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.

High immigration to continue despite rising unemployment

From The Australian:

AUSTRALIA'S record high migrant intakes look likely to continue, with Immigration Minister Chris Evans indicating the global financial crisis would result in only modest cuts to next year's program.

As the fallout from the economic crisis continues to spread, Senator Evans is understood to be sympathetic to fears by business groups that drastic cuts could ruin Australia's image in the global skills marketplace.

The West Australian senator said a small cut to the skilled migrant quota was still "more likely than not", but business groups have been lobbying him to hold his nerve in the face of a deteriorating economy.

"What business has been very clear about is that you shouldn't overreact," Senator Evans said.

"It is a global market, so your reputation and your brand is quite important.

"So certainly a lot of the advice is: don't ruin the brand by knee-jerk reactions, because we're going to be wanting to recruit in these areas, if not this year, then the year after."

Australia's immigration program is at an all-time high following an increase of 31,000 permanent migrants, announced in May.

The increase brought the total number of skilled migrants to 133,500, plus 56,500 family reunion places and 13,500 humanitarian visas.

Overall, Australia is taking more than 200,000 new immigrants a year. The largest jump in permanent settlers occurred under the Howard government.

In 1995-96, the year Mr Howard won government, about 99,000 people settled permanently in Australia. By 2007-08, that number had increased to 150,000.

Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry president Peter Anderson cautioned against bowing to growing calls by the union movement to cut the skilled migration program, including the 457 temporary skilled migration program.

"A downturn of 1-2 per cent is not a proper basis for recalibrating a skilled migration program," Mr Anderson told The Australian.

"It needs to be looked at in the context of emerging gaps in labour market demand. Our caution to the Government is not to jump at shadows or look solely at the macro data."

Mr Anderson said the consequences of a cut would be to place a drag on the productive capacity of the economy at a time when it was most needed.

He said sudden oscillations in the migrant program could damage Australia's reputation as a migrant-friendly country.

Australian Industry Group chief executive Heather Ridout said the lead time with assimilating migrants into the economy was years, not months, meaning impulsive cuts to the quota might not be felt until well after the present crisis had passed.

She said the longer-term outlook for the Australian economy - with an ageing population and a generation of Baby Boomers set to retire - was that migrants would be required en masse.

"We'd be disappointed if there was anything other than a shallow cut," Ms Ridout said. "A deep cut would be about politics, not about policy."

Senator Evans indicated he was alive to the political challenges of assimilating large numbers of migrants at a time of rising unemployment.

"There's no doubt in my view that there's a strong link between the economic cycle and people's attitude towards immigration," he said.

"That's something politicians have to be sensitive to."

Original article

"... drastic cuts could ruin Australia's image in the global skills marketplace."

The "global skills marketplace" is a myth - it doesn't exist. Australia is not competing in some sort of global scramble for skilled immigrants. Only Australia and a handful of other Anglosphere countries accept permanent economic immigrants. The rest of the world realised some time ago that immigration was neither necessary nor desirable. It certainly does not make the receiving country any wealthier. If immigration really was the key to economic prosperity, as the open-borders brigade claim it is, then countries such as Switzerland, Norway, Finland and Japan would all be basket cases.

Moreover, the argument that Australia needs to attract immigrants is absurd. The blunt truth is that immigrants from the Third World will flood into any industrialised country which is foolish enough to open its doors. In a world where billions of people would like to migrate into the industrialised West, Australia does not need to worry about its "image in the global skills marketplace."


"It is a global market, so your reputation and your brand is quite important."

Notice how Senator Evans refers to Australia as if it were a company, a mere money-making enterprise, not a nation in the traditional sense.

When Senator Evans talks about marketing Australia's "brand", he is essentially talking about marketing Australian citizenship to foreigners. Whether or not Australians are happy with membership of their national community being treated like a commodity is never taken into consideration.

Not that the opinions or interests of the majority of Australians ever mattered. Senator Evans admits this by limiting the immigration stakeholders, the groups the government consults when formulating immigration policies, to self-interested business groups. The minister doesn't even pretend to care about the interests of the wider Australian community.


"She said the longer-term outlook for the Australian economy - with an ageing population and a generation of Baby Boomers set to retire - was that migrants would be required en masse."

Needless to say, this is absolute rot. It is exactly the kind of specious nonsense we have come to expect from the pro-immigration crowd.

As a 1999 parliamentary research paper stated: "It is demographic nonsense to believe that immigration can help to keep our population young. No reasonable population policy can keep our population young."

More:

... immigration cannot 'solve our ageing problem'. Substantial ageing of the Australian population over the coming decades is absolutely inevitable. To illustrate the lack of power that immigration has in relation to our age structure, we investigate the levels of immigration that would be required to maintain the proportion of the population aged 65 and over at its present level of 12.2 per cent. In doing this, we maintain the fertility and mortality assumptions of the standard but allow annual net migration to change.

To achieve our aim, 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. ... it is important that the message is heard that our population cannot be kept young through immigration. The problem is that immigrants, like the rest of the population, get older and as they do, to keep the population young, we would need an increasingly higher number of immigrants.

Senator Evans says he is cognisant of the problems associated with absorbing large numbers of immigrants during a period of growing unemployment. Great. So why doesn't he do something about it?

Why doesn't the Rudd Labor Government follow the lead of other countries and reduce immigration?

Schools burdened by foreign influx

From The West Australian:

Schools Suffer As Visa Influx Grows

Jessica Strutt
December 9, 2008

The number of children in State schools with poor English skills whose parents are on foreign work visas has almost doubled in the past year, sparking further fears about the burden they put on the public education system.

Education Department figures released yesterday reveal 1615 non-English speaking children or students with special needs belonging to workers on temporary 457 visas are in public schools, up from almost 870 last year.

Debate on the need for a parliamentary inquiry into the issue was triggered last week when Liberal MP Mike Nahan criticised the Federal Government for failing to fund schools adequately to deal with the huge burden such children placed on them.

The figures released to The West Australian reveal that in the years before 2005, there were only two or three children with special English needs belonging to 457 visa workers in State schools but in 2005 that figure rose to 112.

In 2006, the number increased to 326 and has risen dramatically each year since.

Premier Colin Barnett said last week he would support a parliamentary inquiry, telling Parliament there were about 800 such students in WA schools.

But data compiled by the Education Department in the past week shows that number has almost doubled in the past year.

Independent MP Janet Woollard, who chairs the Lower House education and health committee, will push for a Federal parliamentary inquiry into the “serious problem” of the Commonwealth failing to provide adequate funding to schools to cope with the burden by children of foreign workers.

She said it appeared to be more common in lower socioeconomic areas and was a Commonwealth issue which caused problems for most States.

