Eye on Immigration

Time for tougher citizenship laws

2009-10-22T21:30:00.000-07:00

KEVIN Rudd is considering changes to allow authorities to take action against new Australian citizens who act in defiance of values underpinning their citizenship.

The Prime Minister said yesterday he was reflecting on the adequacy of citizenship laws after news that a Sydney man had been arrested for allegedly harassing the families of Australian soldiers killed in Afghanistan.

On Wednesday, the Australian Federal Police charged self-styled Muslim cleric Sheik Haron for allegedly writing letters to widows calling the dead Diggers pigs and murderers.

The sheik, understood to go by a variety of names, has been charged with using a postal service to "menace, harass or cause offence". He was granted conditional bail, to reappear on November 10.

Mr Rudd yesterday described the case as stomach-churning, but said he would not comment in detail because it was under investigation.

*snip*

NSW RSL president Don Rowe said if Sheik Haron were found guilty he should "not be allowed to live in Australia and enjoy the freedom which has been so valiantly fought (for) and sacrificed by our young men".

Sheik Haron allegedly wrote to Mr Rudd in February claiming that the Black Saturday bushfires that killed 173 people were retribution for Australian support of the execution in Indonesia of militants convicted of the deadly 2002 Bali nightclub bombings.

Immigration barrister John Gibson said there were grounds for the government to take action against a person if the applicant had lied in their application for permanent residence.

But he said it was "far more complex" where a person had obtained citizenship by conferral. "Once you become a citizen, for better or for worse you're a part of the country," he told The Australian.

"Once you become a citizen, for better or for worse you're a part of the country."

Australia has been throwing around citizenship like confetti for decades. Given our ridiculously lax citizenship laws, it is hardly surprising that we have miscreants like Sheik Haron now residing in our country.

Personally, I think Australia should emulate Switzerland's citizenship laws, the toughest in the Western world.

As this article explains:

Switzerland already has the strictest naturalization rules in Europe. If you want to become Swiss you must live in the country legally for at least 12 years—and pay taxes, and have no criminal record—before you can apply for citizenship. It still does not mean that your wish will be granted, however, and the fact that you were born in Lausanne or Lugano does not make any difference. There are no “amnesties” and illegals are deported. Even if an applicant satisfies all other conditions, the local community in which he resides has the final say: it can interview the applicant and hold a public vote before naturalization is approved. If rejected he can apply again, but only after ten years.

Selling Australia

2009-10-15T09:36:00.001-07:00

From The Herald Sun:

Million-dollar sales force up property prices

By Peter Familari
October 08, 2009 12:01am

FORGET the "for sale" sign, the new catch-cry in Melbourne's leafy suburbs is "duoshao qian".

Victoria's top real estate agents have begun hiring Mandarin-speaking salesmen to cash in on the property boom.

Translated, "duoshao qian" means "how much"? And it's a question being asked more than ever before, The Herald Sun reports.

Leading agents say more than 30 per cent of their stock is bought by families from mainland China.

"This calendar year 34 per cent of our sales went to mainly Chinese buyers compared to 15 per cent last year. We're up 125 per cent overall," Jellis Craig director Scott Patterson said.

"Demand is so strong we've got two native speaker agents starting next week."

Some agents say the boom grew when the Federal Government eased foreign investment rules on property last year.

"There's been an incredible surge from Chinese buyers since the rules for foreign ownership of real estate were relaxed by the Government to allow foreign citizens to buy established homes worth more than $300,000," buyers' advocate Mal James said.

"You could say that's the key driver and single reason for the property boom in Victoria especially for homes in the $1 million-$4 million range and it's also the catalyst for so many Chinese buyers."

Mr James says his clients are facing competition from cashed-up Chinese buyers, especially in Kew, Canterbury and Balwyn. There is also Asian interest in Toorak, Malvern and East Malvern.

He says the Chinese are attracted by areas with quality private schools.

The Asian buying spree is pushing up prices and adding to the housing shortage.

"There's no doubt it's adding about 15 per cent to prices and creating a shortage because the buyers are not selling out of an existing home," Mr Patterson said.

Australia permitted 4015 foreign investors to buy homes worth an estimated $2.97 billion in 2007-08, Foreign Investment Review Board research shows.

Victoria had the highest approvals of any state, soaring to 2238 last year, almost double that of the year before. A rise is expected for 2009.

Former plastic surgeon and financial planner Jin Shang will be Jellis Craig's first Mandarin-speaking agent from next week, and he can't wait.

"China is the world's strongest economy and Australia's major trading partner," he said.

"Chinese want residential properties here because they feel comfortable in Australia's multicultural environment and they know it has one of the world's best education systems."

Original article

This is how modern Australia, the "knowledge nation," makes a buck these days - selling its houses, along with its residency rights, to Chinese colonists err... investors.

"Chinese want residential properties here because they feel comfortable in Australia's multicultural environment and they know it has one of the world's best education systems."

So, the Chinese are not coming because they have any interest in the institutions, people, culture or traditions of Australia. No, they are coming because they want more comfort, better education services (courtesy of the Australian taxpayer), and a "multicultural environment" that allows them to surround themselves with fellow Chinese so that they never have to integrate into wider Australian society.

The Australian government, acting on behalf of its mates in the real estate industry, is effectively inviting foreign populations to move in and colonise parts of the country.

And, once again, Australians are forced to carry the costs. They have to compete with rich foreigners for housing in a country already facing a chronic housing shortage. They have to pay their taxes just so that wealthy Chinese can simply move in and make use of Australia's public services and infrastructure. They have to tolerate the creation of foreign enclaves within their cities, knowing that any objection, no matter how slight or reasonable, will result in them being labelled "xenophobic" and "racist."

This is the reality of life in modern Australia, a big piece of real estate up for sale to the highest bidder.

The origins of pro-immigration political correctness in Australia

2009-09-21T12:55:00.000-07:00

From CanDoBetter.org:

The origins of pro-immigration political correctness in Australia

The following paper, published in the Winter 1997-98 issue of The Social Contract journal, was given by Mark O'Connor to the Fourth National Conference of the Federation of Ethnic Community Councils of Australia (FECCA) on December 7, 1996 in Adelaide. FECCA is a major promoter of immigration and multiculturalism in Australia.

Where Does the PC Line on Immigration Come From?

By Mark O'Connor

As a member of a group dedicated to reducing Australia's population growth, I worry that Australia over the past 15 years has had by far the world's highest per capita immigration rate. Luckily we seem to have turned a corner, and our net immigration (if you believe the lowest of the figures being put out by government sources) may now be only 50,000 a year, which is a little over one-third of our net natural increase (i.e. the excess of total births over total deaths - currently about 142,000 persons annually). [Sadly, O'Connor's optimistic observation that Australia seemed to have turned a corner has since been proven incorrect. Immigration has crept ever upwards since the late 1990s, and is now running at record high levels.] Clearly our first priority now should be to work on attitudes as to family size.

Yet immigration remains important. It sends a most negative message to the community. How can the ordinary citizen see having a small family as a contribution to the community's well-being when he or she must also watch (and pay taxes to help) the government increasing our population through immigration? Indeed the Department of Immigration has favorably cited a recommendation from the growth economist John Neville that if the birthrate falls or stays low then immigration should be increased to compensate for this.

Clearly we environmentalists must question the rather bizarre assumptions on which the immigration debate is conducted. How can it be "selfish" to resist immigration yet be enormously to our benefit to take in immigrants? How could former Prime Minister Keating simultaneously claim immigration benefits the economy yet want to charge New Zealand for dole payments to our NZ immigrants? How can it be "racist" to want to control immigration when most immigrants, especially until the last few years, have been of the same Caucasian race as the overwhelming majority of Australians? How is it that when we have rescued people whose own countries or cultures have failed them, we are so often and so complacently told by "ethnic leaders" that we are in their debt rather than they in ours?

Similar questions are asked in the United States. In October 1993 I was an invited guest at the annual conference of FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform. At its final session Professor Otis Graham from the History Faculty at Santa Barbara (CA) spoke brilliantly about the internal contradictions of the USA's current official (or politically correct or PC) line on immigration. Subsequently he was asked how such self-contradictory positions had become established as dogma. He answered, "I simply don't know - I wish someone would explain it to me."

Later in the discussion I offered a rather tentative explanation in the form of a very simplified "story" of how these positions may have been reached. I wasn't very sure how complete or accurate this story (or theory) was, either as a comment on American or even on Australian history; but several of those present, including Professor Graham, pressed me to write it down and publish it. So here it is, still tentative, but a little more fleshed out.

