Melbourne "wrecked" and "full"

In a column entitled "Melbourne is wrecked, and full", Andrew Bolt makes the link between high immigration and Melbourne's declining quality of life.

He writes:

It’s bad enough that we’re already struggling to keep our most basic services running.

But now consider this: at the rate we’re being growing lately, Victoria will add at least another 1.5 million to its population over the next 20 years.

In fact, it could well be more. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd last year cranked up our immigration intake to a record high - more than 330,000 a year, if you include workers on temporary visas. And that’s not yet counting new births.

A year ago, even before Rudd opened our door even wider, the Australian Bureau of Statistics noted Australia’s population was now growing by 1.6 per cent a year, which means that if we don’t stop this madness, there will be half as many of us again by 2050.

And, of course, most of these new people will be trying to squeeze into our cities. Like Melbourne.

Imagine Melbourne growing 50 per cent bigger in your children’s lifetime, if not your own. That’s 50 per cent more people, cars, houses, gardens, air-conditioners and train travellers. Everywhere where’s there’s two, imagine three by 2050.

Forget the social stresses of simply getting on with so many more immigrants, or of trying even to find a little elbow room.

Consider this more basic problem: how on earth are we going to give all our new neighbours power, water, roads, land and trains when we don’t have enough for the people here already?

*snip*

Kicking out this government may not be enough to stop our slide. After all, there is little evidence yet that the Liberals would be any better.

But one thing is clear and urgent: until we learn once more how to give our citizens power and water, trains and roads, we must cut immigration.

After all, why inflict on two million more strangers what we’ve just endured ourselves? We’d only double our pain.

Full article

Rudd evading the question of population

From Online Opinion:

Population pressures

By Barry Naughten
Posted Thursday, 22 January 2009

The Rudd Government has allowed vested interests to veto serious action on climate change.

Rudd himself has rationalised this with an argument about rapid population growth but evades the question of population policy. This comment takes up aspects of the nexus between population policy and climate change.

The White Paper’s conditional target for 2020: the backdown
In its December 2008 White Paper on CO2 reduction schemes, the Rudd Government failed to adopt the “conditional” abatement option of 25 per cent reduction relative to 2000 levels by 2020, as recommended in the Garnaut Report. Instead, the Government has adopted the far more modest target of 15 per cent reduction for 2020.

A reduction commensurate with the 25 per cent cut would be required internationally if global concentrations in the atmosphere were to be held to no more than 450 ppm CO2e, thereby significantly reducing the risk of “dangerous” climate change. Such a path would also require countries such as Australia to adopt 90 per cent emission reduction by 2050.

Other examples of weakening resolve evident in the White Paper included its excessive allocation of free emission permits to trade-exposed industries and unconditional payments of as much as $3.9 billion in free permits to coal-fired generators.

Professor Garnaut has harshly criticised the Government for caving in to the pressure from vested-interests in what has been the most expensive, elaborate and sophisticated lobbying pressure on the policy process ever.

In the White Paper, a lower, “unilateral” target of 5 per cent reduction for 2020 is based on an assumption of no comparable burden being accepted by other countries. The purpose of the higher “conditional” rate is to enable Australia play its part in encouraging a sufficient and co-ordinated response from the rest-of-the-world.

The next major step in these international negotiations is in Copenhagen on December 7-18, 2009 at the United Nations Climate Change Conference. This will be the first test for the most critical player, the United States under the new Obama Administration.

The urgency of such action is heightened by indications that an Obama Administration may systematically conflate climate change with a bogus campaign - supported by neo-conservatives, “oil hawks” and others - urging US independence of “foreign” oil.

Rudd’s “population gambit”
Prime Minister Rudd’s rationale for rejecting the “conditional” 25 per cent abatement option is that Australia’s population growth is high relative to Europe’s. His claim was that “If the Europeans were to embrace the same per capita obligations that we're about to embrace, then you'd be seeing European reductions of the vicinity of 30 per cent”.

Consistent with this claim, the White Paper states that the 15 per cent cut in Australia’s emissions is equivalent to a 34 per cent cut in per capita emissions. Similar calculations show the 25 per cent cut to be equivalent to a 42 per cent cut in per capita terms, in both cases assuming a projected population of 24.6 million in 2020.

This 2020 population projection amounts to as much as a 44 per cent increase on the 1990 level, or a 29 per cent increase on the 2000 level. The Bureau of Statistics (ABS) projects that by 2056, Australia's expected resident population (ERP) could be between 31 and 43 million people. These are extraordinarily high figures for a fragile land under increasing stress, as documented for example in Jared Diamond’s chapter on Australia in his book Collapse.

We do need debate about the nexus between population and climate change
Clearly, a lower projected population growth to 2020 and beyond would ease Australia’s burden in meeting a tighter emission target. But what Rudd’s rationale for “15 per cent” ignores is the absence of any explicit population policy that takes into account Australia’s limited “carrying capacity”, especially given climate change that is already “inevitable”.

Yet there is a lack of informed public questioning of Australia’s population goals.

That said, prominent environmentalists such as Ian Lowe and Tim Flannery have long argued the ecological dangers of excessive population growth, not least as one major determinant of unsustainable forms of economic growth.

