Rudd's open door to illegals

From The Sunday Telegraph:

The Rudd government's relentless claims that "push" factors - the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, unrest in Pakistan - have been responsible for driving more refugees to our shores are proving to be hollow.

The "pull" factors - Labor's softening of the Howard government's hard line against people-smugglers and opportunistic asylum-seekers - remain the principal factors in the huge increase in numbers of undocumented illegal arrivals in Australia, the biggest since 2001.

Now it is revealed that a refugee advocate Ian Rintoul was in constant mobile-phone contact with boatloads of refugees even as they prepared to leave Indonesian waters for Christmas Island.

According to reports in The Australian newspaper last Friday, Rintoul acted as a conduit for messages between asylum-seekers aboard an illegal people-smuggling boat in Indonesian waters, Pakistani people-smuggling facilitators and Australian authorities.

*snip*

Since Labor came to office, Immigration Minister Chris Evans has moved with ferocious haste to remove possible impediments for queue-jumpers.

There's no doubt the new arrivals reaching Christmas Island, where they are assured of residency permits within 90 days, are jumping the queues administered by the UN High Commission for Refugees and bodies such as the International Organisation for Migration.

Acting under the radar, Evans has surreptitiously removed the character test that used to apply to new arrivals and protected Australians from those whose general conduct was questionable.

Shadow immigration minister Sharman Stone says Senator Evans directed the Immigration Department to disregard a person's character, the provision of bogus documents, behaviour that was disreputable and acts that fell short of criminal fraud.

Evans' latest direction also widens the scope of considerations to allow people who are found not to be of good character to nevertheless enter and remain here in Australia.

This may well be why the Government has done nothing about accused East Timorese human-rights violator and murderer Guy Campos, who is still at large, having entered Australia on a pilgrim's visa for the World Youth Day celebrations last year.

Evans has significantly increased the "pull" factor for illegal entrants by changing rules that required the expectations of the community to be considered when decisions were taken on whether to refuse illegal immigrants entry to Australia or remove them from the country.

Someone who commits serious crimes against the Migration Act is no longer considered to be of character concern.

Further, this minister has personally overturned the decisions of the Migration and Refugee Review Tribunal and the courts more than 1000 times.

Yet he has claimed in his statements that ministerial intervention cannot result in a fair outcome and has stated that he doesn't want to "play God".

Evans has also said he wants to delegate his powers back to tribunals and the department, but has not done so.

As with so many of the public statements of the Rudd ministry, there's a huge gulf between what is said and what is done.

The previous Coalition government managed to halt the number of unsafe and illegal people-smuggling boats attempting the hazardous voyage to Australia.

The Rudd government has abolished almost every barrier to this traffic.

It has discarded temporary protection visas, it has dropped the 45-day rule that required applications for protection visas to be made within 45 days of arrival in this country, and it has now proposed a new category of visa for those who currently are ineligible for refugee protection under United Nations High Commission for Refugees rules.

Waiving the rules for those who can afford to jump the queue, those who have been living safely for the most part in third nations and not in refugee camps, hurts the most needy: those living under blue plastic in camps around the world.

Yet once again, we see the Rudd government secretly destroying policy that clearly worked and replacing it with flawed regulation that relies on ministerial discretion.

Such flouting of the community will is doubtless going to result in increased numbers embracing unwholesome anti-immigration groups.

Full article

"Such flouting of the community will is doubtless going to result in increased numbers embracing unwholesome anti-immigration groups."

We can only hope!

High immigration pushing out young Australian jobseekers

From The Australian:

THE Rudd government's alarm about retiring Baby Boomers causing economic growth to fall is unfounded and its policy response -- to bring in tens of thousands of overseas workers a year -- is wrong because of the rapid rise in over-55s staying at work.

According to a new report, a sustained increase in the labour force participation rate among men and women aged over 55 since the mid-1990s, continuing even as jobs are shed during the global economic downturn, should put a large question mark over the immigration program.

If immigration continues at current levels, the group most likely to suffer is young Australian jobseekers trying to enter the workforce, it concludes.

The report -- to be published next week by Monash University's Centre for Population and Urban Research in its People and Place quarterly -- concludes that, even if the net overseas immigration intake were halved from its current 180,000 a year between now and 2018, the labour force would grow by nearly a million workers, about two-thirds of whom would be over 55.

"The Immigration Minister's fear that, without continued, unprecedented high levels of overseas migration, the Australian labour force will soon contract is unfounded," the report concludes. "In the present economic environment of employment decline, sustained high levels of overseas migration are not necessary to ensure adequate labour force growth and such levels are compromising the employment prospects of younger job-seekers."

The report's author, CPUR social researcher Ernest Healy, told The Australian the Rudd government "appears to have been more alarmist than it needed to be in terms of population ageing and labour supply.

"The assumption by the government has been that all these Baby Boomers are going to retire and there will be this crisis of labour growth, but they simply don't seem to be retiring in the numbers the government has been expecting."

Full article

High immigration also adversely affects young Australians by forcing them to compete for entry into the housing market against new arrivals from overseas. Australia already holds the appalling position as the country with the highest house price to income ratio in the developed world, largely due to its massive immigration intake.

Foreign student industry a "recognised immigration racket"

From The Australian:

AUSTRALIA'S lust for high-dollar Indian students has led to a thriving black market in sham marriages, forged English language exams and bogus courses, and turned a once-respected international education sector into a recognised immigration racket.

While the federal government and industry work to repair the damage caused by a recent spate of attacks on Indian students in Australia, education agents say the violence has shone a light on a $14 billion industry riven with corruption.

An investigation into the overseas student industry has found thousands of Indians each year are being enrolled in dodgy courses at inflated prices and sold unrealistic dreams of cheap living and plentiful jobs.

The Australian has found operators across the Punjab, the main feeder community for Indian students in Australia, openly advertising "contract marriages" for aspiring immigrants to partners who have passed the mandatory English test for a student visa.

For an additional fee, agents will arrange bank documents and loans to satisfy Australian immigration law that demands students have the means to support themselves for the duration of their course.

Industry insiders say a flourishing market has also developed around the International English Language Test System, with students paying anything up to $20,000 for a good result.

Sonya Singh, a respected Indian education agent servicing the Australian market, says the myriad scams offered to foreign students each year have made "Australia a supermarket where people are buying stuff off the shelf".

"A good-quality Indian student notices a completely no-good student on the same flight as him to Australia and starts to wonder where he's going," she said. "Indians are so conscious of branding and Australia's reputation has suffered a lot because of the recruitment process.

"My own kids didn't want to study in Australia because they had a perception that poor-quality students go there and that if they told their friends they were going to Australia, they would be laughed at or thought of as lesser."

