There’s not much to say about the riots that hasn’t already been said, but one point that hasn’t been stressed enough is the small numbers of people actively involved. The crowd at Cronulla on Sunday was large, but it seems that only a couple of hundred were engaged in violence. Similarly, forty car loads of thugs were said to have been involved in the subsequent round of attacks on Monday night. That’s alarming but again it amounts to a couple of hundred people. The same was true in the French riots, which mainly consisted of small groups burning cars under cover of darkness. The availability of mobile phones makes organising this kind of thing a lot easier, and calls for a response. I hope that, in addition to those already charged, the police will pursue everyone involved in this shameful behavior. Many of them have been recorded on film and ought to be easy to identify.
Then there are the instigators of the violence. The senders of SMS messages will no doubt be hard to trace, but there’s no doubt about the role of talkback radio and 2GB in particular. It’s unclear whether Alan Jones or his talkback callers have committed a criminal offence, as suggested in comments here and elsewhere, but if he hasn’t, then the government’s spanking new sedition laws are clearly a dead letter.
The laws governing broadcasting are also relevant. Radio stations like 2GB get free allocations of valuable spectrum under a system of licensing which includes a prohibition on broadcasting matter that is likely to incite violence. If this system is to be maintained, 2GB should be stripped of its license by the Australian Broadcasting Authority for broadcasting people like Jones.
John Quiggin 
No one is denying that ‘White’ Australian racism towards Lebanese exists.
But the point forgotten is that many of these young lebanese are equally racist – if not more so.
There were a number of articles in today’s SMH touching on this.
Eg: http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/years-of-rejection-erupted-in-open-rebellion/2005/12/16/1134703611519.html
and
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/young-and-free/2005/12/16/1134703609550.html,
the story (we assume) of Christian Lebanese racially abused by you know who!
“Sitting at a nearby table with his blonde mother, 10-year-old Najee al-Mazri says they were walking through Bankstown this week when a young Lebanese man went up to her and called her a “f—ing Aussie�.
“My mum said actually we’re Lebanese too and then I said something to him in Arabic. And then he’s like ‘oh, sorry’. People shouldn’t be saying dumb stuff like that.�
And see also: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=3962
Week by Week, that post is no more insightful than when you posted it earlier on this thread. Get a new act, or at least an attractive assistant.
Alpaca, delighted that you can read.
Hi Steve,
There is a problem here again because I’m referring to land-use planning and inheritance systems in a specialist way and to my own research. I understand why you think I am championing communism, but I am not.
There are many land-use planning and inheritance systems besides communism and capitalism; they are great big dinosaurs, both of them.
I like the European system where Napoleon I restored Roman justinian law with the Napoleonic Code, which most of West Europe adopted. It is this code, which avoids the splitting up and commodification of land by requiring children to be the inheritors of their parents and refusing to cut children out in favour of spouses. This means that man and woman come into marriage with their own wealth and this is transmitted to their children, not to eachother.
Our system relies on the Salic law of primogeniture, which causes destitution of all but the first born and, where it outlaws women, turns them into chattels. But, worst of all, it permits land to be aggregated and speculated on, then divided up. It promotes COMMODIFICATION of land (and other natural resources), which is what our country, Australia, is suffering most from because this supports the national industry of land speculation and population boosting (to increase inflation of land prices/housing prices). And that is what drives agriculture further out into the margins, and land clearing for agriculture and for housing, overdrawing of water, etc.
This is what I think is ultimately behind civil unrest in this country.
This system ONLY occurs in the USA, NZ, Canad, Australia and England. It is a F***** product of the industrial revolution x crazy British land laws. (Complex subject) The industrial revolution was a mere product of the coincidence of iron and coal and running out of wood to burn, but sealed the fate of the English speaking world to have everything it loved and every other country it ‘developed’ remorselessly destroyed for cash. Like the nightmare of King Midas.
By the way, hundreds of thousands of landless peasants who protested all over Europe, especially in Britain, would not agree with you that capitalism was a better system than communism, but they are all dead, so we don’t hear from them. Have you ever heard of Wat Tyler? The revolt he led of 60,000 English peasants on London was only one of many.
What you say about ‘law and order’ is also interesting, because throughout history the definition of a criminal has mostly aimed to keep the rich safe and the poor submissive. As I said, better to lock up the land speculating population boosters (oh, and the mainstream press) than the idiots who riot without understanding who their enemy really is.
I repeat again that the communist system is not the answer, but neither is the capitalist one. We need to reform land-use planning and inheritance laws along the lines of the Napoleonic code, IMHO.
regards,
Sheila N
# steve at the pub Says:
December 27th, 2005 at 2:33 pm
Sheila, your ideology had 70 years to do something and half the world to do it with. All it did was kill people and ruin lives, making a mess of the ecology into the bargain.
Life is grotty on the bottom of the heap in the capitalist world, but it is a country mile better than being on the bottom of the heap in a Leninist state.
The “riots� are a straightforward law & order issue. The public are sick to death of anti-social behaviour being tolerated, and are sick to death of the judicial system failing to punish criminals by giving them real time INSIDE jail.
The percieved racial bias by the police in favour of Lebanese muslims is not helping any.
I’ve been asked to prove why some of the above comments are pompous sludge. I can’t ‘prove’ any such thing, because it was my honest response to this kind of constipated, ideological, robotic, arrogant diatribe:
‘And finally, Multiculturalist ideology, by focusing on symbols but not on what they stand for, ignores the material reality that we are all still prisoners of the industrial revolution machine, here in Australia, back there in the Middle East, and everywhere else. Resentfully or in blind obedience we continue to exploit oil, gas and coal in ever greater quantities to make the machine go even faster. For declining per capita returns, in an increasingly unprotected industrial and civil environment, we sacrifice ever more of our lives and and our freedom for the greater enrichment of the corporate elite whose greed and ostentation are paraded in the mainstream media. These are the people who have made their fortune from financing, providing the materials or constructing the infrastructure that supplies our unfortunately growing population and they probably laughed their heads off to see the hoi polloi fighting eachother over a public beach.’
I loathe this kind of paranoid, Leninist nonsense. It might burn with righteous passion to all eight members of the February 13 Front, but to most people it reads as a weird dialect.
I should also point out that I wheeled in that useful word, ‘putrid’, not in reference to any commentator’s prose style, although that would be fair criticism of their style, but because one commentator, in all seriousness, told us that we need more ‘discipline’!
Can self-respecting, well-educated grown ups tolerate such authoritarian nonsense? It’s not the general public who are suffering from a bad case of ‘false consciousness’.
As I’ll never own a car and enjoy walking, I’ll just stroll away from these ideological creeps.