Dr Woollard said she would write to Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard and Immigration Minister Chris Evans, asking them to initiate a parliamentary inquiry.

She said inadequate funding to schools meant these children might not be getting the special help they needed to bring their English skills up to scratch.

The additional strain they placed on schools was also unfair on other students, who could be missing out as teachers struggled to cope with the added burden of having special English needs children.

“(These schools) need support for the children who are either going to the schools with no English or with minimal English,” she said.

“The difficulty for the children who are already there is that the teacher is almost trying to run two curriculums within the classroom—one to try and help those children who have no English and another for children who . . . are not having difficulties with English.”

Original article

Two Demographic Bulimics

From On Line Opinion:

Australia and Canada: what cost cultural diversity?

By Tim Murray
Posted Tuesday, 16 September 2008

Poet and author Mark O’Connor has written another important analysis of Australia’s ecological eclipse at the hands of the growth cult. While the continent is obviously unique in its botanical character, the similarities with Canada that O’Connor reveals in his description of the evolution of the growth ethic are simply astounding.

Like Canada, “Australia was and still is, even though much trashed and abused, a treasure house of biodiversity,” towards which the people have a somewhat schizophrenic attitude. On the one hand, “Australians are genuinely proud of their wildlife … many people assign a very high, almost religious value to conserving nature”, as evidenced by their tolerance of crocodiles which make it impossible to swim in their tropical waters. Australia also has 10.7 per cent of its land incorporated in a strategic network of parks.

Yet O’Connor writes, “Attitudes to Australia’s biodiversity remain mixed”. It may be inspirational to watch them in flight but “people don’t appreciate kangaroos eating their crops”. Sadly Australian experience shows that democracy is not good at preserving other species - they don’t vote. “(There is) a theme that runs through Australia’s ecological history: the clash between the desire to protect biodiversity versus the need of an ever-growing human population to make a quid from it.”

He had this warning about false confidence in the natural park system:

These parks have supposedly been created in perpetuity; yet there is a risk that further shifts in ideology may leave a future government free to revoke national parks. (It would by then be able to plead the housing and resource needs of a much expanded population, plus its need of export earnings from lands that would be otherwise going to waste.) Developers constantly agitate for governments to become less sluggish in releasing more land.

O’Connor reminds readers that Australia’s ecology was dynamic. While “we might prefer to praise the Aborigines’ achievement in living sustainably with the land for millennia, and contrast this with the damage eight generations of European lifestyle have wrought,” Aboriginal hunters had already modified ecology by the fire regime they imposed before Europeans arrived.

Paul Watson asserts that Aborigines killed off 85 per cent of the continent’s megafauna before the British hit Botany Bay, an assertion that has been contested. Nevertheless, Watson is one of the very few Canadians not given to romantic illusions about indigenous stewardship of precious resources.

The foundation of Australia’s current ecological crisis, and that of Canada’s, is their false self-perception as vast empty lands desperately in need of more people. Two bloated bulimics who look in the mirror and see themselves as Twiggy with lots of room to grow. The myth is best captured by Australia’s national anthem Advance Australia Fair when it says “For those who’ve come across the seas. We’ve boundless plains to share.”

But as O’Connor notes, Australia has only 6 per cent of its land mass proven as arable. For Canada it is 7 per cent with soils marginal by European standards. As for wheat, because Australia provides 20 per cent of the world’s wheat imports, feeding 40 million people, the “baby boomers” argue that Australia could feed a far higher resident population than its current 21 million. But they forget that much of that foreign exchange is needed to pay for the fuel and nitrate fertiliser used for production, and also that soil loss, acidification, and climate change will diminish yields: “Every tonne of wheat still costs some 50 tonnes of eroded soil”, O’Connor observes.

Even so, with the drought tolerant wheat grown in fertile soils in a good year Australia produces less wheat than France, and in a bad year sometimes less than Britain; all at the cost of “fascinating” bio-regions being cleared and species eliminated.

So if the big empty land in fact suffers from a limited carrying capacity, if food self-sufficiency is a myth, if biodiversity is taking a beating, why then does Australia seem in a frenzy to add to its numbers? Canada could be asked the same question. Who drives growth? Cui bono? Who benefits?

The answer might be found in research done by the Australian Greens which revealed that the governing Labor Party of New South Wales received $8.78 million in 1998-99 from property developers, while the opposition Coalition Parties received $6.35 million. Not surprising then that Sydney’s councils have been instructed to accommodate an extra 1.1 million people (an extra 24 per cent) in 25 years so that Australia offers the paradox of a huge country with urban housing prices comparable to New York or London, where land prices double in a decade and its 1.5 per cent population growth is higher than Indonesia’s and indeed many Third World countries.

As O’Connor says:

Local and even national newspapers run a depressing spiral of puff pieces about how we are desperately short of skilled and willing workers - alternately with pieces about how we are desperately short of projects to provide employment. The intended solution is of course an endless cycle (or spiral) of increasing population and increasing construction. If only politicians could give Australia the construction industry its population needs, rather than the population its construction industry would like.

O’Connor cites Australia’s British-style property system for fuelling the drive to: “fill the country with people” by rewarding private speculation in land. He says:

By contrast, the nation’s capital, Canberra, was built on a French-style system, with the government resuming land from farmers at fair but moderate prices, auctioning it as cheaply as possible, and using the profit it couldn’t help making to provide roads, schools, services and an elegantly planned layout. Canberra remains one of the world’s most livable cities, and (for the developers who control much of Australia’s politics) an embarrassing proof that there is a better way.

To footnote this observation it should be noted that Australian population sociologist Sheila Newman has ably documented the relationship between the British property system and the population growth lobby on the one hand, and the French property system and the absence of any meaningful lobby for growth in France on the other hand.

Students of Canadian civic politics know that developers virtually own city councils. What sinister role do they play behind the scenes in framing federal immigration policy or influencing it?

The Urban Futures Institute, a high profile Vancouver-based think tank, is a consistent cheerleader for massive immigration. Its mouthpiece was formerly “demographer” David Baxter who couched his arguments in demographic statistics to prove that he was in possession of a crystal ball, in fact had no credentials as a demographer. He was merely a front man for the real estate industry which fully funds the institute. He was guaranteed an interview by every media outlet when occasion demanded it.

Has any voice of caution or restraint been raised against this mad rush to ecological oblivion? Well there was the Whitlam Labor government of 1972-75 which reacted to the first global oil shock by limiting immigration and population growth. Then the Australian Academy of Science made a major public statement in 1994 that advised that Australia’s population not exceed 23 million and that immigration be half of what it was during the Hawke-Keating era.