By contrast, in his comments on the deficiencies of the White Paper, Ross Garnaut says:

Our population grows strongly because, for good reasons, we choose to keep our doors open to people from many lands. Our new citizens need transport, a home with Australian accompaniments and access to employment income - all of which generate greenhouse gas emissions.

Other environmentalists such as George Monbiot also discount population growth as an issue comparable to, and relevant to the excesses of consumerism or “affluenza”.

Indeed, the role of population growth, whether due to natural increase or to immigration, is “difficult” for many reasons - political as well as technical.

With respect to natural population increase, it is generally agreed that improved living standards, personal security and education, and especially the empowerment of women, tend to reduce family sizes. But impacts on population growth will also depend on factors such as longevity and age-specific death rates.

The case of “dangerous” climate change shows that affluent states can impose burdens on the less affluent majority of the world’s population. Along with pricing emissions and a variety of other “complementary” mechanisms and abatement policies, this burden can be lightened by curbing excesses of both per capita consumption and of population growth, especially in the affluent countries.

“Lifeboat earth” and right-wing politics of climate change
Immigration and population movements also encompass controversial aspects of population debate.

On the extreme isolationist and elitist right-wing of environmentalism is Garrett Hardin’s notion of “lifeboat ethics”. This envisages the inhabitants of affluent states, having heedlessly created a global environmental crisis such as “dangerous” climate change, then withdrawing behind their own borders to repel environmental refugees by all means deemed necessary. The image is of a “lifeboat” that will capsize if too many boarders are admitted. The Howard government was not averse to playing on such xenophobic fears, when electoral advantage could be had.

Climate change denialists and the “adaptation only” policy pessimists alike can offer only a business-as-usual scenario, both groups failing to support strong abatement of global greenhouse gas emissions. In such a business-as-usual scenario, the affluent states - having predominantly caused the problem - can use their wealth to adapt to such climate change as impacts on their own regions, at the same time choosing to ignore the consequences for the more vulnerable and less self-reliant rest-of-the-world.

Repelling environmental refugees by force - the lifeboat image - is just one component of such a business-as-usual strategy, albeit one rarely highlighted publicly. The Canadian journalist Gwynne Dyer has documented military establishments around the affluent world more-or-less secretively planning for just such an eventuality.

Whatever their views on population policy, part of the reason that progressive environmentalists push for sufficient action on abatement of global greenhouse gas emissions is precisely so that such a “Hardin” scenario, catastrophic for human civilisation and humane values, will not come about.

Conclusion
The main conclusions are twofold.

First, the Rudd Government’s rejection of the 25 per cent reduction proposed in the Garnaut report is reprehensible. This is especially so in a political sense, with the Government having rejected any notion of blocking with the Greens on the issue, instead openly seeking to negotiate just with the Coalition, a strategy that risks even further dilution of targets, and offers little prospect of dividing the main political adversary.

Second, Rudd’s population gambit has, if inadvertently, highlighted the role of population growth, not least in magnifying greenhouse gas emissions. Like most of its predecessors, the Rudd Government has sought to keep population policy off the agenda. Its rational and balanced discussion should not be inhibited by “elaborate and sophisticated lobbying pressures” such as those identified by Garnaut.

Barry Naughten was a senior economist with ABARE, specialising in technology-based energy systems analysis. Currently he is at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies (CAIS), ANU, Canberra.

Original article

The threat of population growth

From The Age:

Population Australia's 'big threat'

Peter Ker
January 24, 2009

PROMINENT Australians have thrown their support behind a controversial new book which argues that population growth is the biggest threat to environmental sustainability in this country.

In a provocative attack on water conservation schemes, such as Melbourne's Target 155, the book Overloading Australia urges Australians to ignore water conservation, forcing politicians to rethink population and immigration policy.

Focusing on perhaps the most taboo aspect of environmental debate, authors Mark O'Connor and William Lines have argued that pro-immigration and "baby bonus" policies are at odds with plans to reduce carbon emissions and secure water supplies.

"The task of simultaneously increasing population and achieving sustainability is impossible," the book argues.

Predicting Australian cities will suffer more congestion, pollution, loss of biodiversity and diminished services, the authors argue there is no point conserving water "until we get restraint in population".

O'Connor said his background was largely in poetry, yet despite his lack of conventional expertise in demography and population studies, his book has struck a chord with prominent Australians and increasingly echoes the views of leading environmentalists.

Former New South Wales premier Bob Carr has agreed to launch the book next week, and has lauded O'Connor's previous books about the perils of unchecked population growth.

The Australian Conservation Foundation has also called for a "substantial reduction" in the nation's skilled migration program in this year's budget.

In its budget submission, the foundation said Australia's population needed to be stabilised at "an ecologically sustainable level".

"Population increase makes it harder for Australia to reduce carbon pollution levels and is placing immense stress on state and regional planning, infrastructure and ecological systems."

The comments will resonate with the Brumby Government, which has presided over an increase in total emissions in recent years, despite improvements in emissions on a per capita basis.

Monash University population expert Dr Bob Birrell, who has read Overloading Australia, said despite the global nature of the emissions problem, national borders still mattered because people tended to adopt the typical emissions profile of the nation they lived in.