Perhaps our "politically correct" attitudes to immigration come from particular conditions produced in the decay of 1960s and 1970s radicalism. Sociologists like Alvin Gouldner and Katharine Betts have pointed out the paradox that entire groups of the tertiary-educated, who once saw themselves as anti-establishment radicals in fierce opposition to the values of their parents, have now moved up the social system and are running bureaucracies and governments. The old "anti-establishment," these scholars imply, now runs the establishment.

This is clearer in Australia where the more left-wing of the two major parties has won the last five elections. (In the U.S., the Bush and Reagan years prevented there being quite such a conspiratorial left-wing tone to the current bureaucratic power group.) Many such people were among those who "saw the light" in the Sixties and Seventies but then in the Eighties, when they were getting a little complacent, were offered money instead - "the money or the light?" - until they eventually chose the money. They were also (again, this is more clearly true in Australia than in the U.S.) the first generation in which easy access to tertiary education became open to a meritocracy of the talented.

"[This New Class] sees itself as a meritocracy; and one gains admission to this class not by inheritance or descent but by having the appropriate skills - and the correct opinions." Gouldner and Betts1 see this new ruling class as differing from a traditional aristocracy in that it does not depend on inherited wealth. Its capital is largely intellectual capital, represented by its tertiary degrees. It sees itself as a meritocracy; and one gains admission to this class not by inheritance or descent but by having the appropriate skills - and the correct opinions. Let us accept this term "New Class" on probation, for the moment, and see what we can do with it. (Luckily this is not a matter of speculating about some poorly known and distantly observed group; it is essentially my own class I am talking about, and includes many of my own friends and former class mates. Reading this, they may well complain that I have "turned conservative," though, oddly enough, I believe that it is they who have done so.)

In Australia in the 1980s, many members of this class entered the bureaucracy and went on to earn degrees in economics, often training in the most cynical of economic rationalist schools (like that of the Australian National University). Thus, underneath the cement of avowed radicalism which binds the new ruling class together (serving as their meal ticket and union card) is sometimes a guilty conscience about having betrayed so many of their utopian and Aquarian ideals - for this was a generation whose hopes went far beyond the dull obviousness of social justice. The triumphalism of their politics often reflected the lyrics from the musical Hair "This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius" - an age of transcendent and psychedelic possibilities, of trusting the universe, and of release from constraints.

The result of this guilt can be a desperate attempt to find new grounds for difference and for moral superiority - no longer, this time, to justify revolution, but rather to maintain an establishment. Any ruling class that lasts more than a decade will feel the need to justify itself by having some ideal to which it appeals. It will invent some central legitimizing principle - usually a moral one. Thus a traditional aristocracy may place a moral value on the notion of "nobility" itself - a quality on which, by definition, it has something of a monopoly. By contrast it may see the classes it exploits as not merely "villains" but "villainous" and therefore needing to be ruled and guided. Our modern ruling class needs some similar principle to justify its free lunches and overseas travel.

They - or let me say "we" - used to be comrades in the struggle that built a better, more humane society. But what radical ideals are left when so many have been abandoned for pragmatic reasons and profit? Most utopian and Aquarian concepts of the 1970s have been quietly drowned. The psychedelic substances are only occasionally used by the successful baby boomers. Experience in running bureaucracies and governments has taught them not to be unduly idealistic about human nature. And so they have fallen back on a more basic or background ideal, one which, at least in Australia, was almost forgotten during the high point of 1970s radicalism. Yet when I went up to university in 1962 this had been the one ideal we all took for granted to treat everyone equally, regardless of race, color or creed (and some were beginning to add of gender).

Almost everyone in Australia believed in this ideal, at least in theory. So it is hardly surprising that the New Class still believe in it, at least in theory. The problem is that it is hard to claim moral superiority on grounds of such a common ideal.

The left-wing and tertiary-educated elite was now quite used to the fruits of power, yet already troubled by increasing evidence that it was just as corruptible as any previous establishment, and that it might soon lose favor with the electorate. In the resulting search for moral self-assurance and legitimacy, radical egalitarianism was the virtue it eventually focused on.

Why? It seems that the divide between left and right, liberal and conservative, is a persistent if fuzzy human tendency. It may be the characteristic mild schizophrenia of our species. And yet, most of the qualities that mark this divide between left and right "Both idealism and self-advancement combined to produce ... believers in democracy who brush aside the majority's views."are as morally neutral as those that differentiate, say, French culture from Greek culture. For example, tending to believe or disbelieve in the perfectability of human nature is not of itself a moral position; nor is the tendency to visualize oneself as a rebellious youth rather than as a controlling parent. The one quality by way of which the left can plausibly claim a specifically moral superiority is its concern with equality - its tendency to side with the underdog.

Before long some politicians and media people who were members or aspirants to this successful class were prepared to side with such underdogs as illegal immigrants, and even against the clear interests and beliefs of their own constituents and nation. Both idealism and self-advancement now combined to produce the mild paradoxes of an establishment that favors anti-establishment sentiments and styles in the arts (and often elsewhere), of believers in democracy who brush aside the majority's views, and of an elite whose claim to privileged status is based quite largely on anti-elitism.

Yet, even a decade ago it was getting harder and harder, at least in Australia, to find true racist rednecks against whom the no-longer-very-young, left-wing, educated classes could rebel - especially after those classes had been running the government and much of the media for years.

Their answer was a trick borrowed, I believe unconsciously, from the McCarthy-ites of the 1950s, and from their spiritual cousins, the Stalinists of the same era. It involves what Freudians call "projection." You project upon some real or invented victim-class your own secret guilts. If you were one of Stalin's henchmen, your secret guilt was an aspiration to privileged middle-class status in a very poor country. Down with the Kulaks! If you were someone like J. Edgar Hoover you could project upon others your own betrayals of public trust and public interest. Down with the communists!

You might then encourage the media to work up an intense obsessive concern about this evil, a concern which contains its own built-in, self-reinforcing loop. The pursuit of communist conspiracy (or in the USSR of a capitalist-revisionist conspiracy) became so omnipresent and all-encompassing that it readily discovered all the evidence it needed to sustain and even intensify its own belief.

By the 1980s, if "racists" (i.e. anti-egalitarians) had not existed it would have been necessary for the meritocracy to invent them. (In Australia, where most ethnic leaders were Europeans and thus of the same Caucasian race as the population that had invited them in, they used the term "racist" just as freely, even though the differences at issue were not racial but cultural - unless one believes in sub-racial classifications.) For some members of the New Class the term "racist" became a way to disparage anyone who believed in "inappropriate" meritocracies and elites - i.e., ones other than those by which they themselves were sustained.

Their other great trick, also consciously imitated from the McCarthy era, was that when you need to enhance your own moral position you discover a conspiracy against some widely-revered public virtue - a virtue to which you can easily lay claim. Thus, by imagining (or exaggerating) a communist conspiracy the McCarthy-ites turned their own minimal and commonplace virtue - that of allegiance to the democratic rule of law and to the legitimacy of the American state - into grounds for a claim of moral superiority, even of heroism.

How could Betts' New Class, the new ruling bureaucratic class of the 1980s and 1990s, turn their own minimal and commonplace virtue of believing in the brotherhood of man (the siblinghood of humanity) into a special virtue that justified their rule? The high immigration policy, toward which some special interest groups were pushing them, inadvertently supplied an answer.

High immigration alienated and indeed damaged the interests of the non-tertiary-educated majority, yet it did so in ways that were deniable. A media blitz, started or helped by special interest groups, soon turned high immigration into a symbol for acceptance of human rights. Once this assumption was swallowed it became clear that those who opposed high immigration - the majority of ordinary citizens - were wallowing in moral error, denying human equality, and in dire need of "guidance" from an elite. ("How satisfactory!" purrs the Mikado in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.)

Initially high immigration had little cost to the New Class. It wasn't usually their jobs the immigrant workers were after, and poverty-related crime took place mainly in suburbs far from their own. For those who had hitched their bureaucratic careers to ethnic programs or multicultural policies, high immigration was pure profit. They could preach against "selfishness" and take the moral credit to themselves, sending the bill to the ordinary citizen. Like the Unjust Steward in the New Testament parable they had found a failsafe way to buy moral credit with someone's else's money (Luke 16 2-4).

The New Class tend to be internationalists (for a mix of idealistic and business reasons) who are strongly opposed to the evergreen appeal of nationalism. Worldwide, it would seem that nation-states based on ethnicity are being formed at a faster rate than at any time since just after World War I.

Ironically, the internationalists soon found themselves in alliance with those who want to Balkanize, multiculturize or racialize the nation-state. (Remember how often multiculturalism was associated with globalization in the discussions about NAFTA?) By a further, now familiar, paradox the cry of "racism" became a trademark of both the globalist New Class and of its allies, the racialists. Some members of the New Class discovered that high immigration, like some of the extreme forms of multiculturalism, could be a way to bring down the nation-state and undercut its loyal supporters. It was twice blessed it could enhance one's status as an international high flyer and simultaneously as a noble fighter for the underdog.

