Gee, if Australia would be a better place with an additional 13 million, then by that logic, wouldn't it be just absolutely swell with an additional one billion, or even two? We'll just solve all the problems that would get in the way of this happening, won't we? We're just so clever and smart, we can do anything we want.

This twit just doesn't get it in so many ways that it's not even worth any further comment.

I get to the lunar right xenophobe and figure the rest of the article will not be on the mark. I am loopy left. Left wing do not support immigration, raving right wing capitalists do.

Now get back to right and left wing 101 young man.

You may consider the US. They were not xenophobic bringing slaves. They were not xenophobic bring in migrant Hispanic labour. White south Africans were not xenophobic living in a land where they were minority race. Raving right wing capitalists alone love cheap labour.

I bought a house in the mid 80's for twice my annual wage, single. That very same house would now fetch 9 times similiar wage of same job of today. (wish I still owned it lol, my timing is pathetic) the number of people that have outright ownership of a home has declined. The level of debt has increased. The gap between rich and poor widened so that comparision to the past redundant.

So young man, you see, the worker is now the migrant farm worker, the exploited, the unrepresented in parliament, the underpaid or underemployed and some of you love that..but is very much raving right wing capitalism gone beserk. The decline of racism is that we will treat all equally, all of them like slaves.

Now we need massive numbers to support the pensions of the baby boomers. Obviously not such a rich nation if we need to do that, are we?

It is like a giant Ponzi scheme when you think about it.

(Cross-posted from Larvatus Prodeo discussion "Big Australia" (http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/11/05/big-australia/#comment-835326))

The questions we should be asking is not whether population growth is a good or bad thing. That argument has been long since resolved conclusively in any discussion forum where opponents of population growth have been allowed freely to argue their case.

Any examination of the evidence has confirmed, exactly as our intuition and common sense would have told us, beyond doubt that population growth, particularly rapid population growth, is gravely harmful to this country[1] as a whole and even more so to its current inhabitants.

Clearly someone is gaining at the expense of the rest of us by necessarily making each of us on average poorer, by forcing us to pay, through higher electricity, gas and water charges, council rates, road tolls, registration, and, above all, massively higher housing costs, for the diseconomies of scale necessitated by population growth well beyond what was Australia's optimimum population level. A good start to working out who it is that is gaining from population growth may be my Online Opinion article "How the growth lobby threatens Australia's future"(http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=8485&page=0) of 24 Jan 09.

By definition, this group who have undemocratically seized control of this country's destiny through their political glove puppets including Rudd, Howard, Keating, Hawke, Bligh, Beattie, Brumby, Bracks and Fraser to name only a few, are totally antithetical to the interests of the rest of us.

They are demonstrably unable, or unwilling to harness the existing resources and existing population of this country in order to earn an honest living and allow the needs of all of this society to be met. Instead, they have imposed a Ponzi scheme on all of us that has impoverished many of us already and is driving our society, our economy and our environment, as a whole, to ruin.

(tobecontinued)

Sorry Cheryl, the sand is getting in your mouth and muffling what
you are saying.

I was in London recently and their major congestion problem is not
on the roads but on the footpaths. No way I would want to see anywhere
near that size population here.

(continuedfromabove)

That it is a Ponzi scheme is totally confirmed by Queensland Premier Anna Bligh's principle supposed justifications for her anti-democratic $15billion fire sale of publicly owned assets that she did not have the decency to inform Queensland electors about during the March State elections (in spite of my own tireless efforts as an Independent candidate to get her to do so). Her excuse is:

"... a State with a rapidly growing population can't afford to ease off building the infrastructure that supports our economy and community. "How Government and the Murdoch press deceive Australian public on immigration." (http://candobetter.org/node/1608)

The question should no longer be about whether or not population growth is harmful, rather the question should be, given this, why anyone in this country would want to see this happen, and, in particular, why Rudd would even contemplate, let alone begin to bring about his insane and reckless plan to increase our population to 35 million by 2050 and what we can do to stop it.

Footnotes:

1. Most environmental scientists argue that Australia has well and truly exceeded its carrying capacity. I hold out hope that if we properly fix up the environment, for example, by adopting Peter Andrews' Natural Sequence and removing all the stupid inefficiencies imposed upon us by free market extremist economic dogma that our leaders are willing captives of and all lived materially more modestly, it's conceivably possible, but very far from guaranteed, that Australia could sustainably support its current population and maybe two or three million more. But none of this will happen if the same people shoving population growth down our throats continue to have their way. (See also, my comment to article "Kelvin Thomson unveils population reform plan at Royal Park Protection Group AGM" at : http://candobetter.org/node/1649#comment-3629)

---

James Sinnamon
Brisbane independent for
truth, democracy and economic justice
Federal elections, 2010

There has, as the author claims, been a fast rate of immigration growth with “little disruption or antagonism.” But things have changed. There is no more fertile land in Australia than there used to be. We are now net importers of food. Two thirds of the country is still waterless; and the states where Jacob Varghese and other big population pushers DO NOT live, are on stringent water restrictions for their relatively small populations. To try to increase the population west of the Great Dividing Range would be idiotic, which leaves only Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane to rack and stack them. But, we are constantly hearing complaints in those cities that they are over-crowded.

I’m not sure that a lawyer would know just how well people who need public services are fairing in Australia, but he says that we are second only to Norway.

But, Norway is first, with a population of ONLY 4.8million!

Until government economic stupidity in Iceland, the people there were happy and well with a population of 300,000. There are many small countries doing as well if not better than Australia.

And, if the rest of the world “loves” crowded cities, they can stay in them in the rest of the world, and allow Australia to maintain a sustainable population.

If we keep racking and stacking as Varghese wants, our cities will not be “..marked by their low density, spacious properties and quiet spaces.”

For someone pushing high immigration and big populations, Jacob Varghese presents in his article quite a few reasons why the opposite should happen. His belief that we can accommodate 35 million people as we did 22 million shows that he is out of touch with the ongoing degeneration of environment, infrastructure, Australian industry (lost by the same politicians wanting more people to come here) and the fact that there are now not enough jobs for the people already here.

Importing more people than Australia needed has been the source of all Australia’s problems to date. We need fewer, not more