"When you add an extra million in a society like ours you are imposing a very considerable additional burden, there is no way of escaping it, and that's the key to understanding why the population issue is so serious in Australia; we live very high on the hog," he said.

Australia will welcome a maximum of 203,500 new migrants this financial year, with skilled migration accounting for 133,500 of those places, and refugees just 13,500.

A spokesman for Immigration Minister Chris Evans said the Rudd Government had started developing a longer-term migration plan that would consider "net overseas migration rates and the impact of demographic changes".

Victoria has swelled by about 1500 people a week in recent years, a rate that Premier John Brumby has described as "about as fast as we want to go".

Original article

How the growth lobby threatens Australia's future

From Candobetter.org:

How the growth lobby threatens Australia's future

Posted January 24th, 2009 by James Sinnamon

Why is it that the Australian government, and other governments, principally in the Anglophone world, deliberately encourage population growth when common sense and intuition, not to mention the hard evidence, tell us that a larger population cannot possibly be in the interests of the current inhabitants of this country or of the rest of the planet?

We are long past the point where adding extra numbers in any way increases the synergy of the inhabitants of this country. Consequently any additional population growth must necessarily make each and every one of us poorer on average as the per capita access to natural resources necessarily decreases in proportion to the increase of the numbers of people.

However, it gets even worse than that, because of the dis-economies of scale inherent in large populations. An obvious example is that Australians are paying extra water rates to finance costly water desalination and sewage recycling plants required to provide water for additional people.

Had we stabilised our population, this would have been totally unnecessary. We could all have been adequately supplied by our existing less unnatural and less technologically complex water infrastructure.

Similar points could be made about transport, electricity, health, education and other services.

To cope with increasing numbers, it is necessary to destroy ever greater tracts of native bushland, to abuse our topsoil and waterways, and to unsustainably dig up ever more of our finite endowment of mineral wealth.

Three and a half decades of extreme 'free market' economic policies have further compounded these problems. These policies hinder governments from making use of what economies of scale are possible. They prevent effective planning in the interests of all members of society. Obvious examples include the huge inefficiencies of the private property market and the shambolic state of Australian urban planning, a result of the dismantling of Whitlam's Department of Urban and Regional Development (DURD) by Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser in the late 1970's.

In some ways it may be the case that immigration does indeed enable the transfer of wealth into, as well as out, of Australia:

• The purchase of a home by wealthy or middle class immigrants as a means of buying Australian citizenship, which is effectively a transfer of wealth from the source country into Australia;
• The poaching of skilled workers, often trained at the expense of taxpayers of other countries, including of poor third world countries - a practice, for which the Queensland Bligh Government has become infamous;
• The selling of Australian university degrees and vocational training, which has notoriously become yet another means of purchasing Australian citizenship.

Little, if any of this wealth trickles down to ordinary Australians and whatever benefit they do gain is more than negated by the loss of previously available educational, training and employment opportunities, and consequent housing inflation (also discussed below). Even if it can be shown that Australia, as a whole, gains, rather than loses wealth through immigration, that wealth will most likely evaporate within this generation.

In any case, on a global scale such wealth transfer is a zero-sum game, at best.

All things considered, it seems far more likely that we are not only becoming more impoverished, but we are becoming even more impoverished than we might expect to be if we had simply divided the existing wealth amongst larger numbers of people!

In a perverse way, it seems to me that this may have actually made it harder, rather than easier, to argue the case against population growth and immigration.

Whilst I can't know for certain if this was true for others, I will try to summarise some of the ways that this fed into my own conscious and sub-conscious thought processes and caused me to avoid questioning our high immigration policies for many decades.

My own intuition caused me to conclude that, if, somehow, immigration made us worse off on the whole, it would surely be harder, rather than easier, for any group to gain from immigration. Therefore, when faced with the strident assertions from all the seemingly credible authorities that immigration was economically beneficial, I found it easier to deny my own gut instincts and not to make the considerable investment of emotion and time necessary to question this pervasive message. Instead, I just quietly hoped that the advocates of immigration, who promised me a more prosperous, vibrant, interesting and sophisticated society, were right.

Alternatively, on occasions when the economic arguments did not seem to quite ring true to me, then the only other likely plausible motive would have been an underlying altruism of an enlightened elite more willing, than the ordinary, backward, redneck, xenophobic masses, to share the wealth of this country with others less fortunate than ourselves.

However, the conclusive evidence, after many decades of this social engineering, is that Australia has, instead, become a poorer and more dependant country as consequence and this has not been brought about because Australia's elites are self-sacrificing and altruistic.

Contrary to what I expected, a small group has, paradoxically, not lost, but rather gained from this chaos and suffering, at our expense. That group is the growth lobby. It is really a group of land speculators and landlords operating in an organised way on a corporate level.

Land speculators and landlords openly welcome the way that growing demand increases the price of vital resources over which they have acquired a monopoly. They profit from commodifying and then controlling access to resources and services which include water, land, power, housing, roads, food production and transport, which each one of us needs in order to live a dignified life, or even simply to live.

As one consequence, in Brisbane at the start of 2009, even previously well-off professionals are being impoverished by insatiably greedy landlords, who exploit these circumstances to increase rents at every possible opportunity. A surveyor, who lives near me (who acknowledges that his own work entails the destruction of bushland to build new housing developments to cope with population growth), told me how he was unable to travel back to Germany this year for his holidays, because of being personally affected by recent rent increases.