The New Class globalists found themselves in effective alliance with leaders of certain immigrant groups who were practicing globalists only so long as the rhetoric of globalism could help them increase their "market share" and hence their power within the country. Some of these leaders are chauvinists who play the politics of ethnic pride in a way to resemble the Nineteenth century colonials "We do have the right to enter your country, and on our own terms, because we need it and you don't really own it; and in any case we are doing you a favor by adding an admixture of our wonderfully rich culture to your sterile, narrow and un-diverse Anglo culture."

The new politically correct line on immigration - much like the plethora of new "culturally sensitive" terms with which the ordinary citizen could hardly keep up - was one more way for the New Class to assert its leadership over the insensitive masses, on whose behalf they had shouted in the streets barely twenty years earlier.

And the fact that there was popular resistance to high immigration was reassuring to the New Class. It enabled them to ward off any nagging doubts that they might have lost their radical edge and suffered the common fate of aging into conservatism. If the New Class could not stay forever young they could at least stay forever radical. Some indeed seemed to desire even more public resistance to their ideas. Mark Ulmann recently accused one group in Australia of being "desperate for a witch to burn."

In high immigration and multiculturalism the New Class had found its difference from the bulk of society, and what seemed to many of them a legitimizing moral principle. They could deliver expansive population growth with the steadily rising property values that meant billions of dollars to some of their friends in business. They could extend contempt to all those excluded classes that had failed to advance like them through the mandatory tertiary education into the new enlightenment.

From patronizing a people's culture it can be a short step (as the history of imperialism shows) to denying their aspirations and interests. It soon became politically correct for the New Class to deny that there was such a thing as an Australian or American cultural identity, other than a multicultural one. This made it easier to deny that the American or Australian people had any exclusive right to their own country, or even that there was such a thing as a cohesive Australian or American people. If the nation does not really exist, then why should not its elected and appointed servants sell out its interests in favor of a global one?

That's the story/theory. How well does it fit the facts - in Canada? in the United States? in Australia? in New Zealand?

Notes
1. ↑ Alvin Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, New York, Seaburg Press, 1979.

Katharine Betts, Ideology and Immigration: Australia 1976 to 1987, Melbourne University Press, 1988; "The Environmental Movement, New Class, and Immigration Reform," Papers of the 1993 BIR Conference: The Politics of Immigration, available from the Department of Immigration, PO Box 25, Woden ACT. I am indebted to Dr. Betts for a number of insights woven into my "story."

Source

Immigration to swell Australia's population to 35 million by 2049

2009-09-21T11:12:00.001-07:00

From the ABC:

Australian population set to soar

Posted Fri Sep 18, 2009 1:10am AEST

The Federal Government has significantly upgraded its population forecasts for Australia to over 35 million people within 40 years.

The Government says its third intergenerational report will show the country's population is expected to grow by 65 per cent by the year 2049.

That is significantly higher than the Government's Second Intergenerational Report which predicted a rise to about 29 million people.

The Government says the revised prediction is due to improved fertility rates, a higher number of women who are within child-bearing age, and an increasing number of immigrants.

The transmutation of America

2009-09-01T20:06:00.000-07:00

From Australia.To News:

Transmutation of America into a tense multicultural bouquet: Can it happen to Australia?

By Frosty Wooldridge

An odd thing happened to the United States in the 21st century as it tripped into quicksand over its guilt-ridden past of discrimination toward minorities such as Native Americans, Asians, Blacks and Latinos.

What happened?

After all, the fact remains that European settlers trespassed, ravaged, and slaughtered 522 Indian tribes—their languages, cultures and ways of life. Anyone reading Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee or The Sand Creek Massacre cannot help but cry at the brutality committed against the aborigines of North America in the 1800s.

To see the Indian reservations today, one weeps at rampant alcoholism, domestic abuse and utter hopelessness of cultures unable to operate in the white man’s world—but totally cut away from their own traditions. It’s sad beyond belief.

Their situation may be much like present day Palestine and Israel. The Jews of Israel commandeered the Muslims’ lands around Gaza, but unlike the docile American Indians, the Muslims responded with rockets, bombs and modern weaponry. An uneasy tension and outright hatred percolates throughout the region.

Back in the USA, without a doubt, African-Americans still suffer from being ripped out of their countries in Africa while forced into slavery. They lost their languages, cultures and ways of life. Traders shredded family members at will and with malice. The white man tore them from their agrarian lives into the mechanized age.

In the case of impoverished Mexico, Latinos crossed into the USA willingly to work the fields while enduring racism on every level. Of course, they hated the ‘gringo’ equally, feeling that he stole their lands.

But in 1965, thanks to U.S. Senator Teddy Kennedy, the United States commenced changing its ethnic makeup by importing millions upon millions of immigrants from all over the third world. Under the guise of ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘diversity’, the citizens of the United States watch(ed) indolently as their own culture, language and way of life vanished(s) into the hands of a peaceful, methodical and invading armada of humanity. Within the past 20 years, over nine million Middle Eastern Muslims now make the United States their home. They expect to grow to 20 million in a few decades.

Unlike the American Indians that maintained small populations, Latinos, by 2042 will become the new majority within the United States—totally displacing the white man’s culture and language within a 60 year period. As an ethnic group, they do not tolerate blacks or whites, and it will be interesting to see how they abide with Muslims.

America immigrated itself out of its identity and into a multicultural and diversity predicament. As President Teddy Roosevelt said, “The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, or preventing it from continuing as a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.”

All the while, everything in America changes beyond its own understanding—much like what happened to the American Indians. Upon his final capture, Warrior Chief Geronimo said, “I think we have lost our way of life forever.”

America spirals into the same dilemma on a gargantuan scale. In the past 40 years, the United States revoked its laws, its culture, its language and its Constitution in order to accommodate outcries from minorities, dispossessed and foreign religions.

In the 60s, Lyndon Baines Johnson offered billions to bring the poor into the Great Society. Tax dollars paid for college tuition for minorities. Every child passed to the next grade whether they accomplished the work or not. As a teacher, I saw ‘affirmative action grading’ allow children who wouldn’t do their work—passed to the next grade. Later, ‘affirmative action jobs’ and ‘quotas’ based on color rather than standards became the norm for workers and students.

But today, Black Americans suffer terrific unemployment, illiteracy and broken families. Millions of kids grow up with a single parent. Violence, ghettos, obesity and hopelessness prevail. In California, Latino gangs dominate Los Angeles neighborhoods as schools ‘house’ students before ‘graduating’ them to the streets, unable to read or write. Millions of unwed teens bring babies into the world with no hope of supporting them other than taxpayer welfare. In Detroit, Michigan, according to NBC anchor Brian Williams, high school dropout rates last year hit 76 percent.

Result: a horrific 32.2 million Americans subsist on food stamps! You must work to get your hands around that number! In America? How? Why?

Today, the same U.S. Congress that perpetrated our massive transmutation into a multicultural society, ponders the appointment of Latino Judge Sonia Sotomayor. By her own admission, she represents ‘affirmative action quotas’ into law school and appointments. She most likely will become an ‘affirmative action’ Supreme Court judge. Yet, when minorities scream at anyone making even the slightest racist statement, she said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male that hasn’t lived that life.”

Americans will find themselves in new conditions as this new legal, multicultural experiment manifests in the coming years. However, it does not portend well for anyone no matter what their race. In a speech in Washington DC, former Colorado Governor Lamm said, “If you believe that America is too smug, too self-satisfied, too rich, then let’s destroy America. It is not that hard to do. No nation in history has survived the ravages of time. Arnold Toynbee observed that all great civilizations rise and fall, and that, “An autopsy of history would show that all great nations commit suicide.”

“Here is how they destroyed their countries,” Lamm said. “First, turn America into a bilingual or multi-lingual and bi-cultural country. History shows that no nation can survive the tension, conflict and antagonism of two or more competing languages and cultures. It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; however, it is a curse for a society to be bilingual. The historical scholar Seymour Lipset put it this way, “The histories of bilingual and bicultural societies that do not assimilate are histories of turmoil, tension and tragedy. Canada, Belgium, Malaysia, Lebanon, Holland, Great Britain—all face crises of national existence in which minorities press for autonomy, if not independence. Pakistan and Cyprus have divided. Nigeria suppressed an ethnic rebellion. France faces difficulties with Basques, Bretons and Corsicans.”