Sheila,
I was trying to understand your comments, but I confess that I cannot. The Salic law is much more common on the European continent (being based on the laws of the Salian Franks (French) rather than the male preferred primogenture more common in the other nations you cited. In any case, modern practice in “USA, NZ, Canad, Australia and England” is for the wealth to be split evenly amongst the children of a person, after going through the surviving spouse. Judges will normally also ensure that all progeny of a relationship will benefit, in the absence of a good reason to the contrary, and certainly in the case of intestacy.
That being the case, to me at least it looks like we are already doing what you appear to be advocating, but, as I said, I may have missed something.
.
As a side note, you may care to review your understanding of the peasant’s revolt under Wat Tyler. From my understanding it was a tax revolt, pleading for lower taxes – this, to me at least, sounds more like a libertarian cause than a communist one.
Wat Tyler probably deserved it.
James Sinnamon has said:
‘What you have done here I find to be no more acceptable than your slur of Paul Ehrlich as a racist, for which you have failed to provide any substantiation.’
My comment about PE was completely acceptable and was in defence of all those non-white folk Ehrlich seemed to find so distasteful in his early-70s nonsense literature.
To repeat myself, I never said that Ehrlich was a racist. He’s obviously never been a member of the KKK or the American N-i Party (see under: George Lincoln Rockwell). I said that PE was a crypto-racist, by which I meant that, oddly enough, his example of over-population was based on a few days in Calcutta. Ehrlich and his multitude of fans might imagine themselves to be humanitarian, caring, visionaries, but his message at the time read ‘They’re brown and they breed like rabbits’.
As I grew up (1971-82) in one of the poorest countries of what is laughably known as the ‘Third World’ (a 1960s usage we should have ditched years ago), I was repelled by Ehrlich’s arrogance and smugness.
If he had used New York or Los Angeles as his chief examples of rampant fertility, then it would be impossible for me to suggest that his atitude was a little – how shall we say? – racist?
Will de Vere, I think tth your quote from Sheila is a very good observation of what has happened to this society and in much of the rest of the world.
Given that John Howard intends to makes us work ever longer more ‘flexible’ hours at nights, weekends and public holidays, for ever lower pay rates, (at least twenty years after the neo-liberal economists assured all of us that they would lead us all to unprecedented prosperity), I would suggest that Sheila’s statement that “we are all still prisoners of the industrial revolution machine”, is quite accurate.
Almost all of the rest of what she has written is completely clear to me, and, moreover, seems to begin to fill what is a gaping void in political discourse these days.
I think the critical point is not the style of prose, or whether you choose to label it as ‘paranoid, Leninist nonsense’ (and in doing so, ignoring Sheila’s twice stated rejection of communism as the solution) but whether or not you think she is wrong.
Can you tell us whether you accept or reject the paragaraph you have quoted and why? Or do you require further explanation?
One other point, Will, if Sheia, is indeed a Marxist after all, then she is definitely in a very samll minority as she is taking on issues which most of today’s Marxists, that I have spoken to, see as completley taboo, that is:
1. Acknowledgelment that the world’s resources are finite, and hence that there is a need to limit human population and consumption of our natural resources.
2. Questioning whether ‘multiculturalism’ and uncontrolled immigration are inherently good things.
Also, she has identified property speculation as the principle cause of the wealth divide in this country. This critical factor has been overlooked by nearly all Marxists in the last 30 or so years. During a period in our history when the cost of housing has typically increased around the order of tenfold and gone completely beyond the reach of many ordinary people, they have either ignored this isssue or have treated it as of secondary importance and have had us believe that it will all somehow be fixed by the only by the successful struggle of labor against capital.
Yes, Sheila’s style of writing is definitely not typical, but to attempt to label it ‘paranoid, Leninist nonsense’ is very wide of the mark.
So, we’re all prisoners of The Machine. Lordy, what a nightmare. Pass the strychnine.
John Howards come and go, but ideological rantation will go on forever.
I saw Vladimir’s corpse in his box a few years ago, but I hear his frenetic, hectoring tone all the time: Bang Bang Bang, you’re all deluded, Comrades. Yes, the world’s resources are finite – I’d be amazed to hear that they’re infinite – but we might all live longer if the Vanguard Party stop attempting to dragoon us into their relentless conflict. Is that apathy, or do I not feel like a frogmarch around the courtyard this week?
I’m relieved to notice that you’ve given up your defence of the appalling Ehrlich.
Will de Vere wrote :
Nothing that you have written about Paul Ehrlich amounts to anything more than conjecture.
Clearly, you have formed your highly adverse views about Ehrlich, not from having read or listened to him first hand, but, rather, second hand, from others who seem to have deemed him to be the Antichrist or worse.
If Ehrlich had never said anything about the grave threat to the planet posed by consumption levels of people in First World countries, I would have regarded Ehrlich very suspiciously. However, he has repeatedly stated that 300 million super consumers in the US are the greatest threat of all to our planet.
If we are to get though the mess we are in, it will be necessary to both reduce our current level of consumption and to also share the resources we have more equitably amongst a people on the panet. Had the word’s population remained at the ropughly 4 billion that it was when Ehrlich wrote “The Population Bomb”, the task would be far from easy.
Do you think adding more than 2 billion to the world’s population since then would have helped matters? Just how many more people do you think can live on this planet before its life support system collapses?
‘Just how many more people do you think can live on this planet before its life support system collapses?’
Actually, I have no idea but nor, I’m sure, did PE. What on Earth is the ‘life support system’ that might collapse? It sounds like something put together during the Mercury program.
As I’m an atheist, he can’t be an Antichrist, but just another well-informed charlatan. As I said many many comments ago, Americans periodically lionise this week’s articulate doom monger. I’ve made it all too clear that I regard him as fool and a fraud. I saw another 1960s hero at the UTS in Sydney a while ago and he had a vast and devoted following of smiley fans. That was Timothy Leary.
Hero-worshippers become so warmed up by the happy glow of listening to their Guru that that can’t notice how offensive some of the Guru’s views are to millions of people. That’s condecension.
What is the environmental burden of flying these pundits everywhere so that they can smile and pontificate?
To close, I’ve been reading about every aspect of the world’s environment for abot 20 years and have never taken his work as interesting or original. As I said a while ago, I was surprised that he made a come-back.
Hi Andrew,
Re Salic Law:
The below is a bit turgid; it is from an old text.
The reference is at the bottom.
I realise that the French are descended from similar German tribes as the English, but I don’t think that they went fully down the Salic route. (I am currently looking in detail at documents about this for a project.) At any rate, they were saved from it completely by Napoleon 1. He got four people to write up a simple code which is the basis for modern French law. It is generally referred to as the Code Civil. The major idea was to keep land together. After the french revolution they wanted to get away from the feudal idea of property. The Emperor Justinian’s code was useful and acceptable because the ancient Romans were well thought of and their laws were nothing like the feudal ones or the Salic ones (which were adopted by the Normans etc., as far as I can work out, since the Salic laws in England replaced the Celtic ones, after the Romans but before the Normans. (The passage below refers to the Celts as barbarians).
