Our Brumby government is bent on growth, and "sustainability" is just a throw-away word with no meaning! Our population is being artifically forced high due mostly to excessive immigration.


A swelling population will not bring "economic benefits" to the average person. Most people know that the contrary is true. The idea that infinite growth will bring infinite economic benefits is totally flawed! The cost of infrastructure will not cover any short-term benefits from more people.



As natural resources become increasingly scarce, they also become more expensive. Land and housing prices have soared, and water prices are set to sky-rocket.



High density living is not "family friendly" and destroying more vegetation and green wedges for housing and infrastructure is completely contrary to any environmental conservation and any addressing of climate change.



Vulnerable wildlife and biodiversity habitat will be become more threatened, and our connection with Nature will further diminish. Already Victoria's environmental reports are abysmal!



Marvellous Melbourne, one of the most "liveable places in the world", under our Brumby's Melbourne@5Million plan, will be a resource for developers, and any benefits will be purely for for them and the building industry, guaranteed Labor supporters

The logic is spot on, and all this would apply equally in the U.S., except the U.S. seems even more immune to logic than Canada and Australia. This type of frank discussion of the issue is almost never found there. All I can add is the end of growth is near. If we don't learn to embrace it, we will simply go down fighting.

Dave Gardner
Producing the documentary
Hooked on Growth: Our Misguided Quest for Prosperity
http://www.growthbusters.com

Thanks Dave

I have signed up for news updates and forwarded link to others.

Every time OLO debates climate change, I ask the skeptics to justify "business as usual". For all their bluster about science conspiracies and personal insults, not one has made a case for continued pollution and exploitation of our dwindling resources.

VivKay

The rate we are going, Marvelous Melbourne is going make a suburb out of Adelaide. Continuous expansion makes no sense and sooner or later we are gonna fill this petrie dish called Earth if sustainable practices and population are not achieved.

Victoria's growth all seems to be vertical, why are we not moving out into the country and also transferring transport, schools and medical centres out there. it's misguided growth to have it all around the central part of Melbourne.

In most parts of the US they have a lot of regional living, it is very pleasant, but does not return much for developers who want to build compact concentrated housing, for maximum returns. This concentrates profits for developers, builders and unions as well so I wonder if that is part of the attraction.

Fractelle, I see your posts on the various Climate Change articles, though I wouldn't say there is much debate. Some commentry and a hard core of irrational and spiteful posters certainly.

I question the CO2 warming scenario currently popular, but like many others don't see how that makes me as a "business as usual" polluter and I don't understand how you make that leap. It's a completely different issue. To say that questioning the AGW belief is akin to being a rabid polluter smacks of religious intollerence and stereotyping. I could be wrong, but is that what you're saying?

Spot on article !
Melbourne has an inferiority complex in regard to Sydney and this is
what drives the growth is good project.
All those slogans about Melbourne is the, Sports, fashion, business,
you name it, capital of Australia has got them into this growth bind.
The aim should be to reduce population or at least keep it static.

There has been a lot of discussion in Sydney about trying to get
migrants to go somewhere else such as Melbourne.
However the politicians do not have the courage to call a halt.
If Melbourne wants to be the biggest city in Australia, then let them.
It will be to their shame in the long run.

In any case all this discussion, just like the pollies, ignores the
elephant in the corner.
Peak Oil appears to have happened last year.
When depletion starts, there will not be the money to build more
suburbs, nor will there be the materials to build housing on the
scale to accommodate large migrant intakes.
Migration may well stop also as travel becomes more expensive and
difficult.

There will be a major restructure of society and the way it works
and feeds itself. Building new suburbs will just not be on the radar.

Great article.

It is often said that Australian lacks a population policy. I would argue that the political establishment in this country does, in fact, have a de facto population policy: bring in as many people as quickly as possible. It is an unspoken policy rarely enunciated in public. Aware that ongoing mass immigration - the driving force behind population growth - is generally unpopular with the Australian public, federal and state politicians on both sides of the political divide have assiduously avoided developing an open policy by means of electoral and other consultative mechanisms, preferring instead to devise immigration policy behind closed doors. Immigration policy is conducted as if it were none of the general public's business.

Such an approach has allowed successive governments to avoid explaining why they believe Australia needs to be running one of the largest per capita immigration programmes in the world.

If Australia was to have an open and honest debate about immigration and population, I am certain the case against ongoing immigration-driven population growth would prevail. As far as I can see, there is no convincing justification - economic or otherwise - for the ridiculously high levels of immigration that successive federal governments have inflicted on this country. For the general Australian public, mass immigration brings much pain with little gain. It drives down wages, pushes up the cost of housing, strains our public infrastructure and services, worsens urban congestion, increases our national carbon emissions, exacerbates our water scarcity problems, leads to the clearing of more land for urban sprawl, adds to our national current account deficit, undermines social cohesion, erodes our shared sense of nationhood, and seriously degrades our quality of life in general.