Finally, with America adding 70 million more immigrants within the next 26 years, I see ramifications that explode beyond our current predicament best summed up by Dr. Otis Graham, “Most Western elites continue urging the wealthy West not to stem the migrant tide, but to absorb our global brothers and sisters until their horrid ordeal has been endured and shared by all--ten billion humans packed onto an ecologically devastated planet.”

Like a chemistry experiment where unknowing students pour a bouquet of chemicals into a beaker, no one knows what kind of an explosion will occur, but they ‘feel’ something regrettable happening.

At this moment, the British, Dutch and French that will become minorities in their own countries by mid century, may be asking themselves why they did the same things as America.

And the American people, unlike the American Indians, did it to themselves. America will never be the same; never get better. Payback, as they say, is a *itch!

Frosty Wooldridge, math/science teacher, has bicycled across six continents – from the Arctic to the South Pole – as well as six times across the USA, coast to coast and border to border. In 2005, he bicycled from the Arctic Circle, Norway to Athens, Greece. He presents “The Coming Population Crisis in America: and what you can do about it” to civic clubs, church groups, high schools and colleges. He works to bring about sensible world population balance at www.frostywooldridge.com

Original article

"Can it happen to Australia?"

It already is.

Evans opens door to foreign athletes

2009-08-30T19:51:00.000-07:00

Another day, another moronic decision by Immigration Minister Chris Evans.

From the ABC:

Immigration Minister Chris Evans says foreign-born elite athletes will soon find it easier to represent Australia, thanks to planned changes to Australia's Citizenship Act.

Speaking alongside Russian-born skater Tatiana Borodulina in Sydney this morning, Senator Evans said changes to the rules meant Borodulina would be eligible to compete for Australia at next year's Winter Olympics in Canada.

While Borodulina has been representing Australia at World Cup level, citizenship is required for the Olympics.

The proposed amendments - to be introduced into Federal Parliament next month - will reduce the residency requirements from four years to two for athletes of 'distinguished sporting talent'.

"This is a quirk caused by the change in 2007 that basically meant an Olympian transferring or coming to this country couldn't compete at the next Olympics," Senator Evans said.

"That's clearly not in our interests and it's not fair on the athletes."

Senator Evans says there was a record influx of more than 600,000 temporary residents over the past year, mainly foreign students and working holiday visa holders.

"Our permanent numbers are down a little bit as a result of us cutting the intake in order to cope with the economic crisis, but there's a lot of people coming through Australia for work, holiday, and study," he said.

He says that while he is not looking at a clampdown, Australia needs to understand what impact the temporary residents have.

"We've got to have a much better longer term planning framework and work with the states to assess the impacts on the cities and other resources."

As one poster at the ABC site commented:

"This shouldn't be lauded as a 'step forward for athletes'. It's a SLAP IN THE FACE for every Aussie kid practicing their sport in the hope of one day representing their country."

Aussie kids? Who cares about them? Certainly not the Immigration Minister. Chris Evans and the Rudd Government are already forcing Aussie kids to compete with a myriad Third World immigrants for access to career and educational opportunities, housing, public services, as well as the chance to represent their country in sport at an international level. But then again, at the rapid rate at which immigration is transforming Australia into a colony of the Third World, Aussie kids won't have a country left to represent for much longer, at least not a country that they'll be able to recognise as their own.

"We've got to have a much better longer term planning framework and work with the states to assess the impacts on the cities and other resources."

Gee, Chris, why didn't you think of that before you opened the immigration floodgates?

Immigration, population and economics

2009-08-27T03:00:00.000-07:00

Below are excerpts taken from chapters 7 and 8 of Mark O'Connor's 1998 book This Tired Brown Land. In these chapters, O'Connor exposes the fallacious economic arguments used to justify high immigration and reveals the real economic costs of immigration.

On the claim that immigration is a great boon for the economy:

The immigration lobby argues that since migrants create a 'demand' for goods and services, they benefit the economy. As one commentator remarked, if things were as simple as that, we could do the economy a power of good by burning down our suburbs at regular intervals. Unfortunately, much of the 'demand' created has been of the sort that sucks in imports rather than generates export industries. The years of high immigration in the late 1980s were plagued by current account problems.

The battle between nations today is to create exports, or import-replacements, not to stimulate internal demand. In a sense we are locked in a friendly but fierce trade war in which our assets are the things we can export (or can do without, or can produce at home) and our liabilities are the imports our population demands.

After years of boosterism by the [former] BIR [Bureau of Immigration Research], the BIR's Lyn Williams finally summed up its research and conceded that the economic advantages of immigration were at best minimal or possibly neutral. Hardly the sort of economic bonanza you'd risk ruining your country for!

***

... boomers often justify high immigration on the grounds that it 'stimulates' the economy. The Sydney Institute, for instance, is a privately funded 'think tank' which is strongly immigrationist. In one guest article in The Canberra Times Anne Henderson, Deputy Director of the Institute, suggested that those who can't see the benefits of higher immigration are irrational Hansonists. By contrast, she tells you, "The rational mind know [that] added numbers of people in a country create jobs in the housing and retail markets, and so on. ... Australia's state premiers (Bob Carr is an exception) are on to this. ...They want immigrant numbers based on population needs (read economic needs) not ad hoc political decisions (read populist prejudice). ...The tide could be turning. Growth in Australia needs people. Industry leaders such as Tony Berg, at Boral, agree. ...National interest in the benefits of immigration in Australia could be making a comeback." Henderson spends half her article 'poisoning the wells' by talking about 'racism'. Replying, in a letter to the editor, the Canberra environmentalist Colin Samundsett remarked "Anne Henderson rides a Trojan Horse constructed out of race to assail her target of having our immigration increased. While wearing the cloak of scholarship woven by the Sydney Institute, in this instance she is attired more like Lady Govina. ...This latest text seems to be a political handout rather than a seriously assembled critique for Australia."

Anne Henderson is only one of many who confuse an increase in 'demand' or in GDP with a better quality of life. In fact, unless a per capita growth in GDP (or better, in real quality of living) can be demonstrated, most individual Australians do not benefit at all financially. In other words, whether we are talking jobs or pay or wealth, few us of benefit from a slightly bigger cake if there are far more people than before to divide the cake up among. This fundamental truth, pointed out repeatedly in the [former] Coalition government's own Mortimer Report, Going for Growth, has been hidden from the Australian people in a propaganda effort supported by sections of the media and by both the major political parties.

On the costs of immigration:

According to Swinburne University's Katherine Betts, the likely negative effects of immigration include:

* Adverse effects on the balance of payments.
* The diversification of resources to infrastructure.
* Diseconomies of scale in the cities that have passed their optimal size (considered to be around 500,000 people).
* Waste of human resources by the neglect of local training.
* Pressures toward capital widening at the expense of capital deepening. (We can ill afford to be a nation that invests mainly in real estate.)

The last point is most important. On average, in all big and small businesses in Australia in 1995, it took about $117,000 of capital to provide one job. This means that billions of dollars of additional capital will be required to get our unemployed into the workforce. As we have no surplus savings in Australia, the capital for new jobs will have to be borrowed from overseas, thus further worsening our balance of payments.

In 1989 Stephen Joske, an economist with the Parliamentary Research Library, estimated that immigration had produced a $7-$8 billion shortfall in investment capital (at then-current immigration levels) for public infrastructure. In other words, the amount of money, which might otherwise have been used to improve existing infrastructure (e.g. schools, public transport) had gone instead into providing basic infrastructure (e.g. roads, sewerage) for immigrants. Joske calculated that the necessary capital investment was some $80,000 (in 1989 dollars) per immigrant. Some of this money the migrants bring with them, but most of it must come either from within Australia or from overseas borrowings. Either way this increases Australia's foreign debt and foreign liabilities. This also puts pressure on interest rates by causing Australia to be seen as a less attractive or riskier borrower, and thus impacts negatively on many sections of the economy.

Properly controlled experiments are rare in economics; but Colin Teese, former Deputy Secretary of the Department of Trade, has pointed out that First World countries over the past forty years have in effect carried out one: a control experiment on the effects of population growth on per capita wealth. The four countries that deliberately sought to increase their populations through immigration - Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the U.S. - all slipped backward badly relative to the rest. A likely reason, Teese suggests, is that too much of these countries' investment has gone into housing, services, and speculative real estate buying (because immigration produces continually rising real estate prices) rather than into capital-intensive production to produce exports and replace imports.