Source of citation below is: Monumenta Germaniae Historiae, Legum, R. Sohm, ed., (Hanover, 1875-1889), Tome V, p. 240; reprinted in Roy C. Cave & Herbert H. Coulson, A Source Book for Medieval Economic History, (Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Co., 1936; reprint ed., New York: Biblo & Tannen, 1965), pp. 334-335.
The Ripuarian [of, relating to, or being a group of Franks who settled along the Rhine, near Cologne, in the fourth century A.D.] Law: Inheritance of Allodial [freehold] Land, c. 450: “The inheritance of land under the barbarians would mean the inheritance of allodial land (freehold land), and in addition there was inheritance of movables. Among some, women could inherit land equally with men, and in most cases all the children shared in the division of paternal property, even the illegitimate children being included; but the Salic Law says that women may not succeed to land. These laws were mainly codified or amended after the invasions, and represent a fairly settled state of affairs in Western Europe.
Concerning allodial land:
1. If any one die without children, if the father and mother be living, let them succeed to the inheritance.
2. If the father and mother be not living, let brother and sister succeed.
3. But if he have neither of them, let the brother and sister of the mother and father succeed.
4. And finally up to the fifth degree of relationship let him who is nearest succeed to the inheritance. But if the sixth male be living let the female not succeed to the inheritance.
Concerning a man who dies without heirs:
If any one have no sons or daughters, let the husband to his wife, or the wife to her husband, or to any one whatever among relatives or strangers, bequeath in the presence of the king all the property, or (give it) as a gift by a series of writings, or by transfer, and use of witnesses according to the Ripuarian law.”
…
Anglophone countries do not compel parents to bequeath to their children. Those under the Napoleonic code do. A lot of our estates go to spouses and second spouses, and often to the second (or third etc)’s children rather than those of the original wife/husband. This means that land can be divided up many many times. And is. This is the origin of commodification. And high prices.
Under Napoleonic code, the whole idea is to keep land in the family.
In other systems sale of land simply doesn’t happen – e.g. Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Cook Is until very recently. The Maoris now don’t sell their land in the North Is (don’t know about the rest).
Much better system than ours. Makes for much more stable communities, less population growth, less building, less energy drawdown, less homelessness etc etc.
A side effect of French law is that it is a lot safer to have a mistress in the open because you won’t get sued for your estate, or married for your estate. That is why (I think) the Americans are so twitchy about infidelity and the French take it pretty much in their stride, stay married, but have mistresses/lovers. BUT, they don’t have children with gay abandon because those children will have to be supported and will receive equal portions of the estate. They cannot simply be left out of the estate as they can in our society. And, indeed, as legitimate children can.
Sheila N
Will de Vere writes (referring to my writing):
I loathe this kind of paranoid, Leninist nonsense. It might burn with righteous passion to all eight members of the February 13 Front, but to most people it reads as a weird dialect.
Hi Will,
It’s not paranoid. It is all from referenced research, much of which has been peer reviewed, but it is technical and you would have to know what I am talking about before you could understand it.
Why do I post this kind of turgid jargon? I post it just in case there is someone out there who is working on the same stuff. And there are quite a few.
It has nothing to do with the Feb 13 Front (I don’t know who they were).
It is heavy going, I agree, but there are certain points I want to get across, and, if I don’t use technical words, it will take me fifty times as long. And I don’t have much time.
It’s obviously totally foreign to you and so you think that I am just making it up as I go along. That just means that you and I have different lives, different perspectives. I can see things you cannot. Probably you can see things I cannot.
Do I call you paranoid?
No, but I think you are complacent. I assume that is because you haven’t lost much in the past few decades, so you assume other people have not, or think they deserved to if they did.
Sheila N
England, in particular, had different approaches to inheritance in different places, e.g. Borough English and Gavelkind arranged ultimogeniture. The thinking behind this was that older children would have the chance to be set up in life during the lifetime of the owner, who would be able to apply the savings of each few years for each in turn.
Scotland had a conflicting mixture of feudal law, Roman Law, and Celtic customary practices, which – modified by the processes that dominated during the Highland Clearances – create differences from English practice to this day.
In more ancient times, with adequate land and cattle the main form of wealth for a largely pastoral lifestyle, Ireland had Celtic practices of partitioning land that were frozen into the Penal Laws in a way that prevented flexibility and prioritised Protestants over Catholics, encouraging the former and penalising the latter even when there were no Protestants around. After the potato famine, customary practices changed to favour land being passed down in viable units.
The Napoleonic system also had too much inflexibility. While Napoleon very much intended for agriculture to be favoured in a way that would maintain and even increase the supply of peasants for recruits, in practice the need to maintain viable sized holdings prevented farm families from expanding; in England, after the land reforms of the late 19th and early 20th century, there wasn’t this restriction and surplus children wouldn’t destroy viable farms; it didn’t (then) cause them to enter a distressed class, since there were urban opportunities.
Will, yours is an all too common character on weblogging. Brim full of simple sass and opinion but able to offer very little hard knowledge with which to back any of it up. The following offering of yours is a sad classic:
“I’ve been asked to prove why some of the above (Sheila’s) comments are pompous sludge. I can’t ‘prove’ any such thing, because it was my honest response to this kind of constipated, ideological, robotic, arrogant diatribe:
Quite simply you have sledged Sheila’s detailed and referenced logic with a string of unsubstantiated invective and, in admitting your inability to back up any of your denouncement, judged that shortfall as acceptable because it is ‘honest’. What a curious use of the word. Is a KKK lynching OK because the protagonists ‘honestly’ believe the ignorant, unchallenged notions that underpin their action?. Are perhaps ‘prejudiced’, ‘emotional’ and ‘intractable’ better terms to use in this context than honest?
At the essence of Sheila’s proposal is simple arithmetic. As more people vie for a vital and finite resource, increasingly aggressive competition will develop within that pursuit.
She further identifies a dynamic whereby a small section of society has developed an elite power by its dominant ownership of basic resources, and then pursued the escalation of that asset value by acting purposefully to increase localised population and thus competition and economic shortage for those resources.
She then further extrapolates the factor effects of quite basic anthropological patterns of behaviour with regard to territory and competitive culture (compounded in this case by artificially contrived compression).
The overarching point then made is that the beneficiaries and architects of this horrible and inhumane socio-economic morass, use their legal, political and media resource dominance to engineer blame toward the phenotypes superficially at large in the fray. This masks and distracts from the underlying Machiavellian manipulations that are the actual and ongoing cause. Plus that the physically causative factors of the growth machinery are further protected by a near impenetrable curtain of social taboo woven from emotions and simplified distortion of the racial components that it has subsumed to its purpose.
H.L. Mencken famously observed: “to every complex problem there is a simple answer, and it is wrong�.