Full article

The solution to this problem is obvious: stop granting permanent residency to foreign students who complete a degree in Australia. The Federal Government needs to take some responsibility and clean up the mess it has created. Australian universities should not have to depend on full fee-paying foreigners for income, admission requirements and educational standards should not be lowered simply to put "bums on seats", and a degree from an Australian university should not be a ticket to permanent residency.

See also:

Indians among highest visa rule breachers in Australia

Getting residency via the kitchen door

When Skilled Immigrants Aren't So Skilled

The Howard Legacy

Migrant accountants fail English test

Immigration "not serving the country"

Foreign students exploiting immigration "loopholes"

The Indian student affair

I have so far refrained from commenting on the recent wave of attacks against Indian students in Australia and the subsequent fallout simply because the level of hysteria has been so high up until this point that it has been virtually impossible to examine the issue in a rational manner. Both Indians and the Australia media alike have used these attacks to once again stick the boot into "racist" Australia. The reality, though, is much different, as Neil Mitchell explains in the following article.

From The Herald Sun:

No, we are not racists

Neil Mitchell
June 11, 2009 12:00am

THERE'S no real point to worrying about being politically correct when that will aggravate a situation already dangerous and misunderstood.

It is fact that Australia's reputation for decency is now threatened by racial tension and the fear is that this could be a glimpse of the future.

The predicament is built around Indian students, the attacks on them, their response to those attacks and the ugliness the subsequent tension has provoked.

If there was any doubt about how seriously the problem is viewed, it was dispelled yesterday when the state's three most powerful people tried to quell the fears and end the stupidity.

The Prime Minister called for calm, but with a degree of passion not normally considered Rudd-like. He deplored racial attacks on any person - "Chinese, Indian, Callithumpian, Queenslanders".

He reminded the world that Australians are also bashed and die in India, which does not provoke parades of chanting ocker backpackers in the streets of Mumbai.

The remaining members of the power trio, the Premier and the Chief Commissioner of Police, met at a railway station and pledged a police campaign supposedly directed at street robberies, but really designed to reassure angry Indian students.

It was a stunt, albeit a worthy one, but let's put the spin aside and look to some basic truths.

It is true that there are gangs operating in this country. Some are racially based and racially motivated.

Some do attack particular ethnic groups.

It is also true that there have been attacks on Indian students described as "curry bashing", an awful term Indians themselves say is a motivation for the attacks.
But there have been far more attacks on Indian students motivated by brutality and theft.

In Sydney, there are dangerous racial undertones to the tension. On the streets at night it has been Middle Eastern versus Indian. That's ugly - and frightening.

The media in India has been hysterical about all this with little concern for the facts and less understanding of this country.

Australian political leaders have been quick to react and overreact, partly because they are concerned about Australia developing a reputation for racism and partly because the education of international students is big business.

And the final truth is that the Indian students have harmed their cause and there is no point pretending otherwise.

Student leaders have portrayed their members as docile, which in itself is a racist generalisation.

Some are gentle, some are not, and the aggressive protests have shown that.

Burning effigies of the Prime Minister makes for good TV, but it incites tensions and alienates decent people.

Worse, the protests seem based on the assumption that Australia's leaders and police somehow endorse this violence and could end it if they had the will.

That's rubbish, on both counts. It's unfair to blame the people and the leaders for the brutality of a few street thugs who are at times just as likely to attack fourth-generation Australians as they are visitors from the other side of the world.

Some of the students have had a rough time, and that is deplorable. But it is the fault of a few criminals, not the society, and not the culture.

Neil Mitchell broadcasts from 8.30am weekdays on 3AW.

Original article

The automatic assumption was that the attackers in these cases were European Australians. But it turns that a number of the attackers were actually of non-European origin, a crucial fact reported neither here in Australia nor overseas. Why is that? Because it doesn't fit the orthodoxy that only people of European ancestry are capable of racism.

As columnist Andrew Bolt points out, political correctness has prevented the public from being properly informed about which groups are actually committing these violent crimes.

Bolt writes:

IF we weren't so scared of seeming racist, we wouldn't now seem so, er, racist that even India is giving us lectures.

Amazing, that. India, which perfected the caste system and is plagued by Hindu-Muslim bloodfests, is telling us we're too prejudiced?

But we have only our own stupidity and grovelling self-hatred to blame. After all, which nation has spent so much apologetic cash and sweat to persuade the world we are vomiting with racism, and which has been, on the other hand, too militantly anti-racist to point out who is actually bashing many of these Indian students?

...

...what police and many journalists refuse to confirm or even discuss is what victims and their spokesmen repeatedly say - that many of their attackers are Africans, Islanders and, less often, Asians who are newcomers themselves, beneficiaries of our eagerness to seem kind and tolerant.

...

That's how the false perception is allowed to grow that these attacks on Indians are just another example of our institutional racism, when the reverse may well be true -- that we're so over-eager to seem not racist that we take in immigrants we perhaps should not, and refuse to admit when they go wrong.

Unfortunately, Australian society is engaged in mass self-deception when it comes to the downsides of immigration-induced diversity. Australian authorities and the Australian media would much rather excoriate the white Australian majority for their alleged "racism" rather than examine those fractious groups actually responsible for much of the ethnically-based crime now plaguing our major cities.

Waste water! Save Australia!

From CanDoBetter:

Review by Katharine Betts of Mark O’Connor's and William J. Lines's book "Overloading Australia," People and Place, vol. 17, no. 1, page 76.

Australia’s population is growing rapidly. In March 2009 it stood at 21.6 million. The current Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, takes it for granted that it will grow to 35 million by 2051.[1] In 1999 when Philip Ruddock was Minister for Immigration he told Australians that there was no need for a population policy because we were unlikely to grow much beyond 23 million. He added that the ‘nation cannot afford to return to [an immigration] program characterised by big numbers and little thought’. [2] Nonetheless the current growth surge, keenly embraced by the new Labor Government, began quietly under the Coalition soon after Ruddock’s 1999 statement.[3]

Much of Australia’s growth is directly due to immigration (nearly 60 per cent in 2007–08) and much of the growth from natural increase is attributable to the Australia-born children of immigrants. For example, in 2007, 25 per cent of all births were to overseas-born mothers.

For those with their eyes open population growth and the immigration that fuels it are never out of the news. There is the unaffordable housing that drives young families into debt slavery [4] (even pushing some to the less-expensive urban fringe where a number died in Melbourne’s recent fires).[5] There is strained infrastructure leading to blackouts, cancelled train services, and to traffic congestion, draining energy from the economy and from human lives. [6] There are hospitals that can no longer care for the people they serve;[7] water supplies that dwindle as drought and growth desiccate cities and stretch the capacity of farms;[8] pleasant suburbs degraded by intensive redevelopment;[9] greenhouse gases that refuse to abate;[0 ]and a natural environment wilting under the burden of numbers.