***

In 1996 Oliver Howes revealed in the Canberra Times that the BIR had published, but had failed to publicise the crucial conclusions of two 1992 books which itemised the costs of immigration to federal and state budgets. Despite the expense of these major studies, the BIR (which had never been accused of lack of diligence in publicising research that could justify high immigration) failed to add up the costs itemised in these books and thus show the total average cost per migrant - a figure one might have thought of some interest to taxpayers and government. In particular, the BIR failed to adequately publicise the implications of the study Immigration and State Budgets by Professor Russell Mathews, which painstakingly calculated and disaggregated the various immigration costs to the taxpayer in the average migrant's first five years. When his itemised per capita costs are added up they come to around $16,762 per migrant at state level. When one adds to this the figure of $8,962 at federal level (provided by the other BIR study), the result would seem to be a total cost of $25,724 per immigrant at State and Federal levels combined. Costs at local government (never properly established) may be relatively minor, but an overall cost of $26,000 per immigrant can be considered conservative. The BIR failed to publicise either the total state costs figure or the combined state plus federal figure. It was only some years later that Oliver Howes did this calculation and published the results in the Canberra Times.

The situation then turned out to be even worse. The BIR had failed to ensure the two studies were compatible. In counting all the monies that migrants contribute to state government budgets, Professor Matthews had meticulously included a per capita share of Commonwealth Funding Grants to the States. (These are essentially a return to the states of a share of the income tax which the federal government collects.) But the authors of the study of costs and benefits at federal level had failed to count these payments as a deduction from the federal budget. When adjustment is made for this inconsistency, the per capita cost per migrant turns out to be $34,500.

***

The former BIR conceded that there might be long-term environmental and economic costs (especially with balance of payments) caused by immigration-fed population growth, but it denied that state or federal governments could reap budgetary benefits by cutting immigration. This seems to be completely wrong. Mathews' figures (available to the BIR since 1992, yet oddly neglected by them) leave no doubt that reducing immigration would provide large savings in both the short and medium term to both state and federal budgets. His figures also leave little doubt that to use immigration as, in effect, a form of 'industry subsidy' cannot be defended as being in the public interest.

On the alleged economic benefits of a larger population:

Some have claimed that a larger population is better for the economy. In an 'Occasional Monograph' (May 1993) titled Ten of the Most Dangerous Myths in Australia Phil Ruthven, chairman of Ibis Business Information, commented: "Rubbish! Twelve of the Top 20 standard of living countries have lower population levels than Australia; and Australia once had the world's highest standing of living with four million people."

On immigration, wages and jobs:

Despite the prevalence at its public conferences of people claiming that "immigrants create jobs", even the Bureau of Immigration Research did not normally claim this. Its formal papers usually argued simply that the economy would adjust to an increased workforce. Wages would fall (an assumption that was tactfully not emphasised) and this would enable employers to put on more staff.

The BIR's final word was in an in-house publication by Lyn Williams, already referred to. After turning the evidence this way and that she concluded the effects of immigration upon the economy and unemployment are close to neutral (or, as the pseudo-medical jargon of economists puts it, "benign"). Even the distinctly slanted fact-sheets provided by the Department of Immigration merely claim that "Research over recent years shows that immigration does not have an adverse effect on the overall unemployment rate" and "The consistent result of research is that immigration does not adversely impact on thhe aggregate unemployment rate."

The last claim, as we shall shortly see, is untrue. It seems unwise for the present Department of Immigration to lean so heavily on the authority of the former BIR, an organisation which awkwardly combined public relations and research functions. As sociologist and immigration expert Katherine Betts puts it, the BIR commonly assumed that adding to the labour force, even in a time of unemployment, would produce a fall in wages that would lead to more jobs being created and thus to no long-term increase in the percentage of the population unemployed. This logic, she points out, ignored both the long-term disappearance of demand for manual labour (important because so many immigrants seek manual work) and the 'stickiness' of wages which (because of factors like unions and wage agreements) do not automatically fall according to the law of supply and demand.

***

It is claimed that more people (whether immigrants or native-born babies) create 'demand'. But do they create a job's worth of demand each? Perhaps only if their demands become more 'frivolous'. Otherwise economies of scale will mean there is less work to be done. Consider, for instance, how much work it would be in an isolated community of just 1,000 people to provide shoes, boots, sandshoes, sandals and slippers in all the styles and sizes that different men, women and children would require. No wonder that craftnames like Shoemaker, Carpenter, and Taylor were numerous in early communities. A significant proportion of the population would have to be in the footwear trades alone, even with modern technology. But if we scale that population up to 100 million, then only a small proportion of it would need to make shoes. Increasing the population does not necessarily increase jobs at the same rate.

The econometrician Matthew W. Peter has disproved the boomer's claim that for every job an immigrant takes another job is created for the existing population. He showed that this was based on a mis-use of the Orani computer model of the economy. When more fact-based assumptions were fed in, for instance that wages are 'sticky', the same Orani model gave the opposite conclusions: that bringing in immigrants does cause unemployment, as well as problems with balance of payments, and a string of other undesirable effects. Unfortunately, disinterested academics like Mathew Peter did not have the public relations expertise of the BIR, and the BIR's unreliable claims continue to be repeated as gospel by some defenders of existing levels of immigration, and in the media.

A further problem is that many of the jobs migrants do create are unproductive. We pay a fortune for consultants and teachers to ameliorate the linguistic and other problems of immigrants; but only from the perspective of those so employed are these problems a boon. For the taxpayer they are a drain and an expense.*

The Melbourne pyschologist and author Valery Yule has commented: "The jobs immigrants create are mainly ones which are profitable to builders and developers: raising the price of land, requiring more housing, resulting in more medium-density housing replacing our world-famous 'quarter-acre-blocks' and wrecking in Melbourne all hope of a Garden City. Requiring more schools, hospitals etc. is not a bonus because they have to paid for from the public purse. Immigration as a source of job creation is a non-ending job creator - it has to keep running to keep creating, and it puts more pressure on our resources. The way things are today, the more immigrants we take, the more imports we tend to buy, and the greater our foreign debt."

***

Apart from failing to recognise that wages are 'sticky', the BIR's calculations also ignored the fact that the unemployment problems created by immigration are not spread evenly across the spectrum of occupations (which would make them easier to solve). For instance, immigrants help provide a great surplus of skills in areas like engineering and sewing. This does not only lead to massive and expensive unemployment (and disillusion) among recent immigrants, it also threatens the employment and salary prospects of anyone currently employed in these professions. (For some years in the 1980s we were actually importing more engineers than we were graduating.)

***

William Mitchell, Head of Economics at the University of Newcastle, has recently raised a more technical objection. He points out that the claim made by many immigration lobbyists that immigration doesn't cause unemployment "completely ignores the question of whether the growth needed to absorb the higher population is sustainable, given the problems Australia has with external debt."

Indeed, he points out that the claim is based on logically incompatible premises: "Unemployment is affected by two factors: increases in the productivity of labour and increases in its supply. Both of these factors could, in principle, be offset by strong economic growth. But, if the economy grows fast enough to accommodate both productivity gains and the addition of migrants to the labour force, it will draw in more imports and the balance of payments will deteriorate. Economic growth of around 2% per annum may be all that we can sustain without increasing our foreign debt. This level of economic growth is not enough to reduce unemployment in the face of any net immigration (or any growth in labour productivity)."

On immigration and socio-economic inequality:

...unemployment is not the only way in which population growth penalises those most vulnerable. As the Sydney University economist Frank Stilwell points out "Economic inequality is fuelled by urban growth, because the inflation in the urban property market benefits existing wealth holders at the expense of new entrants. It also intensifies the fiscal crisis of the state because of the costs of infrastructure - providing the water and sewerage systems, the energy supply networks and so forth. The costs of such infrastructure tend to rise more rapidly than the capacity to fund them through taxation or user charges."

Thus as population grows, whether by immigration or by natural increase, the poor cop it in a variety of ways. Stagnant wages, higher home costs and mortages, less certainty of keeping their jobs (and less chance of changing or choosing where they work). And as government budgets collapse, the social security net is ripped, or unravels.

* Economist Stephen Rimmer noted in 1992, "The lack of English language skills in the workplace imposes substantial economic costs in the form of lost productivity and reduced international competitiveness. For example, in 1989 the OMA estimated the poor English language skills cost Australia A$3.2 billion each year in additional communication time needed in the workplace. This estimate was used to justify more government spending on English language training. In addition, it was claimed in a report published by the Federal government-funded Bureau of Immigration Research that lost output owing to unemployment caused by lack of English language skills could be as high as A$1.6 billion per year. ...In all, the lack of English language skills in the workplace could cost Australia over A$5.4 billion per year - equal to 1.5 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP)." Source: Rimmer, S., "The Cost of Multiculturalism", The Social Contract, Volume 3, Number 1 (Fall 1992).

An easy solution to a growing problem

2009-08-24T04:49:00.000-07:00

From Online Opinion:

Population: a big problem but easy to solve

By Peter Ridd
Posted Thursday, 13 August 2009

Latest statistics show that Australia’s population is growing at a rate of more than a million every three years. This growth rate is being driven primarily by record rates of immigration and a relative young population, itself a product of rapid past immigration. Doubtless Peter Costello’s baby bonus has also made the situation worse by encouraging the increased fertility rates of Australian women.

