An eminently sensible article Professor Ridd. Not sure about the nuclear power bit, but the rest is spot-on.

It is in indeed very easy to reduce our population growth rate, without doing anything that could be deemed draconian.

The main trouble is that governments, federal and state, are in bed with the real estate industry and other big-business vested interests, which are pushing for the maintenance of high growth rates.

This is a going to be a hell of a hard barrier to overcome….or is it?

I see a window of opportunity. With the federal opposition battling to make any inroads into Rudd’s popularity and with zero chance of winning the next election if they take the same old me-tooist approach just with edge-tinkering policy differences, the thing for them to do is to fully embrace the sustainability paradigm, and thus set themselves up as a very different choice to Rudd.

I reckon that if they did this and sold it well, they’d get overwhelming support from the community, to the extent that it would outweigh the influence of the vested-interest big business sector.

I’ve entertained this line of discussion a lot on OLO recently, eg on this thread: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=2980 and indeed have been since pushing it for three years or more on this forum.

I’d love to know your thoughts on this, or how else we might actually get a major population-growth-reduction steady-state-economy genuine sustainability paradigm up and running in this country.

Well done Peter Ridd and good to see that the issues are not just environmental. The economic aspects are also described, which is uncommon. The Productivity Commission did a study in April 2006, showing the the average workers wages fell slightly with increased immigration, but it was common to hear the same politicians (Peter Costello and John Howard) who initated the study, repeatedly say "High immigration is good for the economy." What they meant was that it was good for their mates in Housing who helped fund their re-election campaigns.

The point about Housing being short term and not providing long term benefits like a factory, a scientific breakthrough in farming, medicine or the environment has been crying to be said. It seems like everytime there is any economic issue of any sort reported on the news, somebody from the Housing industry is right there ready to say "It won't be good for the housing Industry" and we are all supposed to fall on one knee and ask for forgiveness. Contrast that with somebody who wants to build a factory and we are ready to immediately throw them in jail, for even considering such a heinous crime against humanity.

Well done, as well, to the AEF who are often criticised by the "Green" groups because they like nuclear power and question other aspects of green dogma, but don't say the obivious: "Net Zero Immigration" like Peter Ridd does.

The big question, though, is how do we, as a society, start thinking and acting long term. Political terms are short. If you want to get re-elected you need to make voters happy NOW. Kevin Rudd increases the population by 1.9% and the economy increases by 0.2% and he is able to say "I've kept us out of a recession," and we fall for it, even though the jobless rate has gone up from 4% to 6%.

Does Kevin Rudd or any politician care if he's done the right thing for Australia in the long term or does he just care that he gets re-elected?

Population needs to be a major media/political discussion topic and glad to see it raised here.

I have concerns that apparently we are already a net importer 20% of fruit and vegetables and we export only 30% of our grain, these figures do not support any increase in population if we want to become sustainable.
The situation will get much worse when fuel prices rise exponentially as we start to run out.

Scrapping the baby bonus is a start. But this is an attitude that also needs to be exported to the rest of the world. The whole world population must stop increasing some time and now is a very good time to start to promote these ideas

The future is a frightening place - especially if the Anti-pops get their way. So the problem is people? - lets gets rid of them.

We've read this antihumanist pap before. Even had to fight wars against people who proposed these population culling policies.

International students? Housing? Messy thinking.

I want MORE people to come to Australia. I want to open the gates wide. Give us your hungry, tired and homeless. We are humanitarians, we are liberal humanists. We've got more food coming out of our fundamentals. Why? Hard work. Something these whacko eugenists have yet to try.

I've got an idea. If the anti-pops are so keen to keep people out, I suggest we let them man the beaches north of Wyndham and Kunnanara in summer. They will be doing us all a favour.

The importation of highly skilled labour tends to increase productivity, jobs and the general welfare. Bringing in students for needed skills who pay for their education themselves is getting these skills without having to subsidise schooling, health Uni etc. Bogus courses do this a lot of damage.

A serious problem is coming in that there will be a huge portion of the population in retirement, and fewer to pay the taxes to support them. Immigration is a short cut to fixing this.

Population in Aus is not the problem, abuses of the system are.