Whilst I generally disagree with "Big Australia" ideas, the opening sentence lost me straight away.

Just as Umberto Eco noted noted that "the lunatic is easily recognised. Sooner or later he brings up the Templars," the pseudo-scientific twitterer is just as easily recognised by their spurious recourse to the Laws of Thermodynamics.

I also take issue with typically elitist attitude that we of the lumpen masses would think Correct Thoughts if our superiors would only take the trouble to re-educate us properly.

We should be shedding people, not encouraging more of them.

This reads like a vacuous response to a vacuous statement by a vacuous politician.

Pretty much an attack on Rudd. Long on rhetoric. Normally it's the UnSustainable People faction who start off sentences quoting Newton's Law on Thermodynamics. Means they're thoughful - and barking mad at the same time.

Funny, just four years ago Costello's Intergenerational Report said we didn't have enough people to adequately fund health and social welfare from 2020 on. Now we're packed to the gills. Are our women pumping out kids by the score? No.

So in four years we've gone from having too few people to too many. This fact vacuum plays in to the hands of the loonies who'd rather save a tree than save a baby from drowning.

Clownfish - since thermodynamics set limits on everything we do quoting it almost any argument can't hurt - but the author did not really connect it to the rest of her essay.

Cheryl is now useing the pro-growthist propaganda from "Demography is Destiny" Costello's Intergenerational Report as an argument against the anti-growthist "loonies"? Seriously Cheryl, with former-breadbasket Australia now consuming more than half the food it produces where is the capacity for it to double its population (within 37 years at the current rate) in a climate change and oil-restricted future? Some of us just want to make sure that our children have something to eat in future. Maybe you are one of those people who don't care because they figure they will be dead by then.

Amen Michael.

If anything it tend to prove the fallibility of the Economic based solutions to anything.
In truth it requires the 3 'e's Energy,Economics and environment.

Likewise current monetary economics' reliance on endless growth in a finite world is the stuff 'magic pudding' fantasy.
see http://www.chrismartenson.com this link for a simple to understand perspective of the *economic* risk of world if human growth continues unabated. It's impact on AWG is bleeding obvious as is the futility of world current business as usual approach neither the Lib or Labor offer a realistic solution

Yes Cheryl, because if Peter Costello makes these predictions, they MUST be true! But I do appreciate you ditching the eugenics strawmen this time, I know it must be hard.

Having the main focus on environmental issues is generally just a smokescreen to cover inward corruption that is not dealt with in society. Many environmentalist are the most indulgent of people. Look at Branson's style of self righteous pontification. The real issues we face are the breakdown of the normal family unit, the flood of pornography leading to epidemic child abuse and degradation of humans, conscience free baby killing, total disrespect for any form of authority and the rise of Islam. These are real issues as opposed to the fantasy of man made gw. It was only two decades ago that global cooling and the ozone layer was going to be 'the end'. Many of todays zealots conveniently forget this fact. The Bureau can't get next weeks forecast right let alone totally flawed models that try and predict trends in the future.

Australia has lots more resources to share but unfortunately due to selfishness, self righteousness and godliness we won't acknowledge this. When a Government can be irresponsible enough give away billions of dollars in order to popular we know their is something seriously morally wrong. Our major challenge is far more moral than physical.

Hear Hear Runner !

An intelligent summation of the present.

The author makes some reasonable points in regard to climate change,however climate change will only compound the problem. Even in its wettest years Australia is basically a tired old desert,it's not the USA or Brazil,fantasies of a "Big Australia" are self destructive.The real test is GDP per capita, not national GDP and most of the countries with the highest living standards have small populations.The current high population growth serves narrow sectional interests, not the national interest. Most of the world is coalescing into trading blocs of hundreds of millions or billions of consumers,what possible advantage is the addition of a few million to our population at cost of social and environmental stress?

by ignoring the first law of thermodynamics - the conservation of energy -we then fall into the 2d law of thermodynamics, which is entropy or no, energy cannot be perpetually created, like that famous fusion machine a few years back, remember? Or put another way, by acting on the muddleheaded belief of perpetual growth, we guarantee that whatever order we had to begin with will accelerate into disorder and decay at the rate of knots and our final state will be much worse than we could have ever imagined. Nature will not take kindly to being constantly abused: keep whipping even a mule long enough and not only will it not perform like Phar Lap but we'll just be flogging a dead horse through sheer force of habit. Truly, we don't have attitudes, they have us by the short and curlies.

According to the Weekend Australia, Kevie nominated three reasons
for a big Australia.