At the present rate Australia will have a population of about 50 million by mid century and 100 million by the end of the century. If this sounds implausible, consider that at the end of World War II, just 64 years ago, Australia’s population was only 7.5 million, i.e. it has almost tripled in that time.

This population growth should be considered an economic and environmental problem of huge proportions. From the economic point of view, Australia relies mostly on mining and agriculture for its export earnings. These industries require a very small proportion of the population to operate (although it is true that due to inadequate training in the technical trades and engineering, they have suffered a temporary labour shortages in recent years).

The growing population in Australia will not increase exports of iron ore, coal or gold and will reduce our exports of food as we are forced to consume more of our output internally. The money that comes to Australia from the sales of our resources presently gets divided among 22 million Australians. When the population doubles the amount per capita will halve.

There are plenty of examples around the world where resource based economies, almost all of which do not rely on a large fraction of their population to produce the export income, are worse off with large populations. Compare the UK with Norway, both supposedly rich from North Sea oil. The UK, with a population of about 60 million, spent the income and will soon run out of oil. Norway, with less than five million people, could afford to save a huge proportion of its income in large government investment funds. Norway’s future is assured.

During the recent resources boom, Australian governments squandered the bulk of the tax revenues generated by the mining companies, at least partially, in building infrastructure for an unnecessary population explosion. As an example of this problem, consider the state of Queensland’s finances which are caught between falling resources income and the staggering costs of providing the infrastructure for a third-world rate of population growth.

In the post war period of immigration there were some sound reasons to expand Australia’s population. There was a genuine, if exaggerated, security concern which was a rational response to the near death experience that Australia encountered in World War II. There was also a concerted effort to expand Australia’s manufacturing industry which, it was argued, needed a larger population to make it viable. In the days of poor transport, we needed large internal markets.

All those factors have now changed. Manufacturing in Australia is on its knees and a growing population will not help. Mining, agriculture, tourism, and the education of foreign students are our biggest export earners and do not need a growing population.

From the environmental side, a growing population is an obvious problem. Currently we have water shortages of varying severity in all our big cities which would have been less acute if we had maintained our population at levels of 20 years ago. Melbourne would not have to contemplate encroaching into its green fringe or building a desalination plant if its population wasn’t growing. Finally, if you believe that C02 causes climate change, Australia’s population growth will make it almost impossible to achieve meaningful emission reductions. We have to reduce per-capita emissions by 50 per cent every 40 years just to keep our total emission at present levels.

Even though the problems of population growth are obvious, it is a political sacred cow that cannot be argued or debated. None of the major political parties will argue for lower immigration because they are scared of being labeled racist. Even the Greens who have a useful population policy are almost always silent on this issue. They should be arguing for lower immigration every time the Australian Bureau of Statistics population figures are released. There is also an unholy alliance between the right wing who want a growing population to feed our housing construction industry and the extreme left who want to allow the whole world to come to Australia on compassionate grounds.

The housing industry is the main beneficiary of high population growth. Every year we have to build a city the size of Canberra just to house our growth. Unfortunately this is not a productive activity, unlike building a factory, a mine, the scientific development of better farming practice, a medical breakthrough or an environmental improvement. House construction appears to be good for us because it employs people in the short term, but in the long run it will get us nowhere because it is not an investment in production. The reality is that Australia has too many people in the industry.

Although the housing industry has always been a big winner from our population policy, there is now another big player that has its snout in the immigration trough. That is our education sector. Presently, applicants who wish to migrate to Australia and have a qualification from an Australian institution get preferential treatment. This has spawned a massive industry in education which could only be described as an enormous immigration scam. In the lobby of a large Pitt Street building recently I noted that half the companies in the building were involved in either immigration advice, or education for foreign students. Many companies were doing both.

It is not only some dodgy colleges which are involved in this cash-for-visa scam. Our universities take in large numbers of students whose main aim is to gain Australian residency. We are prepared to take money from them to smooth their way through the process. Effectively selling permanent residency visas through the education system is neither ethical nor in the best interests of the country.

The population issue is an example of where this country has lost its way and is not concentrating on the big economic, environmental or social issues. We are preoccupied with global warming and the supposed imminent demise of the Great Barrier Reef even though the science on these is far from conclusive. At the same time we ignore the obvious and definite environmental problems posed by population growth: unarguably the easiest and cheapest problem to solve yet underpinning all our environmental problems.

We also refuse to contemplate nuclear power to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because, like population growth, this is another sacred cow that cannot be challenged. Economically we are prepared to sacrifice our future for the short term gain of extra foreign students in our universities and dodgy colleges, and for jobs in our non productive building industry. Socially we are not prepared to pay to train our own kids to become doctors, engineers and trades people to fill the gaps we have in our labour force. At the same time we are happy to take skilled people from developing countries which cannot afford to lose them.

With Canada and perhaps Russia, Australia is in a unique position. We have a small population and a huge country, most of which is agriculturally unproductive and unpleasant to live in. We have a relatively unspoilt environment and an abundance of mineral wealth. We also have a technologically advanced society and a good base in science and medicine. Uncontrolled population growth risks what we have. We should immediately reduce immigration to about 50,000 a year, with the medium term objective of having a zero net immigration policy; and the baby bonus should be scrapped to discourage the present rise in fertility. Because of the pipeline effect, i.e. we have a very young average population, our population will continue to grow to at least 25 million. We can then decide if we wanted to keep the population at that level or reduce it by adjusting immigration to suit.

It really is that easy.

Peter Ridd is a Reader in Physics at James Cook University specialising in Marine Physics. He is also a scientific adviser to the Australian Environment Foundation. He writes this article as an advisor to the Australian Environment Foundation.

Original article

Degrees-for-visas a 'powder keg' issue

2009-08-06T04:38:00.000-07:00

From The Australian:

ATTACKS on Indian students in Melbourne and Sydney may have been only the beginning of the social conflict to be played out as thousands of foreign students stay on with full work rights and compete for jobs and housing, researcher Bob Birrell warns.

"We're just on the threshold of dealing with all the social, immigration and other issues that arise from allowing this juggernaut (the overseas student industry) to go unchecked," said Monash University's Dr Birrell, who is an influential critic of the degrees-for-visas market.

In the latest People and Place journal, he said the federal government had made it much harder for foreigners who emerged from Australian universities and colleges with poor English and no work experience to win visas as skilled migrants.

Many ex-students given these visas in the past had not secured the jobs they were supposedly trained for, leaving Australia with skill shortages.

But Dr Birrell said news of the visa crackdown was taking a while to move through the "recruitment grapevine" and the government had sent a mixed message by allowing about 40,000 former overseas students with little chance of winning permanent residency to stay on temporary or bridging visas with full work rights.

These ex-students would be ripe for exploitation.

"Employers in the hospitality industry will be able to take their pick of the thousands of former students desperate for such work where this is associated with a promise of an employer nomination for a permanent visa," Dr Birrell said.

Indian students had come under attack as enrolments boomed, pushing them into less affluent suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne where they competed for jobs and housing with youth from low-skill migrant backgrounds, Dr Birrell said.

"This has created a powder keg situation as the newcomers find themselves soft targets for youth gangs," he said.

Dr Birrell said it could take a few years to defuse the situation because many students were yet to graduate, thanks to a dramatic growth in numbers leading up to a tightening of the skilled migration rules.

From 2005 to 2008, a qualification in cookery or hairdressing "virtually guaranteed" a permanent residency visa, leading to a massive growth in enrolments, especially of Indian students attending private colleges, he said.

He predicted legal conflict, as ex-students turned to the courts to secure the permanent residency status they had enrolled for. "It is unlikely they will leave Australia without a fight," Dr Birrell said.

Full article

Australian-style points system no solution to immigration crisis

2009-08-06T04:29:00.000-07:00

From Candobetter.org:

The U.K. government is planning to review its immigration policies, in a move likely to make it more difficult for foreigners to become British citizens. The move comes as unemployment is now at a 12-year high and as concerns about terrorism have fueled a surge in protectionist sentiment in the U.K., long one of the world's most open countries. Once-marginal anti-immigration politicians have been gaining ground.

Home Secretary Alan Johnson plant to announce a points system ('PBS') will be modeled after one in use in Australia and introduced last year, that grades workers and students hoping to enter the U.K. on criteria including education, age and need for their skills. Immigration minister Phil Woolas said the scheme would stop the population reaching the 70 million predicted by Whitehall statisticians and bring "control" to the migration system. The number of passports handed out to migrants is on course to hit a record of almost 220,000 this year. Critics in UK say the recent increases to their population, through heavy immigration, are placing a huge burden on public services as hospitals and schools face increased demand but no increases in their budgets.