But while stories of water shortages and degraded infrastructure abound, few of the public figures who comment on them acknowledge the role of population growth in creating these problems and making them harder to overcome. Here Mark O’Connor and William Lines have done us an important service; they have joined the dots between these social and environmental ills and our rapid growth.

From the picture they create a reader could, at first, believe that Australia’s pattern of growth was promising. It is mainly due to government immigration policy, so shouldn’t it be relatively easy to rein it in? Besides immigration is not popular; support for the post-2000 increase is minimal among both the Australia-born and migrants themselves.[11] But as O’Connor and Lines make clear, immigration in fact makes it harder to halt growth because the businesses that profit from it lobby for it, and property developers with deep pockets appear to have bought the favour of some of the politicians who create it.[12]

High migration means more customers, cheaper labour, and minimal training costs. All of these boons intensify pressures from self-interested groups to keep the numbers coming. As O’Connor and Lines put it: ‘It is no surprise that the housing industry lobbies not for the size of housing industry that Australia’s population needs but for the size of Australia’s population that the industry needs’.[13] The concentrated benefits enjoyed by special interests (on the right of the political spectrum) trump the unorganised interests of the majority who bear the costs.

At the same time many opinion makers on the left are quick to decry criticism of immigration-fuelled growth as scapegoating immigrants, even as racism.[14] As if this were not enough, business interests fund academic research into demography and immigration, naturally channeling their money towards those likely to produce results friendly to growth. This is a chilling circumstance at a time when universities are starved of money and academics are under crushing pressure to bring in research grants.[15] Other sources of research funds include state and federal government departments, most of which are committed to the growth targets set by politicians.[16] Researchers who might otherwise point to the costs of growth are unlikely to win such grants; they also risk the disapproval of their left-liberal peers.

The authors point out that the left’s fixation on seeing criticism of immigration-fuelled growth as racism is ‘a good cloak for elitism … the people must not be given power because their views are barbaric’.[17] Thus even though high migration is unpopular, a pro-growth right and a left that is anti-anti-growth mean that voters are unorganised and voiceless.

The authors marvel at the way in which the motives of the occasional reformer who questions growth are earnestly probed while no one examines the growth lobby as it enjoys the handsome profits brought to them by each plane load of new consumers. O’Connor and Lines assert that left-wing xenophobia hunters are not interested in old fashioned rent seekers despoiling the community for their own advantage; they prefer to enjoy the comforts of their moral superiority.[18]

Why must O’Connor and Lines be the ones to point to the damage done to Australia by this blend of greed and snobbery? Why have the media failed to show it to us? Here the authors have a telling vignette about Ian Lowe, a distinguished scientist who takes population seriously. He is also president of the Australian Conservation Foundation and a frequent media commentator. O’Connor asked him why he so seldom spoke out about population. Lowe replied that he often did but that when he did he was ignored. He also told O’Connor ‘how he was sacked as a columnist from one paper for insisting on it. He [Lowe] found that the most biased media were the grossly pro-growthist Murdoch papers’.[19]

Media silence on the question is not always an accidental byproduct of pleasing pro-growth advertisers while deferring to the sensibilities of the intelligentsia. It can be deliberate.[20] O’Connor and Lines argue that just as other vendors to the domestic market have a product to sell, so too do the commercial media; it is always easier to sell to a growing market rather than to compete for market share, or indeed to export. The commercial media have their own vested interests in growth. While the ABC should be immune from these interests, it is more likely to be infected with the racism virus, the infection that makes its host see any scepticism about growth as racism in disguise.[21] Nonetheless, perhaps because it does not profit from growth, the ABC has proved more receptive to Overloading Australia than have other media outlets.

Both authors are accomplished writers and the book is brief and clear; so far it has achieved a fair degree of media coverage. It was launched in February 2009 by Bob Carr, former premier of New South Wales, and a rarity among Australian premiers in that he is a critic of growth. At the launch Carr said: ‘There is a hardly any significant process at State or Federal level today that is allowed to proceed without an environmental impact statement ­ except the pushing up of population’.

O’Connor’s account of the launch goes on to report how Carr ‘spoke of his frustration, when he was Premier, at having a vastly increased Sydney population forced upon him by decisions made in Canberra. … He was then in the invidious situation of having to destroy amenities and allow developers to invade protected areas. As he put it, people don’t want Sydney to be crowded and built up, but they also don’t want it to expand into places like Kuringai Chase and Botany Bay; yet one of those two things has to happen if a million extra people are put into Sydney’.[22]

Some of the media reports have been neutral [23] or even favourable. For example O’Connor was invited to write an opinion piece for the Sydney Morning Herald,[24] and the Adelaide Advertiser.[25] He was also interviewed on the ABC Radio National station on Counterpoint,[26] Breakfast [27] and Late Night Live.[28] But press coverage has been more ambivalent and its tenor bears out the authors’ analysis.

A former Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, said that ‘the extent to which population influenced environmental policy depended on how selfish Australians wanted to be’ and that ‘some people citing environmental reasons for reduced migration were simply opposed to immigration’.[29] Charles Berger, in a generally sympathetic piece in The Canberra Times, wrote that: ‘Overloading Australia … has sparked another round of debate about Australia’s population. Some commentators have been quick to detect a murky agenda of xenophobia hovering behind a green cloak in the population debate. They are right to be suspicious. …’[30] He did, however, go on to exonerate O’Connor and Lines.

Brigid Delaney in the Melbourne Age was not so generous. She wrote that to rein in growth was to risk ‘the development of our inner lives’ because immigrants energise their adopted countries. But there was worse:

"Environmental issues can be a handy Trojan horse with which to wheel in policies and debates about immigration that we are too squeamish to discuss baldly. After all, no one wants a rerun of Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968 that led to race riots across England, nor Pauline Hanson’s polarising comments on immigration that brought Australia to the brink of a spiritual crisis."[31]

But O’Connor and Lines do not advocate an end to immigration, just a balanced intake which would still leave room for refugees.[32] This is a humanitarian position; they write that deliberately ‘pushing up our own population … cannot be justified on environmental grounds. It could only be justified on international humanitarian grounds if we could believe that it would leave us, somehow, very much more able and more willing to help our neighbours’.[33] They also point to the immorality of Australia continuing to pirate doctors and other health workers from poor countries to compensate for our own reluctance to invest in local training.[34] Xenophobia hunters, however, are more interested in displaying their self-righteousness than in understanding and debating an opposing point of view.