National security, long term prosperity and enhancing our role
in the region and the world.

I'm not sure how wall to wall suburbia from Sydney to Melbourne
is going to achieve this, but all you little sardines over there,
should be happily squashed even tighter into your sardine cans :)

Meantime Kevie the wannabe global statesman, can impress you all
on tv.

Long term prosperity -translated means that to win the next election,
the Govt needs a healthy economy and house building for ever more
people, is a major economic driver in the East, for the place
produces little that can be exported. Meantime mining and farming
will have to expand, to pay the nations foreign exchange bills,
so Western Australia, on which the nation depends for its export
revenue generation, will be pushed even harder.

Agreed Kellie.

It is a great irony that we continue to buy into the populate or perish dogma when our major cities are already struggling under inadequate infrastructure and in coping with the burden of growing populations. Mr Rudd has already acknowledged that the greater portion of this growth will be in the two majors - Sydney and Melbourne - followed by Brisbane and SE QLD.

While we can always make do with less (lets face it we are an overindulged society) to ensure the resources can be shared, what do we do about natural resources that we have little control over, particularly water and timber.

Unless we actively populate the deserts to reduce pressure on fertile arable land and urban water resources (including using renewable energy to ensure our dependency on coal is not increased) then we are not going to sustain unfettered growth. This will mean pipelines distributing water (probably through desalination - more energy required) to those drier areas.

Big Councils in QLD are already talking about population caps because of the irresponsibility of governments on this population growth issue.

We would be better off ensuring the developing world has greater access to democracy, social support and economic equality in global business than continuing to move the population problems from one place to another. Development will reduce birthrates naturally over time.

This is a real deal breaker for me as a Green/ALP voter and if the Greens don't get real on sustainability then I am not sure what recourse we have.

Prediction that new Independents will start getting in on the act who subscribe to sustainable policies and this will mean that the larger parties will lose votes. According to a panel member on ABC's Insiders, this has already happened from the Redlands Shire Council up to Cairns in QLD where council elections have shown winners to be from the anti-development/population sustainable camp.

The future needs a middle class...

Without a middle-class, you have no democracy, you have no free education, you have no social mobility etc. Without a middle class you regress back to either a fudal-type society with a small elite with total power, a huge serf-pesant class, and in-between a military/police/survelliance system to protect the order.

Noticed more police, more private security, more survelliance cameras, more survelliance (email etc). Harsher penalties and less generous welfare? The rich are getting richer and the poor getting more numerous? More and more like USA?

It's birthrates... The middle(professional) class in western nations is suiciding. While the welfare class and the Muslims are breeding rapidly?

Welfare actively discriminates against parenthood, marriage and against the middle-class.

Children are quite profitable for those on welfare, especailly those without husbands.

A friend has an aboriginal boyfriend who estimates that he has 100 first-cousins... most with single mothers on welfare.

Meanwhile the middle class can't affort large families.
Solution 1: remove the complex family payments etc... and just make families tax-deductible!

- 5% off your tax per kid? Or
- allow income splitting between all family members, so the middle class can finally afford the children!

What is it about being middle-class that causes it to suicide? What causes middle-class people to fail to have large families?

Firstly feminism is a middle-class thing... Middle-class wives enjoy a work-life balance, dads work long hours and spend the weekends trying to catch-up with their kids...

Look at how many dads you see pushing prams alone on the weekend? Happy, but exhausted after their 50hr week at work, giving wifey some time-off. When do professional dads get time off?

Men know that divorce means everything they ever worked for. Worse still their kids they love are stolen from them...

So professional men are refusing to become fathers...
In city offices you see hundreds of young-ish, professional women, unable to get husbands...

Men know marriage and fatherhood has been rigged by feminism and are refusing to marry... changing girlfriends every few years to avoid the risks of fatherhood and divorce.

PartTimeParent@pobox.com

partimeparent, yet another bitter man trying to blame all Australia's woes on the wicked women?

Apparently we have the dreadful single mothers out there having a wow of a time on welfare, and dealing with bitter ex-boyfriends.

We also have all those despicable middle-class married mothers having a wonderful care-free life while their 'professional' husbands work their guts out during the week and care for their kids alone on the weekend.

Gee, I haven't met many of these women ptp? You obviously know plenty of these happy women out there with carefree lives at the expense of their men? Maybe it was because they had offloaded women-hating men like you?

Extending from Yabby's post highlighting Rudd's "Reasons";
Personally:

-I couldn't care less about our politicians trying to use our population level as some kind of bullying coercion tool on other nations- in fact I'm strongly against it. Any positive promotion and examples we can set for other countries would have NOTHING to do with our population being BIG.

