Clive Hamilton is a very depressing man.
Already congestion, with all its frustrations and rage, is approaching the intolerable. Sydneysiders spend more time stuck in traffic than any other Australians. The growing volume of cars on the roads is undoing decades of legislation designed to clean up the air. In the 1980s smog levels fell after laws were introduced to improve car engines and fuels.
Now the gains have been overtaken by the sheer number of cars, especially in Sydney. The recent State of the Environment Report notes that ozone concentrations have been falling in all capital cities except Sydney, where they are getting worse.
The Iemma Government’s plan to funnel more and more people into established suburbs will inevitably destroy what makes those suburbs pleasant places to live.
Of course this is just one depressing note in whole bunch of depression regarding urbanisation and population.
The issue of congestion has more to do with motoring culture and the failure of adequate transport policies in Sydney. Convenient public transport comprising a range of options from public to private, buses to light and heavy rail and my favourite, a genuine busting up of the taxi cartel (something Macquarie Bank is attempting to do). Add to that a proper road pricing scheme and we could easily move an additional million people. I could go on too about Hamilton’s implied Australia First immigration plan, and the covering up of his fortress Australia mentality with a sop to refugees but that would be churlish of me.
The entire Hamilton view of Sydney and Australia is one based on fear, loathing and a certain helplessness, we can do nothing, woe is me.
Most, if not all of our challenges can be addressed through policy. From simple conservation methods i.e. water tanks (my father-in-law, a Sicilian migrant who came from a farming background, recently captured 3000 liters easily the other day and uses it to water the veggie garden, he couldn’t save more because he ran out of wheelie bins) and big technological solutions to energy (the PM’s Nuclear option).
Sure, argue the toss, on balance I think nukes are good and the technology safe (and yes I would have one in my backyard), something that provides baseload and eliminates coal, and it would provide the eletricity to power Sydney and a greater population, others do not, but in the end the discussion is a positive one about solutions, not lockdown.
Then there is this.
A famous experiment in the 1960s found that when too many rats are forced to live in a cage of a given size they soon display abnormal behaviour including hyper-aggression, failure to nurture young normally, increased mortality, abnormal sexual patterns and infant cannibalism.
In human populations, crowding causes physical diseases and psychological stress. When humans are forced to live in these “behavioural sinks”, defined less by geographical proximity than by excessive social interaction, they respond with aggression, attempts to isolate themselves and, when all else fails, drugs and alcohol.
One thing is certain: as the population of the emerald city expands so will the industries that help us cope with the anxieties of living in a behavioural sink.
I have to ask? How many beautiful, cosmopolitan and exciting cities are there in the world that have populations similar to, or greater than that of Sydney, all without becoming behaviourial sinks? Does Hamilton travel?
If guys like Hamilton can’t provide solutions beyond that of a depressing world view of locking down the city and the country and throwing away the key, they should shut the hell up and get out of the way.
Crossposted at Spinopsys.
First they ate Paris(yuk), then they choked Sydney, a “known” auto-bondage freak, but the Seven Sisters’ lust is forever fired up with rites of passage dirty talk.
“Shit! I can drive!”
Sure, honey, you’re the only one.
Well done, Phil. Great post, particularly that bit.
Great, great post, Phil. Good to see someone else has seen through ‘Hairshirt Hamilton’ (as we call him over at Catallaxy). All power to the cyclists, I say!
Oh, and trackback, where Jason invites interested parties to design the first draft of the Hairshirt Hamilton citizenship test.
I know nothing of this man’s psychological condition, however, having read this article over breakfast this morning in a cafe in an Under Milkwood type country town, with rain falling steadily and minature horses galavanting in their paddocks, I thought he had some good things to say one of which included state politicians getting over their fear of budget defecits and spending more on public transport infrastucture. Agreed, that people who complain about immigration should be scruitinised as to their motives in doing so, however I agree wholeheartedly with his sentiments:
” Under a policy of zero net migration we could allow in perhaps 40,000 people each year, because that is how many Australians leave the country. This gives us plenty of scope to meet our humanitarian obligations and we should use it to increase the number of asylum seekers and political refugees.
Immigration should be aimed at improving the moral capital of the nation rather than our financial stocks. Instead of fast-tracking money-obsessed, self-interested business migrants, or overseas students who slip in the back door through visa scams run by dodgy universities, we should welcome more people who have suffered from oppression and have learned the value of human rights, democracy and the rule of law.”
Shorter Clive: “we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.”
For Howard’s “social values,” substitute Hamilton’s, “improving the moral capital of the nation.”
BTW, since when has it been a “secret” that Australia’s migration is running at historically high levels.
Not a week goes by when Minister Vanstone isn’t on some media outlet trumpeting the same. Clive needs to stop interviewing his navel.
Agreed, the sad old so-and-so should look up for a bit and have a look at the real world.
What Sydney needs to combat its congestion is a whole raft of measures, many of which in NSW would be considered far-sighted or even outright loony but are commonplace elsewhere. First of all, Sydney needs to be considered as a whole, rather than the current coastal-vs-inland, “Leichhardt line” mentality than currently persists. The coastal suburbs have relatively frequent public transport with some degree of ticket integration (albeit for regular commuters only), while inland suburbs have poorer services (not aided by a below-par CityRail) and no integration whatsoever. Higher densities are encouraged towards the east, while harder-to-serve sprawl is still promoted out west. Traffic management is the go along the coast, whilst inland more motorways are being built.
As for the immigration question, I’ll sidestep that one. Clive seems to be slippery enough on the issue to render him dangerous.
Clive Hamilton lives in Canberra – you know, Phil, it’s that new suburb for the overflow from Bowral. http://paulwatson.blogspot.com/2006/12/james-brown-and-slavin-for-man-in-death.html
On the afternoon of Christmas Eve I had a great time in a VERY crowded King Street, Newtown. A fairly densely populated inner city Sydney suburb. The street was full of Newtown’s most colourful doing last minute shopping and I-don’t-know-what-else up the street. It was fun, it was crowded, it was a little bit crazy.
But it wasn’t like this…
If only I had read this before last week I would have known I lived in a behavioural sink and I could have responded accordingly. Look out 2007!
So Geoff as far as you’re concerned there should be no arbiter for immigration? What would be your criteria? Or would you simply have none. Or is it more you just don’t care one way or another as long as it doesn’t impinge on your way of life? If ‘we’ don’t decide then who does, given that someone at some point has to make some sort of decision about who to admit. How many people apply for residency or visas? Do you know? Would you simply let everyone in and bugger the consequences?
Your moral highground is admirable, but not very practical.
Dr H has been contributing in this vein to the new Pria Viswalingam doco series on SBS Decadence which has got to be one of the most offensive, shoddily made, fact free, dumbfoundingly shallow bits of rubbish ever to get screened. It assumes completely without reflection the view of the world quoted by Angharad at 11.44am. “People nowadays care more for plasma screen TVs than their own wee babies!”, as if it were self evidently true and a brave bit of speaking truthiness to power. Instead of complete crap. I suppose its meant to be a polemic but if so, having all the rhetorical force of soggy lettuce, its crap at that too.
Happy new year! (now venturing for lunch into disease riven Marrickville. I expect I’ll come back with TB and a black eye but the portugese chicken rocks.)
Congestion can be solved quite easily by a congestion tax. Fortunately there is a form of congestion tax already operating in NSW. It is called land tax, and it falls most heavily on property experiencing the most heavy traffic, i.e., business districts. All Iemma would have to do would be to increase the top percentage rate by one or two points. This would encourage the movement of businesses to less heavily taxed areas at the margin of the city. An added bonus would be the revenue it collects, which could be put to improving Sydney’s public transport.
It seems a bit rich to suggest, as did one comment on this post, that Hamilton’s stance mirrors John Howard’s shameful comments on deciding who, and in what circumstances, people come to Australia. That comparison is surely given the lie by Hamilton’s call to accept more asylum seekers and refugees.
Instead, my reading is that Hamilton is highlighting the composition of immigration and its relationship to the flawed quest for eternal economic growth that in turn is driving the growth and overcrowding of Sydney. I agree with him both on the need for humanitarian rather than purely economic goals for immigration, and on the overriding need to consider sustainability in all matters concerning population.
A narrow economic focus on immigration also threatens to play into the hands of John Howard’s idustrial relations agenda, where immigration can be seen as a quick fix for skills that should be developed domestically, with the additional aim of watering down working conditions via imported labour.
“So Geoff as far as you’re concerned there should be no arbiter for immigration? What would be your criteria? Or would you simply have none. Or is it more you just don’t care one way or another as long as it doesn’t impinge on your way of life? If ‘we’ don’t decide then who does, given that someone at some point has to make some sort of decision about who to admit.”