How can serious advocates of a moral and sustainable position on population growth cut through in such a climate? One way is to write the kind book that O’Connor and Lines have written, well researched, cogent and readable. Another is put forward a shocking policy proposal.

This concerns both sacrifice and exploitation. We can see its outlines in debate about the Rudd Government’s proposed emissions trading scheme. This will cap Australia’s overall greenhouse gas emissions through the sale of permits to industry, but it will also set a floor under which emissions are unlikely to fall. As community awareness of this has spread many householders are dismayed; their individual sacrifices to lower emissions are not only going to count for nothing, they will actively help polluters to pollute. Private spending on solar panels, solar hot water, and on low-emission cars will do nothing to reduce greenhouse gases; it will just enable dirty industries to emit more. But the same can be said of many sacrifices that individual Australians make for the environment; they are all nullified by the extra people brought in to pander to the growth lobby.

Here O’Connor and Lines put forward their suggestion. Instead of washing up only once a day and letting the garden die, we should all waste water. Saving water just makes it easier for growthists to increase the population. (They do say that would never suggest that we waste a non-renewable resource.)[35] But why struggle to cut your shower to less than two minutes when the Government is bringing in more than 200,000 extra people a year?

The answer? Take a deep bath and bring the crisis to a head. And while you are enjoying your bath you could read this excellent book.

Mark O’Connor and William J. Lines, Overloading Australia: How governments and media dither and deny on population, Envirobook, Sydney, December 2008, ISBN 9780858812246, A$19.95

Available online from www.abbeys.com.au, www.readings.com.au and www.booktopia.com.au.

References
1 See Rudd quoted in M. Franklin, ‘Rudd warns Australia must prepare for emerging arms race across Asia­PM flags major naval build-up’, The Australian, September 10 2008, pp. 1, 6
2 P. Ruddock, ‘The Coalition Government’s position on immigration and population policy’, People and Place, vol. 7, no. 4, 1999, pp. 6–12
3 See P. Kelly, ‘Restocking the nation’, The Weekend Australian, 3 August 2002, p. 28.
4 J. Hewett, ‘Under mortgage pressure’, The Australian, 20 October 2007, p. 21; B. Day, ‘How to plan for a fiasco’, The Australian, 22 April 2008, p. 14
5 Editorial, ‘A tragic week in Australian history’, The Australian, 14 February 2009, p. 16
6 AAP, ‘Heatwave claims lives’, The Age, 1 February 2009; AAP, ‘Qld: Labor plan to cut southeast traffic conges­tion’, Australian Associated Press General News, 26 February 2009; J. Gordon and R. Sexton, ‘National road chaos looms’, The Age, 8 March 2009, p. 1; C. Lucas, ‘Connex hit with commuter squeeze’, The Age, 5 March 2009, p. 10
7 R. Wallace, ‘Hospitals fail to meet most targets’, The Australian, 3 October 2008, p. 7
8 G. Roberts and P. Murphy, ‘Recycled sewage “will have bugs”’, The Australian, 29 October 2008, p. 9; B. Doherty, ‘Water plan may not go far enough’, The Age, 23 October 2008, p. 1
9 M. Clayfield, ‘There’s a hole in our suburb, dear Labor, oh dear’, The Australian, 7 March 2009, p. 5
10 G. Readfearn, ‘Pollution skyrockets ­ Coal and gas for electricity blamed’, The Courier-Mail, 12 January 2009, p. 11; T. Arup, ‘Emissions heat up in economic meltdown’, The Age, 14 March 2009, p. 4
11 See M. O’Connor and W. J. Lines, Overloading Australia, Envirobook, Sydney, 2008, p. 107.
12 Others may not need persuading. See ibid., pp. 4, 8–9, 26, 88ff, 98, 106, 145, 162.
13 ibid., pp. 125–6
14 ibid., pp. 141ff, 160, 164, 167, 172–3
15 For the role of the Scanlon Foundation with its mission to create ‘a larger cohesive Australian society’, see ibid., p. 82 and p. 205 n. 199. The Foundation believes that the future prosperity of Australia is ‘underpinned by continued population growth’. See < http://www.scanlonfoundation.org.au/socialcohesion.html> accessed 9/3/09.
16 For example academics critical of the high growth trajectory of the Victorian Government’s Melbourne 2030 strategy, and who are likely to apply to it for research contracts, are well advised to keep their criticism to them­selves. A public servant conveyed this warning, as a friendly gesture, to a group that I was a member of in late 2003.
17 O’Connor and Lines, 2008, op. cit., p. 144
18 See ibid., p. 145. 19 ibid., p. 171
20 ibid., pp. 38, 133–34
21 O’Connor and Lines devote a chapter to the pro-immigration bias of the ABC. See ibid., pp. 158–164 and p. 141ff.
22 Email from Mark O’Connor to PopForum@yahoogroups.com 10 February 2009
23 See P. Ker, ‘Population Australia’s “big threat”’, The Age, 24 January 2009, p. 3; P. Ker and A. Morton, ‘Popula­tion debate booms’, The Age, 30 January 2009, p. 2.
24 M. O’Connor, ‘Many in denial over rising population’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 19 December 2008, p. 27
25 M. O’Connor, ‘Australia’s bizarrely high population growth lies behind many of our worst problems’, The Advertiser, 3 March 2009, p. 18
26 Monday 1 December 2008, audio available at < http://www.abc.net.au/rn/counterpoint/stories/2008/2434745.htm> accessed 9/3/09
27 Wednesday 28 January 2009, audio available at < http://www.abc.net.au/rn/breakfast/stories/2009/2475805.htm> accessed 9/3/09
28 Tuesday 5 March 2009, audio available at < http://www.abc.net.au/rn/latenightlive/> accessed 9/3/09
29 Quoted in Ker and Morton, 2009, op. cit.
30 C. Berger, ‘Aim for sustainable population and generous immigration’, Canberra Times, 13 February 2009, p. 15
31 B. Delaney, ‘Murky agenda behind this green debate’, The Age, 27 January 2009, p. 11
32 O’Connor and Lines, 2008, op. cit., p. 72ff
33 ibid., p. 57
34 See ibid., pp. 69, 110.
35 ibid., pp. 182–184

Source

Hyper-population growth. How far down the gopher hole?

From Australia.To News:

Hyper-population growth. How far down the gopher hole?

By Frosty Wooldridge

While regular Australians battle the elite ‘growthists’, America fights for its life because we are already where Oz doesn’t want to be! As said in one Aussie letter to the editor, the ‘growthists’ expect to add more population to Sydney that lacks housing infrastructure and to Melbourne that lacks water. Growthists prove to be as silly as the laughing kookaurra bird. They don’t possess the common sense of an emu!

