This forum has a sub group. They are called "The Unholy Alliance".

They are the forum anti immigration bigots. They consist of 2 rather separate groups, who have come together as brothers in arms against immigration.

The first group is the six or seven racists and cultural haters on this forum, who base their hate on radical right wing ideological misinformation. The second group is the two or three immigration haters who base their hate on radical left wing ecological misinformation.

These haters have come together as one on this forum.

Haters never change. They will go to the grave that way. Thus it's pointless trying to change them. They are a tiny, tiny minority of hateful Australians who are good at jumping up and down and yelling and screaming. They will eventually die, and hopefully be replaced by people of decency, humanity and compassion.

Nature doesn't do per capita, Pericles. If there are enough people, it doesn't matter if per capita consumption is low. China is now the highest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world, even if you exclude production for export, and consumes twice as much meat as the US. This is not because the average Chinese is living high on the hog.

You also seem to have bought into the guff about boundless plains. Australia is mostly desert, with only about 6% arable. The average quality of that arable land is also very low, apart from some small areas of alluvial soil and over old volcanic hotspots. See these maps of rainfall and soil quality by Dr Chris Dixon of the CSIRO

http://www.australianpoet.com/boundless.html

According to the World Bank, Australia produced an average of 2.2 tonnes of grain per hectare in 2012, with 47.7 million hectares of arable land. France produced 7.5 tonnes per hectare in 2012, with 18.4 million hectares of arable land. Even in a good year, if both countries had planted all the arable land with grain, we would only have been able to produce about 76% as much as France. France has much more reliable rainfall than Australia, so it can count on producing those sorts of harvests every year, but Australia only produced 1.1 tonnes of grain per hectare in 2006. We produce about 3 times as much as we consume ourselves in a good year and 1.6 times as much in a drought year.

http://www.resilience.org/stories/2010-05-06/can-we-feed-“big-australia”

There is also no guarantee that present levels of agricultural production can continue. Apart from possible deterioration due to climate change, we have serious problems with land degradation and urban sprawl covering up good agricultural land. (A lot of people hate the battery chicken lifestyle in dense, crowded cities.) We are also heavily dependent on imports of oil and phosphate rock, which have been becoming scarcer and more expensive, as has food on the world market.

http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/foodpricesindex/en/

We need to think very carefully before we add any extra mouths.

Divergence, there is not even one tiny figure that you produced that proves that Australia can't sustain a higher population. Your argument is based on ideology and not mathematical, empirical fact.

NathanJ "As we continue to increase our population through immigration - from people who come from well off countries, we only make the situation worse."

Actually more than half of our immigrants are from Medium/Low Human Development countries, and only 31% are from our level (Very High).

And it doesn't matter if Tajik goat herders, who live in a tent, ride a donkey and grow their own veges move here.

As soon as they arrive in Sydney/Melbourne, their rustic low-impact lifestyle will vanish, replaced by high-energy "all mod cons".

Nhoj, if only there *were* an alliance, we might get somewhere!

Unfortunately the greenies want nothing to do with the ethnic nationalists.

The greenies will twist themselves inside out to avoid the racial/cultural ramifications of immigration.

And the cultural continuitists often have environmental concerns too, but this is ignored (along with everything else they say), as they are dismissed as "Nazis".

Neither group is motivated by "hate", but by love, of their people, nature and logic.

The true unholy alliance is between the reality-oblivious flippant, arrogant, pancultural "utopians" who cannot allow their naive faith to be challenged by more sensible perspectives and the libertarians who cannot accept any limits on human choice (even though many immigrants are themselves not tolerant/enlightened enough to embrace those noble ideals).

The panculturalists hate reality, hate their own people (a projection of their self-void), hate the mountain of evidence that says this is an insane experiment that can only end in disaster for all.

And yes, haters never change.

Your naive faith will die.

Unfortunately, only after millions of people pay the price, with the loss of a shared identity/community, loss of living standards and even loss of life.

Good post, Shockadelic, although the cultural factors will be moot if we stuff up the environment badly enough.

Nhoj,

It depends on what you mean by a bigger population and in what time frame. If you are talking about a few more million and not too far in the future, that is one thing, but our growthist elite is subjecting us to 1.8% population growth (60% due to immigration, about a third of the remaining 40% due to births to recent migrants, and the rest due to demographic momentum from the long-standing population). If maintained, this means that our population will keep doubling every 38 and a half years.

Some of us actually care about our children and grandchildren, and about what happens to our friends' children. Some of us even think that other species have a right to live too. From the figures that I have given, it is clear that we won't be able to feed ourselves in a long drought, without even considering other impacts on the environment, if we double our numbers, and it will be even worse if we triple the population. There are a lot of factors out there that have the potential to severely decrease production. We got lucky with the Green Revolution, but it is foolish to bet your children's survival on some marvellous new technology that will come along to save the day.

http://www.theage.com.au/environment/un-climate-conference/australia-faces-prospect-of-being-unable-to-feed-itself-20110713-1hdyn.html#ixzz1S1hsRxuM

http://www.pc.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/8896/landdegr.pdf

You might read "Dirt: the Erosion of Civilizations" by Prof David Montgomery (Soil Science, University of Washington), as well as "Constant Battles" by Prof Steven LeBlanc (Archaeology, Harvard) and "War Before Civilization" by Prof Lawrence Keeley (Archaeology, University of Chicago). They will tell you more than you want to know about how societies collapse, because they have trashed their environment or because they simply let safety margins get too thin.

You need to do some reading to open your eyes about the carefully sanitized, Disneyfied, PC version of human history that is spooned into people by elements of the media and the education system, along with big dollops of what Americans call "liberal guilt".

But they are not my measurements, Divergence.

>>Nature doesn't do per capita, Pericles.<<

They are the measurements sanctioned by the WWF (not the wrestlers, the other mob) as being appropriate to beat developed countries around the head with guilt. As stated in the opening post:

"Australia has one of the world's largest ecological footprints per capita, requiring 6.6 global hectares per person."

So please, take your per-capita complaint to them.

>>A lot of people hate the battery chicken lifestyle in dense, crowded cities<<

Except, it would seem, many of the immigrants who are the subject of NathanJ's whinge. Thus you should thank them for slowing the "urban sprawl covering up good agricultural land" that concerns you.

And Shockadelic, as we have come to expect, waxes lyrical in his justification of the stance of all the dog-in-the-manger Little Australians:

>>The panculturalists hate reality, hate their own people (a projection of their self-void), hate the mountain of evidence that says this is an insane experiment that can only end in disaster for all.<<

Not entirely sure what is meant here by the term "panculturalists", but most of my acquaintance embrace the reality of the privileged position in which we find ourselves, love their country and its multifaceted population, and do not in any way think of them as an experiment, insane or otherwise.

But perhaps that mindset is also the result of my battery-chicken city existence. Life might be very different for those enduring the back blocks of Woop Woop.