Traditionally, foreign workers boost both the economies of the countries they work in as well as their home countries. But studies say that the current global economic crisis has sapped much of such cross-border monetary exchanges. The short-term benefits of growth are evident, but the long-term implications are severe.

Other European countries are clamping down on immigration as their economies slow and citizens complain that too many people are being allowed in.

In future migrants to the UK would have to spend five years as temporary residents, before becoming "probationary citizens". Points could also be deducted and citizenship either delayed or withheld for those found breaking the law or engaging in anti-social behaviour.

With record immigration levels to Australia, and so-called "skills shortages" in areas such as hair-dressing and cooks, this system hasn't reduced the number of foreigners entering Australia! Citizenship to Australia is extremely easy to aquire. The "skills shortages" hasn't translated into full employment or increased training courses. HECS and loans are escalating costs for university and now TAFE loans in Victoria and more Australians trying to aquire skills will become casualties of excessive fees.

Assisted by higher birth rates and heightened net overseas migration, Australia added a record 406,000 residents last year. The previous record was 375,000 in the year to June 2007. Bernard Salt: Clusters of growth excite property developers and concern planners. They localise demand for property and intensify demand for infrastructure. Our growth is determined by the property market!

Political lifecyles last until the next election. Australia must try to survive, intact, until at least the next generation and remain "sustainable" after that!

It’s time Australia cut immigration, apart from genuine refugees. Anti-immigration is not racism! It is about having an optimum population plan, a sustainable limit to how our environment, society and economy can equitably cope with the projected number of people.

John Howards "go for growth" mentality, and that record numbers of births implies confidence in the economy, still hasn't been re-evaluated. Developing countries have high birth rates too, to ensure an income in old age!

The points based system is trivial and has done little to reduce our immigration numbers, and legally discriminates against genuine refugees.

Original article

Govt 'bedazzled by the dollar' in race for students

2009-08-04T04:28:00.000-07:00

From The Canberra Times;

The Federal Government must look past export dollars and clean up the education of foreign students before Australia's reputation is irreparably damaged, an academic says.

One of Australia's leading social scientists, Bob Birrell from Monash University, told ABC's Four Corners program last night the Government had been ''bedazzled by the dollar'' and must ensure overseas students were not exploited.

Dr Birrell's comments come as federal police and immigration officials raided the offices of a Sydney migration agent allegedly involved in a scam to exploit foreign students.

Police are also investigating allegations of death threats and an assault in Sydney at the weekend on an undercover reporter employed by Four Corners to assist with the item about the exploitation of students.

Dr Birrell said the Federal Government had not properly monitored dealings with overseas students.

''As the figures mounted in billions every year, and they could proudly say that this is a $15 billion [a year] industry more than wheat, wool and meat put together there's perhaps an understandable reluctance to look critically at the foundation of the industry.''

Four Corners said some students had been ripped off to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars by colleges, or by migration or education agents.

*snip*

An undercover reporter with Four Corners named Sydney immigration agent Sam Tejani as assisting students to cheat on the English language tests. The program alleged Mr Tejani charged up to $5000 to fix the results of tests. Mr Tejani declined to appear on the program, but stated in a written response that the allegations were false.

Australian Immigration Law Services spokesman Karl Konrad said there was evidence of a black market in certificates confirming foreign students had 900 hours of work experience in their trade to allow them to stay in Australia.

''There's no doubt that the fake experience certificates or the letters that they need to pass the skill assessment process is very widespread and we brought this to the attention of the immigration department years ago, but it wasn't really acted on,'' he said.

Migration Institute of Australia chief executive Maurene Horder said the migration agents' representative body was concerned about the allegations. ''Unfortunately, hearing reports about international students and visa applicants falling prey to unscrupulous operators is not a new issue,'' she said.

In May last year, the association reported 60 unscrupulous operators in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane to the Department of Immigration, she said. She called on the department to crack down on illegal or unethical behaviour among registered migration agents.

Full article

Rudd's open door to illegals

2009-07-27T07:31:00.000-07:00

From The Sunday Telegraph:

The Rudd government's relentless claims that "push" factors - the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, unrest in Pakistan - have been responsible for driving more refugees to our shores are proving to be hollow.

The "pull" factors - Labor's softening of the Howard government's hard line against people-smugglers and opportunistic asylum-seekers - remain the principal factors in the huge increase in numbers of undocumented illegal arrivals in Australia, the biggest since 2001.

Now it is revealed that a refugee advocate Ian Rintoul was in constant mobile-phone contact with boatloads of refugees even as they prepared to leave Indonesian waters for Christmas Island.

According to reports in The Australian newspaper last Friday, Rintoul acted as a conduit for messages between asylum-seekers aboard an illegal people-smuggling boat in Indonesian waters, Pakistani people-smuggling facilitators and Australian authorities.

*snip*

Since Labor came to office, Immigration Minister Chris Evans has moved with ferocious haste to remove possible impediments for queue-jumpers.

There's no doubt the new arrivals reaching Christmas Island, where they are assured of residency permits within 90 days, are jumping the queues administered by the UN High Commission for Refugees and bodies such as the International Organisation for Migration.

Acting under the radar, Evans has surreptitiously removed the character test that used to apply to new arrivals and protected Australians from those whose general conduct was questionable.

Shadow immigration minister Sharman Stone says Senator Evans directed the Immigration Department to disregard a person's character, the provision of bogus documents, behaviour that was disreputable and acts that fell short of criminal fraud.

Evans' latest direction also widens the scope of considerations to allow people who are found not to be of good character to nevertheless enter and remain here in Australia.

This may well be why the Government has done nothing about accused East Timorese human-rights violator and murderer Guy Campos, who is still at large, having entered Australia on a pilgrim's visa for the World Youth Day celebrations last year.

Evans has significantly increased the "pull" factor for illegal entrants by changing rules that required the expectations of the community to be considered when decisions were taken on whether to refuse illegal immigrants entry to Australia or remove them from the country.

Someone who commits serious crimes against the Migration Act is no longer considered to be of character concern.

Further, this minister has personally overturned the decisions of the Migration and Refugee Review Tribunal and the courts more than 1000 times.

Yet he has claimed in his statements that ministerial intervention cannot result in a fair outcome and has stated that he doesn't want to "play God".

Evans has also said he wants to delegate his powers back to tribunals and the department, but has not done so.

As with so many of the public statements of the Rudd ministry, there's a huge gulf between what is said and what is done.

The previous Coalition government managed to halt the number of unsafe and illegal people-smuggling boats attempting the hazardous voyage to Australia.

The Rudd government has abolished almost every barrier to this traffic.

It has discarded temporary protection visas, it has dropped the 45-day rule that required applications for protection visas to be made within 45 days of arrival in this country, and it has now proposed a new category of visa for those who currently are ineligible for refugee protection under United Nations High Commission for Refugees rules.

Waiving the rules for those who can afford to jump the queue, those who have been living safely for the most part in third nations and not in refugee camps, hurts the most needy: those living under blue plastic in camps around the world.

Yet once again, we see the Rudd government secretly destroying policy that clearly worked and replacing it with flawed regulation that relies on ministerial discretion.

Such flouting of the community will is doubtless going to result in increased numbers embracing unwholesome anti-immigration groups.

Full article

"Such flouting of the community will is doubtless going to result in increased numbers embracing unwholesome anti-immigration groups."

We can only hope!

High immigration pushing out young Australian jobseekers

2009-07-19T10:28:00.000-07:00

From The Australian:

THE Rudd government's alarm about retiring Baby Boomers causing economic growth to fall is unfounded and its policy response -- to bring in tens of thousands of overseas workers a year -- is wrong because of the rapid rise in over-55s staying at work.

According to a new report, a sustained increase in the labour force participation rate among men and women aged over 55 since the mid-1990s, continuing even as jobs are shed during the global economic downturn, should put a large question mark over the immigration program.

If immigration continues at current levels, the group most likely to suffer is young Australian jobseekers trying to enter the workforce, it concludes.

The report -- to be published next week by Monash University's Centre for Population and Urban Research in its People and Place quarterly -- concludes that, even if the net overseas immigration intake were halved from its current 180,000 a year between now and 2018, the labour force would grow by nearly a million workers, about two-thirds of whom would be over 55.

"The Immigration Minister's fear that, without continued, unprecedented high levels of overseas migration, the Australian labour force will soon contract is unfounded," the report concludes. "In the present economic environment of employment decline, sustained high levels of overseas migration are not necessary to ensure adequate labour force growth and such levels are compromising the employment prospects of younger job-seekers."

