Population Discussions
Mark O'Connor keeps us regularly up to date with letters and articles on the ongoing discussion in the media on population. We have copied many of the letters and articles here:
This is not planning, it's pressure
POPULATION growth and urban sprawl are out of control around Melbourne (''Housing estate pushes urban sprawl limit'', The Age, 29/8).
The decision to situate a large housing estate ostensibly belonging to Melbourne but outside the proposed new urban boundary 50 kilometres from the city at Wallan, to avoid infrastructure taxes, makes it clear that planning is not remotely to do with ensuring that Melbourne and its suburbs work well now and into the future.
''Planning'' in Victoria is a misnomer. The Brumby Government's pursuit of increased population for Victoria places immense and increasing pressure on Melbourne and its environs and is irresponsible.
Jill Quirk, East Malvern
More of everything
LIKE Tony Jones (Letters, 29/8), I was taken aback by John Brumby's interview on ABC radio, where he expressed actual enthusiasm for continuing population growth. So much for the once ''most liveable'' city and our ''garden state''. Now, as most people realise, overpopulation is at the root of almost all of Melbourne's major problems, from water worries to road rage. Government and business interests may welcome the hordes of new arrivals, but our quality of life deteriorates quite dramatically, almost by the day. Gardens become concrete. Green becomes grey. What we lose in trees we gain in traffic lights. Commuting time doubles. Parking is a hassle. Air quality decreases and, across the bay, the horizon is, more often than not, a smoky blur. Violent crime is out of control. Depression and stress are common afflictions. We have a real sense of being hustled along in the proverbial rat race. Bigger, faster, greedier, richer.
Is this what we really want? Do economic imperatives really condemn us to this? Even if we have no choice but to cope with a burgeoning population in our once fair city, do we have to actively encourage it, as Mr Brumby seems eager to do?
Vivienne Player, Beaumaris
SENATOR Chris Evans' claim that immigration should be the nation's labour agency, meaning a continued high intake of migrants, especially younger, skilled workers, is absurd ("Migration rules set for revamp", The Age, 31/8).
The Australian population should be our normal source of workforce. Decisions about who comes to Australia should not be left to employers. Big employers have a long history of making bizarre ambit claims about the numbers they propose to employ. Often the real aim is to create a surplus of job seekers and thus bully governments into giving the go-ahead for short-sighted projects to create jobs.
The liveability crisis should be a higher priority than importing "skilled and willing" (read "temporarily more docile") workers from elsewhere.
Senator Evans bizarrely claims that his "attempts to have a more sophisticated debate about the topic have totally failed". What efforts?
The book Overloading Australia documents him claiming in May 2008 that net immigration was less than half what the Bureau of Statistics says it was. Recently he claimed immigration had been ''slashed'', when it was soaring. Now he admits we have "an unprecedented, unplanned migration wave". He should resign and be replaced by a minister who serves the Australian electorate, not vested interests.
Mark O'Connor, co-author, Overloading Australia, Lyneham, ACT
It's time to debate, people
I AGREE that it is ''time for a reality check on immigration policy'' (Editorial, 1/9). I would go further and say it is time for a national population policy. Tim Flannery, in his Australia Day address in 2002, indicated that a population policy was vital for Australia to have an environmentally sustainable future.
He said the way to achieve such a policy was for the nation to engage in a truthful, vigorous debate, together with a government inquiry charged with setting an optimum population target. Once the target had been decided we should determine our immigration policy in light of it. This, Flannery believed, would take most of the hysteria out of the immigration debate.
In my view, the bipartisanship way the major parties have kept immigration policy debate out of the public arena is an affront to democracy. I believe an appropriate forum for debating a population policy would also act as a prophylactic in keeping irrational ideologies out of the debate.
Arthur Bassett, Blackburn South
Population consumes growth performance
by Crispin Hull on September 5, 2009 (Crispin Hull is a former editor of The Canberra Times)
AT last. Australia is out of recession. “What?” I hear you ask, “I thought Australia had escaped the recession.”
Not so. Those eagerly awaited National Account or GDP figures which came out this week do not tell the fully story. And, incidentally, this is the 50th anniversary of the publication of those figures.
Australia has been in recession since about mid-2008, but the economists will not tell you that.
You see, the GDP figures add up national income and determine whether the economy has expanded or contracted. But they do not account for population growth. In the past year population growth has been greater than the growth in the economy. So income per head has gone down, not up as the Government and economists would mislead you into believing. Now you know why you have been feeling the pinch.
I hasten to add that this is not the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ fault. It just produces the figures. Unfortunately, it cannot do everything at once. The national account figure is seen to be more important than the income-per-head figure so is done first.
But you can do back-of-the-envelope figures. The population is growing at an astonishing 1.9 per cent – at poverty-causing Third World rates. But between mid last year and now, the economy as a whole was growing at less than that rate. So we were going backwards. It is now growing at an annual rate of 2.4 per cent, just ahead of population.
And even then, GDP on its own is not a good measure of human well-being. Yet every quarter the government, the economists, business and financial journalists gather round like supplicants waiting for the statue of the Virgin Mary to shed tears of blood and announce, “We are saved. We are saved. The economy has grown.”
But population growth always takes some, and sometimes takes all, of the growth. Moreover, there are obvious costs to higher population which far outweigh any benefits.
Higher costs of water (witness this week’s Cotter Dam cost); land (witness the unaffordability of housing); longer commuting times; infrastructure costs or infrastructure degradation if the money is not spent; and extra competition for space in cities and wild places.
Despite the costs to the many and the unpopularity of high immigration, governments of both complexion continue it.
The Environment's Deepest Enemy
The following letter, from Canadian population campaigner Madeline Weld, is a reminder of how world-wide and international are the ideologies that destroy environments.
The letter was sent on 17 May to The Ottawa Citizen, and concerned an article it had run about a "land swap" that was being organized to expand a road called Terry Fox Drive.
In sending it on, her fellow activist Tim Murray remarked
Brilliant letter Madeline! Replace the words "Ottawa" or "Kanata" with the words "Melbourne", or "Denver" or "Vancouver", or any of 500 cities in the world of equivalent population levels, ... and your article could be seen as a template for universal frustrations. I am particularly satisfied that your analysis did not follow the standard soft green route of demonizing developers to the exclusion of so many of their collaborators.
Here is what Madeline wrote:
[Your article] illustrates the fact that unrestricted growth destroys the environment, while smart growth destroys the environment more slowly. As our expanding human population requires ever more space, we will just take it, wherever it may be and however it may be zoned. "Boundaries shift," said a senior planner for a development company, referring to the planned expansion of Terry Fox Drive through the habitat of endangered plants and animals. And shift they will. Developers know that the Ontario Municipal Board will almost always rule in their favour if recalcitrant residents or environmentalists give them any trouble.
What is playing out in Kanata is repeated countless times in Canada and around the world, as the global population soars from its current 6.8 million to a projected 9 billion-plus during the next 40 years and Canada's population soars from 33 million to 44 million, an increase of 33% driven primarily by the government's own policies. Environmentalists may win the occasional battle, but as long as they refuse to recognize growth as the enemy, as most steadfastly refuse to do, they will lose the war to preserve the habitat that biodiversity depends on. When push comes to shove in an increasingly crowded world, human needs for space to live, grow food, and meet their energy needs will always trump the needs of other organisms.
The developer seems like the obvious villain in this case. But the real villains are the sacred ideology of growth, our governments who embrace this ideology, our environmentalists who refuse to challenge it, and the rest of us with our silence. The developers are mere implementing this sacred ideology at whose altar we all worship.