Please stop being so unproductively and aggressively simple in your response to these enormously complex issues and threats that are looming out of the enormity we have allowed to be constructed around us. All you have to do is try to understand the unfamiliar and assess it on its true merit, rather than reflexively repelling it as would a programmed white blood cell within a dominant host system.
In a following post you glaringly displayed your dire need for better awareness as well as your capacity for delusion.
You asked “What on Earth is the ‘life support system’ that might collapse?�
Have you heard of the biosphere? A phenomenon of balanced function at the global and local level upon which humanity utterly depends for its existence?
You then stated “I’ve been reading about every aspect of the world’s environment for about 20 years..�
That’s a long time to read on a subject and still not be aware of its most fundamental structure. Do you need a better reading list or better comprehension? Some of us here can assist with the former. Please just ask. The latter however is entirely up to you.
I’ll leave you with another terribly relevant quote:
“ How fortunate for leaders that men do not thinkâ€? – Adolf Hitler.
Greg Wood has said:
‘The overarching point then made is that the beneficiaries and architects of this horrible and inhumane socio-economic morass, use their legal, political and media resource dominance to engineer blame toward the phenotypes superficially at large in the fray. This masks and distracts from the underlying Machiavellian manipulations that are the actual and ongoing cause. Plus that the physically causative factors of the growth machinery are further protected by a near impenetrable curtain of social taboo woven from emotions and simplified distortion of the racial components that it has subsumed to its purpose.’
Yes, this is the kind of prose sludge that I found so annoying in the first place. It’s badly written and condescending. I said that this kind of hectorin
Then, to undermine his own case, Greg Wood tells us that:
I’ll leave you with another terribly relevant quote:
“ How fortunate for leaders that men do not thinkâ€? – Adolf Hitler.
No, that’s not relevant.
Sorry, I hit a typo there.
I said that this kind of hectoring is ‘paranoid’ because ideologues always claim that the public suffer from ‘false-consciousness’, that is, that they’re are being brainwashed by the Powers that Be. It’s nonsense.
I’ll say goodnight with a small dollop of more such entrancing prose:
‘She then further extrapolates the factor effects of quite basic anthropological patterns of behaviour with regard to territory and competitive culture (compounded in this case by artificially contrived compression).’
If this kind of stuff were read in the open air, birds would fall fom the trees and cattle would have heart attacks.
WD
NB: I’ve only recently learnt about Godwin’s Law.
Will, if you closely examine the Wikipedia entry on Godwin’s Law you will see that Greg has not violated the spirit of Godwin’s Law. He was not comparing you with HItler, rather he seemed to be implying that you are incapable of thinking, and judging from the quality of most of the contributions you have made, so far, to the different discussions, he doesn’t seem to be too far wide of the mark.
Other that, all I can say, yet again, is that the meaning of what Greg wrote was perfectly clear to me. I did have to consult my dictionary to find the meaning of ‘phenotype’, but I think it is generally a good thing to have one’s vocabulary exapanded as a result of encountering such new terms.
Other than that, I can only repeat, on Greg’s behalf, Sheila’s earlier words :
Now, attacking an argument or a point of view, this I can understand. Applaud, even. But to encourage people to attack one another in what ought to be an area for free exchange of ideas?
Surely you would see this venue as more Socratic than gladitorial. I’m sure that academics never would seek to attack or repress a person because their views are unapproved. Such things simply never occur. Like anti-white racism, I suppose.
Will, the paragraphs remain a blank mass to you because you refuse to think about the concepts presented.
They are not difficult but they are manifold and layered. It is a lot to consider at once, but that is the state of things. Maybe you need some more time to reflect upon and digest parts of it.
If you demand to stay at the simple level that the popular media keeps warmed over for public consumption then Adolf’s quote stands as pertinent to you and all the others that lend their ‘democratic’ weight to support of the bloated shambles we are now suffering. I am not saying you are like Adolf. I am saying you are the type he refers to – the putty that delights and enables corrupt leadership. Can you get that little bit corect as I intented it? It is as simple as it is important.
Nataly
I appreciate your comment and in a well intended interchange would fully support what you call for. Unfortunately this topic is quite chronically not one of those.
Sheila and James have posted detailed points and perspectives that are vitally pertinent to the understanding of this thread issue. These have been slurred, twisted and largely ignored by a few posters who simply do not want to engage in the unfamiliar, but highly researched perspectives offered. Very sadly this seems to be a normal situation when dealing with growth and the myriad tentacles that reach from it.
As such, the behavior itself does become part of the argument. It is a purposeful technique that acts to stonewall and crush the novel points being put, rather than to deal with them on a basis of merit. It leans toward being a form of censorship to wither the unusual view before it can get any air or traction. It is imposed by people who do not want to reflect at all upon the fundamentals of the system of belief that they have largely taken for granted.
As such, the ‘ad hominem’ stance does itself becomes very much a part of the issue. It is generically similar to the ‘ad hominem’ media thrust made against the warring culture groups – anything to avert attention from the real points.
My review of Will’s behavior was not to chastise him or to engage him in war. It was first to prompt him to offer some more substance, and beyond that to make the basis of his argument publicly explicit for the benefit of any other blog readers who are less sure of the topic.
Anyone who doubts that the swelling population is being actively manipulated to believe particular things, rather than be encouraged to think and decide clearly about them, should take a look at the resource link provided below.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/persuaders/view/
Click on item 5 – “Give us what we want”.
To be clear about this prevailing dynamic is not condescension. It is a vital awareness.
Greg Wood had said
‘I am saying you are the type he refers to – the putty that delights and enables corrupt leadership. Can you get that little bit corect as I intented it? It is as simple as it is important.’
Well, speaking as the putty to the Wood, I’m only a little relieved that some of my hurried and sardonic observations have made it through all the barbed wire. They’ve returned with some strange tales.
James Sinnamon has said
‘Other that, all I can say, yet again, is that the meaning of what Greg wrote was perfectly clear to me. I did have to consult my dictionary to find the meaning of ‘phenotype’, but I think it is generally a good thing to have one’s vocabulary exapanded as a result of encountering such new terms.’
There’s an episode of ‘The Simpsons’ in which in Lisa tells Bart a quote from Pablo Neruda and Bart smirks and says ‘I am familiar with Neruda, Lisa’. Yes, I know the approximate meaning of the word ‘phenotype’ and it’s one of those words I usually have to look up because it’s so damned recondite. I wish it were more exoteric, but when it’s jammed into the same compartment as 300 other panting solecisms and sweaty jargons, this passenger can’t wait to disembark.
So long, it’s been a lovely riot.
Oh, before I go, James Sinnamon also said to me:
‘He was not comparing you with HItler, rather he seemed to be implying that you are incapable of thinking, and judging from the quality of most of the contributions you have made, so far, to the different discussions, he doesn’t seem to be too far wide of the mark.’