The sooner the issues of immigration and population are brought out into the public domain, the sooner Australia can work toward implementing immigration and population policies which actually serve the public interest, not special interests.

What about the huge flow of INTERNAL migration?

The Age reported on April 24 this year ABS figures showing that while Melbourne was growing at 75,000 a year, Brisbane and Perth are each growing at nearly 45,000 a year. Brisbane (not including the Gold and Sunshine Coasts) will pass 2 million in October this year and Melbourne will pass 4 million in December.

61% of Melbourne's growth last year was on the fringes - a sociological and environmental disaster.

The SE Queensland Regional Development Plan projects more than an extra million people in the SouthEast in under 20 years. It requires 40-50% of new dwellings to be constructed within the existing urban footprint, and new greenfield developments to be on smaller blocks of 400-600 square metres. Brisbane is seeing huge infill activity - essential to prevent eventual loss of all the countryside.

How do you stop all these people coming? Bring in Russian/Soviet residence permits (propiski)? Or wait for prices to get so high that would-be internal migrants are priced out - as people are being priced out of Sydney?

Or do you accept the inevitability of population increase and plan to minimize its impact on livability?

The projected large increase in population and in density within developed areas presents a huge challenge to planners and legislators to prevent loss of livability.

Trees – particularly large, shady trees – are vital to preventing this loss. Developments must make sympathetic and generous provision of space around building footprints to retain existing trees and to plant additional ones, especially larger species which make the difference between seas of hot walls and roofs and leafy, cool, livable and beautiful suburbs. Existing public open space and recreation areas must be preserved and where possible increased. Vegetation Protection Laws must be legally enforceable. Local communities can help identify vegetation and spaces of high social and environmental amenity for them.

Governments must enforce architectural design for sustainable housing appropriate to the climate. Building footprints should be minimized to retain existing trees. Urban areas must provide a mix of housing lot sizes. And children need open space!

Glorfindel trots out some of the usual empty rhetoric:

"How do you stop all these people coming? Bring in Russian/Soviet residence permits (propiski)? Or wait for prices to get so high that would-be internal migrants are priced out - as people are being priced out of Sydney?"

Easy answer: stop issuing building permits.

"Or do you accept the inevitability of population increase and plan to minimize its impact on livability?"

Even the U.N. is stating that global population growth will stop in this century. How then is growth inevitable? How much growth must we accommodate before you would say enough is enough? Do you wish, as Tim, comments, to let even more people onto an already full elevator? And finally, how are large urban concentrations sustainable, and even viable, in a Post Peak Oil world? We have no other energy source on the horizon that will make up for the loss of fossil fuels.

Glorfindel says: "What about the huge flow of INTERNAL migration?"

Most of the population growth in our capital cities is being driven by external, i.e. overseas, migration. Thus, the focus of debate needs to be on external immigration, not internal population movements.

"Or do you accept the inevitability of population increase and plan to minimize its impact on livability?"

That's a bit like the driver of a speeding car telling his passengers that they should brace for impact as he speeds 180 km/h toward a cliff. When the passengers tell the driver to brake, he responds: "Why don't you just accept the inevitability of our current trajectory and plan to minimize its impact?"

In truth, there is nothing inevitable about the projected population explosion that you refer to. Contrary to your assertions, population growth in Australia is not some natural, undirected phenomenon that we have no control over. Rather, it is a direct result of government policy, specifically immigration policy. Without immigration, our population would already be in the process of stabilising.

We could curb population growth tomorrow by simply reducing immigration to much saner levels. All that is needed is the political will.

"Urban areas must provide a mix of housing lot sizes. And children need open space!"

But immigrants need shopping malls more. And since they are the ones driving Australia's population growth, not children, it is likely that the good urban planning principles that you promote will be ignored in the mad frenzy to cram millions more people into our already overcrowded capital cities.

Excellent article Tim.

But we should always differentiate between good growth and bad growth, as the two types are absolutely poles apart.

Good growth is stuff that leads to genuine progress. It includes better resource-use efficiency, the development of alternative energy sources and methodologies and technological advances that facilitate these things.

Bad growth is continuous expansion of resource consumption and continuously increasing economic turnover due to population growth. It is stuff that weakens the demand / supply relationship, while not improving our average quality of life.

It is very good to see that there is a lot of sympathy amongst OLO contributors for the views expressed in this article. This has been the case for many similar articles on this forum. So the next step is to work how to achieve a non-expansionist paradigm.

In theory it is so very easy to make a huge advance in Australia simply by reducing immigration to somewhere near zero and abolishing the baby bonus bribe. But with the continuous growth paradigm so entrenched, how do we get this implemented?