If you allow ‘growthists’ to win, you will suffer the same conditions now facing the United States. What are they? Read and weep!

America added 106 million people from 1965 to 2006. Demographic experts showed 300 million people living in America in October 2006. They expect an added 100 million by 2035. The consequences grow irreversible and unsolvable.

As population rises, carrying capacity drops. What is “carrying capacity?” For a quick rendition, it means, “The amount resources on a given piece of land to allow long term sustainable human, plant and animal life.”

If animals or humans exceed ‘carrying capacity’ of any given land mass, they crash in numbers by various means, i.e., famine, war and disease. Garrett Hardin, noted biologist called it, “The Tragedy of the Commons.”

For the 6.7 billion humans in the 21st century, oil resources will define that capacity quotient. Noted Geologist Walter Youngquist said, “This is going to be an interesting decade, for the perfect storm is brewing—energy, immigration and oil imports. China grows in direct confrontation for remaining oil. I think the USA is on a big, slippery downhill slope. Will the thin veneer of civilization survive?” To see how fast we grow, visit www.populationmedia.com

Youngquist continued, “Beyond oil, population is the number one problem of the 21st century, for when oil is gone as we know and use it today—and it WILL be gone—population will still be here.”

The world uses 84 million barrels daily! That’s 42 gallons to a drum! By mid century, use will top 120 million barrels per day. It will run out because of limited reserves in the ground.

Dr. Albert Bartlett of the University of Colorado said, “Present population growth rate is putting our children at risk. They will experience holes in the ozone causing serious biological effects on plants and humans. World ocean fisheries are collapsing from endless plundering. Two thirds of the world’s people will suffer from water shortages by 2025. It is not possible to sustain population growth or growth in rates of consumption of resources.”

Where is the worst overpopulation problem on the planet according to Dr. Bartlett? “It’s right here in the United States!”

Dr. Bartlett said, “Can you think of any problem, on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way, aided, assisted, or advanced, by having continued population growth—at the local level, the state level, the national level, or globally?”

How many people in the United States are enough? How far down the gopher hole do we want to dig ourselves? At what point is enough—too much? If we shut down the borders today with zero immigration, while enjoying our sustainable 2.03 fertility level of American women on average, we would still grow via ‘population momentum’ by an added 40 million.

In other words, we’re painting ourselves into a perilous corner. Once the numbers manifest, our society will suffer irreversible consequences with unsolvable problems. One visit to Los Angeles will show you they suffer toxic air, dwindling safe drinking water, gridlock to the point of insanity, water shortages, endless highways and housing development. Consider San Francisco, Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Detroit, Denver and all other large cities grow beyond the bounds of reason!

Sustainable growth, slow growth, managed growth, smart growth and all other kinds of growth are oxymoronic. There is no such thing as sustainable growth. Why? All growth exceeds carrying capacity at some point. In other words, the bubble bursts, the dam breaks, the glass spills, the balloon pops and the red-lined engine blows up.

“Population growth is given as a cause of the problems identified, but eliminating the cause is not mentioned as a solution,” Bartlett said. “We are prescribing aspirin for cancer.”

At the current rate of growth driven by immigration, America will double its population just past mid century—from 300,000,000 to 600,000,000. As long as the underlying cause of a problem is not dealt with, we, and our leaders, as a nation, perpetuate a falsehood which Mark Twain called ‘silent-assertion’: “Almost all lies are acts,” he said. “I am speaking of the lie of ‘silent-assertion’. It would not be possible for a humane and intelligent person to invent a rational excuse for slavery; yet you will remember that in the early days of emancipation in the North, agitators got small help from anyone. They could not break the universal stillness that reigned from the pulpit and press all the way down to the bottom of society--the clammy stillness created and maintained by the lie of silent-assertion that there wasn’t anything going on in which intelligent people were interested.

“The conspiracy of the silent-assertion lie is hard at work always and everywhere, and always in the interest of a stupidity (unlimited growth) or sham (unlimited immigration), never in the interest of the respectable (average citizens). It is the most timid and shabby of all lies. The silent-assertion is that nothing is going on which fair and intelligent men and women are aware of and are engaged by their duty to try to stop.”

‘Silent-assertion’ worked until it brought China, India and Bangladesh to their knees with sheer misery of numbers. How do I know? I’ve spent a lot of time in Asia and other overpopulated regions. China, even with enforced one child per family, grows by 10 million annually. India, with 1.1 billion, adds even more yearly. Bangladesh suffers 144 million people in a landmass the size of Iowa. Do you see anyone racing to immigrate to those havens of human overload?

What I ask is, do we as a nation, want millions upon millions of added people from countries already exceeding their ‘carrying capacity’? Legal immigration proves as dangerous as illegal. To think otherwise will allow that ‘silent-assertion’ to create another China or India in America. Just imagine Iowa with 129 million people and all the rest of the United States with THAT kind of population density!

Albert Einstein said, “The problems in the world today are so enormous they cannot be solved with the level of thinking that created them.”

We are no longer living in the 20th century America with only 75 million people riding horses or trains. We’re in the 21st century with cars and jets and 300 million people added to the 6.7 billion on the planet--creating horrific environmental consequences. Again, we had to change our ‘silent-assertion’ about slavery and we MUST change our ‘silent-assertion’ about population growth and economic growth. If we continue steaming full speed ahead like the captain of the Titanic, our children will be on board when we hit the peak oil, global warming, ozone holes, collapsing species, air pollution and other commensurate problems related to the overpopulation “iceberg.” Most died on the Titanic because there weren’t enough life boats.

Maybe some of us choose to maintain our ‘silent-assertion’ in the face of growing consequences, but how can any parent or grandparent be that callous to their children? That gopher hole drops mighty deep!

In this second and final part of this series, if you read carefully, you will connect the dots as to what is happening to Australia. It’s already happened to the United States.

In 1965, the ‘growthists’ in the U.S. voted for a new immigration policy that changed our 100,000 immigrants annually to 1.2 million annually. That single bill added 100 million people to the USA in 40 years. That same bill will add another 100 million in 26 years. That next 100 million will stuff our civilization into the toilet.

In the last column you read and connected the dots from Dr. Albert Bartlett as he asked questions that pertain to the ‘silent assertion’. You know this country cannot keep pretending that we can grow forever. We must stabilize our population sooner rather than later. We cannot apply 20th century solutions that will not solve 21st century challenges.

We cannot expect Third World countries to solve their own exploding populations. They grow by 77 million annually.

