Hi C.J.,
Your Post says - It is this attitude by exenophobics that is the real reason political parties in Australia avoid debating immigration like the plague. Yes I agree that politicians are very fearful of debating immigration but it's because a lot of elections can hang on a few hundred to a few thousand votes in their electorates so they will not risk offending any ethnic group by debating immigration.

I see we are still in opposition in our views about the stability of multi-tribal societies. I dispute the idea of exenophobia being the cause of ethnic cleansing as you know. My position has always been that mankind is as territorial as any lion or other species on the planet. Lions too will kill their own species if they don't back down and surrender the territory.

exenophobia : meaning - morbid fear of foreigners.

I suggest it is not so much the foreigners that are feared as the terrifying fear of loss of control of territory. Most people in refugee camps are there because they have nowhere to go because they have been pushed out of their territories.

Incidently a lot of countries in the world don't allow immigration of foreigners in the numbers we do. Their reason being they have too many people already. In other words they use the sustainable population argument to not take immigrants. Maybe they are secretly hanging their hats on the hook of sustainability to disguise their exenophobia.

Fractelle-: Why should a prosperous nation like Australia need to import skilled labour?

That question says it all. It also points to the answer.

Greed and failure of Government.

There was a time in this country when businesses with more than 5employees were required to train an apprentice.

CJ Morgan, you state that immigration should be 'restricted to bona fide refugees and their families'.

How's that going to work? We have a water shortage as it is, so how can we support more people?

By advocating bona fide refugees (and who's to know whether they are bona fide), you place that ahead of skilled migrants and those that can support themselves. Many, if not most, refugees will not be able to secure employment (language difficulties, unskilled status etc). So how can we afford to support them?

I suppose you see this as a paranoid xenophobic response.

Australia’s immigration intake was today cut by 14% for next year, down from this year’s 133 500 to 115 000.

Well…what can we say about that?

It is good that our absolutely manically pro-growth rulers can see that maximising population growth does have a downside and needs to be mitigated, if only slightly.

There is scope for further reductions within the minds of our unillustrious PM and his cronies. They have announced that further cuts are possible. I think that we will probably see another cut sooner or later, as the unemployment rate rises.

But the total is still absurdly high – higher than it ever was under Howard. So it needs to be reduced a whole lot more.

And most significantly, there is not the slightest thought of sustainability in the reasoning for this reduction…you know: the sacred balance between the human impact on the environment and resource base balanced with the ability of the environment to take the punishment without a constant increasing in degradation, and for every possible element of the resource base that can be renewable to be so, rather than having its stocks run down.

The maximised rate of growth has become the almost maximum rate of growth….which is only ever so slightly less absurd in the face of highly stressed water resources and all manner of other resource problems and environmental issues.

http://www.smh.com.au/national/immigration-slashed-to-protect-jobs-20090315-8yy2.html?page=1

What strange logic from Austin Powerless - on the one hand we don't have enough water to allow any immigrants at all, but on the other those who are "skilled" apparently don't consume any. Of course there are no refugees with useful skills, and most of them won't secure employment anyway.

Tell that to the post WW2 reffos from all over Europe, the Vietnamese and Lebanese refugees. None of them work or drink water either. I put it down to their "language difficulties" and "unskilled status".

<< I suppose you see this as a paranoid xenophobic response >>

Yes, that sums it up quite nicely.

Sharkfin - as ever, I find your quaint proto-sociobiological ideas laughable, but there's no way I could be bothered explaining to you why (again).

Suffice to say that it's people like you and Austin who ensure that the population debate is never taken up seriously in political discourse these days. No political candidate (except perhaps our Pauline) would want to be seen to be supported by racist ignoramuses, so they just leave the subject alone.

Quite tragic, really.

Whats tragic is that the small minds of the green left seriously believe that the Australian continent can't support our current population.

Perhaps it would be correct to say that the South East of the Country is becoming a little crowded. But Qld, the Northern Territory and WA have vast areas which could support large increases in population.

Not that I am suggesting a massive population increas is a good idea. It isn't. But the present migration program is fairly small and inconsequential.

A good reason to limit skilled migration, would be to reduce competition for jobs given the large numbers of Aussies who might well be unemployed in the next few years.

With better management we could make many of our resources go a lot further. The doom and gloom merchants of the loony left have their own agenda, however. It is little surprise that many of these middle aged eco warriors were once socialists.