Immigration brings real and tangible benefits, but to whom? Certainly not the average Aussie who has to put up with lower wages, higher housing costs, clogged cities, overloaded public services and infrastructure, water shortages, further environmental degradation, cultural and demographic displacement, and a host of other costs incurred by immigration.

According to Swinburne University's Katherine Betts, some of the negative economic effects of immigration include:

* Downward pressure on domestic wages.
* Higher housing costs.
* Adverse effects on the balance of payments.
* The diversification of resources to infrastructure.
* Diseconomies of scale in the cities that have passed their optimal size (considered to be around 500,000 people).
* Waste of human resources by the neglect of local training.
* Pressures toward capital widening at the expense of capital deepening. (We can ill afford to be a nation that invests mainly in real estate.)

This is saying nothing about the very real environmental and social costs of immigration to the average citizen.

And for what? So that the big end of town can be subsidized with more consumers and cheaper labour?

Australia's current immigration policy is stupid, reckless and undemocratic.

It is a stupid policy because there is absolutely no reason for it—in particular, Australians as a whole are no better off economically because of mass immigration.

It is a reckless policy because it threatens to ruin our fragile environment, diminish our quality of life, dilute our per capita wealth, and undermine national cohesion and identity.

And it is an undemocratic policy because it second-guesses the Australian people, who have shown through smaller families that they want to stabilise population size and through opinion polls that they want less immigration.

It's high time Australia rethought immigration.

Exactly Reyes, but most of those pushing for the immigration numbers are not putting forward the end reality in any believable manner. Most older Australians know the reality of the harshness of this country. Some newbies seem to think well, that will all be solved, it will never happen.... Perhaps, perhaps not.... However, you cannot change the climate in this country as many think.

It is simply not sustainable to take that many people in such short a time frame..

Do Australians want to have a lesser lifestyle ...NO, do they care about their culture as it is, YES you bet they bloody do. Call us what you will, we want the people of this country to prosper not fall into third world. Hell I want my grand kids to have some sort of meaningful cultural inheritance and decent lifestyle.

Oh, by the way Raebee- to answer your question, no, the article wasn't worth reading beyond the first page- pretty much everything Jacob said was spread over the reply pages.

The sad part is there ARE ways to manage an increasing population (which WILL increase at some rate for a while) both comfortably, democratically (people could actually support it) and sustainably-- yet most of the people that get the privileged spotlight are expand cities, use up more natural resources, and tell everyone to knuckle down and get used to it.

To King Hazzar, sorry but I do not believe it is manageable to maintain that many people in a decent living standard in the time frame of a decade. We are too far behind now with infrastructure, it is not possible to amend this in 10 years without degrading the living standards. Rental properties are horrendous, that's why people live 6 to a room now.

The money for infrasucture is not there mate and what money there was has been wasted or mismanaged. Closing rail lines is an example, we should be building more. Nothing much is being done to collect water, the governments in the states see no further than the main cities. Successive federal govermnets have had a policy of cutting government speding. Therefore I still say it is not sustainable without loss of living standards.

People who immigrate rarely go out to the country centres. Decades of lack of government spending has already degraded many of our country towns paticularly regarding health care. So are we to think that politicians of the future are going to be any different? I think they will be worse. They don't care as long as there are people to tax. You know why they don't care? Because they will never live the lifestyle they intend to inflict on the average Australian. They will continue to live their protected livestyles. Why not if you can do it I suppose?

I generally agree with most of the comments on here.
However one repeated comment made is;
"Look how the immigrants have improved Australia".
Frequently they are referring to restaurants, coffee shops etc.
Well booee, almost all those commentators were not here in the 1950s & 60.
What would they know ? I dispute that it is better now compared to
what it would have been if immigrants had not turned up in the years since 1950.
Are they saying we would not have had improvements in anything and the
country would be like a 1950s museum in this century ?
What a load of rubbish.
There is no need to list all the things we are putting up with these
days that just never happened then.
Perhaps we need to bring back the 6 o'clock swill.

Let us not hear any more about needing more immigrants to improve the
country. We have definately reached the point where more is worse.

For those who have missed it, the Public Health Association of Australia has called for some leadership on Australia's population growth, citing many of the same concerns raised in this forum, including environmental instability and unsustainable population growth.

The full media release is at
http://www.phaa.net.au/documents/mediaRelease/MediaReleasepopulationpolicy.pdf