Thanks, JS, you’re a genuine charmer. Since early childhood, like most of us, I’ve been capable of thinking. Please don’t try to go into politics. Or public life. Or public. There’s no future for you there.
GW, “Nataly” appears to be a sophisticated spambot stealing text from nearby in order to deliver the “Nataly” link as a payload.
PML,
Are you suggesting that Nataly is like a turing test.
Regards,
Terje.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test
Will, you have, again, avoided discussing any of the substance of the contributions made by Sheila N (see here, here, here, here and here) and Greg Wood (see here, here, here, here and here,). If you still find these to be ‘unreadable nonsense’ then can I suggest you have a look at my earlier contribution :
This is some of what Sheila and Greg have restated later, but in greater depth and detail. Please tell us substantively what you think is wrong with what I have written. It’s up to you, but if you don’t, then I think I am entitled to agree with Greg’s conclusion that you are unwilling to confront ideas which conflict with your own world view.
Will De Vere wrote : Since early childhood, like most of us, I’ve been capable of thinking.
Perhaps Greg was being too kind when he wrote, “I am saying you are the type he refers to – the putty that delights and enables corrupt leadership.”
Yes, I can see that you are capable of thinking, but you seem to want to stop others from thinking by resorting to ridicule, invective, debater’s tricks and emotional blackmail. An example is one of your instances of conjecture used in an attempt to ‘prove’ that Paul Ehrlich was a racist, or, in your terminology, a crypto-racist :
Of course, none of the above are Ehrlich’s own words, although it is a crude restatement of of some of Ehrlich’s description of Calcutta was even back in 1968 with so many people are crowded together. I can guarantee that if those who bear ultimate responsibility for the Cronulla riots have their way and crowd another 30 million into this country, Ehrlich’s description of Calcutta in 1970 will also be applicable to much of Australia.
So, we are to conclude that it’s off limits for any person to discuss population levels in countries where people have dark skin? Perhaps, Will, you would care to tell us what you think a suitable population size for India would be? Back then it was 600 million, which is more than the total world pollution of 500 million of 1650, and fifty times the total population of Australia at that time.
That already unthinkably large figure has already climbed to 1,088,137,000, which would have been the result of an annual increase in population in the order of only 1.6%.
Would you care to say just you think a suitable population size for India should be 2 billion, 4 billion or even more? It would only take less than 50 years at past population growth rates for India’s population to double. Unless you think that India’s population should continue to grow to infinity, then you would have to agree that at some point zero population growth would be necessary. Why a can’t that point be now, or better still back in 1968?
Just what sort of material standard of living do you think can be achieved for 1 billion people given the physical limits of India, or even the 600 million people that existed back then? Obviously our life support system (have you now grasped the meaning of this term?) could not withstand so many people with the same material standard of living as we are used to here. There are two alternatives, neither of which, by the way, are absolute guarantees that we will avert calamity anyway : (1) maintain the current inequitable status quo, or (2) achieve a compromise in which countries like ours sacrifice a substantial proportion of our our levels of consumption in order to help people in poorer countries. However, if populations continue to grow as they have up until now, then people in the third world will end up little better than they are even if we do make those sacrifices.
So, those are my thoughts on this most worrying and perplexing issue of our time.
Please try to prove Greg wrong by, finally, telling us what your substantive thoughts, on the issues I have covered in this contribution, are.
James Sinnamon,
No, I’ve dropped out of this discussion forever.
Will De Vere
No, Will, you never entered the discussion in the first place.
Bye.
Gosh!
I am amazed that Greg Woods understands what I say so well! And restates it so elegantly – much better than I did.
I also think that Woods’s explanation of why he criticised De Vere’s behaviour (not De Vere so much) was brilliantly analytic.
And I find myself agreeing totally with Sinnamon.
In response to P.M.Lawrence, your comments are interesting, but you are treating these practices as if they are in the past. What I am looking at is what we have finished up with.
Where did you get the idea that Napoleon created the code in order to have more peasants?
I have not read that interpretation, but I would say that France is well off because it did not have the population explosion of England, which finished up imprisoning or exporting its poor and desperate… to, um… Cronulla and similar places.
Once again I have no time to linger. (Some will be grateful)
all the best,
Sheila N
January 3rd, 2006 at 11:59 pm
Firstly, welcome back, Sheila.
You may be interested to read the article, “Are we deceived by multiculturalism?” by Danny Nalliah, who is, himself, of Sri Lankan ethnicity, on Onine Opinion. it has attracted a large amount of discussion.
He states : “Multiculturalism is simply not working. The multicultural melting pot has turned into a pressure cooker and it’s now a case of assimilate or implode Australia. …
“I find it hard to believe that Australians, the same demographic who watch TV shows like Big Brother and elected as their first Australian Idol, Guy Sebastian, whose parents come from South-East Asia, are really all that racist.”
On the related issue of population levels and human consumption of natural resources, these recent articles may be of interest:
Sheila N, to the extent that you drew on the past for supporting evidence, it is important to widen the factual base under consideration. To the extent that “what we have now” is described by something more general in application than a mere topical account, its theory can be tested against that past data, and to the extent that it is a mere topical and specific descrition of today it lacks the predictive value that could make it useful and even the sort of breadth that makes it interesting.
As for the need for recruits/conscripts (rather than peasants per se), that was a constant concern in French politics from 1870 to 1939 – and in Italy too, after the Risorgimento. It was widely understood that Napoleon had had a demographic objective in this respect. The lack of a population explosion seemed of little moment in the face of defence needs in an era of mass armies.
James,
Just in case you may think that you had won the debate on population – as you would remember we have had this debate many times and I think the result has always been a simple disagreement – you believe that we cannot solve the problems we have and I believe we can.
You tend towards a pessimistic view, I tend towards the optimistic. As neither of us have a crystal ball, we can only await events, while trying to shape them with reasoned arguments. Keep going – you may be right: but I, for one, do not think so.
The debate on the ‘correct’ level of population will probably never be concluded.
I was interested, though in the article by Danny Nalliah – in one breath he argues that multiculturalism has failed and then seems to imply it has succeeded in its original aims. I will have to re-read it in depth when I get some time.
Andrew, I don’t think we have had the debate, many times, although I agree that some of my arguments from above have been repeated from here. Part of my motivation in doing so was to make a point about what I felt was an example of the use of a crude emotional ploy by another contributor in order to avoid substantial discussion of the issues I, and others, were trying to raise.
Of course, you are entitled to be optimistic, if you insist, but I suggest that you also demonstrate, when you express your optimism, that you fully appreciate the almost unthinkably enormous scale of the problem to be solved. That is what the article I referred to, above, about China endeavours to do.
To quote Jeff Nesmith, from that article, writes :
James,
Well, if not many then several or a few.
.