I’m all in favour of border control and a national migration policy. I’m unaware of any nation state that doesn’t exercise the right to decide on who enters the country and the circumstances in which they do so. I’m just amused by the fact that what Hamilton is saying is essentially no different to what Howard has said except that Hamilton would actually be far more restrictive on immigration than Howard.
BTW, given that 20-30,000 NZ’ers arrive here annually with the intention of remaining permanently, Hamilton’s suggested annual quota of 40,000 migrants per annum would presumably be subsumed by trans-Tasman traffic long before we’d reach the level of the current humanitarian program which is running around 12,000 per annum.
I really don’t think that he’s thought this through…………
Agree with Amanda about the Pria doco – it’s tosh.
I don’t have a lot to say on Sydney public transport because I don’t live there, but what Alex on the bus said sounds right to me – I stayed with friends in Bondi and Paddington a couple of times a few years back and found the public transport in the Eastern suburbs great – compared to Brisbane in particular (though there’s been a lot of improvement up here in the past few years).
As to Dr Hamilton, if he didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him to prove that there is at least one person who meets the “latte intellectual elite” stereotype. Though I’m not too sure about the intellectual bit.
I heard one of his colleagues and co-authors, Richard Eckersley from ANU, give a talk in Melbourne in October which was predicated on statistics you could have shot massive holes through “demonstrating” that everyone in Australia was incredibly depressed and that we wouldn’t have a chance of cheering up unless we immediately embraced “deep democracy” and “sustainable growth” or something. It was an appalling example of a social scientist distorting evidence to push an ideological bandwagon. Admittedly, it was also horrendously depressing so perhaps he and Clive are on a mission to prove themselves right through expounding their views. I think Eckersley popped up on the SBS show too.
I have never lived in Sydney, so won’t comment on it’s livability – although I can’t say it’s ever appealed to me much on my many visits there and if I was forced to move to another capital city in Australia, it would probably be in my bottom two choices. However, a lto of people do choose to live there, so I presume they prefer it.
I don’t mind some of Clive Hamilton’s stuff – he does to move outside the box occasionally. Of course this doesn’t mean that everything inside the box is wrong, nor that everywhere he goes to outside the box is right. I agree that state governments (and some economic commentators) need to get over their fear of budget deficits to enable more expenditure on the right sort of infrastructure projects.
I think there are good arguments in support of policies that encourage people – including migrants – to settle in places away from Sydney, south-east Queensland and Melbourne. The evidence suggests this is strating have some small effect. However, I cannot believe the canard of zero-net migration is being raised again by anyone, let alone Clive Hamilton. It is an unworkable, inhumane, misanthropic and misdirected policy that was unworkable when it was being pushed more regularly 10-15 years ago. It is doubly so on all counts now days when movement of people, labour and capital is much greater.
Even if we were to achieve the near impossible and get net permanent migration down to zero, the big ‘migration’ numbers these days are in temporary residents, which is around 500 000 per year. And what about the millions of tourists? They all consume resources, take up space, travel, etc. Why just pick on the relatively small number of premanent migrants? Even the worst and most malevolent form of citizenship test couldn’t come close to what this sort of policy could achieve – millions of people unable to become permanent residents, just so we can kid ourselves that our country can’t cope with any extra people in it.
And what do we say to those countries who react to such an iron curtain policy by refusing to allow Australians to migrate there for work or other endeavours? And how we deal with our economic and social relationship with New Zealand when we say they can no longer move here – as we would have to do to have any hope of coming close to the figure. And what about family migration? It is hard enough now for foreign spouses of Australians to get visas (and there are a lot more Australians partnering with foreigners, due to the above mentioned propensity for Australians to be allowed to travel). The same applies with parents wanting to migrate to live with their children and grandchildren as they age. While governments should be spending more on training, it is ludicrous to think that our economy could cope with hundreds of thousands of workers – skilled and not so skilled – being taken out of the employment market.
I still shudder to think how this was official Democrat policy for a few years in the early 1990s – a separate story in itself how that managed to happen. It was also of course One Nation policy for some time. Some within green groups still push it today, along with a few Hansonites, but if there is one positive side effect from John Howard’s demonstration of how ruthlessly xenophobia can be when it is implemented, it is that such selfish and callous ideas no longer have much currency. Presumably it’s OK for people to consume the planet’s resources elsewhere, just not in Australia?
Given that the suburbs identified for increased densities are all on public transport routes, there’s a good reason for increasing density there and not just adding greenfield sites on the perimeters. Public transport is good in the inner city, not so good once you get further out and away from the train lines though.
There’s a bunch of adherents to the quarter acre block school of planning and Hamilton has huddled up with them. Back to the 50s! (although he’d be horrified to think that I suspect).
And that’s what makes Canberra a particularly dead place to live I reckon. Too spread out and too suburban. I’m scared to walk around in Canberra at night because I’m alone on the streets. Not so in overcrowded Newtown.
Is this what a circle jerk looks like?
The following video examines the arithmetic of steady growth, continued over modest periods of time, in a finite environment.
Have a squizz and tell me again how wonderful population growth is
http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/lectures/461
I have failed to find any substantial objection to Clive Hamilton’s excellent article in today’s Sydney Morning Herald In any of the posts above.
Obviously, factors such as former NSW Premier Bob Carr’s investment in tollways and roads to the detriment of rail have exacerbated the effects of terrible crowding of Sydney and this was acknowledged by Clive Hamilton himself. Nevertheless, there is only so much that can be achieved with even the best and most visionary urban planning, if ever greater numbers are crowded into this country and into our major cities. Having lived in Sydney on and off since 1979 and having seen it transformed from a pleasant city into the overcrowded polluted slum that it is today, I was horrified to learn from Clive Hamilton that yet another 1.1 million are to be crowded into Sydney in the next 25 years.
In Queensland, particularly its South East Corner we are now reaping the whirlwind of having had our population doubled from 2 million in 1974 to well over 4 million today. This includes:
… and the fools in charge of Queensland are still aiming to increase its population by a further 1.25 million by 2026.
The following is the vision of the Real Estate Institute of Queensland has for Queensland’s future in 10 years time:
This was from an article “Owning a slice of the action” by Patrick Lion in the Courier Mail on 23 June 2005.
Given that the REIQ keenly anticipates the cost of the average Brisbane Home rising from $365,000 to $800,000 over the next 10 years the “day at the office” will indeed be very long for many workers struggling to market the mortgage payments.
Can anyone here, assuming you don’t feel as horrified as I do at the REIQ’s vision of utopia, tell me why they believe they are wrong? How do they believe it can possibly be avoided if hundreds of thousands more are to be crowded in to SEQ in the next 10 years.
Other discussions on the question of immigration and population growth can be found on Online Opinion. These include a forum in response to Andrew Bartlett’s article A crisis in housing affordability”, a forum discussion “The political hypocrisy of boosting immigration numbers as drought tightens its grip” and a forum discussion “Solve the housing crisis – wind-back immigration”.
Some who read these discussions may notice that I have borrowed from some of the arguments I have made onhese forums.
BTW, one of the “green groups” which opposes high immigration, referred to by , is Sustainable Population Australia of which I am a member. A former President of SPA, John Coulter was also once the Leader of the Democrats. At that time the Democrats did have a policy against population growth including high immigration. This was also the policy that the Whitlam Labor government adopted in 1974 in response to the oil crises of 1973. Similar policies were adopted by European countries including France at the time. After Whitlam lost office, subsequent Liberal and Labor governments resumed policies of high immigration whilst European government maintained their low immigration policies.
The major reason for the difference is the difference in land use planning. In Europe, development is controlled by government whilst in Australia it is controlled by private property developers. This makes it impossible for any small group in French society to gain at everyone else’s expense, unlike the case of Australia. In Australia the groups who gain from immigration have succeeded in having the Government maintain high immigration rates to suit their purposes. For more information, please refer to Sheila Newman’s excellent Masters thesis of 2002 “The Growth Lobby and its Absence : The Relationship between the Property Development and Housing Industries and Immigration Policy in Australia and France”. It can be downloaded from http://www.candobetter.org/sheila. Sheila Newman is the current Vice President of Sustainable Population Australia.
Just out of interest, I’ve been for a wander around Newtown a few times at night (and off King St). What exactly would you anticipate happening if it’s unsafe?
Ps – Andrew put the zero immigration thing back in its box rather brilliantly, I thought.
Bloody immigrants coming here drinking our water, using our trains, living in our flats…
A bit weird to argue that France is a stellar case for the integration of immigrants compared to Australia, I’d have thought.
Yes. Bringing over tens of thousands of Algerian immigrants, plonking them in large industrial estates, and then having industry piss off was hardly a triumph of planning, was it?