The Science Council of Canada issued a similar report in 1975 when it warned that Canada’s population should not go beyond 30 million. The government responded by abolishing the Science Council and then proceeding along a path that saw the land of frozen tundra, lakes and mountains fill up one-fifth of its Class 1 farmland with subdivisions and become a nation of 33 million with the fastest growth rate in the G8 group.

The Australian Democrats came out in favour of zero-net-migration, but the political culture was poisoned. Under the Hawke-Keating Labor governments of 1983-1996 Australia was essentially a “plutocratic democracy” where voters were presented with a Hobson’s choice between parties who were “servants of business-growth lobbies”. While cognisant of conservationist sensibilities, “Hawke dared not offend the growth lobby”.

But even the large immigrant communities were among the 73 per cent of voters who in 1991 said immigration levels were too high, or the 71 per cent in 1996 who held to this opinion. Again, Canadians have affected consistent opposition to immigration in the same proportions, but like Australians, have been presented with a solid parliamentary front in favour of a policy they detest.

But nevertheless, given the scale and persistence of this discontent Labor’s spin-doctors needed to give the old myth of Australia as an empty land a make-over. There was no farmland available and urban land prices were beyond reach, so alright then, it would no longer be Australia’s manifest destiny to build a “great” nation but rather a “diverse” one.

It would become a United Nations of ethnicities and races sustained by permanent immigration long after the pioneering period had past. But the obsession with cultural diversity would trump concern for preserving biological diversity.

O’Connor writes:

Thus instead of being ashamed that we have lost so many of our marsupial species, many Australians on the left seem more ashamed that we do not have flourishing Inuit or Bantu community in their particular city. Quite why it should be Australia’s duty to turn itself into a representative sample of the cultures of the earth is never explained. Instead, there are constant shouts that any reduction of immigration will lead us tumbling back into an abyss of “racism” and “boring monoculturalism”. Thus Labor was able to disguise a right-wing policy of relentless growth as left-wing “tolerance”.

Hawke’s and Keating’s spin doctors even took advantage of the Anglo-Celtic guilt over having immigrated upon the Aboriginal tribes without their permission and violently displaced them. Somehow this became a further reason why high immigration, so long as it was no longer Anglo-Celtic, was essential - as if inviting in the rest of the world would legitimise it.

O’Connor forecasts that the Rudd Labor Government will continue on the traditional quest for economic growth, only addressing GHG issues if they do not compromise this goal. He compares Australia to “a cruise liner whose captain is required to sail in the direction chosen by a deck-steward whose priority is to keep the sun shining on the deckchairs in the saloon section, so that their occupants will order more drinks.”

The metaphor is an interesting one, for Canada too could be compared to a cruise liner. The HMS Ecological Titanic still robotically stopping to pick up more passengers as it ploughs forward towards the iceberg of over-population.

We may, albeit in diminished numbers, adapt to climate change, but we will not adapt to biodiversity collapse. O’Connor spoke of Australia’s botanical and ecological fragility, but this is what environmentalist Brishen Hoff said of Canada: “Our boreal forest continues to experience wholesale clearcutting and relentless road expansion. More water is being diverted from the Great Lakes watershed than what is being replenished, causing the highest lakes (Nipigon, Superior, etc.) to dramatically drop their water levels. I could go on with thousands of examples of species extinctions and worsening environmental quality right here in Ontario and Algoma-Manitoulin all because of human population growth.”

In fact most of the more than 500 threatened species dwell within the range of Canada’s major urban centres where they are imperiled by sprawling subdivisions roughly 70 per cent of which are occupied by immigrants. But remember, mass immigration is to be celebrated in Canada as, in the words of Green Party leader Elizabeth May, “our great multicultural project”.

Like Sydney, Vancouverites are told that they must move over and accommodate another 800,000 migrants in the coming 23 years (24 per cent growth) and appreciate the newcomers for the “diversity” they bring. But at what cost this “cultural diversity”? An infinitely richer, more vital heritage. The biological diversity of the species that this growth will extinguish.

What’s the answer? O’Connor quotes Gordon Hocking of NSW: “As long as we stick with an economic system that needs to perpetually grow we will remain trapped on the road to ecological and climate disaster.” Brishen Hoff would add “None of these symptoms can be reversed without shrinking the size of our economy and then moving to a steady state economy”.

Bulimics gorge, then purge. Let’s hope our national binging ends soon and our demographic weight loss is progressive and incremental rather than dramatic and deadly.

Watch for the upcoming book by Mark O’Connor and William Lines, Overloading Australia.

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

Dissatisfaction with immigration grows

From Swinburne Research News:

Australians’ attitudes towards immigration are changing, according to Swinburne sociologist Katharine Betts.

In an article published in the People and Place journal, Betts describes how Australians’ dissatisfaction with immigration is growing, with many people believing our rates of immigration should be reduced.

Her report shows that between 2004 and 2007 the proportion of voters wanting to reduce our intake of immigrants rose from 34 per cent in 2004 to 46 per cent late last year.

From a conventional economic perspective these years were rosy, so it is unusual to see support for immigration decline so steeply in such circumstances. According to Betts’ “one possibility is that the immediate negative consequences of rapid population growth became evident to more people: rising house prices and rents, pressure to increase residential densities in previously low-density suburbs, increased congestion on the roads, pressure on hospitals and health services and overcrowding on public transport.”

These changes were felt most in Victoria: “This may be because, over the four-year period, Melbourne absorbed a greater proportion of Australia’s population growth than any other region,” said Betts.

Despite this growing electoral disquiet, the new Labor Government is increasing the immigration program to record levels. The total planned permanent intake for 2008-2009 stands at 203,800.

According to Betts’ report, the demographic trajectory that the new Government has committed itself to has minimal electoral support. “Urban congestion and declining housing affordability suggest that the disjunction between this policy and popular feeling may not be easy to ignore over the long term.”

Source

Tibet, Australia and mass immigration

From The Social Contract:

Om Mane Padme Hum: Tibet and the Final Solution

By Denis McCormack
Volume 3, Number 4 (Summer 1993)

Through the years, generations of scholarly orientalists have variously translated and interpreted the well-known mantra, om mane padme hum. Commonly associated with Tibet, in short it means "the jewel in the lotus." In extenso, it means "upon physical release from this world, may your spirit join the cosmos in like manner to an individual dew drop rolling from the cradle of a lotus leaf into the universality of the pond." World events would suggest that most peoples, including the Tibetans, prefer the company of their own kind prior to the post-mortem pond.

Over forty years of worldwide handwringing by all manner of governments, organizations and high-profile individuals has sought Tibet's salvation in the face of the Han Chinese juggernaut. As I write, news bulletins carry reports of the latest unrest in Lhasha. Mass immigration has now created a Tibet of over seven million Chinese and six million Tibetans. Roughly the same demographic ratio applies in Xin Jiang province (the name of which, ironically, means 'new border' in Chinese) against the local Turkic Central Asian people to the northwest of Tibet. There, the mass movements of Chinese into the region have taken place for many of the same reasons, and at about the same time.