Nesmith is assuming the resource mix will not change between now and 2031 – an assumption I cannot see is supportable, and in fact he moots the change at the tail of the article. If, for example, the US burned as much oil per unit of GDP now as it did 30 years ago they would be using more than double the oil they currently are. For the food problem, if the grain fields of the Ukraine and Russia were brought up to the efficiency of the US, Canada and Australia it would largely solve the problems of lack of food, and that is neglecting any improvement in the yield in the US, Canada and Australia. A large part of the world’s paper is produced for newspapers and copying / printing – within 30 years I would be surprised if e-paper (or similar) had not largely replaced these uses. The car problem is a simple space limitation – given the likely high relative cost of land in China’s cities, I would also be surprised if the Chinese had as many cars per unit of GDP output as the US does now. They are likely to consume in other areas. To say that, if China becomes as wealthy as the US it will consume in the same way with the same proportions 25 to 30 years from now is simply incredible – as in not credible.
In any case, (IMHO) before China becomes a wealthy nation it will need to have a political makeover – a process that will probably delay the entire process for a decade, at least.
Back again! You just can’t keep a good gadfly down or, as James Bond might have said, ‘Never say forever’.
I’m in strong agreement with Andrew: the above figures have a static, monolithic tone to them. Technology alters our resource use all the time eg how many million of tons of paper have already been saved by the growth of email? I’ve no doubt that the growth of the Chinese economy will have an important environmental influence, but not in the form of this kind of commodity use, and it’s impossible to believe that the average Chinese could be as prosperous as the average American in only 20-30 years.
The numbers cited remind me of Nikita Krushchev’s boast in the 1950s that the USSR would surpass America’s economy by 1970. He was right, but he had only been thinking of steel, coal, pig iron etc. The West was moving onto silicon.
Another example of monolithic thinking: earlier in this Symposium of Vast Brains, J. Sinnamon quoted P.Ehrlich (St Paul of Bengal) as talking about ‘300 million’ American ‘super-consumers’. 300 million? Many millions of Americans – the poor, the elderly, Native Americans, hippies in Oregon, children – might be bemused to hear themselves described as ‘super-consumers’. The figure was a blatant exaggeration for rhetorical puposes.
Perhaps the ultimate American super-consumer is Bill Gates. After building himself a colossal palace in Seattle, he has donated at least $7 billion to disease control in Africa and elsewhere. I just can’t find it in my heart to dislike him anymore.
It doesn’t take a punster to recognise that we should always take our Sinnamon with a pinch of salt
In case it may be of interest, my response to Andrew’s latest contribution, can be found in the Peak Oil discussion.
Hi PM Lawrence,
Sorry to rudely leave your comments without a response for so long.
The problem is that I am heavily into research about historical reasons for differences between the anglophone countries’ land-use planning and inheritance systems and … um (cut a long story short)…”other systems”. I also look at systems in other species, so I come up with some unusual interpretations, from a pretty wide base.
I’m familiar with the ‘populationnist’ interpretations of various French policies, but I don’t see how it applies to the Napoleonic code, unless Napoleon was unfamiliar with what it was going to deliver. Four ‘experts’ drew the code up, not N. himself, I gather.
And, if Napoleon and anyone else had wanted a lot more soldiers, the Feudal system was specially made to deliver them. As it was, the French, since the revolution, tended to use immigrants when they needed soldiers, giving them citizenship if they would serve in the army. When they didn’t need anyone, citizenship would become hard to get. I know that Petain awarded prizes for big families and that bonuses for 3 and more continued up until the 1980s or so, and currently there is a twit of a minister for the Interior who is trying the same trick, but the French have generally stood up to these tactics. There is a book by Francis Ronsin, La Greve des ventres, [Wombs on strike] Seuil, 1997, which is all about the move during the 19th century to purvey contraception and information by members of the French working class. The philosophy was to protest being raised in ignorance for cannon fodder. The leaders of the movement were constantly thrown in prison, as a law came out forbidding this. A very similar law came out at the same time in Australia after the 1903 enquiry into the Decline in the birthrate in NSW.
At any rate, Napoleon may have wanted lots of soldiers, but the Code would not have delivered them, IMHO. Only cheap fossil fuel delivered a baby boom in France as in so many other countries after the 1st world war. Notably, the French birth rate (and immigration rate) plummeted in 1974 with the first oil crisis.
I would be interested to know what, in the Code, indicates that it could produce more soldiers, or if you have a specific basis for your interpretations.
What I have read indicates that the French, after the Revolution, wanted to get rid of the feudal system and went to the most obvious authority, which was the old roman empire sources, especially Emperor Justinien’s code.
The article below is a really good study on the matter, if you read French. In case you do not, I translate below the quote:
“Les rédacteurs du Code civil ont explicitement voulu revenir à ce qu’ils croyaient être la conception romaine de la propriété, qu’ils ont surtout comprise comme un argument commode pour s’opposer aux pratiques féodales et aux droits seigneuriaux. Adaptée aux besoins de l’époque et aux aspirations de la classe bourgeoise montante, la propriété est devenue un attribut de l’homme, la marque du bon père de famille, la condition de la liberté.” This is from: René Robaye, Du “dominium ex iure Quiritiumâ€?, à la propriété du Code civil des Français. http://www.ulg.ac.be/vinitor/rida/1997/robaye.pdf
“The people who drafted the Civil Code wished explicitly to return to what they believe was the Roman conception of property, which they understood especially to be a useful argument to use against feudal practices and rights of seigneurs. Adapted to the needs of the times and to the aspirations of the rising bourgeois class, property became personal possession, the mark of a good father, and an attribute of the condition of liberty.”
Are you familiar with the Justinian code and the relatively low population growth rates of the Romans? I would be interested to discuss more off-line with you about details of English land-use planning and inheritance in history if you have any detailed knowledge.
Oh, dear. This is another long one. Mr De Vere will have a field day. :-))
Sheila N
# P.M.Lawrence Says:
January 8th, 2006 at 11:32 pm
Sheila N, to the extent that you drew on the past for supporting evidence, it is important to widen the factual base under consideration. To the extent that “what we have now� is described by something more general in application than a mere topical account, its theory can be tested against that past data, and to the extent that it is a mere topical and specific descrition of today it lacks the predictive value that could make it useful and even the sort of breadth that makes it interesting.
As for the need for recruits/conscripts (rather than peasants per se), that was a constant concern in French politics from 1870 to 1939 – and in Italy too, after the Risorgimento. It was widely understood that Napoleon had had a demographic objective in this respect. The lack of a population explosion seemed of little moment in the face of defence needs in an era of mass armies.
Sheila N, more later when I have had a chance to digest it, but for now:-
– “the Feudal system was specially made to deliver them”; so it was, though of a speciaised and obsolete sort, but what the enlightenment called the feudal system was in fact the institutionalised hermit crab like arrangement that had been instituted to buy out the main beneficiaries of feudalsims, and not feudalism as such.
