Why struggle to cut your shower to two minutes when the government is bringing in more than 200,000 people a year?
by TheRealists ~ September 8th, 2009
I have a timer in the shower; it helps me get to work on time, and I vaguely feel better for not harming the environment so much. But every week thousands of people are coming to Australia.
One week passes.
It’s only a few thousand more people.
Another week passes. Another few thousand people.
Over a decade.
We have millions more people.
Why am I being a smuck and trying to reduce my time in the shower if the government is going ignore my efforts and treat me like a smuck?
It’s not only water; it’s congestion on the roads, it’s the cost of housing, it’s the overcrowded health and education sectors, it’s suburbs degraded by intensive redevelopment and it’s greenhouse gasses that continue increasing, among other things.
Overloading Australia: How Governments and Media Dither and Deny on Population is a book by Mark O’Conner and William J. Lines. It explores the current debate (or lack thereof) on population policy that is currently being held in Australia.
The book comes up with some unique solutions to break through the lack of any serious debate on the issues. I recommend the book to anyone that takes an interest in Australia’s population. It can be purchased online for less than $20 from Booktopia, Abbeys or Readings.
September 10th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
Book Review – Overloading Australia.
From The Independent Australian, Issue No 17, Summer 2008/09:
OVERLOADING AUSTRALIA – how governments and the media dither and deny on population.
Mark O’Connor and William J. Lines.
Envirobook. 2008. 241 pp. RRP $19.95
Reviewed by Geoff Mosley.
Mankind is suffering from an addiction to economic and population growth which at this stage it appears only nature can cure. The justification given by the sufferers is that both forms of growth are necessary for prosperity as a result of the ever growing consumption they deliver. The fact that endless growth is impossible because the earth’s resources are finite is conveniently ignored. Discussion of the subject of growth is taboo in government circles and is rarely discussed in the media.
Sooner or later, but perhaps only when nature’s retribution becomes more obvious, people will understand the error of their ways and seek an alternative to endless growth. In the meantime there will be a few who will document and examine the contradictions inherent in the present situation and an even fewer number who will provide an outline of a broad alternative way of life to growth.
Mark O’Connor and William Lines focus on the former task, providing a text which is both an encyclopaedia and a bible on the subject of Australia’s overpopulation. Their book provides all the statistics on facts, trends and costs that the reader will need to become informed on the topic and makes the central point that it is the relatively high net immigration levels that are responsible for well over half of Australia’s high population growth, standing at 1.6% per annum in 2008.
Where the book excels is in recording how governments, the media and environment groups have dithered, distorted and obfuscated. In the case of government the main explanation given is their short term outlook and compliance with business interests. The Commonwealth Government avoids developing an open policy by means of electoral and other consultative mechanisms, preferring instead a de facto policy. State governments take population growth as a given.
According to the authors, both the media and green groups have been muted by the playing of the ‘race card’ by business interests.
Why though have environmentalists been so easily put off their stride? The development of a longer term, big picture, view depends upon the effectiveness of the conservationists. According to O’Connor and Lines these groups have fallen victim to the short term concepts of human welfare of the ‘New Class’. So while the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) has had a policy which calls for nil net immigration since 1978, for many years now it has been reluctant to show leadership in promoting it.
The book essentially concentrates on its stated aim – ‘to clear the intellectual deck of twaddle and rubbish’ – but does mention the immediate solutions of abandoning pro-natalism and limiting immigration (with greater preference given to refugees); preparing the ground, it is hoped, for more comprehensive solutions addressing every major facet of the way we live.
The book also performs a valuable service in pointing to the counterproductive nature of merely attempting to mitigate problems in a way which ignores population growth. In the case of water they recommend a protest movement involving non-compliance with water restrictions. Otherwise, reduced consumption levels will be seen as an open sesame to growth. A similar point is made with regard to those overseas aid efforts which help maintain unsustainable population levels.
Saving water will of course save you money but endless growth of population will cost you the earth. Getting people to pay for deadly overpopulation is one of the biggest confidence tricks ever perpetrated on the public.