Nope.
I can’t see any reason for the sort of bullshit these people go on with aside from xenophobia and NIMBYism. If there are infrastructure issues, then government should do better on them. But I’m more than happy to share South East Queensland with more people. I wasn’t around in Brisbane in 1974:
But from what I gather, it wasn’t funkster city.
As to the sacred quarter acre block, most European cities feel like cities and have all the vibrancy and economic benefits thereof because people are crammed into them like sardines.
Just sayin…
Reducing global population growth (defintely a good idea assuming its done ethically) is very different from just keeping people out of Australia so we can keep on being one of the most profligate nations on Earth. Encouraging people to migrate to areas other than Sydney and S-E Qld is also a good idea (many of those who came to S-E Qld are actually coming from interstate (esp Sydney) rather than overseas anyway – not sure how we can forcibly keep all them southerners out though, other than through seceeding).
The weakness of Hamilton’s arguments are compounded by the unnecessary cheap shots he also takes. Attacking business migrants as “money obsessed, self-interested” people merely opens him open to criticisms of xenophobia. Blaming big business for being behind the “secret” increase in immgration also just sounds like aiming for populism in the absence of being able to make a plausible argument.
The fact that we can’t manage our water, energy, transport and planning needs efficiently should not be blamed on people who aren’t even here yet. We should be recycling water as a matter of course, not just because we’ve got shortages at the moment or more people coming. We can save far more energy. We can all eat less meat for frick’s sake, (something very few green groups seem very interested in promoting despite the large water and energy savings)
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By the way, apart from being former leader of the Australian Democrats (and least electorally successful until I came along), John Coulter is also now on the national executive of the ACF (as he was back in the 1980s I think). However, zero migration is not ACF policy as far I am aware (it better not be or I’m cancelling my membership) and it has not been Democrat policy for many years either.
One of the few positive things Pauline Hanson did was make a lot more greenies far more reluctant to promote what was in effect the same (absurd, selfish, counter-productive and unworkable) immigration policy as her. Hamilton’s criticism of Howard “exploiting Hansonite xenophobia” shows a lot of chutzpah, considering he is basically doing the same thing through another avenue – although in the world of wedge poliutics and triangulation, plenty of others do similar things (including Howard himself of course)
and whilst we could do with having less developed driven land use policies, as Kim said, using the French example is also seriously weird.
Apart from our bizarre and irrational obsession against the tiny number of asylum seekers who arrive here in boats, Australia actually does pretty well compared to most countries when it comes to consistently bringing in a sizeable number of migrants from a mix of places for mix of reasons. It’s one of the areas where I think most countries have more to learn from us than we do from them – (which is another reason why importing the idea of a citizenship test will serve no good policy purpose). The current government’s willingness to reinforce rather than counter the natural tendency for certain groups in the community to be targets of prejudice certainly hasn’t helped, but they will have to keep it up for a while yet to undo the positives of past practices (much of the residue of which still survives under the rhetoric)
Kim,
I fail to see what point you were trying to make. I wasn’t arguing that France treated particularly well, people who want to move there.
A friend, who was a fluent French speaker, found it impossible to stay. The only way she could have stayed was if she were to have married a French citizen.
Obviously not great from her point of view, but from the point of view of the French who don’t want to lose their quality of life by overcrowding, it is perfectly understandable.
One of the reason for the maintenance of high immigration is to keep ratcheting up property values for the benefit property speculators. They have been quite forthright about this in the past. As an example, I heard an economist who worked, if I remember correctly, for the Property Council of Australia, say, during a discussion on Radio National’s “Australia Talks Back” about the crisis of the property ‘industry’ back in May 2004, when the skyrocketing values of housing prices briefly stalled, that once high immigration resumed, property values would pick up, and, of course precisely this has occurred, making housing unaffordable for even greater numbers of Australians.
daggett, this begs the question of how you maintain enough economic activity in the absence of immigration. And that’s quite outside the moral issues involved. Simply put, what gives “us” the right to maintain our “quality of life” at the expense of others who wish to share it? Actually, if you have any understanding of the economics, that question doesn’t arise, but it still gets to the moral clarities.
NIMBYism, like I said.
I wouldn’t give any credence to anything the Property Council of Australia said. Pretty standard MO for them to say that property prices are perpetually increasing because of Magic Factor X, Y or Z.
Remember: The Market is Always Hot.
Byron and Noosa shires are pretty good counter-examples anyway – attempts to maintain “quality of life” by keeping people out really send property prices through the roof.
Joint’s crackin tonight, for a long weekend, isn’t it?
But it’s bed time for my tired old bones.
xx
Kim,
Firstly, let’s separate the two questions:
1. The claimed economic benefits of migration with the moral question, and
2. Whether we have a moral right to stop others from coming here.
Firstly,why do you think it is not possible for an economy to function without the numbers of people increasing endlessly? The economies of Finland, Switzerland and France seem to function perfectly well and none have large immigration programs.
Norway is a country which has a generous program of foreign aid, but which restricts immigration. The reason for this, apart from self-interest, is that far more people in poor countries stand to benefit from foreign aid than if, instead, an equivalent amount were to be spent on settling some of those people in Norway.
Incidentally, you may be interested to know that Gore Vidal used Norway as an example, when discussing whether or not industrialised countries had an obligation to settle within their borders, every person from a third world country who wished to do so. He said:
—
Christine,
There is abundant other evidence that property developers, land speculators and associated industries derive enormous economic benefit, at everyone else’s expense, from immigration and that is why they lobby so hard to maintain it. Again, I suggest you have a look at Sheila Newman’s Master’s thesis for the evidence. You may also be interested to read the submission by the Victorian branch of Sustainable Population Australia’s submission to the Productivity Commission’s Inquiry into housing affordability. They can both be found at: http://www.candobetter.org/sheila.
I reckon CH is saying some very good things and his hopes for a less profligate Australia achieved through reduced migration is also a good thing. The solutions to Sydney’s car mess is surely not thriugh a continuation of th eALP’s mad embrace of toll roads and PPPs – just as it is not in my home of Melbourne. Sydney is close to stuffed unless you insulate yourself in the eat or by the harbour and dont drive. The postes carping on against CH should be fuly aware that th eestablished policies of the tweedle dee and tweedle dum offer no hope so CH is right to be dommsdayish.
I think there is quite some confusion here. Andrew Bartlett obviously confuses accepting refugees with immigration. Of course refugees (real ones) should be accepted, but immigrants? No way! I’m an immigrant BTW, arrived here in 1963 aged 11 with my entire family of 10. Looking back, I now consider we were economic refugees. My parents found it impossible to make ends meet in France and Belgium where we lived. Back then, the population of Australia was a mere 12 million, if my memory serves me right. Was immigration ’sustainable’ then? Probably. Is it now? No.
I have just left Brisbane. Yesterday in fact. I’ve lived there for 43 years, but I expect it is on the verge of collapse within maybe as little as 5 years. If this drought doesn’t break, Brisbane’s in deep doo doos, and does it look like breaking? Not from where I’m standing….. Developers are building 25,000 houses a year, each one releasing at least 100 tonnes of greenhouse gases in the building process, and requiring some ungodly amount of water and energy to satisfy their new occupants, who on the whole also have to drive 50 km to get to work. The new 6 lane highway to Brisbane is alrady a car park in peak hours.
Australia is already overpopulated. We have the world’s poorest soils, most erratic weather, and the most resource demanding population in the world. Not a good combination. To top it all, Australia could, on current trends, be as good as totally out of oil in 6 years time. So we’re heading into a perfect storm of climate change, peak oil, and water collapse. And you still think bringing more people here’s a good idea?
Wakey wakey…..
I know lots of French people here. Those who have recently gone back to visit have said to me that this was their last visit. France is overcrowded, and it’s lost its unique cultural sense because of immigration. It was once a place where living was the culture. Now it’s full of Arabs, and existentialism has replaced living. Why is the place full of Arabs? Because where they come from is also overcrowded, and they want a piece of the affluenza action. Greed rules.
I don’t agree with everything Hamilton says, but he is right about the levels of depression. I’m one of its victims, and hopefully moving out og the depressing suburbs of Brisbane will fix me, but all I can see over the horizon is stupid humans breeding like rabbits destroying the environment, just like rabbits, using up non renewable resources until none are left, and complete collapse of civilisation as we know it.
Mike.
What are the advantages to high immigration? The Productivity Commission did a study of the impact of 50,000 extra “skilled” immigrants a year, coming to Australia for the next 20 years. The result was that the average hourly wage dropped. I’ve got it, Andrew Bartlett and John Howard. Let’s reduce our pay, so we can have more immigrants. Several studies overseas have found similar results. Clive Hamilton points this out in his article. The Productvity Commission (PC) report even highlights that no environmental concerns were considered and notes that it is possible that environmental conditions would worsen. It’s more than possible, it is a certainty.