The growth lobby also includes property developers, financiers, building companies and suppliers of building materials. There are also others that gain from population growth through high immigration, such as immigration lawyers, employment agencies and cheapskate employers.

Whilst these activities may provide a facade of economic prosperity, none are capable of increasing the underlying ability of this society to provide for its own needs.

Queensland Premier Anna Bligh in April 2006, then Deputy Premier, ludicrously defended population growth on the grounds that it was necessary to keep people in the construction industry employed.

How could Premier Bligh, supposedly an intelligent person, have failed to ask herself the obvious question: How are those additional people then to be employed? Must we build yet more houses to keep them employed and import yet more people to Australia in order to provide a demand for those houses?

At some point such 'growth' has to end and Queenslanders must be able to find gainful employment by meeting the needs of other Queenslanders instead of future inhabitants.

The longer Australians put off stabilising our population and establishing a steady state economy, the worse will be our circumstances.

But the growth lobby wants this situation to continue indefinitely. To ensure that the forced march to dystopia continues, the growth lobby pours funds into the coffers of Australia's major political parties, including Anna Bligh's Labor Party. It creates obligation and dependency in our political parties and governments. In turn, our governments endlessly facilitate the real-estate economy, in the face of every democratic objection, merely to keep themselves in Government.

If we are to hope for any kind of a decent future for ourselves and our children, these corrupt arrangements must be brought to an end and the power of the growth lobby must be broken.

Original article

Migrant accountants fail English test

From the SMH:

OVERSEAS accountants are flocking to Australia under the skilled migration program but few pass the English requirements to work in the sector, leaving labour shortfalls unmet, a study into immigration policy has found.

There are now more overseas accountants gaining visas each year than there are domestic graduates in the field, a study in the upcoming edition of the People And Place quarterly journal has found.

But the occupation remains on the critical skills list because students using Australian accounting courses to gain permanent residency do not find work.

"The main reason is poor English skills," said the director of the Centre for Population & Urban Research at Monash University, Bob Birrell. Of the 9107 foreign accountants granted visas in 2007-08, more than two thirds studied at Australian institutions.

"The fact that such a large majority of overseas student graduates possess poor English indicates that Australian universities are conferring graduate credentials on students who do not have the skills needed to practise their profession," Professor Birrell said.

The study that Professor Birrell wrote with Ernest Healy uses the "abysmal" employment experience of overseas accountants, by far the largest group in the skilled migration program, to illustrate the program's shortcomings.

For example, the accounting firm KPMG said substandard English resulted in less than 1 per cent of former overseas student applicants landing a job in the company's entry level program.

"This experience indicates the potential for pruning the current program without damage to its core objective of filling skills shortages," the paper said.

The number of skilled migrants entering Australia is at a record. The Minister for Immigration, Chris Evans, has said a small cut to the yearly intake of 133,500 was "more likely than not" when numbers for 2009-10 were adjusted in the May budget to factor in the global financial meltdown.

The mismatch between accounting graduates and available jobs exposes a problem that was allowed to brew for a decade, the paper said.

From 1996 to 2007, the Coalition government tied only a small number of new university places to accounting studies. At the same time, universities hungry for the bigger financial returns of full-fee-paying students gave priority to overseas students, it said.

Part of the solution was for the Department of Immigration and Citizenship to raise the English language standard for student visas and demand higher standards of accrediting bodies, the paper said. "DIAC is fully aware of the dire employment situation of migrant accountants and of the role of English language skills in producing this outcome."

Full article

More:

Degrees still lure low-skill migrants

Bernard Lane | January 14, 2009

AUSTRALIA'S misguided trade in selling accounting degrees to migrants seeking permanent residency visas should be tightened up yet again and locals should be trained to fill severe shortages in the profession, says Monash University researcher Bob Birrell.

Dr Birrell, whose earlier work on the visas-for-degrees industry has inspired sharp debate and partial reform, will release this week new, more complete figures showing that more than a third of overseas students who secured visas as Australian-trained accountants had worryingly low English language skills.

"I regard the 2006-07 data as the best indication yet of the standards of Australian universities ... they're nowhere near the standards required by the profession," Dr Birrell told the HES.

In a paper to be published by People and Place journal, he and co-author Ernest Healy use updated figures and a new breakdown of nationality and occupation to show that accountancy as an easy route to permanent residence is especially attractive to the weaker English speakers among mainland Chinese students.

On the English language test known as IELTS, 45 per cent of mainland Chinese given visas as accountants did not manage a score of six (see tables, page 26). The percentage for mainland Chinese awarded visas across all university disciplines was 37 per cent while the figure for all nationalities given visas as accountants was 38 per cent.

Dr Birrell argues that even an IELTS score of six is not good enough for genuine university study while professions that take communication seriously demand a minimum score of seven, a standard adopted by large accounting firms such as KPMG.

Poor English is commonly cited by employers when asked why so few overseas graduates accepted as skilled migrants manage to secure jobs as accountants at a time of chronic shortages.

"The (former overseas) students who have struggled in the boom years are almost certainly going to go to the back of the queue as the economy slows," DrBirrell said.