There are a few errors. For instance the 1996 State of the Environment Report was Australia’s second, not its first, and the idea that the ACF may now provide leadership on the immigration issue appears to be wishful thinking given that the Foundation is currently in the process of removing the nil net migration objective from its policy statement. These are minor quibbles compared with the value of this book. Perhaps a future edition would help the reader more if it included a time line of all the past major events relevant to the book’s thesis.
Geoff Mosley is the Australian Director of the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy. He is a former Executive Director of the Australian Conservation Foundation and former member of the National population Council.
http://www.theindependentaustralian.com.au/node/50
September 10th, 2009 at 8:58 pm
Review by Katharine Betts of Mark O’Connor’s and William J. Lines’s book, “Overloading Australia,” People and Place, vol. 17, no. 1, page 76.
Australia’s population is growing rapidly. In March 2009 it stood at 21.6 million. The current Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, takes it for granted that it will grow to 35 million by 2051. In 1999 when Philip Ruddock was Minister for Immigration he told Australians that there was no need for a population policy because we were unlikely to grow much beyond 23 million. He added that the ‘nation cannot afford to return to [an immigration] program characterised by big numbers and little thought’. Nonetheless the current growth surge, keenly embraced by the new Labor Government, began quietly under the Coalition soon after Ruddock’s 1999 statement.
Much of Australia’s growth is directly due to immigration (nearly 60 per cent in 2007–08) and much of the growth from natural increase is attributable to the Australia-born children of immigrants. For example, in 2007, 25 per cent of all births were to overseas-born mothers.
For those with their eyes open population growth and the immigration that fuels it are never out of the news. There is the unaffordable housing that drives young families into debt slavery (even pushing some to the less-expensive urban fringe where a number died in Melbourne’s recent fires). There is strained infrastructure leading to blackouts, cancelled train services, and to traffic congestion, draining energy from the economy and from human lives. There are hospitals that can no longer care for the people they serve; water supplies that dwindle as drought and growth desiccate cities and stretch the capacity of farms; pleasant suburbs degraded by intensive redevelopment; greenhouse gases that refuse to abate; and a natural environment wilting under the burden of numbers.
But while stories of water shortages and degraded infrastructure abound, few of the public figures who comment on them acknowledge the role of population growth in creating these problems and making them harder to overcome. Here Mark O’Connor and William Lines have done us an important service; they have joined the dots between these social and environmental ills and our rapid growth.
Read the rest:
http://candobetter.org/node/1182
September 24th, 2009 at 2:48 am
On the recent projections that immigration will push Australia’s population to over 35 million by 2049:
“These numbers are staggering and a clear indication of how out of control immigration now is. To put it into perspective, the total projected population growth from immigration and births to natives as well as immigrants is equal to the combined populations of Ireland and Portugal.
How is Australia expected to cope – socially, environmentally and economically – with such a huge population explosion? What impact will this massive population increase have on quality-of-life issues such as urban sprawl, overcrowding, traffic congestion, overburdened infrastructure and services, housing costs, stress on the environment and natural resources such as water, loss of open spaces, and pollution?
Given that immigration will be the prime driver of this projected population explosion, it also raises disturbing questions about what kind of nation Australia will become in terms of its ethnic and cultural character. Although no one can say for sure, it is reasonable to assume that, if these projections are borne out, what is now a nation of mostly European-descended people will become a nation of mostly Asian and Third World peoples by the mid 21st century.
This means that, unless we change course, the Australia in which most citizens grew up will be swept away forever by an immigration-driven demographic tsunami. Most of the immigration fueling the looming demographic revolution will come from non-Western countries where the customs, habits, and values of the people are radically different from Australia’s historic, British-derived cultural pattern. Australia will become an increasingly alien place.”
http://eye-on-immigration.blogspot.com/2009/09/immigration-to-swell-australias.html
October 1st, 2009 at 12:06 am
thanks realists, i said the same thing to a relative recently,I told my dear father in law, that i wont be cutting my 10 minute shower to 4 minutes, to suit a government obsessed with population growth. Any new australian who arrives to hear we have stage 3 water resctrictions, will ask them selves, did i hear wrong when i read australia was the lucky country.????