Is Andrew Bartlett saying that we should just accept a lower standard of living because high immigration is so important? Eat less meat, so we can have more immigrants? The PC also says that the biggest beneficiaries of high immigration will be the immigrants themselves (no surprise) and the capital owners. Are the property developers and pro-growth business people that powerful, that they can push through a policy (with Andrew Bartlett and John Howard’s help) which makes them richer and the rest of us poorer? Will the capital owners be eating less meat?
We are not living sustainably now. Adding people will make it harder to live sustainably. In 40 years Andrew Bartlett, John Howard and Peter Costello will all be dead and their kids will say, “My Dad didn’t think it was important to try to live sustainably, now the land and water are stuffed and we don’t have any more fossil fuels, but at least we didn’t upset New Zealand over immigration.” 40,000 immigrants a year is not an iron curtain. There will still be plenty of Kiwis living in Australia.
Is there anybody who thinks that making Nuclear Power safe is an easier solution to sustainable energy than reducing immigration? What is the mentality that says that we should have a thousand difficult solutions like new interconnected public transport systems, recycled wastewater, desalinisation, pumping saltwater to save the Murray, wind power, tidal power, biofuels, becoming vegetarians, land reclamation, etc., but not have low immigration, as well? Low immigration is the easy part of the solution. The fact is we need both reduced immigration and all these difficult land, water and energy solutions to live sustainably. Neither will be enough on its own. Right now we are getting neither.
If reducing the world’s population is a good idea, how do we tell all the other countries it is a good idea while still making every effort to increase our population. We are just saying “More Aussies is good, more of you other people is bad.” Is that what Andrew Bartlett and John Howard want to say to the rest of the world?
I hear that Bartlett is really a nice guy, so I wonder why he seems to be stooping to slur Clive Hamilton. (Andrew Bartlett, on 31 December 2006 at 12:52 am):
Bartlett writes: “Reducing global population growth (definitely a good idea assuming its [sic] done ethically) is very different from just keeping people out of Australia *so we can keep on being one of the most profligate nations on Earth.” * Pretty unfair on Hamilton, Andrew!
These ad hominem tactics of labelling growth-lobby opponents as ‘xenophobic’ or ‘wanting to live a profligate lifestyle’ arise because the pro-growth lobby actually has no serious ecological, humanitarian or economic basis. But the arguments promote wedges between political streams where people would otherwise recognise their commonality.
Growthism constantly gets mainstream press and derives power because its arguments reinforce the ability of the rich to preserve their power and status at the expense of the declining welfare of the rest of the population – human, other species and vegetation. Keeping on growing in the light of looming petroleum decline, actual severe water shortage, shocking species decline, increasingly cruel treatment of livestock as economic margins for kindness reduce, and climate change, is just plain stoopid, horribly cruel and selfish – but it does make some influential people and corporations richer. (Notably the ones that own the Press).
Those who deny Australia’s grave ecological problems by supporting unsustainable economic growth through forced population growth here seem to use pseudo-humanitarianism to excuse their desire to continue to live high on the hog at the expense of a growing number of marginalised people and other forms of complex life here and elsewhere. (Without high immigration Australia’s numbers would otherwise stabilise then decline in 50 or so years if we do not increase our birthrates.) Unsurprisingly some well-meaning people actually fall for growthist propaganda, since all the mainstream ‘authorities’ – churches, Media, and the paid and elected political hacks endorse this line. To fail to do so is to lose all your influence or run the risk of serious notoriety. If the Democrats endorse the pro-growth stance then they are propping up the rest of the Murdoch/Fairfax/Packer etc-led parties and the mainstream fed churches and welfare agencies who have property developers on their boards and invest in real-estate speculation.
Growthist propoganda is one of the results of our very poor media-ownership laws which every government gives more of our democracy away to because governments rely now on the media for publicity. As well as controlling our politicians, the corporate media own the property dot coms, mines, building materials, and increasingly agricultural land. Water will be next. Population growth increases demand for the materials and other assets they transact.
This is a very scary scenario. To promote continuous global economic growth is to promote wars over fuels, materials, land and water and to create more political refugees and asylum seekers. To use Refugee Rights rhetoric as a wedge against ecological arguments is very often the cynical resort of serious economic growthists and just increases political entropy and the decline in human rights whilst stigmatising those who are pointing to this decline and trying to stop it.
Clive Hamilton’s book, Growth Fetish, Pluto Books, 2005 or 2006 contains simple, saleable and democratic answers to all the major problems in Australia and to peoples’ search for quality of life and community in the second last or the last chapter (I forget which). It is an easy read and literally a work of genius in simplicity. But obviously Murdoch and Fairfax and Packers’ stables of growth merchants would never seriously endorse these suggestions. That Hamilton gets the occasional piece in the mainstream press is due to three things – the validity of his message and his abilty to express it; his ability to reach people via TAI – The Australia Institute, and the need that the press has to appear as if they give the welfare of ordinary people a bit of coverage from time to time. Lest we all wake up and stop reading and watching them.
Sheila N
Kim wrote on 31 December 2006 at 1:14 am
“daggett, this begs the question of how you maintain enough economic activity in the absence of immigration. And that’s quite outside the moral issues involved. Simply put, what gives “usâ€? the right to maintain our “quality of lifeâ€? at the expense of others who wish to share it? Actually, if you have any understanding of the economics, that question doesn’t arise, but it still gets to the moral clarities.
NIMBYism, like I said.”
Kim, you sound sincere, but to me it just looks like you just don’t realise how serious is our decline in local human rights (e.g. new industrial laws, increasing homelessness), in simple access to resources necessary to life and health (local democatic control over land and water rights without resort to expensive and unreliable often privatised technologies), local information (increasing syndication of global anglo infotainment in lieu of guaranteed education and strong diverse media), and the basing of economic growth on increasing materials extract and export whilst literally chewing up land, poisoning and depleting aquifers and generally trashing all things bright and beautiful. (See for instance the lead article in the recent SPA Newsletter No 71 about West Australia or the Queensland articles in No 72: http://www.population.org.au/media/newsletters.htm).
Nor do you seem to realise that it is economic growthism that drives increasing incursions into the Middle East and Africa in a desperate search for more fuel (petroleum). Nor do you seem to realise that, to keep economic growth going we are going to have to fall back on coal and coal oil despite our knowledge of the ghastly consequences. (See Barbara Freese: Coal, A Human History, which will show you that the system that created the third world started by dispossessing its own people). The pursuit of materials to keep on keeping growing drives marginalisation in Australia and in the third world. In fact Australia was always and is increasingly being treated like a third world country which is being mined for its land and materials in the continuing style of WA Inc. (See Trevor Sykes, The Bold Riders, Allen & Unwin).
What, pray tell, is the humanitarian point of feeding this system’s insatiable appetite for more and more victims?
Money and the GDP measures don’t show these problems up because digging up the country and selling it off under the feet of its inhabitants (human, other species and vegetable) makes a lot of money. It is naive to imagine that something that makes money is necessarily good for the world or Australia.
Why you really don’t seem to know about these things that are all around you is the interesting question. What kind of education did you have? Who do you look to for information and guidance? Why do you think that things are so great in Australia when many of us feel the evidence is all around us that they are not?
Sheila N
I feel your fear and paranoia Shelia, and that of your stablemates in the Australia is for me and me alone club, and I’m sure you can do better at wrapping the tinfoil even tighter to your head.
There is no denying the issues in play, but none of them are intractable, all are solvable, most by simple solutions combined with smart growth and efficiencies and the right application of specific technologies to specific problems.
I know you think you have a froward looking view, but it’s not. The paradox of what you and Hamilton suggest is a going backwards, so you can count me out. I prefer a bright (Viridian) green future full of promise, technological solutions to future problems and a view that is positive in our ability to problem solve.
If that makes me (as you see it) a growth fetishist and puts me in the pocket of developers then so be it, given how far we’ve come as a species, I’m betting that my view is more right than yours.
Now run off and do something useful, like build a solar/wind energy capturing fuel cell. Or pushing for newspaper organisations and book publishers to abandon print and go online and digital with new models of production and distribution so we don’t have to cut down trees or wood chip.
That stuff is happening now, though given your evident paranoia and inability to cope with the future you’re probably missing it as is speeds past you.
Eric,
It should be pointed out that even though the Productivity Commission failed to show any substantial benefits to immigration, it tried its hardest to do so. If they had properly assessed the harmful effects on our enviroment caused by the demands of ever greater numbers of people or if they had used indexes that accurately measured our prosperity instead of the GDP, the picture would have been far worse.