The continuous growth paradigm is not inevitable. The implementation of a non-expansionist sustainability paradigm is inevitable. But how do we get the general community and politicians to embrace it, with urgency?

Ludwig comments: "Good growth is stuff that leads to genuine progress. It includes better resource-use efficiency, the development of alternative energy sources and methodologies and technological advances that facilitate these things."

I no issue for the most part with these things in and of themselves, and am certainly not in favor of wasting things. However, at present these seem to be nothing more than enabling behaviours for our addiction to growth. Without an overarching strategy which looks to reduce consumption, halt and even reverse population growth, and acknowledge our not-so-privileged place on this small and beleaguered planet, such measures are, as a good friend has noted, simply rearranging the deck chairs while the Titanic sinks beneath us. We have no political leadership with this sort of broad vision and understanding, and indeed our leaders seem to be doing their utmost to hasten the coming collapse. The truly sad part is that we will let them get away with it, unless the future sees some sort of environmental crimes tribunal.

I concur with the above comments. A friend living in Melbourne often displays her angst with the current government's obsession with growth and the never-ending push into bushland.

Many overseas migrants are encouraged first to live in cities like Adelaide as most prefer Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth. What happens is after the agreed period they often head up to QLD or move to other cities increasing the amount of internal migration to the larger centres.

Not only are cities like Melbourne expanding but they are doing it in the face of severe water shortages. The irresponsible north-south pipeline project is testament to the selfishness of this growth push much to the detriment of rural dwellers and the health of our river systems.

Nick Xenophon is right when he argues for water management to be handled at the national level. This is the only way our national rivers can be protected from selfish state interests and one up-manship.

How do we get our governments out of the habits of this growth obsession? You have to wonder sometimes if they represent the people or just a handful of property developers.

The only option is to aim for sustainability:

- set an agreed limit for our population that is sustainable
- one in one out immigration policy
- no baby bonuses or paid parental leave
- a measured and well planned decentralisation project to boost ailing rural areas and relieve pressure on larger urban centres
- careful management of our river systems and the regional/urban divide
- more emphasis on locally grown food production centres

Not in my back yard = NIMBY ,Affordable or social housing in my backyard = ASHIMBY! Now that makes sense, who's first in this line of density proponents, hands up? Who actually has delivered, not me you say, or is this just more idealistic rubbish!

Rick S, yes it seems that the promotion of the good type of growth to which I refer in my last post is being used by antisustainabilityists in a highly devious manner to aid their growth addiction. Their goal just seems to be to reduce per-capita consumption of stressed resources in order to squeeze more people in! This is blatantly obvious in cities with precarious water supplies.

.
“The only option is to aim for sustainability:”

Absolutely right Pelican. I course I agree with all your points regarding this. But while the way forward seems obvious to you and I, how on Earth do we get our politicians to embrace it??

This is surely one of the most important questions of our time.

And I’m afraid that I just don’t see any easy answer.

Dallas says "Not in my back yard = NIMBY."

And don't forget the newer version, that describes those who are so fed up with things that they are taking whatever action they can:

NIMBI

(Now I Must Become Involved).

I agree with Ludwic & Pelican,
The politicians won't even recognise peak oil so I don't think there
is much chance to get them to consider raising the drawbridge.
Natural population growth is negative, so stopping immigration will
solve most of the growth problem.

I read an interesting article which suggests that when the national
cost of oil reaches 4% of GDP then the economy stalls and growth stops.
In the US this happened last year in May at about $110 per barrel.
Hence the Global Financial Crisis (GFC).
So when we get there again the government will be forced to face zero
growth whether they like it or not.
So hang on tight.

A riddle:

Two people knock on a politicians door. One is carrying a bag of money and says "I can help you get re-elected, if you help me." The other says I've got some ideas that will help people have a better lifestyle, after you retire from politics.

Which one is the politician more likely to give his support to?

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

There is no sense lamenting that politicians should think about the future and not worry about getting re-elected. Even if one guy comes along and does think about the future in preference to short term interests, he will get beaten at the next election, anyway.

Until the general public recognises that sustainability is important and population is linked to sustainability, there won't be any change to the developer / politician coalition. It is too sweet an arrangement for both.

What could possibly make the general public concerned enough with sustainability to break this developer / politician coalition? If we look for one silver bullet, we might be waiting a long time. Maybe if everyone just keeps up the effort, just as the dozen or so commentators on this article have done, the tide will eventually turn. Maybe eventually is too long.

Thanks for those thoughts, ericc, and I certainly agree. It seems that a certain critical mass is required for major social change, and I think that we are still quite far from that threshold, barring some immediate disaster. Yet there are those who feel that the only sane and civilized thing to do is continue to work peacefully toward that critical mass.

Personally, as I have said elsewhere on this forum, I believe that we are long past the point of disaster prevention, and can only work on disaster mitigation to the best of our abilities.