In 1989, the dalai lama of Tibet was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In his acceptance speech, he said:

"The issue of most urgent concern at this time is the massive influx of Chinese settlers into Tibet... this development, which threatens the very survival of the Tibetan nation, its culture and spiritual heritage, can still be stopped and reversed. But this must be done now before it is too late."

These sentiments were echoed by actor Richard Gere who politicized his portion of the recent Academy Award presentations with his thoughts on Tibet. He subsequently expanded on them in this way:

"Now Beijing is facilitating a huge Chinese population influx into the area. Tibetans call it the "final solution". ... If there is no stop to the population transfer of Chinese, the destruction of Tibet and its ancient civilization will be complete."

Gere went on to castigate U.S. administrations of the last forty years for their complicity in Tibet's demise. He has testified on Tibet before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It is a pity he cannot also recognize the same immigration dynamic in the context of the United States, where the firmament is clearly lacking star performers who are willing to speak out on behalf of its culture.

On May 13th of this year, the dalai lama was in London seeking diplomatic support from British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd for a "one country-two systems" Hong Kong-style of government, as he now concedes that full independence is no longer a realistic prospect. He sees the "two systems" approach as an avenue toward respect for Tibet's cultural, geographic, linguistic and racial uniqueness. The Foreign Secretary has agreed to take an assertive line with Beijing over such issues as human rights and the mass movement of Chinese into Tibet. But, few observers will be holding their breath in the hope of any change in Chinese policy. Many believe that irreversible demographic and cultural damage has already been done.

Australia's educated and political elite have long supported the dalai lama's cause. It is curious, therefore, that this same respectably veneered class is the mainstay of the push for Australia to be "integrated" with Asia. Mass immigration and its Trojan horse, "multiculturalism," are the openly preferred policy tools toward this outcome. It is beyond dispute that the "Asianization" of their country is highly unpopular with the vast majority of Australians.

Given that the irreversible cultural shifts being brought about by sustained mass immigration are no more sanctioned by the majority of Australians, Canadians, or Americans than they are by the Tibetans, what does this tell us about the legitimacy of the two-party, representational, democratic political systems we all rely on? If who we are, and what we look like, along with our language and cultural biases can be so vulnerable to radical change, are these not the most serious and urgent grounds for reshaping the machinery of government? It matters little whether mass immigration policy is forced at the point of a bayonet from without, or through gradualist, undemocratic, long-term bipartisanship from within - both paths lead eventually to the "pond."

A particularly blatant Australian example of suppressive bipartisanship came to light recently. Ex-Prime Minister Hawke has been a life-long, self-confessed "high-immigration" man. During the sixties and seventies he rose to power through his presidency of the Australia Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), the peak representative body of organized labor. By the late eighties, his personal and political esteem had sunk so low in the eyes of the public that he was deservedly jettisoned from the premiership of his own party.

Hawke spoke at a recent government-funded immigration/multicultural talkfest titled "The Politics of Immigration". He told the conference that he could not deny the contention that the major parties had reached an implicit pact to keep immigration off the political agenda. He said that, for most of the post-war period, the parties had maintained bipartisan support for immigration in the face of public opposition. He also stated that "There are no other issues on which the major political parties have been prepared to act in this way, with the common cement of ACTU support, to advance the national interest ahead of where they believed the electorate to be."

Throughout history, mass immigration has been the ultimate weapon of political, ethnic, racial and cultural destruction. It remains so today. We cannot undo history, but we can learn from it. What motivates modern "democratic" governments to feign ignorance of these lessons, so clearly documented from ancient times down to the present day?

In 1970, another Nobel laureate, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, said in his acceptance speech:

"The disappearance of nations would impoverish us no less than if all peoples were made alike, with one character, one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, they are its generalized personalities the smallest of them has its own particular colors and embodies a particular facet of God's design."

Amazingly, neither Solzhenitsyn nor the dalai lama has ever been called a "racist pig" by the one-world/international brotherhood brigade. Who would have guessed the dalai lama to be an immigration reformer? Unfettered by a big business growth lobby, a well-funded minority multicultural lobby, or a gaggle of ecumenical do-gooders, he tells it like it is and lays claim to large acreage on the world's highest moral ground. However, in his case, being morally right does not ensure the ascendancy of his ideas against the overwhelming arithmetic of immigration. Regardless of his capacity to solve it, at least the dalai lama knows what Tibet's major problem is: it isn't the economy, stupid - it's immigration!

Denis McCormack of North Fitzroy, Victoria, is the Australia correspondent for The Social Contract. Long interested in the situation in Tibet, Mr. McCormack speaks Chinese and taught in rural China.

Original article

Mark Krikorian on skilled immigration

American immigration reform advocate Mark Krikorian, author of The New Case Against Immigration: Both Legal and Illegal, on the problems associated with "skilled" immigration:

Trying to do large-scale skilled immigration would have a number of problems: first, there just aren’t that many Einsteins around. Secondly, almost all of today’s skilled immigrants went to college here — in other words, American taxpayers have massively subsidized their education (as with subway fares and the like, tuition doesn’t come close to covering the cost of education). This subsidy, as Borjas says, is “sufficiently large to outweigh any of the productivity benefits that foreign students presumably impart on the nation.”

Maybe most important, skilled immigration creates its own problems — different from the problems created by unskilled immigration, but conflicts nonetheless with a modern society. Chief among these is assimilation; this sounds odd, since skilled immigrants are obviously more likely to successfully undergo the preliminary kinds of assimilation — learning English, getting a job, and driving on the right side of the road. But “patriotic assimilation” — the growth of a deep emotional attachment to America — is less likely to occur among educated immigrants. This is both because they have the resources to live a trans-national life, flitting back and forth across borders, and because they are likely to have already developed a fully formed national identity before they get here, precisely because they went to elementary and secondary school in the old country.

Full interview

Hundreds of babies at risk from TB-infected immigrant doctor

Below is an example of what happens when you fail to adequately train enough of your own doctors and become dependent on importing Third Worlders to staff the hospitals.

From Yahoo!7 News:

A doctor at Adelaide's Women's and Children's Hospital has tested positive to tuberculosis (TB), putting hundreds of babies at risk.

SA Health has identified 300 babies who may have come into contact with the doctor.

They have been given antibiotics as a precaution, even though the risk of infection is extremely low.

Other children and hospital staff are being offered testing.

The department says doctors are contacting the families of those children.