Noted scholar and biologist E.O. Wilson said, “The raging monster upon the land is population growth. In its presence, sustainability is but a fragile theoretical construct. To say, as many do, that the difficulties of nations are not due to people but to poor ideology and land-use management is sophistic.”

Those of us living in large cities in America can’t help but wonder: where does it all lead? Denver, where I live, suffers a ‘Brown Cloud’ so thick with toxins that every breath fills my lungs with poison air. Our traffic proves a daily nightmare of accidents, road rage and wasted hours sitting in bumper to bumper frustration. I-70 heading into the mountains makes a weekend getaway a nightmare. Returning proves a study in aggravation. Throw in our water shortages and you’ve got quality of life racing to the bottom of the sewer. Our natural gas costs jumped 33 percent this fall after they jumped 30 percent last year. Our electricity costs jumped 13 percent. Gas prices move toward five dollars a gallon. It’s already eight and nine dollars a gallon in Europe.

Because of mass immigration, we expect an added six million people into Colorado by mid century. Texas adds 12 million by 2025 while California adds 20 million by 2035. Water shortages will become water wars!

The 1993 EPA report stands as a perfect example of silent assertion’s denial of population growth as the prime culprit of our cities’ dilemmas: “Where many areas are experiencing rapid urban growth and associated environmental problems…a stronger emphasis on sustainable agricultural practices will be a key element in any long-term solutions to problems in the area.”

How friggin’ stupid is that statement? We cannot keep growing and stop destroying farmland! In Colorado, we pave 100,000 acres annually in the name of ‘growth’. Tell me how you can grow corn, wheat and vegetables on pavement! You cannot solve traffic gridlock by adding thousands of cars to the highways. You cannot solve water shortages by adding more people, lawns and toilets to flush.

The respected journalist Bill Moyers introduced another aspect of overpopulation when he asked science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, “What happens to the idea of the dignity of the human species if population growth continues at the present rate?”

Asimov replied, “It will be completely destroyed. I like to use what I call the bathroom metaphor: if two people live in an apartment and there are two bathrooms, then both have freedom of the bathroom. You can go to the bathroom anytime you want and stay as long as you want for whatever you need. Everyone believes in the freedom of the bathroom. But if you have 20 people in the apartment and two bathrooms, no matter how much everyone believes in the freedom of the bathroom, there is no such thing. You have to set up times for each person, you have to bang on the door. “Aren’t you through yet?” And so on!”

Asimov made what may become a profound observation as we head into further overpopulation dilemmas: “In the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive overpopulation. Convenience and decency cannot survive overpopulation. As you jam more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn’t matter if someone dies, the more there are, the less one person matters.”

Does anyone here think Chinese and Indian citizens enjoy their predicament? If they enjoy it, why are they fleeing their countries?

Thus, you might ponder a few of Dr. Bartlett’s Laws of Sustainability:

First Law: Population growth and/or growth in the rates of consumption of resources cannot be sustained. Persons who advocate population growth are advocating unsustainability. Such persons mislead themselves and others.

Second Law: In a society with a growing population, the more difficult it will be to transform the society to the condition of sustainability. This is caused by the phenomenon of ‘population momentum’.

Third Law: The response time of populations to changes in human fertility rate is 70 years. In other words, if we want to stabilize the population by mid 21st century, we must make changes now. For the record, the US created a stable society at 2.03 fertility level from 1970, but immigration at two to three million annually negates it.

Fourth Law: The size of population that can be sustained (carrying capacity) and the sustainable average standard of living of the population are inversely related to one another. The higher the standard of living one wishes to sustain, the more urgent it is to stabilize population growth.

Fifth Law: Sustainability requires that the size of the population be less than or equal to the carrying capacity of the ecosystem for the desired standard of living. The rate of destruction of ecosystems increases as the rate of growth of the population increases.

Sixth Law: The benefits of population growth and consumption accrue to a few. The costs are borne by the ‘many’ average citizens. That’s why politicians and developers promote growth along with real estate people. They move to other havens where they escape the ‘results’ of their labors.

Ninth Law: When large efforts are made to improve efficiency, the results are wiped out by added population.

Fourteenth Law: If humans fail to stop population growth and growth in the rates of consumption of resources, nature will stop these growths. By contemporary standards, nature’s method of stopping growth is cruel and inhumane.

One look at the March 14, 2005 Time Magazine piece that reported eight million people die annually of starvation world wide—offers a window into our future. Additionally, you can see it on many of the religious channels where they solicit money for food for millions of starving children in Africa. Notice they offer food which creates more children, so they never solve the core issue of too many humans. They need to offer birth control devices, for, without birth control, all their efforts and your money become useless as those populations explode by 85 million annually.

Nonetheless, I’ll receive hundreds of emails countering this column by well meaning people who operate via emotions, hopes and faith that it will turn out okay. Their propensities fall into the “Cassandra Syndrome”: The Cassandra Syndrome is a term applied to predictions of doom about the future that are not believed, but upon later reflection turn out to be correct. This denotes a psychological tendency among people to disbelieve inescapably bad news, often through denial. The person making the prediction is caught in the dilemma of knowing what is going to happen but not being able to resolve the problem. The origin of the name is derived from Cassandra, who, using her prescience, foresaw the demise of Troy. No one believed her.

What happened to Bangladesh, China and India, happened! Their problems relating to overpopulation create a miserable life for their citizens. As to what is happening in Amsterdam, Holland; Paris, France and Sydney, Australia from immigrating incompatible Third World cultures and languages, which resulted in violence, happened! They dug a ‘gopher hole’ they can’t escape because the ‘beast’ is inside them. It WILL and it IS happening in America unless we change course before the ‘beast’ is too big for us to stop.

I’ve covered the major laws. If you want a full and terribly sobering copy of this report, call 1 800 352 4843 or www.thesocialcontract.com. Ask for the Fall 2007 Quarterly.

We can be docile passengers on the Titanic by silently suffering our fate, or, we can stand up and speak out to the captain and crew of our ship (president and Congress). We are not lemmings or other helpless animals willing to be led over a cliff. I’m confident that millions of Americans refuse the ‘silent assertion’ mode of denial. They know their actions will be the only thing that saves America from drowning by mass immigration. They know their actions create change for their children like their parents’ action in the last century gave them the wonders of a country that provides “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Ask yourself: do you want Australia to end up like the USA, or China, or India or Mexico? I can answer that question unequivocally—NO! Not now, not later, not ever! Australia needs to pass an “Australian Population Policy” and lead the world toward population sanity.