Former Democrats leader John Coulter criticised these shortcomings of the Productivity Commission in a media release of 6 January 2006 on behalf of Sustainable Population Australia.
Newtown is perfectly safe, Kim, you’re right. The NIMBY crowd are not only misantrophes, they’re fearful cowering depressives.Just to stir the pot a little, as if it isn’t stirred enough, it’s far, far safer walking late at night in the thick of the densely populated city than almost anywhere else that time of the day. Anyone care to disagree? I’ve been dead drunk past midnight staggering home from Central station with nary a care about getting mugged, something I wouldn’t even consider doing in the suburbs. If we want less crime we should fill the country up and get rid of trading hour regulations.
Christine Keeler wrote on 31 December 2006 at 12:47 am
“Yes. Bringing over tens of thousands of Algerian immigrants, plonking them in large industrial estates, and then having industry piss off was hardly a triumph of planning, was it?”
Most of them were not immigrants, Christine. They were French citizens. And the riots in France have been greatly exaggerated by the Anglo press in order to make their own problems look better. Algeria was, until 1962, French. That meant that Algerians had free movement in and out of France just like everyone else. There was also a bridging period under the Evian and other accords. It was in fact difficult for Algerian-born French to make enough money and remain in France during this period unless they were exceptionately skilled and thereby able to get out from under the employer lobby which, up until 1973, continued to seek cheap labor. Because of the attraction that Mainland France had for the citizens of French Algeria some of these people continued to seek work there despite the awful conditions meted out to unskilled non-mainland-born workers. Attempts were made to dissuade the employment in and movement to the French mainland of these people because, since they were citizens it was becoming increasingly difficult to deny them their rights to reasonable housing and wages in a post-war situation where there was serious competition for housing. One strategy then was to attempt to flood the market with non-French immigrant labour from places like Marocco and Tunisie because those people had no legal right to remain in France permanently and could simply be brought in on a visa for a year and then left in limbo with little alternative but to go home if their work permits were not renewed. These people without rights posed serious competiton to unskilled French-Algeria-born workers and made it increasingly difficult for them to remain in mainland France. Employers were supposed to guarantee them housing but this was poorly complied with.
In 1973, 1974 French employers, under a right wing government, admitted that the situation was out of control and, in the light of the oil shock and planning for future trends in oil depletion, France and most European countries simply stopped importing immigrant workers. France then engaged in policies of overseas AID which incorporated training and a bunch of other agreements whereby the governments of ’sending countries’ politically limited emigration in return for benefits.
This new policy did not affect people and their descendents who were born in Algeria when it was French.
Any child born to a person born in Algeria up to 1962 (and later in some instances which I would have to look up) also had the right to French Citizenship (droit du sang). Under European Law developed during the era when the Soviet Union would not allow its citizens to leave, a convention of family reunion came about, which the French delayed ratifying until quite late. (Australia is not a signatory to this). This convention meant and still means that any French citizen has the right to import spouse, parents, children, brothers, sisters. This carries the implication of chain migration and chain citizenship through blood or marriage association with a French citizen. The main way to stop chain migration under these circumstances is to limit physical accomodation (public housing and subsidies to private housing) so that relatives are not able to gain access to France and then apply for citizenship. The French are well aware of this. Many endorse on the one hand the limiting of public housing in order to limit immigration but are infuriated by the fact that people who manage to get a foothold in France are entitled to public housing which is limited
. Public and private housing both are costs to the state and only limited sources of private profit.
It is a grave political error, which French-Algerians accuse as racism, to assume that all or most ‘Algerian’ people and their descendents are ‘immigrants’.
Note that in France and most of the Western World with the exception of Australia, permanent immigration means a visa of one year or more and does not entail the right to work. Most immigrants counted as ‘permanent’ are on one year visas. Work permits must be sought separately.
To stay in France permanently you really have to have citizenship or have managed to renew your visa continuously. Citizenship is the equivalent of Australia’s permanent immigration. The actual rate of citizenship acquisition in France plus a count of the number of people who manage to continually renew their visas is fairly difficult to estimate but when I last tried I worked it out at somewhere around 70,000 net per annum. The difficulty is that it is considered racist to count people as immigrants after they become French citizens so the records are not accessible.
Details of this and of Australian figures and laws are in Appendix 4 of my thesis which is probably on-line somewhere; hopefully at Swinburne if not at http://www.candobetter.org/sheila . I am relating this from memory so will almost certainly get something wrong. Note that there were and are other French territories where the people also have the right of free movement and to work in and out of France. These include New Caledonians and French Guineans and several other countries where there is also free education, health-care and housing. Note that French territories tend to have lower rates of population growth than their English speaking neighbours in the Pacific.
Sheila N
Phil on 31 December 2006 at 11:53 am, obviously miffed, published a diatribe entirely based on unsupported opinion, and urged Sheila N to “run off and do something useful, like build a solar/wind energy capturing fuel cell. Or pushing for newspaper organisations and book publishers to abandon print and go online and digital with new models of production and distribution so we don’t have to cut down trees or wood chip.”
His excuse for his abuse was that he has a lot of faith in technology
He also indicated that he believes that human beings (like Father Christmas perhaps) have somehow evolved beyond material limits.
All I can say, Phil, is, if we have so many solutions then why are we in this mess? If you know so many technical answers, why don’t you do something useful and build them yourself? And, if your faith is so strong that your arguments don’t need evidence, how come you resort to insults, you superior product of evolution, you.
))
Sheila N
Phil,
I would suggest to you that your own time would be spent far more usefully if you took time to comprehend the arguments of those of us including Clive Hamilton, who have given all of these matters a great deal of thought.
Phil wrote:
In fact many of us are doing just that and many more would love to do the same, if we had the land and money. However none of us are under any delusion that such activities by only a small minority of the Australian population will make a significant when the world’s out-of-control globalised economy is destroying our natural capital at an unprecedented rate.
In Cuba in the 1990’s the whole society was able to confront the crisis that we will all have to soon face ourselves, as Mike Stasse has shown, when oil imports from the former USSR were suddenly cut by 53%in 1990. As land was not monopolised by private speculators and developers, it was possible to use every suitable available piece of land in the cities and in the countryside in order to grow food sustainably, largely according to the principles of permaculture, so that little artificial input from petroleum-based energy and petroleum-based fertilisers and insecticides was necessary. Cuba got over this crisis well before the end of the 1990’s and now have a food supply far more sustainable, nutritional and healthy than that of the U.S. and Australia. (Check out excellent “Diet for a Dead Planet” by Christopher D. Cook RRP AU$29.95, but not around meal times, to learn how food is produced, processed and distributed in the U.S., and, I am told, in Australia to a significant degree also.)
Whatever its faults, the Cuban government was one which was capable of turning its country to deal with a resources shortage. (for further information see http://www.communitysolution.org and The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil) The same cannot be said for the Howard Government, nor, unfortunately, many who now adopt the mantle of ‘dissident’. When this changes, I am sure that millions of Australians would jump at the opportunity to develop sustainable agricultural and manufacturing systems in the cities and in the countryside as they did in Cuba. The question will still remains, what will be achievable if we have millions more mouths to feed and if the continued deterioration of our environment is not stopped. (See Paul Sheehan “We Fiddle as the Continent turns to Dust” written in October 2006.)
In regard to your technological optimism, I think you should read what was written in another forum in response to an article by Professor John Quiggin, “Against the Doomsayers”:
Miffed? Good grief! More like incredulous. Look, while I’ve taken the time to read your (and Daggett’s) vast tracts of commentary (most of which should be published on your own blog), I’ll have no truck with your endless negativity. You sound like you work for Hamilton.
We do have solutions, I highlighted two that are occurring right now, show me where you have a positive one that is related to something other than your humans are bad and we should shut the door narrative, then I’ll be prepared to listen without the snark.
I’ll also throw in a blog commenting tip – keep it short ok? I’m sure your thesis is a good one, but I don’t think we need to read it here all at once.
Fo real! You’re using Cuba as an example? The Island Paradise? Look, the reason they had to resort to their solutions is that they did not have many options. We do. Many. Want me to list?
Energy: Nukes, coal, gas, solar, wind, wave……and the capital to invest in serious r&d, scaling a project etc.
Cuba because of it’s historical choices does not. They were left to scrabble on the land, and I should note that when push came to shove they gave their citizens a pretty free hand in helping to alleviate impending starvation and the people responded with creativity. I rest my case.
Phil said “There is no denying the issues in play, but none of them are intractable, all are solvable, most by simple solutions combined with smart growth and efficiencies and the right application of specific technologies to specific problems.”