Chief medical officer Professor Paddy Phillips says there was no sign of TB when the doctor arrived in Australia in March.

"He has not slipped past screening. He passed screening. He was well and healthy," Professor Phillips said.

Immigration Department official Sandi Logan says the doctor had a medical examination and chest x-ray in India by an approved doctor before coming to Australia and the results were clear.

"The doctor was free from any signs of TB," he said.

The doctor is now on sick leave.

Nine-week delay

SA Opposition health spokeswoman Vickie Chapman is outraged that babies have been put at risk.

"We have a situation where a doctor has been working at the hospital for some nine weeks before he has undertaken his test for tuberculosis," she said.

"But understand this - the children in the neonate ward are the children who are less than a week old.

"They are vulnerable, often prematurely born, and they are very sick children and it is quite unconscionable for the Government to say 'Well we'll just give them a dose of antibiotics'."

Source

This is hardly the first time an immigrant with TB has been allowed to enter Australia:

MIGRANTS with serious illnesses - including lepers and more than 100,000 people with tuberculosis - have been allowed into Australia.

An audit of the Immigration Department has found that it knowingly allows migrants to enter Australia with serious contagious diseases but frequently fails to check up on whether they have sought medical attention.

The Australian National Audit Office revealed yesterday that since 2000-01 more than 100,000 immigrants with tuberculosis had entered Australia on the condition that they submit to medical supervision.

The damning report said that, despite imposing the conditions, the department was unable to follow up and check whether the medical advice had been sought.

*snip*

The audit said the current health screening procedures had "limitations and gaps", which weakened the Department of Immigration and Citizenship's ability to protect Australians from public health threats.

The system relied largely on the honesty of visa applicants to disclose whether or not they had a disease that could be a public health risk, the audit said.

Full article

Immigration-driven population exposion a disaster for climate targets

From Sustainable Population Australia (SPA):

RECORD POPULATION GROWTH DISASTER FOR CLIMATE TARGETS

“Australia’s greenhouse emissions are rising in lock-step with population increase”, says Dr Coulter, National President, Sustainable Population Australia (SPA).

"Premier Brumby welcomes Melbourne growing to five million by 2020, adding almost half a million more homes plus requisite roads, hospitals, power stations…. Every premier has this attitude to population growth and house building, an attitude shared with the Rudd Government,". "The energy expended and greenhouse gases emitted from this continual expansion are huge.

"No wonder Climate Change Minister, Penny Wong would not commit Australia to a 2020 target for emissions before the Poznan, Poland meeting next week," he says. "It is impossible to reconcile cuts in emissions with Australia's continued population growth. Australia's very high population growth rate will make it impossible to achieve acceptable greenhouse emission targets.

“Professor Garnaut told us that a10 per cent cut in emissions by 2020 involves a 30 per cent per capita cut; three times more difficult.

"Surely the Rudd Government can do the simple maths. Why does it persist with such high population growth rates? The answer lies in its priorities. It has done the maths, it does know the answer, it pursues the same business-as-usual economic goals as its predecessors (ever more population and economic growth) while paying lip service to climate change and environmental sustainability. We know this because Minister after Minister has refused to meet with SPA and discuss this matter or even to answer questions addressed to it.”

The Australian Bureau of Statistics has announced that as at June 2008, Australia's population had grown to 21,374,000, an increase of 1.7 per cent or 359,000 people. “Such growth rates are characteristic of Third World countries but most unfortunately for our children’s future, it’s occurring in Australia with the highest per capita emissions in the world” concluded Dr Coulter.

Source

Deconstructing "immigrationism"

Australian writer and poet Mark O'Connor, co-author of Overloading Australia, describes in a talk given back in 1993 the various dishonest debating ploys used by immigration advocates.

The world average for net immigration is of course zero. Most countries take in about as many immigrants as they produce emigrants. Overpopulation may be the greatest current problem for most nations, yet a well balanced immigration program need contribute little to this.

Only a handful of countries, such as Australia and Canada, have seriously unbalanced immigration programs. In these countries many more thousands of people enter the country than leave it each year. The net influx then becomes a serious problem both for the economy and for achieving population stability and ESD (Ecologically Sustainable Development).

The word 'immigrationism' in my title is not a mere synonym for immigration. We are talking about an ideology - one that is currently omnipresent in the media. Immigrationism is the belief that a large surplus of immigrants over emigrants is a normal and healthy situation.

Like all ideologies, immigrationism is dangerous because it invokes our moral sense and then applies it to a simplified and perhaps misleading model of the universe. Yet, like all ideologies, it becomes less dangerous once one has a name for it. One can then keep long-term tabs on the creed, note and remember what sorts of people its leaders have been, and also which awkward facts its PR may have swept under the carpet.

Oddly enough, we have had till recently no common word for 'immigrationism' and have had to speak clumsily and rather misleadingly of 'the ethnic lobby' (as though most immigrants were immigrationists). It is even possible that I am the first person to coin or use the word 'immigrationism' in the present debate. Yet if so, how have we done without it? Immigrationism is surely as vivid and identifiable a presence in Australian politics as environmentalism or monetarism.

There is now a second near-synonym which I will occasionally prefer this is 'the politically correct line on immigration,' or PCLI for short. As this second term suggests, immigrationism is part of the wider problem of political correctness - that is, of orthodoxies and assumptions that may constrict debate.

The current PCLI often presents itself as self-evidently humane and altruistic, and its opponents as selfish and chauvinistic end of discussion! However, our immigrant intake is not in fact dominated by refugees but by those whose skills are allegedly of value to us, and by those whose own ethnic groups, motivated by ethnic chauvinism ('racism') or family loyalty, have lobbied hardest. Further, a glance at the politically correct discourse of mainstream Australian media will show that it is in fact obsessed with materialist values, e.g. with ways to increase GDP (Gross Domestic Product).

So let's take a closer look at one of the crucial code-words of the PCLI.

The Use of 'Racism' to Inhibit Debate

Twenty-five years ago, in the Vietnam era, we Australians had a conservative establishment, a rather complacent, self-indulgent and self-perpetuating establishment. It saw itself as right-wing, and it far too readily dismissed its dissidents as pro-Communists or pink. Today we have a similarly complacent establishment, but one that sees itself as left-wing, and far too readily dismisses its dissidents as crypto right-wingers.

This I think is the explanation for the common cant use of the word 'racism' in contexts which have little or nothing to do with race. Many of those who misuse this word are quite literate enough to know that 'racism' is not a loose synonym for any and every kind of prejudice against minorities. (They may not realize, though, that by their misuse of this word they merge cultural or ethnic differences into racial ones, and thus recreate a central plank of Nazi propaganda).

