazz and myself who champion liberty and freedom and not the slavish pursuit of instrumentalism and mass sterlisation programs.

Thanks Aime for having a shot at the questions I posed in my first post and to others who responded accordingly.

Unfortunately I can’t see that starting a new political party would be the solution to restoring the baseline responsibility of government, which is to act for the greater good and rather than being strongly biased in favour of the highly vested-interest big business big donations sector.

The same sort of thing would happen with a new party as happened with One Nation for as long as the current relationship between this sector and both major political parties remains entrenched.

Unfortunately, expecting any government to significantly change the donations regime is too big an ask. So I think that we have to play the game within the existing financial arrangements.

Therefore the sustainability lobby has got to either compete directly with the big biz donations by offering similarly large donations, or we need to impress the urgency of reducing immigration to about net zero and of striving directly for a sustainable society upon big business moguls to the point where they can actually see the light and ‘buy’ the right sort of change in direction from government.

At any rate, it is well and truly time to stop wasting our energy debating the significance of the continuous population growth issue with milly, Shazzy, Cheryl and runner and start concentrating on what we can do about it.

Pericles, you’ve asked interesting questions. How about you have a go at answering mine and I’ll endeavour to answer yours.

Mil Ob, Pericles, Shazzbazz and Cheryl who claim to champion liberty and freedom seem to be the only ones who have mentioned the slavish pursuit of instrumentalism and mass sterlisation programs.

If you wish to maintain the pursuit of freedom, you will need to come up with some better alternatives, although it must be coming very difficult to breathe while your heads are buried in the sands of time.

Ludwig, that is a perfectly reasonable request.

>>Pericles, you’ve asked interesting questions. How about you have a go at answering mine and I’ll endeavour to answer yours.<<.

I presume these are the questions... errr... in question, as it were.

>>How on earth do we escape the trap engendered by the donations regime from the building industry and their associated big business buddies in various fields, to governments?

How do we make governments independent of the enormously powerful big business lobby?

How do we restore the baseline responsibility of governments?<<

The answer to all these is of course to conduct government with transparency and with honesty.

But I have to question whether these are - if not "the most important questions of our time", as you describe them, rather dramatically if I may say so - at all relevant to the issue of population.

You do have to make the assumption that the only reason for our increasing population is the baleful influence of "big business", whose objective is to warp population policy to their own nefarious ends.

And nothing at all to do with mummies and daddies wanting little babies.

But let's just suppose for a moment that you are right. And that all we have to do is make the government processes transparent, and punish politicians who are dishonest, in that they do not properly represent their constituents' wishes. Which will, in short order, remove this undue influence from evil lobby groups.

Now we are free to implement our own, anti-growth policies.

What would they be?

What would be their planned impact, as in what is the intended effect on the economy?

How would they be enforced, by whom, and what would be the penalties for non-compliance?

And for extra marks, how would this impact our international relations? With China. With Indonesia. And with the United States.

OK, you solution-deniers, time to get to work.

Shaz says "This is our Future : Desalination of Sea Water by the combination of Contained Solar Sea Water Evaporation and Contained Chilled Water Condensation producing totally salt free water ."

Shaz, we haven't got time. In all probability, peak oil has been passed, which means oil and other fossil fuels will become increasingly more expensive. Oil is vital for all industry. Without it, we cannot continue to produce "stuff" which includes your desal plants.

Also, you'd need to pump that water everywhere and that takes massive amounts of energy, energy that will no longer be there post peak oil.

We're currently in population overshoot. The only thing that's got us there is the cheap and abundant energy found in fossil fuels, especially oil. Once oil becomes prohibitively expensive, it's game over. The agricultural industries will collapse almost overnight. People will starve. Think Easter Island and if you're not familiar with the reasons behind the Easter Island collapse, then please read up on it. We're weaving the same constraints around ourselves!

Some of the answers will be in curtailing population expansion and to "go local." By that I mean transition towns and local food production. Learn how to grow your own food. The supermarket shelves won't be filled with "stuff" forever.

Shaz and Cheryl, you may prefer to believe that technology will save us as it always has and I'll agree that mankind has a long history of "just in time," but this time mankind is facing a disaster of unimaginable consequence and grabbing at rainbows isn't going to make it go away.

V-KKK wants some “substance”! Well, a slimy V-KKK quote does the trick neatly here; watch V-KKK eat up its own toxic, racist vomit: “...don't trust them [Chinese] or we will all be working for Chinese masters before the end of the next decade.” See: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=8915&page=0#141635

Yep, dem Chahneez varments is reel nastee critters all gon cum n trick us n try take us over like a plague, or dem creepy monsters in science fikshun!

I never abused V-KKK, because s/he did the job already as just another self-abusing genocide groupie. The “race” baggage is just more visible in this case.