Bob Woodruff of ABC asked input from all citizens concerning the future of our planet. Go to www.earth2100.tv for a sobering reality check as to what we face and to what I have been writing about for the past 20 years. Our ‘window’ to change to a balanced population and non-polluting energy diminishes every day we ignore the symptoms manifesting all over America and the planet.

Frosty Wooldridge has bicycled across six continents – from the Arctic to the South Pole – as well as six times across the USA, coast to coast and border to border. In 2005, he bicycled from the Arctic Circle, Norway to Athens, Greece. He presents “The Coming Population Crisis in America: and what you can do about it” to civic clubs, church groups, high schools and colleges. He works to bring about sensible world population balance at www.frostywooldridge.com

Original article

Unnecessary immigration neutralises economic stimulus

From Immigration Watch Canada:

AUSTRALIA : UNNECESSARY IMMIGRATION NEUTRALIZES ECONOMIC STIMULUS

A recent study by researchers at Australia's Monash University found that the Australian government's $42 Billion economic stimulus will be neutralized by Australia's unjustified and unnecessary high immigration levels. The stimulus is intended to protect Australian workers and their jobs.

Immigration to Australia will mean a total of around 140,000 new job seekers each year---at a time when the government itself is projecting no employment growth. A major reason for the 140,000 figure is that employer-sponsored visas to immigrants are inadequately regulated. Australian employers do not have to prove that Australian workers are unavailable for jobs. Also, Australian employers do not have to pay immigrants as much as they pay Australian workers. As a result, employers are abusing the program.

The Monash University researchers recommended the following:

(1) Priority should be given to how Australian training and mobility incentives can help Australian workers relocate to areas of skill shortages, not to removing obstacles to immigrant recruitment.

(2) Immigration should be strictly limited to those skills where there is a substantiated case that the skill cannot be obtained from within Australia.

(3) The range of occupations eligible for skilled immigration should be curtailed, particularly for employer-sponsored visas.

(4) Employers should have to provide proof that Australians are not available for the jobs in question.

The report was written by Bob Birrell, Ernest Healy and Bob Kinnaird. It is titled , "Immigration And The Nation Building and Jobs Plan": CPUR Bulletin, Centre for Population and Urban Research, Monash University, Melbourne, 2009. It is available at http://arts.monash.edu.au/cpur/index.php

Source

Also see:

Rudd Govt's immigration programme a threat to Australian workers

Isn't it interesting how these findings have been almost completely ignored by the mainstream media here in Australia?

"Managing" growth

From On Line Opinion (Australia):

The ubiquitous rationale of growthism

By Tim Murray
Posted Monday, 29 June 2009

It’s uncanny. Two cities on two continents, but “growthists” in Vancouver and Melbourne seem to be reading from the same playbook.

Lance Berelowitz, an urban planner who chaired Vancouver’s planning commission, praised the Mayor’s so-called “Eco-Density” initiative as the answer to the city’s ever-increasing house prices. Given that between 800,000 to one million new residents are expected to come to Greater Vancouver in the next 25 years, it can be assumed that developmental pressures on the city’s limited land base will steeply drive up land costs. It follows then, that “housing prices in Vancouver will keep going up, unless we substantially increase the housing supply to match the ageing demand.”

For Berelowitz it is unconscionable that Vancouver, currently representing about 27 per cent of the metro area’s 2.2 million citizens, continues to throw up a kind of cordon sanitaire around its perimeter and not “shoulder its load” by accepting its share of growth. To do this he offers several European solutions to shove more innovative housing units into the area. But what is interesting about his plan is that he failed to mention Vancouver’s housing surplus. Between 1991 and 2006 Vancouver grew by 126,000 people who required 15,000 new dwellings to house them. But developers built 69,000 units. According to activist Randy Chatterton, judging from BC Hydro statistics, 18,000 units are unoccupied, and MLS listings are up 26 per cent while sales are down 10 per cent. Now there are seven unoccupied apartments for every homeless person in Vancouver.

“Accepting our share of growth” is a standard line of urban planners and politicians. What they never reveal is their role in not only accommodating growth but promoting it. Developers build houses on spec. They are built on the expectation that compliant governments will continue to provide international clientele (migrants) and the monetary and tax policy necessary to lubricate investment in real estate. It is a case study of Say’s Law - supply creates its own demand. Berelowitz never once thought to question the necessity for Vancouver to grow by 45 per cent in the next quarter century. He never thought to consult Dr Michael Healey’s landmark 1997 study of the Fraser Basin ecosystem that recommended a halt to immigration and a Population Plan to defend the region and others like it from runaway population growth. That’s because the ideology of urban planning is not growth-control but “growth management”.

Former real estate developer and media mouthpiece Bob Ransford recently “despaired” of those in Vancouver with, are you ready for this old chestnut, a “drawbridge mentality”, that is, “who think we can resist the global flow of population and somehow sustain our lifestyle”. One wonders what kind of lifestyle Ransford imagines for the Vancouverites forced to live like sardines in a sardine can just so more migrants can move in and buy the bachelor suite closets that his developer friends would obligingly sell them. It seems logical that the law of physics would place a limit on the process of densification that Berelowitz, Ransford and the Mayor would set in motion, but so far they have shown no apprehension of it. And the law of “livability” would surely fall well short of that physical limit.

One wonders how Ransford would behave if he were the last of ten passengers on an elevator that safety regulations set at ten. Would he hold open the door for more people in the lobby who wanted in because he feared being accused of “Nimbyism” or having a “drawbridge mentality”? Would he suffer an urban planner who insisted that the elevator could hold 12 or 15 people, or a real estate developer who sold tickets to more people than could safely ride on the contraption? Would he listen to a human rights advocate who said that every person of colour from another country had a right to jam on board regardless of the elevator’s carrying capacity because it was a matter of social justice? If it was a matter of profit, one suspects he would. Growthists can’t grasp the concept that existing passengers, existing residents, be they of a city, or a nation, have a moral right to set limits.

Ransford ices his argument with more tired clichés. Cliché number one: “Our kids will not be able to afford to live in a city where no new housing is built.” Trouble is “our kids” aren’t buying that new housing. In Greater Vancouver 85 per cent of new housing is occupied by immigrants, while 70 per cent of new housing in other Canadian urban centres is occupied by “new” Canadians.

Cliché number two: “If we halted growth we will have a real labour shortage with our rapidly ageing population.” Fact: the C.D. Howe Institute demonstrated that it would take an unsustainable immigration rate 28 times higher than its present rate for the next 50 years for Canada to maintain its present age structure. Postponed retirements and higher productivity will greatly lessen the impact of this over-hyped bogeyman.