They use the word in this way because they need a 'boo-word' - a word with such intensely negative connotations that, hopefully, no opponent in debate can shrug it off, yet so vague in its meaning that it can be applied to practically anyone who disagrees with them. As with the McCarthyites, who called anyone to their left 'pro-communist,' the trick is to loosen the original denotation of a word until it means less and less, while retaining the original intensely negative connotations. At the same time the true believer refuses to notice any degrees or gradations. To him or her 'a pinko is a pinko,' or 'a racist is a racist.'

In recent months the news programs of Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), and Special Broadcasting Services (SBS) have run several items of Australian news each week that are introduced by the logo or title 'RACISM' - a remarkable feat of political correctness considering that most of the items were in fact not about racial but about cultural or ethnic issues. Somehow the more accurate terms 'ethnicism' and 'ethnic chauvinism' don't seem to appeal to them, or to some newspapers that follow their lead.

Such witch-hunts, once launched, can go a long way. Once their term 'capitalist running dog' or 'communist fellow traveller' is extended to anyone who questions the politically correct orthodoxy, almost the whole population is at risk. Similarly, once 'racism' comes to be a loose synonym for any kind of prejudice the war against 'racism' can continue without limits - or it could in a dictatorship. The recent raids on the Immigration Department might be just a beginning.

As the McCarthyist and Fascist eras show, a witch-hunt in progress attracts misguided idealists. It also attracts the competitive egos of some mediocre writers and artists who, lacking original ideas of their own, seek to carry the pre-established views to new extremes.

Even democracy itself, a philosophy based on respecting the will of the majority, could be under threat since the true PCLI apparatchik is liable to brush aside the will of the majority as 'revisionist' or 'racist' or whatever.

The good news for environmentalists is that such outbreaks of ideology are a bit like boils. At least in a democracy they tend to come to a head and burst, leaving a painful slow-healing sore. We need to keep the pressure on them until they do.

So, to the larger issue of political correctness.

Immigrationism and Political Correctness

A central question for this conference is, I take it, how could a democratic government introduce a policy as problematic and unpopular as Australia's recent immigration policy?

* We have known for at least the last 20 years that we were headed for an age of automation and computers in which the last thing we would require was more labor. Instead we brought in a million migrants over the past 10 years, and wound up, perhaps not entirely unrelatedly, with a million unemployed and an economy half-ruined. (And as the economy sinks, more and more environmental standards are being abandoned.) [Note: This speech was given in 1993]

* We have long known that the present population of Australia (which refuses to contemplate any major change in its wasteful and destructive life-style) was already doing permanent and morally inexcusable damage to this nation's fragile environments. Yet we have set immigration levels that have kept our population on course to double at least every 50 years.

* We know that the population of those currently in world refugee camps greatly exceeds the total number of immigrants we could conceivably take in over many decades. Yet for the past ten years we have kept refugees to a mere 11,000 odd per year, while we have taken in anything up to 160,000 other immigrants per year, mainly from countries whose populations have no real need to emigrate. Indeed one of our largest sources of immigrants is a European country whose chauvinist government actually bribes its people to have more babies.

So we have a policy that is environmentally, economically, and morally a shambles, and which the Australian electorate has overwhelmingly rejected in all the opinion polls.

Yet you could tune in to a whole year's editions of the ABC's TV NEWS and 7 30 Report and discover only that our high immigration policy is good and inevitable, and that anyone who questions it is probably a secret member of the Hitler Youth League.

Environmentalists like Paul Ehrlich and David Suzuki have condemned Australia's population growth as extreme by First World standards. They have also argued that the First World's population growth is actually far more of an environmental problem than that of the Third World. Granted that each Australian expects to use resources equivalent to at least 30 Third World citizens, Australia's 17 million [now 21 million] is already the equivalent in environmental load of about 540 million Third World citizens - roughly the population of Africa, and almost all of it supported on our coastal rim.

Yet, for over a decade, parts of our national media, notably including some SBS and ABC TV programs, have been spreading an ideology according to which Australia's traditional culture and national identity are cripplingly narrow and inadequate; hence, only massive immigration from as many overseas countries as possible can restore Australia's credibility by turning us into a progressive multicultural nation. Persons opposed to population growth have often been accused of cultural chauvinism (what the illiterate calls 'racism') and the effects of population growth on environment, urban problems, the economy, and on Aborigines, are either dismissed or are presented as benign. The SBS/ABC ideology sees itself as a progressive, egalitarian and international one.

The Dilemmas Our Opponents Are Facing

An advocate of high immigration rates obviously needs to believe that Australia can take millions more people. To defend this position, he or she may ask, 'How can you or anyone else presume to tell when Australia is overpopulated?

The environmentalist's answer is very simple, 'If the current population, with the lifestyle it presently requires the government to provide, is already doing permanent and unacceptable damage to the farm-lands, the forests, the rivers, and the unique native species of which we are custodians, then we are already overpopulated.'

Some immigrationists will wriggle further on that spike by demanding, 'But couldn't we all reduce our environmental impact on everything by 50 percent each, and so have twice as many people?'

The environmentalist's reply is nothing less than devastating 'We could, but we haven't. Australians today demand more resources per person than ever before. It will be time enough to re-open the case for more people if in a decade or so this pattern of consumption has been reversed.'

Some immigrationists are social optimists who claim that population isn't a problem any more because 'we' are just about to introduce some much improved system for equitable distribution of wealth. But once again, the environmentalist may simply ask them (a) how they're so sure their system will work where Karl Marx's failed, and (b) just how soon are they promising to install it nationally or globally, and (c) whether better distribution will necessarily save the environment.

This leaves the committed immigrationist in a hopeless dilemma. Only ecological illiterates still believe in the 'empty country' myth. Yet if Australia is already approaching its optimum population, or has exceeded it, immigrationism is irresponsible.

The simplistic myth of Australia as a 'land without people for people without land' has been tried and found wanting. Out of hundreds of thousands of immigrants who arrived after the Second World War from depressed agricultural areas in Europe, very few succeeded in finding land in Australia. Most of the land that was economically farmable (and much that wasn't) had long since been ruthlessly cleared. Post-war immigration to Australia did not mean finding a use for an 'empty' land, it meant further overloading the balance of cityfolk to farmers - that is, of food and import consumers to food and export producers.

In short, for those emotionally committed to immigrationism the optimum-population debate is a morass. It involves issues many of them are either not expert in or simply don't care to think about. Many immigrationists prefer to see their creed simply in terms of human charity, of helping people. Yet, like the Unjust Steward in the Bible, they try to give away what is not quite theirs to give. In a more modern analogy, the would-be charitable immigrationist is a bit like someone who writes a check to the Salvos [Salvation Army] on someone else's account - and without even finding out if the account has the required funds.

