Having individually named me, Malcolm King needs to be clear about what I said to a journalist - as compared to what I was reported to have said - about population increase. When asked whether Australia should consider adopting a one child policy I responded that it was something that should be thrown into the mix for public debate. When asked what was a sustainable level of population for Australia, I advised that on current rates of resource consumption it would be seven million.

From this King extrapolates and casts me into a group where, by his definitions, I am anti-humanist, a hater of science, someone who probably has not seen the Australian environment which I want to save, misanthropic, imperialist, and possibly anti-refugee and racist.

Come now Malcolm. You’ve met me. You’ve worked with me. And you know that not one of these labels fits.

Sustainable Population Australia (SPA), of which I am the National President, argues that our immigration program should be reduced so that it is no larger than emigration, and at the same time we advocate government giving greater priority to our humanitarian intake. Indeed, the issues of immigration and refugees must be totally separated.

We go further than most in regard to our obligations and responsibilities by calling on government to include not just political but environmental refugees in our humanitarian intake, and for the financing of our nation’s overseas development assistance program to be substantially increased.

Last year Australia’s population grew by 1.9%. Should that continue, our existing population numbers will double in the next 37 years.

Each new person will consume food, water and energy, along with health services and other infrastructure. Most Australians understand that this is unsustainable.

It is not racist, anti-humanist, or anti-scientific to suggest that it is human beings causing the problems, and more human beings means more problems.

Malcolm King’s optimism that a solution will be found is simply not justified.

Good to hear Kanck come on board, even if it's game over for the Unsustainables UnPeople lobby. She must have realised the incredible damage her own side is doing in the debate.

Some curious semantics here as she again says a sustainable pop in Oz is 7 million. That's defact green polly talk for saying she wants Oz pop to be 7 million, however you carve it.

I checked King's quote. It's from AAP. Still, it's nice to have it from the horses mouth.

She says: "We go further than most in regard to our obligations and responsibilities by calling on government to include not just political but environmental refugees in our humanitarian intake, and for the financing of our nation’s overseas development assistance program to be substantially increased."

This is a massive volte face re the Unsustainable Antipeople's stance on immigration. Rick. Divergence, your position is splintering left, right and centre.

“So I wish I could live another hundred years, to see my coffee-coloured grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and socialise with their non-Anglo parents and grandparents, and laugh at the tanties of early C20 doom-sayers.”

Loudmouth Joe – where is that rock you live under? Many of our grandchildren are already “coffee-coloured” and many of us (except the rock apes) have been socialising with non-Anglo parents and grandparents for decades.

But there you are, grunting away. First paragraph recommending birth control. Second paragraph, recommending Africans breed like rabbits, despite the AIDS plague, malaria, climate change and droughts and floods which sweep away whole plantations on the African continent.

Ah……your third paragraph – a clanger and typical of the free racketeers, who poach skilled people from poor nations who have struggled to educate their own, only to be cleaned out of skilled labour and professional people by the greed merchants in the West.

And spare not a thought for the uneducated women and children languishing in squalid refugee camps around the planet who are often raped, beaten and even murdered and have no chance of escape.

Only those who can enhance your bank balance are welcome! Who cares if skilled migrants or affluent young men with thousands of dollars to pay people smugglers jump the queue and deprive the helpless and penniless of a decent life?

Go forth and populate says the loudmouths and the clowns in our society. No worries about the more than 5 million children per year who die of hunger (about 1 every 5 seconds) and 40 million victims of all ages who die each year from starvation and diseases related to malnutrition.

Sizzling climates, mutilated forests, toxic waters, polluted air, dead oceans, desertification, crass, violent, short-sighted and shocking ecological behavior and resultant change. Living as if the Earth has no value is the norm for the intellectually disabled rock apes. Yay!

Clownfish,
Your constructive reply to my earlier post deserves a considered reply which will be forthcoming in about 24 hours time as my allowance for today is about to be reached.

Mil-observer,
Presumably you have better credentials than Diamond or Ehrlich on the population issue (and everything else). Instead of just throwing insults left right and centre do us all a favour and produce some evidence, just a tiny bit to support your view. If you cannot I suggest you shut up.

Cheryl,

You are doing exactly what Malcolm King did, putting words into Sandra Kanck’smouth.

What Sandra says she means or she should at least be given the benefit of doubt until or unless you are able to prove otherwise. It is easy to accuse people of doings things they haven’t done or thinking thoughts they haven’t thought if there is no onus on you to substantiate your accusations.

I agree with Sandra that at our present rate of consumption and resource exploitation 7 million is about the level of population that Australia could sustain. This does not mean – I repeat does not mean we should do a bit of culling or start forcibly sterilizing people etc. But we can start by reducing immigration levels almost immediately and by getting rid of the baby bonus and other incentives to breed and replace them with incentives not to do so.

When talking about things like sustainability we are not talking about a simple black and white issue, as you would perhaps have it. We might be able to sustain our present population for a period of say a decade or two at more or less current levels of consumption but as time marches on and our resources start running out or getting prohibitively expensive to extract we will no longer be able to do so and by then it will be much harder to bring population down to a more sustainable level and/or adjust our living standards downwards.

Sustainable Population Australia is what Sandra says it is and is not what you might want to believe it is.

GOOD NEWS! GOOD NEWS!

Australia’s quarterly GDP up by 0.25% so it is now a bigger nation than it was 3 months ago.

BUT WAIT… What’s this I hear? Per capita GDP has fallen by over 1% for the same period and unemployment has risen at the same time! How can this be? The answer is immigration according to Stephen Koukoulas a respected economic analyst who was interviewed today (Sunday) on ABC TV’s Inside Business.

Funny that but there you are; population growth has done nothing to improve our personal well-being while of course it has boosted total retail sales, residential housing demand, traffic congestion and environmental destruction. And even in the boom time per capita growth did not keep pace with population growth.

Another odd thing is that neither the government nor the opposition have publicly acknowledged these facts. And the Greens too are silent on the matter though it is not as if any but an insignificant number of these migrants were actually refugees.

kulu: presume all you like about my "credentials". You may even conjure some image of me as an Oxbridge don or Ivy League toff, if that makes you more comfortable when reading criticism of academic fraud - that's up to you, of course...

But my more detailed destructions of Jared Diamond are contained in my postings on the OLO cross-thread link I posted repeatedly here (or try this URL, if the server's still playing up: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=8838&page=0 ).

Therefore, I've already produced "the evidence" that you demand, including 121 words of direct quotation from Diamond's book itself (Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed* (2005), Ch.10 'Malthus in Africa: Rwanda's Genocide').

Now, other OLOers could probably confirm for you that I'm not going to "shut up", as you suggest I do.

But are you going to "put up" in defence of Diamond? If so, then I look forward to it.