Saw on the news tonight Indian government officials going around trying to convince people to get sterilised. If I remember correctly, they were offering, some 50 years ago, transistor radios to males if they has the snip. No mention of radios this time.

A well balanced immigration policy such as Australia has, goes a long way towards creating prosperity for both immigrants and native born. This is self evident as Australia's economy has prospered from post war immigration.

On unemployment,only a wet behind the ears fool would believe in the simple arithmetic that if there are 507,500 unemployed and there are 438,500 job vacancies then simple materialistic says unemployment should be 507,500 - 438,500 = 69,000. The fool has not taken into account skill, location, people transitioning between work, part time and full time employment and those in society who are simply unemployable for various reasons but still show up in the jobless figures. For those reasons full employment is considered achieved when the jobless number reaches 2%.

Canem,

Nowhere have I said "World Population is not decreasing". In fact, the opposite. My original post pointed out that the population continues to increase. One of my points was that the increase trend was in decline and rapidly approaching the point where it will reverse.

The take-away from this is that another (YET another) of the great scares has now been thoroughly debunked. While it should have been fully discredited decades ago when its main predictions utterly failed to materialise, many who just wanted it to be true held on to the hope that the predicted disasters would yet come about.

But that has now evaporated. That the world population will reach a point where it starts to decline is now completely accepted by those who make such predictions. The only question remaining is when that point will be reached and how quickly and extensive the decline will be. The latest research suggests it will be sooner than we previously thought.

Such a profound and unprecedented change will have enormous ramifications for humankind. Most obviously, the issue of purported human induced climate change will be resolved. The bigger issue is how societies will function with less kids and more retirees. Japan has been grappling with that for some time now with no solutions at hand. France has stuck its toe in the water for a partial solution and the results are there fore all to see - riots in the streets. (An interesting take on a childless society is the book "Children of Men").

Another take-away is yet another lesson in taking all predicted disaster scenarios with several pounds of salt. The Population Bomb, the Coming Ice Age, Nuclear Winter...all wrong and all consigned to the dustbin of history. Only to be replaced by even more preposterous scares.

My understanding is that severe unpleasantness will result soon- in the form of cascading failures- and well before the 11 or 12 billion mark is reached- so that means we need to have better plans in place now. As some say "you fail to plan- you plan to fail". Communists seem to believe failure is the best way to bring about Communist Utopia- I believe that incremental remediation is a better way to reduce suffering- Communists would say that I suffer from false consciousness.

If the world doesn't listen- then you have to find a way of insulating yourself from the failing policies- despite their persistance.

Unless people are made to be more responsible & not perpetually bailed out, there's no hope of ever getting the upper hand on the problems facing the whole of humanity.
Breed less if you can't feed your offspring ! If you don't know how to do that, ask !
If you're not able for whatever reason to do so you must accept that others will be forced to make a decision for you ! The time for idiotic pussy-footing has passed a long time ago.

Indy,

Obviously as a non-productive you don't want to apply any of your above post to yourself, as you take welfare every fortnight from us taxpayers. Where do you fit in to all this.

"others will be forced to make a decision for you!" a thinly veiled demand that people be sterilised, or done away with completely, against their will. WHAT ABOUT YOU!