Therein lies the problem…. Smart growth? Are you kidding me? Can you explain the difference between ’smart growth’ and ‘dumb growth’? Growth is growth. It’s a MATHEMATICAL FORMULA. Period. 3.5% growth means doubling everything in 20 years. Period. If this stupid nonsense keeps going, 20 years from now, there would be twice as many people, twice as many cars, twice as many roads, we’d need twice as much food, twice as much water, and we’d release twice as many GHG’s. Efficiency (and I know all about that, because I’ve ‘run off and did something useful’, I’ve built the most energy efficient and solar powered house in Qld – that’s what I do) always ends up gobbled up by growth. POINT IN CASE: today’s car engines are twice as efficient as they were 30 – 40 years ago. So what do we do? We put them in 2 tonne 4WD’s, because now the engines are so efficient, a landcruiser doesn’t use any more fuel than a 1975 Holden. On top of that, there are now TWICE as many 4WD’s on the road as there used to be Holdens in 1975, and presto, fuel consumption is up, GHG emissions are up, and tthe result of all the efficiencies is zilch!! ZILCH! We are far worse off now when it comes to cars than we were 30 years ago……….. the same goes with houses which now have more bathrooms and toilets than I’d care to point a stick at.
Then Phil added “I know you think you have a forward looking view, but it’s not. The paradox of what you and Hamilton suggest is a going backwards, so you can count me out. I prefer a bright (Viridian) green future full of promise, technological solutions to future problems and a view that is positive in our ability to problem solve.”
I used to believe in ‘the green techno future” too. The point is, building my ‘green’ house has required 100 MWhrs of energy, causing the release of 100 tonnes of CO2. I could NEVER in a million years have built it without fossil fuels. If there’s one thing this exercise I’ve been going through has taught me, it’s that with fossil fuels you can do anything, build eco-houses, and your favourite dumb idea, the fuel cell and the hydrogen economy…..
The REAL future is not going backwards as you describe it, it’s going SIDEWAYS. I’ve gone sideways. I no longer work, (Halleluyah!) will ditch my car for good this year, and I will grow much of the food I need. I haven’t had an electricity bill for 18 months. The system sucks, really sucks, led me to depression I can do well without. For me the future has never looked brighter. Yours, obviously must be pretty dark, because with your head in the sand, you won’t be able to see much.
Please don’t be condescending to Sheila N. I think she’s much smarter than you.
Mike S.
Phil, I don’t think it’s possible to persuade these people, despite your excellent credentials and experience in an industry with a real interest in changing existing transport and infrastructure in Sydney (disclosure: two personal friends have dealt with Phil on a business level and through them I can vouch for just how good a businessperson he is – click on his name if you want to know more).
They’re too interested in pretending to be the national Mother-in-Law and being leading exponents of miserablism.
Economic growth is not the same as population growth. I thought the whole point of this “green” anti-immigrationism was that we’re not getting “overcrowded” because of declining birth rates.
So Phil’s a brilliant businessman. So what? In a previous life, so was I. I co-owned one of the most successful photographic studios in Brisbane, and was even elected President of the Qld Division of the Australian Institute of Professional Photography in 1989/90/91. I won more photo awards than I care to gloat over, and had letters behind my name as a result. So what? Who really cares?
This has no bearing whatever on the future of our society. I have been studying “Limits to Growth” for many years, and have come to the undeniable conclusion that growth is finished. Not if, but when.
At least I’m glad to see Phil’s into bicycles. When the rego on my car runs out, my only form of transport will be my carbon fibre road bike on which I used to do 160 – 200 km a week before I embarked on my building exercise…….. oh yes, I’ve built a whole house, pretty much on my own, from scratch, one I designed from the ground up MYSELF. I’m no dill you know…….
Mike S
Mike, glad to know you’ve made your choice, I’m happy that you’re happy.
Me? I’m holding out for my floating bicycles powered by the energy manufactured from a Soylent Green of survivalists who didn’t make it over the wall of the great city I’m living in.
By the way Helen, personally I’m no successful businessman, I work for one, yet care deeply about his business which is of course in my best interests. As a result his success looks like my success……….otherwise known as “the way the world really works”.
Modest as usual Phil. When the time comes I’ll be looking to get a ladies mountain bike from you – yes, I like chain guards and not having to execute a roundhouse kick in order to get on the thing.
Reality Check said: “Economic growth is not the same as population growth. I thought the whole point of this “greenâ€? anti-immigrationism was that we’re not getting “overcrowdedâ€? because of declining birth rates.”
But it is……. 3.5% growth of ANYTHING, people, wheat, money, IS a mathematical formula. So if the economy ‘grows’ at 3.5%, then it means in 20 years twice as much money is throughput for the system, and twice as much energy and unrenewable resources have to be used up.
And if the population isn’t growing because of declining birthrates, then why are entire suburbs popping up in The Gap which I’ve just left, and Caboolture which I used to drive past with monotonous regularity when I was building? There’s so much building going on there that the Bruce Highway is being widened to six lanes PAST Caboolture!? The same is going on between Brisbane and the Gold Coast where much of the highway is EIGHT lanes wide……. It’s like Brisbane and its surroundings has gone totally MAD.
I stopped riding my bike in Brisbane because the major road I used to cycle on was turned into a 4 lane highway, and riding it was life endangering. That, for me, was a major reason why I decided to abandon ship.
Also, if the birth rate is going down, why is it houses have on average doubled in area in the last 20 years? It’s called economic GROWTH, that’s what.
The nonsense must stop, and if we don’t do it ourselves, Nature will do it for us.
Mike S
Phil,
If you think my posts are long, then that’s unfortunate. In my defence I would argue that at least they are an attempt to address the very serious issues at hand properly acknowledge and respond to points made by others on this forum. I think that they are still a useful contirbution to the discussion, but if other site users overwhelmingly think that they are a waste of time, then I am perfectly happy to put them elsewhere.
For your part, you have avoided addressing the substantive arguments in Clive Hamilton’s article and you have avoided addressing the substantive arguments put by myself and others in support of Clive Hamilton.
I would suggest that one reason they are long is that rational discussion of these issues has been prevented for the last three decades by unfair vilification of people who have advocated population stability and low immigration as xenophobic, racist and misanthropic and this still persists even now on this forum. So, viewpoints that should have been aired decades ago only being properly aired fairly today.
Only last year when I attempted to discuss the population question with a fairly well known left wing person I was told that even discussing such a question was ‘taboo’.
You aren’t obliged to read my responses to what I see as the fallacious illogical case in favour of continued population growth, if you also happen to consider the question to be ‘taboo’ or if they make you feel uncomfortable in any other way.
—
I included material about Cuba as an example of what can be done if the whole society can be harnessed towards confronting the serious problems they face. It’s a pity that this has not altered your view that I am only negative and misanthropic.
The same sort of thing that is happening in Cuba should be happening in this country, but isn’t. To attempt to exhort individuals to go off and attempt to solve these extremely formidable problems as individuals as you have done, whilst our Government is leading the rest of this society in precisely the wrong direction, is only an attempt to divert people away from effective political activism, in my view.
The issue is not overcrowding, Mike. It’s enforced social interaction. Many of the largest ‘McMansions’ are constructed on relatively small parcels of land. They are clearly designed to allow people to avoid excessive social interaction. More information on research in this area here, here, and here.
Interestingly, Hairshirt Hamilton chose not to highlight the one part of Calhoun’s research that hasn’t been discredited: forcing people to live in close proximity to people wholly alien to them causes all sorts of problems.
My partner is a builder. He’s knocked up a few McMansions in his time, although is focussing on restoring old Queenslanders to their former glory where we live now.
Hey! I think unrestrained growth is bad, that we should consolidate our existing suburbs so we don’t get the problems of expansion on the fringes.
But you are peddling some errors here.
You can can obtain growth in GDP by growth in services. It doesn’t follow that growth in GDP requires doubling of cars, doubling of resource use etc. If only economics was that simple.
Nor is it true that population growth is causing growth in the size of houses. In fact average household size is dropping and people are overconsuming housing. Another great reason to consolidate well located existing suburbs. you just can’t increase density by building bigger houses with fewer people in them.
Pretty well everyone on this thread agrees that we need to use resources more sustainably and that something needs to be done. A bigger question might be what population can the earth sustain and how does Australia fit into a global solution. I’m an immigrant. I’m not prepared to say “close the door now I’m here.”
Angharad said: “You can can obtain growth in GDP by growth in services. It doesn’t follow that growth in GDP requires doubling of cars, doubling of resource use etc. If only economics was that simple.”