-I don't believe we are under threat from Indonesia (which is what this whole 'security' bull is all about). Many Australians don't realize Indonesia is actually a wealthy, civil nation with plenty of its own resources- and about the same amount of land as Australia that is NOT desert).

-Industry? I didn't realize that our industries were suffering, our economy was heading into disaster due to labor shortages (ignoring unemployment rates) and that having vastly higher competition between employees was good for us citizens.
Obviously ultra-rich countries with low populations like Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Monaco are NOT the type of nations we should be following.

PELICAN- Damn straight!

I think the population cap is a nice concept- but impractical. The easiest way to have a more sustainable population is to simply have local councils take over property developments (banning private interests from doing so), and ONLY be allowed to actually initiate any developments on the request of local residents stating children moving out of home- and probably with some consultation to the people in the areas near the potential development. That way population will only increase at the rate the people of the area want it to.

As for the Greens' more ambiguous sustainable population policy- personally, I'll probably just vote them anyway- as otherwise they're quite exceptional, and I will just demand more clarification from them afterwards. It's not like they're going to be WORSE than the other two parties in that regard.

KH, Pelican,

I agree that local area caps won't work simply because of the greed/selfishness and the amounts of money involved.

A number of the councils were stacked with cashed up pro developer candidates.
In the space of 4 elections CR have gone from $40k all up to close to
$100k all up. The cost of a campaign has gone from Bank card ability to $30k ish. Think about it who can AFFORD that.(developers) they are talking 10's of millions $ in a single development.

They can green field net $5-6+ in a single deal. It all depends on density and cheapness of the house.

NB the price charged has increased OVER that of the increase in building costs.

Developers include $100,000's to manipulate the rules to meet their profit needs.....
Political campaigns, BS public consultation etc.
Individual's greed and 'option manipulation' by the developers.
Faux farmers who clears bush land 'to farm' but then changes his mind.
Farmers get a Max $10K fine for illegal bush clearance, the developer's $250k.
Christmas time objection periods (everyone's away or preoccupied.)

Add QLD is the ONLY STATE that ALLOWS 'Injurious Affection' i.e. if a smell exclusion zone is modified to accommodate the development then it can't be reinstated by subsequent councils, at the pain of being sued for the FULL POSSIBLE benefit of the project regardless of any work being done if they do.

That mean the business (30 year pig farm or surrounding farm land) is at risk if the new residents complain and having it shut down. Thus rendered land for Developers only use.

NOW THE POINT ;If the council had to go to the people for major or collective developments at election time then the local and 'I A' was removed With a closing date say 3 months before then the locals MIGHT have a meaningful say.

King
I am not for caps either but this is the way some Councils are moving in response to over-development, mainly at the coast. As for voting Greens, I agree they can only be vastly better than the Bill or Ben flowerpot men alternatives.

It is a shame that Councils don't encourage referenda on each and every development proposal - real participatory democracy.

I am not sure that I would entrust all development proposals to the Councils in entirety, given the history of some shires such as Wollongong and the risk of corruption - but with public participation in decision making the risk is reduced.

Rudd should spend about a week at the top end of "Perth" - that's the 100Km long sprawl on the west coast. What will he find? A mind numbing sea of inadequately designed homes, little if any sense of community, zero cultural presence, everything needing a car to get to and most things a decent drive away.

Call Perth a city if you will but I never have. It has no soul, and any sense of community it had has dwindled. People used to be friendly - that's gone. Now we are driven and driven hard by resources. We suck up thousands of people a week to join the FIFO brigade. Money has flowed and we have all of its attendant downside.

If you say more people, the have to live somewhere. Extending the suburbs north and south is getting very expensive in infrastructure costs. Other cities are much worse - Sydney for e.g

Rudd has no idea. No vision. Now is the time to stop the rot. We certainly have plenty of land but water is scarce and getting scarcer.

I agree Pelican and Examinator;

That's why I think it's important that councils should only have the right to build anything when a local constituent demands it (publishing their name to it), and the people nearby the proposed development site must be asked for permission on the exact intended structure before it can go ahead, and to top it off, the rest of the constituency may also participate/vote on it via referenda for a few weeks before it is cleared.

That should seal up any cracks a crooked developer or councilor would try to exploit to bypass public consultancy.
Now all we need are more people like Ted Mack getting voted into councils, and less people like, well, pretty much the rest of the councils across NSW.

I see my point about the Laws of Thermodynamics stands confirmed.

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