The only way to avoid entering this debate is to deny your opponent speaking-rights - that is, to rule him or her out of court. How do you do that? Well, if you are unscrupulous you go for 'moral monopoly.'

The Art of Moral Monopoly

The essence of the moral monopolist tactic is to claim that you preeminently possess some virtue - which in reality is shared by almost the entire community - and that your opponents disgracefully lack it. (Respect for 'motherhood' used to be a favorite choice.)

Claims to moral monopoly usually involve a conspiracy theory. In the U.S. in the 1950s the followers of Senator McCarthy obsessively denounced a supposed conspiracy to overthrow the government. This conspiracy was largely a myth, but the myth was a godsend to the accusers. It allowed them to turn the widespread and minimal virtue of allegiance to the national government into a sort of moral monopoly of their own. This helped free them from the responsibility to argue logically or to be nice people. It was also a great cover for vested interests.

The belief that all human beings are sharers in the brotherhood of humanity is a basic cherished view of our culture, for at least the last 30 years. Yet in Australia in the 1980s some members of the multicultural lobby attempted to make this commonplace virtue a peculiar possession of their own group. They did this by setting up a conspiracy theory that people who preferred lower rates of immigration were part of an omnipresent 'racist' conspiracy.

We can now see why the 'racism' ploy forms such an essential part of the immigrationist position. Without it, the debate would largely turn into one on the environmental and economic carrying-capacity of Australia.

Conspiracy theories constructed by moral monopolists often rest on very odd assumptions. Some immigrationists claim that Australia is obliged to maintain high immigration until we have a roughly representative mix of the peoples of the world (or alternatively, of 'Asia' or of 'the Pacific region') right here in our own country. Needless to say, no such moral obligation exists. The people of Thailand, China, Finland, etc. are not ashamed of having a predominance of people of a particular ethnicity or culture in their country.

Indeed, national boundaries since the age of nationalism began, have been increasingly drawn along ethnic lines. It is a little hard to see why Australia alone or almost alone has an obligation to radically change its ethnic mix, and to become a sort of microcosm of the world - unless they mean to argue that Australia is not a real nation but a sort of international treaty area, like Antarctica. But then the moral monopolist doesn't debate; he or she assumes.

Read the full speech

Illegal immigration debate 'set to flare again'

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

The debate about asylum seekers could flare again as Australia signals its doors are again open to people smugglers, former immigration minister Philip Ruddock says. Mr Ruddock, one of the key architects of the previous Howard government’s hardline policy against asylum seekers, made the warning following an increase in boat activity in recent months. “I think we’re about to see a very real and substantial debate about these issues in the Australian community again,” he told reporters on Wednesday.

The federal government had relaxed measures aimed at effective border protection, he said. That was likely to send signals abroad that Australia was a more attractive destination for people smugglers, Mr Ruddock said.

People smugglers were corrupt, had little care for people’s lives, and looked very closely at the opportunities that were open to them. “I’m sure that smugglers would be saying to people, `Look if we can get you into Australia, you’ll be able to remain permanently, that’s a very different outcome to what was in place.”

Original article

Opposition criticises citizenship test changes

From the ABC:

The Federal Opposition has criticised the Government's decision to axe the general knowledge quiz about Australia in its overhaul of the citizenship test.

The Government has dumped questions about famous Australian sporting identities like Sir Don Bradman from the test, after a review conducted by a panel of experts.

The Government today revealed the focus of the citizenship test will move away from general knowledge about Australia's popular culture and toward the Pledge of Commitment new Australians make when becoming citizens.

And the standard of English will be lowered for "disadvantaged" applicants such as refugees, who will sit a special course.

Ethnic and refugee advocacy groups have welcomed the changes, saying the existing test is discriminatory.

But Opposition parliamentary secretary for citizenship Concetta Fierravanti-Wells says she believes the general knowledge quiz is important.

"Those questions in the end form an important part of our history and our culture," she said.

"They are an important component for the understanding that new citizens have of the Australian way of life."

She says she is yet to see the questions in order to gauge the level of English required.

"English is very important, I mean when my parents came to this country it was a different set of circumstances," she said.

"But English today, particularly in Australia's modern economy, is very important."

Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull says he is pleased the Government is retaining the citizenship test, despite the planned changes.

Mr Turnbull says it was inevitable the Government would change the test.

"We are pleased that the Government is keeping the citizenship test, that it's keeping a test that we proposed, we set up, we established, when we were in Government," he said.

"As far Don Bradman is concerned, I'd simply say that it is a very brave selector that drops Don Bradman."

Original article

By removing the cultural component from the citizenship test, the Rudd Government is undermining the meaning of citizenship.

Members of a particular national community are united by a common culture, language, heritage and history. It is immensely difficult to see how citizenship can still serve as a bond between the members of a national community if it has been stripped of all meaningful content and reduced to nothing more than a vertical relationship between individuals and a state bureaucratic apparatus.

Granted, the Don Bradman question was silly. In truth, the test should have focused more on our country’s broader cultural and social history and heritage, including Australia’s British and, more broadly, Western civilisational heritage. But stripping all cultural content from the new citizenship test essentially makes Australian citizenship substanceless and, therefore, meaningless.

Australia faces a new wave of illegal immigrants

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

Indonesian and Australian police have stopped 14 boats laden with asylum seekers from travelling to Australia this year, including at least three in the past six weeks, as people-smuggling activity accelerates across the archipelago. Four boats have made it to Australian waters. On Thursday, one of them, with 12 Sri Lankans aboard, became the first boat in two years to reach the mainland, near Shark Bay in Western Australia. Government sources said the arrivals, who were being transferred to Christmas Island, would have access to Australian law should they claim asylum.

The previously undisclosed figures on people-smuggling disruption, confirmed by Australian Federal Police, highlight the success of the joint operation combating human trafficking. But the data also points to a spike in asylum seekers trying to come to Australia, a politically sensitive issue for the Rudd Government. This year, the Government softened its policy towards illegal immigrants and has allowed the navy - which intercepts boats - to stand down for two months over Christmas due to a manpower shortage.

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Victorian Police Commissioner fudges African crime statistics

From the Herald Sun:

Best intent can't fudge Sudanese, Somali crimes

Andrew Bolt
November 21, 2008 12:00am

CHRISTINE Nixon yesterday confirmed it. She did mislead us on crime rates of African refugees.

It's actually four times worse than she'd claimed.

But the Chief Commissioner admitted this only accidentally, after misleading you again in the Herald Sun with more fudged statistics.

Just before last year's federal election, Nixon embarrassed the Howard government's immigration minister, Kevin Andrews, by contradicting his warnings that the crime rates among Somali and Sudanese refugees were high.