Lastly, Ransford recruited the words of retired planner Peter Oberlander who said that compact settlement patterns were an inevitable feature of urban growth especially where we were committed to preserving agricultural land. “The city is humanity’s supreme achievement”, he maintained, in dismissing fears about continued growth. Apparently Oberlander never heard of the failure of “smart growth” in America or the compromise of British greenbelts by developers or he might be less confident in his “compact settlement patterns.” And when it is recalled that a Greek polis was ideally imagined to consist of 5,000 citizens, one shudders to think that today a city of five million is considered a “supreme achievement”.

In a speech that could have been ghost-written by any of the aforementioned Canadian growth-a-holics, Premier John Brumby of Victoria spoke of his government’s plan to “manage growth”, because you see, growth is inevitable, and growth projections must be treated as, if anything, “pessimistic”, i.e. conservative. Thus Melbourne is going to grow at least 44 per cent by 2030, with 6.2 million people by 2020. “Demographer Bernard Salt has projected we will regain our title (sic) as Australia’s largest city within 20 years.” Note that the Premier treats a population growth plateau like a sports trophy to be raised aloft in triumph. Melbourne will regain its “title” like Mohammed Ali regained his title against George Foreman. Similarly when Victoria was “losing” people in the 1990s, presumably the state of Victoria was a “loser”. But now “the exodus has been turned around and people are now voting with their feet in favour of Victoria”. It is as if Premier Brumby is fighting an election campaign and people moving to Victoria are casting a vote for him. A commonplace illusion among Premiers, Governors and Prime Ministers

But he does acknowledge the strain that in-migration places on infrastructure and states that a million extra residents will require 380,000 new houses or apartments. Given Melbourne’s growth rate, he projects only a 17-year supply of land, and housing affordability, planning and supply issues demand full attention. He confesses that “the faster we grow the greater the demand on land supply”. Yet the one option that Brumby will not consider of course is to lobby the federal government for a severe cutback on immigration. Out comes a variant of Canadian Cliché number two: “we are facing a skills gap of 123,000 jobs over the next decade, which could curb our ability to benefit from the climate change economy.” Victoria attracts 27 per cent of Australia’s skilled migrants, and Melbourne 25 per cent of migrants of all categories. It is curious that the Premier would think that the importation of workers would be key to fighting climate change, when research clearly indicates that the best climate change fighting strategy is reducing population growth.

Certainly the Vancouver experience leads one to question the party line of housing lobby groups that releasing more land is requisite to housing affordability. Australian Property Monitors operations director Michael McNamara argues that “demand for housing is extremely flat and developers haven’t been able to sell the projects that they’ve got, let alone launch new projects - so we totally dismiss the argument that releasing more land on our cities’ outskirts is going to affect affordability”. ANZ Bank senior economist Paul Braddick says “there is no strong evidence to suggest that a lack of land supply has been driving up prices. The proof of that is house prices have gone up across the board - indicating it is not just land availability that is the culprit here.” Macquarie Bank analyst Rory Robertson attributes the fact that city house prices have grown 75 per cent faster than wages in the past 20 years to a halving of interest rates, the halving of capital gains taxes in 1999 and massive immigration which chose to settle in the eight capital cities.

Of relevance here is a study done by Bob Birrell and Ernest Healy of Monash University in 2003 entitled Migration and the Housing Affordability Crisis. While the authors acknowledge that Melbourne’s housing price spiral “cannot be attributed to recent migration levels,” they qualify their statement with significant findings. “The impact of migration varies sharply by metropolis. For Sydney the share of household growth attributable to net migration in 2001-2002 is 47.8 per cent Migration makes the next biggest impact in Perth where it is projected to contribute 33.5 per cent of household growth, then Melbourne where it constitutes 28.6 per cent of growth in 2001-2002.” By 2021, however, migration will account for 63 per cent of Melbourne’s household growth.

“Developers and builders are already heavily dependent on immigration to sustain their activities in Sydney. Within a decade those operating in Melbourne and Perth will be dependant on immigration for nearly half the underlying household growth. This will apply to Australia as a whole by 2021 when 48.4 per cent of household growth will derive from overseas migration.” It is in this context that the idea advanced by population sociologist Sheila Newman that property developers are key lobbyists for the country’s ecologically suicidal policy of high immigration becomes very plausible. As Birrell and Healy state, “It is no wonder that the housing and property industries in Australia are so keen for high migration”.

That immigration has a crucial impact on housing affordability is not immediately apprehended in any correlation of housing price increases in six major Australian cities with a given volume of migrant settlers. From 1989 to 2002 Sydney increased 30.7 per cent, Melbourne 20.5 per cent, Brisbane 45.8 per cent, Perth 23.5 per cent Adelaide 28.1 per cent and Canberra 34.8 per cent. What must be understood, however, is while certainly investors and speculators played a major role in the housing price spiral, immigration boosted their confidence, and without that the spiral would never have taken off. That is why, Birrell and Healy explain, Sydney’s housing bubble remained the strongest, for even if immigrants demanded mainly rental accommodations, “this is still vital to investors if they are to fill their properties with tenants”.

“In the case of Sydney, the intuition of residents and some politicians that immigration is a factor in the housing affordability crisis, is correct. The absence of the immigration component of household growth in Sydney would significantly reduce the underlying gap between demand and supply. There is little doubt that a reduction in the national immigration intake would improve affordability in Sydney.”

The authors conclude by saying that “Immigration is an important underlying factor shaping growth in demand for housing prices because of its role in household formation … By 2021, according to our projections, the migration component of household formation in Sydney will be around 75 per cent, in Melbourne and Adelaide 60 per cent and in Perth 54 per cent”.

As a rule of thumb, according to Albert Saiz of the University of Pennsylvania, “an immigrant inflow of 1 per cent of a city’s population is associated with increases in average rent and housing prices of about 1 per cent .” (Journal of Economics, Volume 6, Issue 2)

By that token then, immigration has added 18 per cent to the price of Vancouver real estate, or to put it another way, it has reduced the supply of housing stock available to resident buyers and the price mechanism has adjusted accordingly.

The logic of growthism calls for an increase in supply, for more housing units through more density and/or the release or development of more land. The logic of common sense, however, calls for a decrease in demand, that is, a decrease in tax incentives for real estate investors and speculators and a reduction in migrants.

Whether it be Vancouver or Melbourne, throughout the Anglophone world, the issues are the same, cloaked in the same euphemistic code language of growthism. The choices are ours to make.

Tim Murray blogs at (We) Can Do Better. He is Director of Immigration Watch Canada, and Vice President Biodiversity Canada which he co-founded. Tim is a member of Sustainable Population Australia, the Population Institute of Canada and Optimum Population Trust UK. His personal blog is at sinkinglifeboat.blogspot.com.

Original article