Frankly spendocrat, I'm not interested in your idealistic delusions about humanity.

As somebody who has travelled to less developed nations, I can honestly assure you that my reservations are driven by a desire to protect this country from the many problems experienced elsewhere. My own anecdotal observations aside, anybody with a sound understanding of contemporary history will comprehend the perils of high immigration.

Despite your assertions to the contrary, there is nothing wrong in loving your own national traditions and attempting to safeguard your own way of life. I do not see any moral imperative for Australia to import the world's problems, simply because this country's founders built a nation more prosperous than most.

You keep incinuating that Australia is just a piece of good luck that we are obliged to share, and that people like myself are "selfish" for putting the national interest first. What utter rot. If Australia's prosperity is simply a product of lucky geology, then why is it that most other resource-rich nations are failed states? Why is it that resource-poor Ireland has a much higher living standard than resource-rich Saudi Arabia? Maybe, just maybe, a nation's wealth has more to do with the characteristics, culture and traditions of its citizenry than the land's physical geography and geology. The sooner you understand that a nation is more than just a piece of land, the sooner rationality will prevail.

Yes, 300,000 immigrants seems like an excessive amount of people to be dragging into an arid and unforgiving land like Australia, but there are so many factors that influence the population numbers over a 10-100 year time span. Check out this link........

http://elecpress.monash.edu.au/pnp/free/pnpv6n2/mcdkipp3.htm

I might add that nobody will get much out of writing to politicians in an election year. It's doubtful you'll get a reply. Even a visit to a local pollie won't get you far. Imagine how vulnerable they must feel at this present time? One little slip of the tongue could spell disaster for their party.

On a personal level, I believe that immigration should be scaled back to at least half that number until we can access the impact drought and global warming are having on our Nation. Just because there's been a couple of days of average rain doesn't mean the drought is over yet.
Now, I'm hearing that due to limited water supplies, electricity supply might also become unreliable. Of course, the power company heads are deigning there's a problem, which usually means there is a problem. We really don't need anything more than a "stable" population until the sustainability of this great country has been fully accessed.
Aime.

Those who hide behind lofty humanitarian ideals to promote high immigration levels are nothing more than mouthpieces (whether they are conscious of this or not) of land specalators, property developers and dependant industries.

As I cross-posted to http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=4834#83259 :

If anyone still seriously maintains that immigration is not a factor which fuel housing inflation and is not, as a consequence, encouraged and welcomed by land speculators and property developers, they should check the sories in pratically every day's newspapers about growing housing unaffordability. Also check out these articles:

"Property prices tipped to soar" at http://www.realestate.com.au/review/apr072/prices_soar.html?from=review

"Michael Yardney - who runs buyers' advocacy service Metropole Property Investment Strategists -

"... said Australia was on the cusp of one last momentous real estate boom caused by strong immigration, a lack of land and an increasing proportion of single-person households. As the price climb continued, home ownership levels would also continue to fall, he said."

"Boom, migrant demand lift roof off home sales" at http://www.theage.com.au/news/business/boom-migrant-demand-lift-roof-off-home-sales/2007/06/09/1181089394431.html

"Scott Keck, managing director of property consultants Charter Keck Cramer, said part of the market's resurgence stemmed from immigration, with about 1000 people settling in Melbourne every week.

"'In the past two years, 80 per cent of migrant families coming to Melbourne have purchased their own home within 18 months of arriving,' he said."

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The way that Australia's Growth Lobby has been able to surreptiously impose its environmentally, economically and socially reckless high immigration program on the rest of us has been meticulously documented in Sheila Newman's Masters thesis of 2002 entitled "The Growth Lobby and its Absence : The Relationship between the Property Development and Housing Industries and Immigration Policy
in Australia and France". It can be downloaded from http://candobetter.org/sheila

Also, another shorter document can be found on the same page. It is a 13 page pdf document from Monash University's "People and Place Magazine" vol 4 no 14 of 2006 entitled "The Growth Lobby and Australia's Immigration Program" by Katharine Betts and Michael Gilding. It is at http://candobetter.org/sheila/growthLobbyAndImmigration.pdf