"(Universities) are going to come under pressure from the students who are looking for permanent residency - that they can actually achieve this result from their heavy investment of time and money."

Dr Birrell pointed to a "wilful neglect" of domestic training of accountants and cited Curtin University of Technology as a dramatic example of an imbalance whereby overseas students greatly outnumbered locals (see tables).

He hoped the Bradley review would lead to more local opportunities in the medium term but urged the federal Government to complete the reform of the visas-for-degrees market started in September 2007 and revisited last December.

Little improvement would be found in the 2007-08 figures given the "very long pipeline" of former overseas students in the system. He said the 2007 and 2008 rule changes meant many overseas students pursuing the accountancy route to permanent residency would take up the soft option of a new professional year, the Skilled Migrants Internship Program, because it did not stipulate any English language requirement.

"What happens if people finish their professional year and (get a visa but) but still don't have level seven (in IELTS), which is quite likely?" he said.

Full article

If the Department of Immigration and Citizenship is aware of the situation, as the authors of the report claim, then why hasn't it acted to rectify the problem? Why does it continue to allow the universities to serve as permanent residency factories* for non-English speaking foreign students? Why has the Department allowed this to continue even though the students in question are virtually unemployable and, thus, no benefit whatsoever to the Australian economy?

* See chapter six of Dr. Peter Wilkinson's book The Howard Legacy (2007) for a detailed look at how Australia's universities have allowed themselves to be exploited as visa factories. As Dr. Wilkinson notes, "the universities market themselves as providing education but they know, and certainly their prospective applicants know, that they are marketing permanent residency visas."

Economic growth needed to employ immigrants?

From the October 2008 SPA Newsletter:

Economic growth needed to employ immigrants

For some time now we have been told that we need immigrants to this country to fill the enormous number of job vacancies left unfilled. However, it seems we have been fed ‘spin’ by the business leaders and economic consultants.

The story line goes that the gowth in immigration from 171,000 in 2007-08 to a forecast 203,000 in 2008-09 is required to support the economy. The benefits to the country have been modelled and mount into the billions of dollars over 20 years. [Note: these "benefits" are dubious as they do not factor in infrastructure and environmental costs incurred by immigration. Even if one ignores these costs, the "benefits" of immigration are trivial in per capita terms.]

Imagine my surprise when listening to an interview by Fran Kelly (FK) with Shane Oliver [chief economist at AMP Capital Investors] the other day, discussing the economy and in particular the impact of the latest interest rate cut by the Reserve Bank and the expected slowdown in the ABS GDP figures for the April-June quarter on employment. Here we have Shane Oliver telling us that now we have to maintain a high level of economic growth (3.5%) to enable the country to provide jobs to employ the large number of immigrants we have coming into the country. Its the ‘smartest’ about face I think I have ever seen.

FK: If growth has slowed further, if we find that out in the National Accounts today, what will that mean for unemployment?

SO: Well, the bottom line is that Australia needs to have (GDP) growth of between 3 to 31/2% each year to absorb the new entrants to the labour force and those new entrants are coming from natural growth in the population and pretty high immigration levels. So if we’ve got (GDP) growth running way below that and through the first half of this year average growth will be something of the order of about 2% if you average the March and June quarters, then that suggests that unemployment will start to rise and in a year’s time I think we’ll see unemployment well above 5%, maybe 51/2% and even though the labour force figures don’t yet show that, all the labour force figures show is a slowdown in employment growth. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence out there with a whole range of companies over the last couple of months announcing layoffs including Holden, Ford, IAG, Qantas, National Australia Bank, and the list goes on, so I think we will see rising unemployment.

(ABC Radio National “Breakfast” with Fran Kelly (FK), 3rd September 2008)

Read full interview

This blind commitment to maintaining high immigration levels irrespective of labour market conditions simply demonstrates how Australia's immigration program has become divorced from serving the needs of Australia and its existing population. It is an example of immigration for immigration's sake.

As Geoffrey Blainey put it, "an immigration system set up originally to serve the nation has been undermined. Now it is the nation that exists to serve the immigrant."

Put quality of life first

Barry Cohen, former Federal Labor MP, asks some tough questions about the Rudd Government's massive immigration program.

From The Spectator:

Balance population with quality of life

Barry Cohen
Wednesday, 10th December 2008

Unless I’ve been grievously misled, global warming/climate change is caused by the excessive amount of carbon emissions poured into the atmosphere. The major offenders are the developed countries, and the more affluent members of them in particular. Near the top of the list is our good selves with a footprint Ian Thorpe would envy.

And what, I hear you ask, has been Australia’s response? Well for starters, the government has ratified Kyoto; it is developing a carbon trading emissions scheme and is investing in a range of alternative energy proposals, including hybrid cars, solar energy, clean coal, wind and much more. Australia is taking global warming seriously. There are no sceptics or deniers in the Rudd government.

There is one problem. An increasing number of people are finding it difficult to equate our climate change initiatives with our immigration policy. Carbon emissions, we are told, are caused by people and affluent people in particular. Ergo, the more affluent nations are the more carbon emitted. You don’t have to be a climatologist, an economist or a demographer to work that out, you just need an IQ above room temperature.