How so? Designing and building houses is a service. So is servicing cars, and selling them, and cleaning them… And all the people who do these services drive everywhere, and they all eat food, and they all use electricity to watch TV on their new plasma screens, and they all replace their computers when they’re deemed too slow to be cool…….
“Nor is it true that population growth is causing growth in the size of houses.”. I never said that, in fact I said the opposite. Family sizes have halved, but house sizes have doubled…..
“Pretty well everyone on this thread agrees that we need to use resources more sustainably and that something needs to be done.” Let’s get one thing straight: NOTHING we do is sustainable. Nothing. Believe me that came as a shock to me too when the penny dropped. The only people who live sustainably are those who hunt and gather in New Guinea or the Amazon. There are waaaay too many people on this planet for us to do anything sustainably. The term ’sustainable’ has now been hijacked to the point it’s meaningless.
Like I said, not even my so called ’sustainable’ house could’ve been built without fossil fuels, and once they’re gone (only a matter of time, how long no-one can say for sure), all bets are off.
Our insane agricultural system is what has me most worried. Did you know that out of every ten calories you consume nine come from Fossil Fuels (Gas Oil and Coal)? What happens when they start getting in short supply? Who decides who eats and who starves? Triage anyone?
Oh and yes I do know about organics. I practice organics right here, and I (at the moment) drive to the shop to buy my organic fertiliser, which was brought to the shop on a truck, which was grown on farms using tractors, water pumps, etc etc etc……… I hope you get my drift.
BTW, I didn’t invent the saying “NOTHING we do is sustainable”. A chap called Peter Fries who is some head honcho with the UN’s environment sector told me so. And I trust his opinion greatly.
Mike S.
So, OK Mike. What’s to be done? You’ve argued there’s a looming environmental catastrophe, you’ve built your not-so-sustainable house, ditching your car and growing your own food and you’ve left the urban slums (the Gap!) that “behavioural sink”.
Given the original post was a critique of Hamilton’s op-ed about urban consolidation and immigration – what are you proposing for the rest of us? Should we all move to a 5 acre block somewhere?
Angharad said: “You can can obtain growth in GDP by growth in services. It doesn’t follow that growth in GDP requires doubling of cars, doubling of resource use etc.”
There’s one other thing I omitted to say about his which is important. Yes indeed we manufacture a lot less ’stuff’ than we used to in this country, but instead we import it fromn China, India, Korea, Thailand…….. and THEY use the resources and energy.
The end result’s the same. Our consumption (and use) of the stuff they make for us results in just as much pollution and resource depletion as if we manufactured them ourselves. In fact because they don’t have all the eco-law hoops we have to jump thru, their pollution levels are far worse than ours would ever be.
Mike S.
I imagine you’re a nice person too, Shiela. That doesn’t stop zero-net migration being a crap idea though. Hamilton has slurred migrants, as have plenty of the arguments put for the ‘house full’ case above, and if my calling him on that is “stooping to slurring him”, then I guess I’ll just have to stoop.
I have spent a long time fighting against people like Howard and Hanson using migrants as an easy whipping boy. It would be grossly hypocritical of me to back off other people just because they put a flimsy ‘environmental’ cloak over the top of their argument. Hanson and some of her AAFI fellow travellers did the same, some of whom also were active in parts of the green movement. The left have as bad a history of bigotry and prejudice as the right – it is a human trait, not an ideological one – and it should be attacked consistently.
The reason why people who are argue such an extreme position as zero-net migration get labelled as misanthropes anbd xenophobes is because that is a core basis of the position. It is not an anti-population growth position, it is a ‘make people stay/go somewhere else’ position, so that people who are already living in a grossly profligate and inefficient way can keep doing so. You can’t argue a misanthropic policy and then complain when people call it that, the same as Hanson couldn’t make racist statements and then expect people not to criticise her comments as being racist, regardless of the other points she wished to make.
The social justice implications are completely ignored – globally and locally. Anyone wanting to come here is labelled ’self-interested and money obsessed’, when self-interest is the clearly expressed motivation presented in much of the arguments above and in Hamilton’s original article. You want to maintain your high quality of life, but you don’t want to give anyone else the chance to improve theirs. It is extreme environmentalism at its self-obessed, anti-human, unjust worst. Efforts by the green movement to show that they are not single issue and are concerned about social justice, social services, workable economic policies and the like are totally undermined by proposals like this.
Getting the right mix of migration is important and difficult. An ‘open door’ policy is an extremist approach which is not workable, certainly while we do urban planning so appallingly. A ‘house full’ policy is just as extreme and equally unworkable. It is a one-dimensional (non)solution which shows a failure of intellectual and policy imagination.
The real debate on migration issues lies in getting the intake right taking social, economic and envrionmental factors into account, in combination with better settlement services and informed public debate based on facts, rather than ‘migrants take our jobs/drive down wages/ruin our environment/destroy our culture’ stuff. Australia does better than most countries at this, but we need to do better, especially at the planning level. We need to be focussing the debate on these issues, not getting diverted into debating positions which are extremist, unjust and apart from anything else, utterly unworkable.
If you don’t like crowded cities, go live in a small country town – many of them would welcome some population growth. But don’t pretend you’re being more ’sustainable’ by doing so.
I prefer a ‘think globally, act locally’ approach, rather than a think locally, act locally, the rest of you can bugger off’ approach. Migrants are people too, and we’re all stuck on the one planet.
Spoken like a true politician, Andrew
=)
Values statements, cheaper than the price of hard facts and too slippery to call to account!
Politics is all about appearing to be the Good Father to the Credulous Children.
Of course I couldn’t expect you to respond by saying,
“Yes, actually I AM spruiking to make the rich richer at the expense of safe and affordable water, land for housing and sustainable agriculture, environmental ammenity, and democracy, but naturally I am packaging that basic policy in values statements which no-one will ever be able to hold me to!”
Your political life would be over if you did. You would never get any press again.
I am not running for election so I don’t have to promise a chicken in every pot whilst promising no chicken will ever come to any harm.
I can relate the facts and you can just sit back and throw mud at me and other truth merchants every so often.
A nice little earner.
What you promise reminds me of an old song by Dalida and Delon, called Paroles:
Words, candy and chocolates,
Thanks but not for me,
but you can certainly offer them to someone else
who likes flattery as much as you do ..
Encore des mots toujours des mots
More words, still more words
always the same words …
…
Easy words, breakable words …
Words like the wind strumming a violin
and carrying the perfume from flowers on its back
Not for me thanks,
but you can certainly offer them to someone else
who likes wind …
Words,
nothing but words,
magical words, tactical words,
which sound false
Oh yes, so false
Sheila N
If it didn’t so seriously threaten the comfort, well-being and ultimate survival of all that I love, I could feel some benevolence toward the abysmal ignorance shown by multiple posters on this forum regarding the basic arithmetic of growth.
As things are though, this intractable befuddlement, borne of an obstinant refusal to actually listen to and think about quite simple principles and relationships, sickens me.
The very simple and cataclysmic arithmetic implications of systemic growth upon finity have been linked to, but very clearly have either not been attended to or have not been very well grasped by a large number of apparently otherwise quite intelligent posters. Commentators who continue to rabbit on about various human ‘imperatives’ as though these somehow transcend physical reality (yes, I do demand the right to fly as my birthrite and denounce gravity as an inhumane prejudice that victimises my genuine need) or blandly stated blind faith in technology’s ability to leap the physically impossible exponential frontiers that are so obviously posed by compounding doubling.
Then there is the seemingly willful confusion being garbled between various values that can be subjected to a growth analysis. Yes economic growth can be compounded separately to population growth but the fact salient to CH’s article is that right here, right now this is not so. In fact an evil inverse is at work. Economic growth is being pursued very simplistically, very expressly and very destructively via population growth.
There is no doubt that gross wealth is rising, factored largely via increases in values of finite resource stocks and escalating dysfunction management due to demands driven by population compression. How though is the game going as regards per capita returns, equity (of income and access to vital social commons) and overall structural balance?
A perfect example of the frightful liquidation of social and ecological capital underway, a reality that those oblivious to it like to discredit as negative paranoia, is the pursposeful intent of the Beattie Govt. to (literally) liquidate the productive and recently restructured SEQ dairy industry, as well as an entire long established community, in pursuit and promotion of a flawed dam that ostensibly but falsely presents notional capacity to supply water to service ongoing SEQ urban growth.
Surely when population growth has become the economy, sacrosanct above all else, even real industrial growth, it is time for intelligent people to yield to the ugly reality of the topic, regardless of what they might most like to believe.
I’m utterly staggered that Andrew Bartlett, a SEQ resident and a representative Senator with an enormous responsibility to get matters of such local significance into some accurate focus, can be so completely at sea on the vitally active components and their relationships.