– on the Roman population thing, I understand (but cannot cite) that in the early principate it was found that slave households tended to have high birth rates, though unfortunately not of Romans per se, and that in Byzantine times the kapnikon tax system also encouraged this (as is shown by what happened under its continuance by the Ottomans, leading to the traditional compound oriented lifestyle of Albania that susrvived in Kosovo where Hoxha hadn’t suppressed it); under Byzantium, however, the tax rates were so high and the relative privileges of monasticism so great that many peasants moved into that, more than offsetting the benefits.
The kapnikon approach, unlike the somewhat similar French hearth tax and its abortive English imitation under Charles II, did not emulate a poll tax. Instead, it worked in a way very like the Tragedy of the Commons, at least between cadastres; there was no tax penalty for increased numbers per household, and some benefits.
As I said, I’ll go into the Napoleonic question in more detail after I have had time to digest and reflect.
There’s an excellent media release from the environmental group Sustainable Population, Australia, which completely demolishes the hogwash, fed to us for years by economists, that continually rising population is necessary for economic prosperity.
The media release is a response to the recent Productivity Commission report on Immigration, which, itself, meekly repudiates the nonsense from economists, but only in the meekest possible fashion. It begins :
For anyone who may be interested, I have put a copy on the web, here.
“…hogwash, fed to us for years by economists, that continually rising population is necessary for economic prosperity.”
Which economists are those, James?
The question is not even easy to frame in a meaningful way. It’s obvious that a spontaneous baby boom will not boost per capita GDP. At some point – say, thirty years later – when the babies are all placed in relatively productive jobs, GDP per capita might rise above the level it would have been at without the baby boom, but this is essentially a demographic affect, not an economic one, and the beneficiaries are the marginal babies themselves, not the society as a whole.
Where the high population growth is due to immigration, it boils down to whether the immigrants have above or below average skills, doesn’t it it? If below, why would any economist try to claim their arrival will increase per capita GDP?
Even if one could define the problem clearly, it’s not an easy proposition to test empirically in any case, since the causation between per capita GDP growth and population growth is mostly from the former to the latter. For poor countries it’s a positive effect (a bit of growth reduces the death rate) but for richer countries appararently negative.
Argue as passionately as you like about population pressures, but leave the poor straw economist alone.
James Farrell wrote : Which economists are those, James?
Perhaps not all economists have been arguing that continually rising population is necessary for economic prosperity, but it definitely appears that way, and the voices of economists opposed to that view don’t get much airing.
The GDP is widely acknowledged as not being an accurate measure of prosperity, as the news release pointed out. Even it’s originator, Simon Kuznets from the US, pleaded in the 1930’s that the GDP not be used in the way it is being used today.
Up until recently, the GDP has been effectively used to conceal the detrimental effects of many Government policies including that of boosting of population size, but in the latest Productivity Commission’s draft report on the Economic Impacts of Migration and Population Growth it was not possible to fully conceal this any longer, even on the flawed basis of GDP measure.
The Report predicts that per capita income will increase by 0.6% whilst hours worked will increase by 1.6% (I don’t have the latter estimate on hand but I remember it being sonething like this). So, even according to GDP measures, we are going to be paid less on a pro-rata basis as a result of immigration.
James Farrell wrote : Where the high population growth is due to immigration, it boils down to whether the immigrants have above or below average skills, doesn’t it it?
Only, possibly, if we accept the GDP as an accurate measure of propserity, and only then, if we ignore the large numbers of skilled workers in Australian including IT graduates who are now unemployed or under-employed.
However, common sense should surely tell everyone that if there are more people to share the same name number of resources, that overall prosperity cannot possibly improve.
At the moment, the Queensland Government (which, perversely, is also trying to encourge another million people to move here) is trying to cut back on the numbers of people who are allowed to camp at Inskip Point, one of the very few areas remaining where families can still camp at relatively addordable prices near the beach. Inskip Point is on the mainland, just across from the southern tip of Fraser Island.
The large numbers of campers are a strain on the area.
How do you feel that increasing Australia’s population will improve this situation? Do you think the skilled, as opposed to unskilled, migrants may, perhaps, be able to conjure up more Inskip Points out of thin air – perhaps somewhere inside one the many new high rise buildings in Brisbane?
James Farrell wrote : If below, why would any economist try to claim their arrival will increase per capita GDP?
They have and they continue to do so. They appear to be doing so in order to serve the needs of land speculators, property developers and related industries, as I have shown earlier. The argument they have put, and which a lot of people buy, is that with a larger population we can achieve a greater economy of scale, which would make the production of cars and consumer items cheaper for everybody.
However that argument can only stand if we assume that there are enough natural resources for everybody. As there is demonstrably not enough water, particularly in Brisbane, Sydney, Adelaide and Perth, as global petroleum extraction is expected to soon begin an inexorable decline, and as the same is soon expected to be true of other natural resources including copper and natural gas, any increase in population size can lead only to greater competiton for resources and, hence, a decline in everyone’s quality of life.
This simple basic common sense seems to have completely escaped those economists and industry leaders such as Richard Pratt who have stridently and deafeningly argued over recent decades that our population needs to be increased to the 50 million mark.
This is just asking for environmental and economic and social catastrohe of which the Cronulla riots have given us a small foretaste.
J.Sinnamon has said ‘However that argument can only stand if we assume that there are enough natural resources for everybody.’ ‘Assume’ is deathly laden rhetorical word. Thoughtful proponents of a higher population for Australia haven’t just ‘assumed’ that we have the resources. I believe that we have the resources and the space for a higher population and a greater intake of immigrants and refugees.
The kind of white Aussie yobs involved in the Cronulla riots assume that they’re living in Paradise, rather than another underpopulated suburban slum-desert, and Australian xenophobes will always play the environmental tune: P.Hanson did. Australian cities will be more liveable and vibrant if they have a higher population density. Again, imaginative technology will enable us to reduce urban consumption of energy and commodities.
If the wealthy nations start arguing – in bad faith – against immigration for environmental reasons, they risk generating growing resentment by the rest of the world. An early reason for the Japanese-American war of 1941-45 was the USA’s racist immigration quotas in the 1920s against the Japanese. The literal meaning of ‘Paradise’ is enclosed space, presumably with a high wall and barbed wire. Australians who cling to the delusion that Australian is a Paradise that must be barricaded against others are living in their own form of Fool’s Paradise. We have an obligation to help other nations and we are able to.
That’s a very long answer, James, but you haven’t convinced me that economists in general see population growth as conducive to prosperity. I assume you mean professional economists in academia and government. Private sector economists are often guns for hire, but they are not influential. All you’ve done is to repeat the assertion, and augment it with the claim that economists are propogandists for ‘land speculators, property developers’. Given the stridency of your condemnation of economists, I would have thought you could supply one or two names of influential economists who take this line, or references to some influential writings.