Part of the solution therefore, and I stress the word ‘part’, would be to reduce or at least stabilise our population. As reduction is nigh on impossible, that leaves stabilisation as the only alternative. And what are we doing to achieve that? Increasing the annual migrant intake to 190,000, which is double the number during the first year of the Howard government. That doesn’t include 100,000 temporary skilled workers allowed in on 457 visas.

One has to be very careful here, for anyone questioning immigration numbers runs the risk of being branded a racist. Nevertheless, I believe it behoves me to ask politely, ‘What the hell is going on?’ If there was a public debate about the level of immigration in the run-up to the last election, I must have missed it. Now, however, we find both government and Coalition united in favour of a dramatic increase in our annual migrant intake.

For 2008-9, the projected figure is 203,800 plus 100,000 on 457 visas. When the Chifley government initiated the post-war immigration programme, the slogan was ‘Populate or Perish’. One justification was that having just fought a ferocious war with Japan, we needed to build up our population to defend Australia against ‘the yellow peril’. The White Australia policy was alive and well. Our population of six and a half million could not justify our occupation of such a vast empty continent. Economies of scale would enable us to produce goods at a lower price and increase our ability to export.

Only the last of these three reasons has any validity today, and even that is questionable. Our export income is no longer dependant on the mass production of consumer goods. Specialised quality production, agriculture, mining, tourism and educational services earn most of our foreign currency.

The latest excuse for increased population is a shortage of skilled labour. Those arguing the case may be right, but in doing so they should answer the following questions: how many of our current unemployed can be trained to fill these jobs? What effort is being made to train unemployed Aborigines in northern Australia where the mining boom is creating demand for the many skilled and highly paid jobs available, or do we believe they are incapable of being trained? If more skilled labour is required, why can’t we cut, at least, temporarily, the numbers brought in under family reunion and humanitarian categories? Halving both categories would reduce the annual intake by 35,000. What impact will the current increase have on our population level? When will we achieve those levels? What then? Where will new migrants live? Where will the water come from to service them?

I could continue, but I’m sure you get my drift. Which brings me to my life-long obsession, that governments never connect the dots between increasing population numbers and the ‘crises’ that daily beset our citizens — congested roads, air and water pollution, prohibitive land prices, housing shortages, overcrowded hospitals and schools and so on. And that’s before the impact of climate change.

Why am I so obsessed? I was born in 1935 when Australia’s population was around five and a half million. When I became an MP in 1969 it was 12 million. It is now 21 million. In my lifetime the population has almost quadrupled.

On 10 June 1970 I asked PM John Gorton for a cost benefit analysis of immigration, and in a speech that followed asked, ‘We all know that if we follow unthinkingly the present immigration programme we will reach any figure we care to name: 25, 50, 100, 200…. The question is, when? Will it be by the year 2000, 2050, 2100, 2200 or 2300?’

The above led to the then minister for immigration, Phillip Lynch, appointing Professor Borrie to lead an inquiry into population. Unfortunately, the Borrie Report, when tabled, avoided the question of numbers. In fact, no federal government has been prepared to answer the following question: How many people can Australia contain and ensure that each and every citizen has a genuine quality of life?

If our population doubles in the next 40 years, as it has done in the past 40, what will life be like in Melbourne with seven million people and Sydney with eight million? The mind boggles.

All these questions must be asked and publicly debated before any attempt is made to substantially increase our population, and certainly before we take the Garnaut Review seriously.

Original article

Many still in denial about Australia's population explosion

From the Brisbane Times:

Many in denial over rising population

Mark O'Connor
December 19, 2008

The United Nation's Population Fund is concerned population growth in Asia averages 1.1 per cent a year. Australia, as a First World country, should have a much lower growth rate. It does not. By the end of the Howard era, our annual population growth had risen to a stunning 1.5 per cent: almost off the First World scale and high even for Third World countries. (Indonesia's, by contrast, was then 1.3 per cent, but has recently come down, with much effort, to 1.2 per cent.)

Under the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, our rate has increased. According to Bureau of Statistics figures, it is now 1.7 per cent. Both natural increase and net migration continue to rise. At this rate, one which many are determined to maintain or increase, our population will reach 42 million by 2051. By the end of the century, it will pass 100 million.

This is far above any credible estimate of the population Australia could hope to feed.

Troubles will come sooner. This week's government white paper proposes a 5 per cent cut in emissions, but this, like Ross Garnaut's report, assumes large per capita cuts can outpace population growth, like a swimmer prevailing against the tide. But this planning is based on the dubious assumption we are heading for 28 million people living in Australia by 2051, rather than 42 million. If the Rudd Government does not change course, even painful per capita cuts will deliver no overall cuts, but an increase.

Much the same goes for water consumption. El Nino droughts come two or three times a decade, yet state and federal governments are, in effect. gambling it won't happen on their watch. Several of Rudd's ministers, most notably Penny Wong and Peter Garrett, are "population deniers". Even Rudd has been heard repeating the nonsensical claim that "numbers are not the issue". They are.

Some claim Australia is a big country, "boundless plains to share", etc. Yet the geographer George Seddon has remarked Australia is more truly "a small country with big distances". Even our agricultural areas are not so large, or fertile, as population boosters pretend. Wheat is our main crop, yet France, for instance, grows twice as much wheat (and far more of most other crops).