Andrew, is your bleeding heart drowning your brain?
Are you spruiking electoral market share within a narrowly informed, self-satisified urban niche by way of a message that can reliably secure self-promoting mass media bandwidth?
Are you the unwitting tool of national operatives far more resolute and purposeful than you have ever been?
These are fair questions to ask of a parliamentary representative.
As for the various other posters – this topic ain’t a simple rhetorical game. Resource depletion is deadly. This civilisation would not be the first to succumb to it. In fact is would be the first not to if it can somehow manage to adequately increase its empathy toward physical reality. If not it willl be the biggest, most globally pervasive one to fall yet. Where you gonna go?
You owe it to your dependents to think openly and comprehensively on these matters. Be aware of the nature and source of the repetitive social messages we are all absorbing and that we tend to reflexively reflect as obvious fact, because they are so familiar, and reasonable, because they are so uncommonly contended.
There is nothing more negative in its final outcome than optimistic delusion.
Sheila, that was a really cheap shot. Andrew B has been completely transparent about where he’s coming from on this thread (as he has been at Catallaxy). Maybe you need to get over yourself and actually think through the implications of what he says.
Just sayin.
Andrew, you wrote:
Of course, I agree.
If as, appears to be the case, the Democrats haven’t yet come up with what they believe is the ‘right intake’, I would suggest that is well past the time that they gave this question some serious consideration.
One place to start would be Michelle Graymore’s PhD “Journey to Sustainability: Small Regions, Sustainable Carrying Capacity and Sustainability Assessment Methods”
If you approach this question with an open mind, you cannot preclude the possibility that we may have already exceeded the limits that our environment can handle, can you, just as I, in the absence of the knowledge I now have, could not have entirely ruled out the possibility that this continent really needs 30 million, 50 million or even 100 million in order to be viable, as some have suggested?
And, if the evidence supports that we have indeed exceeded the limits, as I believe we have, what then? Do we continue to allow another 1.25 million to be crowded into South East Queensland by 2026? Or do we, at some point do, what you now tell us is unconscionable, that is to tell those that want to settle here that our continent is indeed full?
If we have already exceeded that limit, then surely the time to stop immigration fueled population growth is now? At the very least we must stop peddling the nonsense that this country needs more people.
Andrew, you wrote:
I think you need to re-read some of my posts. Could you suggest why it would not be for more equitable for citizens in poor nations to receive foreign aid rather than an equivalent being used to settle only a far smaller number of people from those countries here? Can you tell me why Gore Vidal is wrong to defend Norway’s right not to take in large numbers of immigrants from countries like Bangladesh?
Also, it should be again pointed out Sustainable Population Australia supports an increase in the intake of humanitarian refugees, whilst arguing for an overall reduction in immigration.
The fact is the world is in a terrible mess today because we failed to pay sufficient attention to the very considered warnings of people like Paul Ehrlich in 1968, and, long before that, Thomas Malthus.
Instead, the world paid far too much regard to the ill-informed and recklessly irresponsible opinions of the likes of Julian Symon. We allowed the world population to grow from around 4 billion back then to 6.5 billion on the basis of the unsustainable fossil-fuel-dependent increase in agricultural productivity of the “Green Revolution”. No-one has any idea how the necessary agricultural productivity can be maintained when the supply of petroleum based pesticides and natural-gas-based fertilisers soon begins to inevitably dwindle.
We are hardly going to make any worthwhile difference to this by allowing Australia to also become overcrowded.
The problem can only be fixed if we control our numbers and urge others to do likewise, and generous foreign aid should be given to those countries to both lift them out of their poverty and to provide them with the means to control their population.
Hi Scepticlawyer,
For some reason you didn’t see the cheap shots that Andrew just made, maybe because you agree with his value-statements or because he seems like a nice guy.
Much of my research and writing is thinking through the implications of the identikit rhetoric on growth economics and population growthism of politicians like Andrew Bartlett. See chapter 6 of The Growth Lobby & its Absence on http://www.candobetter.org/sheila
The history of ‘populationism’ goes back to just before Federation. It was built on land speculation.
Andrew will not have to back up the promises inherent in his completely non-specific values statements and the gate posts will continue to be moved magically as they always have been in this country. That is how we got to where we are today – in a big awful mess. Andrew’s values statements cost him nothing and he has failed to address real arguments and problems raised here with effective arguments but has simply mouthed cliches or thrown mud at people who don’t make statements they cannot back up.
That’s cheap-shooting in my book.
Because of smooth talking, kindly smiling, growth-pushers like Bartlett I now face losing all the food trees in my permacultured back garden because Melbourne’s population and economy have outgrown the water supply (again) and I may not water the trees more than twice a week.
This will cost me enormously since I will have to work extra hours to go and purchase fruit I would have picked and I will lose perhaps 13 trees which I have faithfully nurtured for three years. It is lucky that I actually get money by working for others. Everyone does not have that choice.
Is Andrew Bartlett going to make it rain some more or float an iceberg round to Melbourne or ruin some more of our environment to run a desalination project in time to stop my orchard failing?
No, he isn’t. So why should I respect him or any of the other politicians who don’t stand up against growth?
I personally cannot think of anything more evil than overshooting water-supply by intentionally boosting population.
Andrew may well be a cheery and likeable well-spring of good intentions but we all have to walk the road that’s paved with those.
Sheila N
Mike, it all sounds so hopeless. Why don’t you just neck yourself? That’s a surefire way to reduce your environmental footprint.
What provide the basis for you to go to uni and do the thesis you are spruiking and linking to?
Instead of making arcane accusations that distract from the very pertinent questions that you quoted yet so curiously ignored, why not attend to those questions?
Without water we are all dust. Growthists have an overwhelming obligation to explain with absolute exactitude both where vital resources will come from to furnish their dreams as well as what the collateral consequences of that provision will be. Surely such expectation can’t be a contentious one.
Dear all,
On reflection, I am really sorry that I responded to Andrew’s cheap shots with my own not much more expensive ones.
We thus detracted from Daggett’s careful and detailed approach with a set of questions for Andrew that would greatly help this subject along.
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2006/12/30/and-a-happy-new-year-to-you-too-clive/#comment-276943
Sheila N
I think you mean the stupidly snarky ad hominems that didn’t at all respond to Andrew’s points, but just dripped in sarcasm of the most puerile kind.
No, I mean the fair and reasonable questions regarding water supply that Reality Check quoted but then offered no response to whatsoever ahead of making tenuous claims of systemic benevolence that must somehow alienate a person’s right to make objective judgement on that system.
As for your remarks, I’ll assume they refer directly to my comments to Andrew.
You may have noticed that Andrew is an elected Senator with a very distinctly described obligation to represent the public interest of his home State. When he can recognise the significant flow of people into SEQ from Sydney, and when he can ( I assume) grasp the water crisis now gripping SEQ (amongst other less visibly palpable horrors), yet with that recognition he still chooses to throw such shallow rhetoric in defence of the main cause of that flow, I have every right as a constituent to question his motives.
In luie of some adequate explanation beyond the hackneyed rhetoric he has coughed up thus far in defence of current record levels of immigration boosting, my only other recourse would be to question his intellect commensurate to the proper demands of his publicly funded duty. Which I guess I did do in my first question put to him in the post I assume you are referring to.
Please tell me precisely where my logic on this falls down.
And further to this incredibly silly statement quoted above, and in direct pertinence to the blog topic, it is measurably more difficult and more expensive now for an Austalian citizen to get a tertiary degree than it was 30 years ago before this current phase of back-to-the-future, industrial revolution style ‘free’ market driven growth exploded its community destroying stench all over us. And getting steadily worse.
Moving forward?
Who do pundits claiming such ‘progress’ think they are kidding? Themselves most likely?
Well, I’m back from NY’s drinkies and have had a few and have decided that I don’t feel too charitable to the depressives who’ve now come to dominate this post. So, in the spirit of the new year, I think they should piss off since it appears that this is a co-ordinated spammy effort.
My good cheer has left me, so with Yobbos words as a clarion call to sanity, I agree that this pack of depressives should neck themselves.
If it comes down to living in a future world populated, organised and run by them, or death by a calamity of climate change, growth and energy poverty, I’ll take death thank you.
Aftermatter:
It should be noted that the reason I closed comments to this post is that certain spammy commenters were unable to restrain themselves when it came to length of comment, preferring to post essays, they obviously have a lot to learn regarding blogging etiqette, their “style” was impolite in its excess.
If they have anything to say on later posts they can happily do so, but brevity is the watchword when it comes to blogging discussion, it allows others into the discussion – any voice is just one of many.
Lastly, if they also persist in spamming older posts of mine I will place them in the banned list.