Of course extra people might put a strain on natural resources. Again, can you point me to any reputable economist that denies this? On the other hand, you can’t seriously be saying that, if a country benefits from an influx of highly skilled and diligent immigrants, this will always be more than offset (in terms of your preferred measure of income) by the diminution in natural resources per capita.
Economies of scale are indeed very important when it comes to material propsperity. But economists have generally regarded specialisation and trade as devices to achieve scale economies. As long as there’s scope for fewer and larger production units and improved transportation, you don’t really need more people.
Will de Vere wrote : Thoughtful proponents of a higher population for Australia haven’t just ‘assumed’ that we have the resources.
What ‘thougthtul proponents’?
Where have proponents for higher population ever shown that they have given the slightest thought to where the water required by the additional numbers now living in the Sydney basin and South East Queensland was going to come from, let alone for the extra milion that they want to move into each of these respective areas in the next 20 years?
James Farrell,
Perhaps, you are correct to point out that not all economists have been promoting the view in favour of population growth.
However, those who disagree with this point of view don’t seem to have made their position widely known, for example, after Richard Pratt, in his Australia Day speech of last year, ludicrously argued for a population size of fifty million.
When economists opposed to this view fail to make their views heard, this serves to reinforce the impression, which even I had succumbed to until not so long ago, that population growth is good for the economy.
If I do become ‘strident’ over this issue from time to time, it is partly out of coming to the realization at how the Australian public, including myself, has been cynically lulled into complacency about the critical population issue by the pro population growth lobby in recent decades.
They have succeeded in selling to the public as justification for population increase based on the spurious ‘economy of scale’ economic argument as well as by disingenuously appealing to our humanitarianism. In reality, population growth was never intended as anything more than a crude mechanism to use extra demand for land to drive up the value of property investments.
For detailed evidence on the link between property speculators and the pro population increase lobby, please refer to the Master’s thesis of Sheila Newman, who has contributed to this forum and who is co-editor of the Final Energy Crisis. Copies can be found here and here (just click on “Sheila N” “Sheila N Says”) (Be warmed : even though it is html, it is 2.6MB in size).
As an example, an article in the Courier Mail of 18 Feb 2005 is entitled “Migration brings steady growth”. It states: “… with migration to the Sunshine coast flourishing and rental and housing yields in the region increasing by up to 7 percent in a year, the commercial market is nipping hard on the heels of this steady growth.”
So population growth has clearly suited the needs of property developers and property speculators, however these polices have resulted in crowded and unaffordable housing, traffic congestion, water shortages and all sorts of other problems due to the growing strains on our infrastructure.
Prior to the Christmas break we were warned by Queensland Premier Beattie that the State’s electricity generation may not be able to cope with the anticipated extra demand, particularly from additional air conditioners. Whilst these fears were not fully realised, I did once endure a four hour black out, and I know of others who complain of surges and brownouts from time to time.
So, it is as plain as day that the infrastructure is barely coping with existing demand, and yet on Thursday 8 December last year the Queensland Government spent taxpayers money to pay for full page advertisements in the Brisbane Courier Mail and (presumably) other capital city daily newspapers celebrating the fact that Queensland’s population had reached 4 million and also urging more people from other states to move here. The advertisement stated :
Peter Beattie has never explained to the Queensland public how increasing the size of Queensland’s population would help us to better cope with our power supply problems, our growing water scarcity, and greater competition for our limited number of recreational amenities such as at Inskip Point.
The only plausible explanation for this idiocy, on the part of the Queensland Government, which I can think of, is that the Queensland branch of the Labor Party, like most other state Labor Party branches, are heavily dependant upon donations from property developers.
James Farrell wrote : On the other hand, you can’t seriously be saying that, if a country benefits from an influx of highly skilled and diligent immigrants, this will always be more than offset (in terms of your preferred measure of income) by the diminution in natural resources per capita.
I agree, theoretically, it is possible that a country can derive a benefit which offsets the greater competition for natural resources. In practice,in more recent years, this rarely, if ever, appears to have been the case. In any case, it doesn’t appear that a full comparison of the costs of importing skilled workers over training or retraining of current residents has been made, particularly in regard to IT graduates, many of who are under-employed or unemployed.
Also the morality of taking away, from other countries, particularly poorer countries, skilled workers trained largely at their expense, when our own Federal Government has been too bone lazy and mean to provide training opportunities fro Australians here, is highly questionable.
One other final point, there are, in fact, extremely few occupations in the world, today, skilled or unskilled, that don’t rely on the destruction of natural capital, particularly fossil fuel energy. Those who do not include farmers who are able to grow crops, without using fertilisers manufactured from petroleum, and hunter-gatherers like the Australian Aboriginals.
So, just about every new arrival on our shores, as well as, at the moment, almost every additional birth, can only harm our prospects for long term sustainability.
J.Sinnamon has claimed that the proponents of a higher population for Australia aren’t thoughtful.
Read: I’m super-logical, I super-think, I know the ultimate answers. They’re zombies, they just assume. The Sinnamon style of rhetoric reminds me of AJP Taylor’s description of Martin Luther: ‘a ruthless bore’.
Four million people are too many for Queensland? On which planet does the Sunshine State exist? Pluto? Why not flatten the Atherton Tablelands to make room for all those people? My mind still boggles at the idea of a city of four million in the 20th century. I would sooner believe in heavier-than-air-machines or rockets that can go beyond the earth’s atmosphere. Surely they would suffocate!
Who or what is Inskip Point? Is it another underpopulated suburban slum like Cronulla or Bondi? Does it deserve to live? Is it as big and green as Central Park or just a collection of rocks? Is it smaller than the gardens in central Melbourne? Why is it so precious? How many Queenslanders were conceived there?
How many Sutherland Shire Slum (Cronulla) residents send their money back to the slums of Sheffield or Dublin? Many immigrants ship an incredible proportion of their income to their home countries. Immigration might not be a life-or-death issue to me – should I give a damn? – but it is of immense benefit to every country from Sudan to China. Bear in mind that Australia has an incredible population overseas, about half a million, all dossed down in squalor in the Bowery or Cheapside. Those Aussie huddled masses, yearning to breath free.
I suspect – I don’t know – that Australia can support 50 million people without trauma to our precious ‘identity’ (definition?) or the global ‘life support system’ (defintion?). We now go through about 25 cubic kilometers of water (3/4 of that on agriculture; call in the microdrips and buy Indian cotton). With stricter conservation and permaculture ie pumping the pee into the yard or Inskip Point, we can drastically reduce our use.
Zhou En Lai famously said of the French Revolution that ‘It’s to early to tell’. What if Greenhouse is only a SHORT TERM problem in history? I’m sure that if the world in 2106 is an environmental Utopia, there will still be millions of J.Sinnamon types around to hector, bully, patronise and sermonise at us around the backyard. CO2 and methane might be temporary, but they are with us forever.