The human as well as the natural environment deteriorates as population grows. Two years ago, the NSW Government instructed Sydney's councils to accommodate an extra 1.1 million people within 25 years. Bankstown, for instance, was told to build 26,000 extra homes. Most councils protested it was impossible to reconcile this with conserving the amenity of the suburbs. Even these draconian plans will be overwhelmed by additional people.

In the Hawke-Keating days, the knee-jerk reaction to any suggestion that population growth, and therefore perhaps immigration, should be reduced was to accuse the critic of "racism". Yet polls show most immigrants think immigration is too high.

But the Government seems asleep at the wheel. The Minister for Immigration, Chris Evans, claims to foresee only "a continuing modest increase in our population levels over coming years".

Others continue to claim that births are not keeping up with deaths. Bureau of Statistics figures show that births each year in Australia are twice the number of deaths, have been so for decades and look like being so for several years more. Baby bonuses are the last thing we need.

Tim Flannery has suggested that, granted the rate at which we are losing soil, Australia's safe carrying capacity in the long term may be as low as 8 to 12 million people. As he points out, humans are extremely long-lived mammals. Population growth, like herpes, is easily acquired but very hard to lose.

In 1994, the Australian Academy of Science held a conference to publicise its findings on population: 23 million people should be our limit. Today, with peak oil and climate change now realities rather than theories, that might have to come down.

Over the years, Australians have been promised a series of points at which population growth would supposedly be capped: Bob Hawke spoke of 25 million, which the Fitzgerald report had suggested might be the limit set by water resources. Within the last decade, Philip Ruddock, as minister for immigration, spoke soothingly of our population naturally peaking at some 23 million (later he said 25 million). Peter Costello's Intergenerational Report claimed that population would be only 28 million in 2051. Our current trajectory is to break 100 million by 2100.

Just as every fat person was once a normal child, so every bloated behemoth nation of 100 million-plus was once a nation of 5 or 10 million, with intact ecosystems and abundant water. Even Java, as late as the early 19th century, had fewer than 5 million people.

Population increase suits governments wanting to please the business community now, by doing something the full cost of which will only emerge over the next 20, 30, 40 or 50 years - far beyond the attention span of three-year governments. There is still a way out and it is not economically naive to think population growth can be slowed.

Much of politics is repetitive and unproductive, but sometimes a logjam breaks. In the past two years, most politicians have ceased being in denial about climate change, greenhouse emissions, limits to water, and peak oil.

All these crises reflect the deeper underlying problem: our population growth is out of control. Waiting for the population debate to begin is like waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Mark O'Connor is co-author of Overloading Australia : How Governments And Media Dither And Deny On Population, published by Envirobook.

Original article

Rudd puts immigration over carbon cuts

From Candobetter.org

Surprise, surprise! The Federal Government has welched on its emissions-cut targets to mitigate climate change.

The Herald Sun reported today that the reason given is that the Rudd Government doesn't believe "the world will get its act together on climate change soon."

The global emergency is being treated like some kind of board game. Why don't they simply cut population growth?

You might just as well ask a bunch of lemmings not to take a running jump.

This is from Monday's ABC radio national PM programme. Kevin Rudd comments on the emissions targets that have just been set: http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2008/s2446990.htm

The Prime Minister defends his 2020 target with the option of going higher if the rest of the world moves, saying it's comparable to Europe's response.

KEVIN RUDD: The EU's 20 per cent target announced over the weekend is equal to a 24 per cent reduction in emissions for each European from 1990 to 2020. Our five per cent unconditional target is equal to a 27 per cent reduction in carbon pollution for each Australian from 2000 to 2020 and a 34 per cent reduction for each Australian from 1990.

That is because Europe's population is not projected to grow between 1990 and 2020. By contrast Australia's population is projected to grow by 45 per cent over the same period.

Note that Rudd totally misrepresents what is happening: The growth is 'projected' ... as if it happened all by itself. Europe has cut back on its growth since the first oil shock. Rudd is setting out purposefully to grow Australia's population enormously. It would not grow much at all by itself and, without his interference (despite the interference of Howard), would stabilise and hopefully decline within a couple of generations. People should understand that Rudd is forcing a population growth policy on Australians and is selling it to them by pretending he has no control over it; allowing them to infer that this is a natural phenomenon. It is not. It is a conscious, coercive political policy carried out by the Federal government with the complicity of the States.

Comment on Rudd's speech from a disgusted correspondent on roeoz@yahoogroups.com: "This means that the Labor Party is fully aware that population growth makes it more difficult to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but have decided to grow anyway. Australians will be faced with making larger cuts in living standards than people in Europe in order to feed the growth monster. We will be sacrificed on the altar of the housing industry by a government that represents business before the people."

Original article

A poster writes:

When are we having a public debate on immigration and population growth?

Our Government is factoring in a population growth of 48 per cent between 1990 and 2020 to meet the 5% reduction of emissions by 2020. As one of the planet's highest per capita carbon emitters, surely our obligation to cut back means we should not be deliberately increasing our numbers? Businesses and land developers benefit from a continual demand for goods are services but most of the population is disadvantaged and have their liveability reduced. More people means additional environmental impacts as more people demand and compete for natural resources. While people are encouraged to live sustainably, and become more conservative in their water and power usage, our government boasts of our high population growth rate! Surely these efforts are contradictory?