Not so, said Nixon: "Those Sudanese refugees are actually under-represented in the crime statistics."

She was silent on the crime rate among Somalis, but repeated: "The young Sudanese who actually come into custody or dealt with us, only really make up about 1 per cent of the people we deal with . . . (W)hat we're actually seeing is that they're not, in a sense, represented more than the proportion of them in the population."

I wrote here on Wednesday how police and census figures showed Nixon had said something untrue - and had helped to (unfairly) damn Andrews as racist.

The crime rate among these refugees was in fact anywhere between four and eight times higher than that for the rest of us, despite VicPol's apparent attempts to have fewer Africans charged or prosecuted.

A furious Nixon had a letter of denial published yesterday in the Herald Sun. But what I find astonishing is that it again plays with figures to deny a problem obvious to even Nixon's most junior officer in Fitzroy or Flemington.

Excuse me, but I will quote every laborious word of it so Nixon cannot again claim she was misrepresented:

Andrew Bolt's claims in today's paper misrepresent me and make claims that I misled the community. I strongly refute this and would like to set the record straight.

When we look across the state, 1.2 per cent of people in Victoria were processed as an alleged offender in 2007/08.

Of the African born population -- 63,513 people -- 816 or 1.3 per cent were processed as an alleged offender. These are similar to the figures for 2006/07.

Our crime statistics also show that of 60,923 alleged offenders, 316 were born in Sudan, representing just over 0.5 per cent of all offenders processed.

This is the highest rate for all African born offenders in Victoria. People from Egypt, Mauritius, and South Africa all have larger populations living in Victoria, and they reflect 0.11 per cent, 0.10 per cent and 0.14 per cent of the offender population respectively.

So for Mr Bolt to claim that "African refugees were over-represented" is just wrong. If Mr Bolt wants to question my integrity, perhaps next time he could get his facts right.

Some of you will have immediately spotted Nixon's most obvious trick.

I had talked specifically about the crime rate among refugees from war-torn Somalia and Sudan.

To contradict me, Nixon now gave crime figures for all "African" immigrants, including law-abiding Jews from South Africa, businessmen from Egypt, farmers from Zimbabwe and trained workers from Mauritius.

That's not who we're talking about, Chief Commissioner. That's not the people your officers fight in the streets.

Nixon's letter does not mention - or dispute - the figures I drew from her own police statistics that show Somali immigrants are in fact four times more likely than other Victorians to be charged with crimes.

But it does let drop a figure Nixon hasn't released before - that 316 Sudanese were dealt with for alleged crimes in the latest year of records.

What Nixon fails to add is that with just 6200 Sudanese in Victoria, this means about one in 19 Sudanese each year gets picked up for alleged crimes - more than four times the one-in-83 rate for all Victorians.

Bottom line: Nixon last year claimed Sudanese were "underrepresented" in crime figures, but her own statistics show they are overrepresented by a factor of four.

I agree, this figure may be too high because Sudanese immigrants are on average younger, and the young are more prone to crime. But it may also be too low, because police are slower to arrest Africans, and don't always record their place of birth.

Whatever, they are Nixon's best figures and show I was right. Chief Commissioner, you did mislead us on crime among African refugees.

You may well feel that this will better help these traumatised newcomers to fit in, and I admire your good heart and many of your efforts to help them.

You may even be right to worry that telling the truth as I do will hurt more than help. But forgive me if I no longer trust what you say on this topic.

Original article

China's "Heinrich Himmler" granted Australian visa

From News Weekly:

Beijing's butcher is granted Australian visa

by Joseph Poprzeczny

Communist China's chief political enforcer, who also stands accused of being its pre-eminent exterminator, has been touring Australia.

The little-known Zhou Yongkang has taken the unusual but ominous step of visiting Australia unannounced on what was in all likelihood a fact-finding trip directly linked to his repressive policing duties.

The highly unusual visit sparked protests and questions about why someone with such a murderous record was permitted to enter Australia.

The concern was most evident across Australia's Chinese community, many of whose members fled or refused to return to China following the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

Zhou is a member of the nine-men standing committee of the Poliburo of the Chinese Communist Party - China's most powerful governing organ which wields unchecked authoritarian power.

According to Chinese-born New Zealand academic, Professor Dong Li, Zhou holds a senior cabinet post where he is assigned "to maintain law and order".

Professor Li reported: "He is undoubtedly the czar of the formidable 800,000-strong Chinese armed police, the well-equipped regular police force, all public procurators' organs, the entire judicial system and China's prison system.

"Zhou is to communist China today what Heinrich Himmler was to Nazi Germany."

Professor Li said that Zhou had a geological engineering background and held the top party post in China's biggest province of Sichuan from where he persecuted anyone designated as a dissenter.

"It was this that brought him to the attention of then Communist Party leader, Jiang Zemin," Professor Li said.

"Jiang Zemin consequently commissioned him to carry out the massive nationwide prosecution of the Falun Gong. We know that 43 Falun Gong were tortured to death in some of the concentration camps hastily set up to imprison them.

"Zhou came to international attention seven years ago when he was sued by Falun Gong practitioners in a Chicago Court that issued a summons."

However, this unwelcome publicity did not hinder Zhou since he was promoted in the following year to become China's "top cop" when he took up the post of Minister of Public Security (Police) and the General Political Commissar of the Armed Police. This meant taking command of all Chinese police forces.

"He told his men that one of the most crucial jobs ahead of them was to annihilate the Falun Gong resolutely, thoroughly and speedily," Professor Li said. "Falun Gong deaths from torture nationwide soared under his supervision with up to 2,988 being well-documented by the end of 2005."

The Epoch Times, which offers Australian readers the most comprehensive uncensored coverage of events in China, said several rallies held across Australia condemned the decision to allow Zhou to enter the country.

Spokeswoman for the Committee to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong, Li Chen Zhang, told the Sydney rally that it was Zhou who directed the clampdown on Falun Gong, Tibetan Buddhists, Christians and other dissidents in the lead-up to Beijing's Olympics.

According to Ms Li, Zhou was reported saying in the early preparations for the Games: "We must strike hard at hostile forces at home and abroad, such as ethnic separatists, religious extremists, violent terrorists and heretical organisations like the Falun Gong."

Former Australian Human Rights Commissioner, Dr Sev Ozdowski, said he believed the Australian Government should have been monitoring Zhou's activities during his visit because he was "one of the hard core" members of China's ruling Communist Party.

"He doesn't believe in law and order," Dr Ozdowski told Epoch Times. "He very much believes in unlimited rule of the Communist Party."

Several members of Australia's Chinese community have also questioned the decision of the Australian Minister for Immigrations, Senator Chris Evans, in granting Zhou a visa to enter Australia.

Full article