Isn’t time we realised that our high and artificial population growth rate is prohibiting our ability to reduce carbon emissions? Just because we have always had a heavy immigration program it doesn’t mean it has to continue! We are not a colony any more, or living in the 1950s. Our high population growth rate could easily be avoided by halting our skilled immigration program. When is the debate starting?

Immigration is no solution to an ageing population

Áine Ní Chonaill, spokesperson for the Irish immigration reduction organisation Immigration Control Platform, debunks one of the more popular myths about immigration:

Immigrants are no fix for an aging society

The Irish Times
10 August 2004

One of the great myths regarding immigration is that the aging profile of Europe will require large-scale immigration if the dependency ratio is not to become a big problem.

An excellent book, Do We Need Mass Immigration?, by Anthony Browne (published by Civitas, £6.00), deals, one by one, with the arguments of mass immigrationists and what he has to say on this point is of particular interest. The idea is known as “replacement immigration” and is more and more put forward as an unquestionable scientific law by pundits and by media.

Browne said this is “one of the most widespread and comforting self-delusions since humanity believed the sun went round the earth”. It is, he said, refuted by elementary demographics: immigrants are no fix for an ageing society because they age too.

The idea has been discredited by every authority that has looked at it – from the UN, to the Council of Europe, the European Commission, the UK Government Immigration Advisory Service the Home Office, and the OECD.

Browne quotes from a Home Office report of 2001. “The impact of immigration in mitigating population aging is widely acknowledged to be small because immigrants also age. For a substantial effect, net inflows of migrants would not only need to occur on an annual basis, but would have to rise continuously. Despite these and other findings, debate about the link between changing demography and a migration ‘fix’ refuses to go away.”

The Council of Europe in a 2000 report argued: “Migration flows cannot in future be used to reverse trends in population ageing and decline in most Council of Europe countries. The flows required would be too large and it would be impossible to integrate them into the economy and society.”

Even the UN report, Replacement Migration: Is It A Solution to Declining and Ageing Population?, often cited as proving the case for replacement migration, actually came to the completely opposite conclusion. The authors concluded that the scale of migration needed to change the demographic profile of a whole country is so large as to be “out of reach”. For example, to combat the effect of aging population in South Korea (a very rapidly aging society) almost the entire population of the earth would have to move there by 2050.

Key is the “dependency ratio”, which the UN defines as the ratio between the number of people of working age compared to the number of pensioners. Currently this is 4.09:1 in the UK and in the absence of immigration, changes in fertility and retirement age, is forecast to decline to 2.5:1 by 2050. So “bring in young people”, say the pundits.

But, the UK government actuary in a report (2001) said: “The single reason why even large constant net migration flows would not prevent support ratios from falling in the long term is that migrants grow old as well! Although a steady large inflow of young migrants would continue to boost the working-age population, before long it would start adding to the retirement-age population, and a four-to-one (say) potential support ratio could not be maintained.”

The UN calculates that to keep the UK ratio at 4.09:1 Britain would need 60 million immigrants by 2050, bringing the population to 136 Million. To continue the strategy another 130 million immigrants would be needed by 2100, doubling to about a quarter of a billion.

The scale of immigration needed to avoid adapting to an aging society is extraordinary, as the table shows; what it doesn’t show is that it is exponential and never reaches a plateau, it just keeps on growing. The US and Japan would need half a billion immigrants each, but even they would face the same problem.

The UK government actuary reached the same conclusion (2001). “Immigration policies should be governed by political and humanitarian objectives, and not by demographic considerations,” he argued.

Browne also said that the dependency ratio as defined by the UN is too narrow. The ratio, taking more factors into account, gives, said the UK actuary, a more benign picture.

It is a mistake, said Browne, to think in terms of “solving” an ageing society. An ageing society is the logically inevitable consequences of increasing life expectancies and stabilising populations. “An ageing society is not something we can escape, but it is something we can adjust to,” he said.

Finally, Browne said there is no need to fear that an ageing society will mean unbearable healthcare costs. In fact, studies on the subject show that the impact of an ageing society on health spending will be relatively small. This is because the effect of increasing life expectancy is not so much to increase healthcare costs as to postpone them.

The Wanless Report for the British Treasury said: “Demographic changes have had less of an impact on health spending than many people tend to think. There is a widening body of evidence which shows that proximity to death has a larger impact on healthcare costs than age.” It is therefore possible that the effect of an aging population will be to postpone rather than to increase health service costs.

Áine Ní Chonaill is PRO of the Immigration Control Platform.

Source

A 1999 Australian parliamentary research paper, entitled "Population Futures for Australia: the Policy Alternatives", also reached a similar finding. It found that in order to maintain the proportion of the population aged 65 and over at present levels, "enormous numbers of immigrants would be required, starting in 1998 at 200 000 per annum, rising to 4 million per annum by 2048 and to 30 million per annum by 2098. By the end of next century with these levels of immigration, our population would have reached almost one billion."

The paper concluded:

"It is demographic nonsense to believe that immigration can help to keep our population young. No reasonable population policy can keep our population young."

Pity our politicians still haven't got the message.