The report's author, CPUR social researcher Ernest Healy, told The Australian the Rudd government "appears to have been more alarmist than it needed to be in terms of population ageing and labour supply.

"The assumption by the government has been that all these Baby Boomers are going to retire and there will be this crisis of labour growth, but they simply don't seem to be retiring in the numbers the government has been expecting."

Full article

High immigration also adversely affects young Australians by forcing them to compete for entry into the housing market against new arrivals from overseas. Australia already holds the appalling position as the country with the highest house price to income ratio in the developed world, largely due to its massive immigration intake.

Foreign student industry a "recognised immigration racket"

2009-07-19T08:54:00.000-07:00

From The Australian:

AUSTRALIA'S lust for high-dollar Indian students has led to a thriving black market in sham marriages, forged English language exams and bogus courses, and turned a once-respected international education sector into a recognised immigration racket.

While the federal government and industry work to repair the damage caused by a recent spate of attacks on Indian students in Australia, education agents say the violence has shone a light on a $14 billion industry riven with corruption.

An investigation into the overseas student industry has found thousands of Indians each year are being enrolled in dodgy courses at inflated prices and sold unrealistic dreams of cheap living and plentiful jobs.

The Australian has found operators across the Punjab, the main feeder community for Indian students in Australia, openly advertising "contract marriages" for aspiring immigrants to partners who have passed the mandatory English test for a student visa.

For an additional fee, agents will arrange bank documents and loans to satisfy Australian immigration law that demands students have the means to support themselves for the duration of their course.

Industry insiders say a flourishing market has also developed around the International English Language Test System, with students paying anything up to $20,000 for a good result.

Sonya Singh, a respected Indian education agent servicing the Australian market, says the myriad scams offered to foreign students each year have made "Australia a supermarket where people are buying stuff off the shelf".

"A good-quality Indian student notices a completely no-good student on the same flight as him to Australia and starts to wonder where he's going," she said. "Indians are so conscious of branding and Australia's reputation has suffered a lot because of the recruitment process.

"My own kids didn't want to study in Australia because they had a perception that poor-quality students go there and that if they told their friends they were going to Australia, they would be laughed at or thought of as lesser."

Full article

The solution to this problem is obvious: stop granting permanent residency to foreign students who complete a degree in Australia. The Federal Government needs to take some responsibility and clean up the mess it has created. Australian universities should not have to depend on full fee-paying foreigners for income, admission requirements and educational standards should not be lowered simply to put "bums on seats", and a degree from an Australian university should not be a ticket to permanent residency.

See also:

Indians among highest visa rule breachers in Australia

Getting residency via the kitchen door

When Skilled Immigrants Aren't So Skilled

The Howard Legacy

Migrant accountants fail English test

Immigration "not serving the country"

Foreign students exploiting immigration "loopholes"

The Indian student affair

2009-07-18T02:26:00.001-07:00

I have so far refrained from commenting on the recent wave of attacks against Indian students in Australia and the subsequent fallout simply because the level of hysteria has been so high up until this point that it has been virtually impossible to examine the issue in a rational manner. Both Indians and the Australia media alike have used these attacks to once again stick the boot into "racist" Australia. The reality, though, is much different, as Neil Mitchell explains in the following article.

From The Herald Sun:

No, we are not racists

Neil Mitchell
June 11, 2009 12:00am

THERE'S no real point to worrying about being politically correct when that will aggravate a situation already dangerous and misunderstood.

It is fact that Australia's reputation for decency is now threatened by racial tension and the fear is that this could be a glimpse of the future.

The predicament is built around Indian students, the attacks on them, their response to those attacks and the ugliness the subsequent tension has provoked.

If there was any doubt about how seriously the problem is viewed, it was dispelled yesterday when the state's three most powerful people tried to quell the fears and end the stupidity.

The Prime Minister called for calm, but with a degree of passion not normally considered Rudd-like. He deplored racial attacks on any person - "Chinese, Indian, Callithumpian, Queenslanders".

He reminded the world that Australians are also bashed and die in India, which does not provoke parades of chanting ocker backpackers in the streets of Mumbai.

The remaining members of the power trio, the Premier and the Chief Commissioner of Police, met at a railway station and pledged a police campaign supposedly directed at street robberies, but really designed to reassure angry Indian students.

It was a stunt, albeit a worthy one, but let's put the spin aside and look to some basic truths.

It is true that there are gangs operating in this country. Some are racially based and racially motivated.

Some do attack particular ethnic groups.

It is also true that there have been attacks on Indian students described as "curry bashing", an awful term Indians themselves say is a motivation for the attacks.
But there have been far more attacks on Indian students motivated by brutality and theft.

In Sydney, there are dangerous racial undertones to the tension. On the streets at night it has been Middle Eastern versus Indian. That's ugly - and frightening.

The media in India has been hysterical about all this with little concern for the facts and less understanding of this country.

Australian political leaders have been quick to react and overreact, partly because they are concerned about Australia developing a reputation for racism and partly because the education of international students is big business.

And the final truth is that the Indian students have harmed their cause and there is no point pretending otherwise.

Student leaders have portrayed their members as docile, which in itself is a racist generalisation.

Some are gentle, some are not, and the aggressive protests have shown that.

Burning effigies of the Prime Minister makes for good TV, but it incites tensions and alienates decent people.

Worse, the protests seem based on the assumption that Australia's leaders and police somehow endorse this violence and could end it if they had the will.

That's rubbish, on both counts. It's unfair to blame the people and the leaders for the brutality of a few street thugs who are at times just as likely to attack fourth-generation Australians as they are visitors from the other side of the world.

Some of the students have had a rough time, and that is deplorable. But it is the fault of a few criminals, not the society, and not the culture.

Neil Mitchell broadcasts from 8.30am weekdays on 3AW.

Original article

The automatic assumption was that the attackers in these cases were European Australians. But it turns that a number of the attackers were actually of non-European origin, a crucial fact reported neither here in Australia nor overseas. Why is that? Because it doesn't fit the orthodoxy that only people of European ancestry are capable of racism.

As columnist Andrew Bolt points out, political correctness has prevented the public from being properly informed about which groups are actually committing these violent crimes.

Bolt writes:

IF we weren't so scared of seeming racist, we wouldn't now seem so, er, racist that even India is giving us lectures.

Amazing, that. India, which perfected the caste system and is plagued by Hindu-Muslim bloodfests, is telling us we're too prejudiced?

But we have only our own stupidity and grovelling self-hatred to blame. After all, which nation has spent so much apologetic cash and sweat to persuade the world we are vomiting with racism, and which has been, on the other hand, too militantly anti-racist to point out who is actually bashing many of these Indian students?

...

...what police and many journalists refuse to confirm or even discuss is what victims and their spokesmen repeatedly say - that many of their attackers are Africans, Islanders and, less often, Asians who are newcomers themselves, beneficiaries of our eagerness to seem kind and tolerant.

...

That's how the false perception is allowed to grow that these attacks on Indians are just another example of our institutional racism, when the reverse may well be true -- that we're so over-eager to seem not racist that we take in immigrants we perhaps should not, and refuse to admit when they go wrong.

Unfortunately, Australian society is engaged in mass self-deception when it comes to the downsides of immigration-induced diversity. Australian authorities and the Australian media would much rather excoriate the white Australian majority for their alleged "racism" rather than examine those fractious groups actually responsible for much of the ethnically-based crime now plaguing our major cities.

Waste water! Save Australia!

2009-07-17T02:12:00.000-07:00

From CanDoBetter:

Review by Katharine Betts of Mark O’Connor's and William J. Lines's book "Overloading Australia," People and Place, vol. 17, no. 1, page 76.

Australia’s population is growing rapidly. In March 2009 it stood at 21.6 million. The current Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, takes it for granted that it will grow to 35 million by 2051.[1] In 1999 when Philip Ruddock was Minister for Immigration he told Australians that there was no need for a population policy because we were unlikely to grow much beyond 23 million. He added that the ‘nation cannot afford to return to [an immigration] program characterised by big numbers and little thought’. [2] Nonetheless the current growth surge, keenly embraced by the new Labor Government, began quietly under the Coalition soon after Ruddock’s 1999 statement.[3]

Much of Australia’s growth is directly due to immigration (nearly 60 per cent in 2007–08) and much of the growth from natural increase is attributable to the Australia-born children of immigrants. For example, in 2007, 25 per cent of all births were to overseas-born mothers.

For those with their eyes open population growth and the immigration that fuels it are never out of the news. There is the unaffordable housing that drives young families into debt slavery [4] (even pushing some to the less-expensive urban fringe where a number died in Melbourne’s recent fires).[5] There is strained infrastructure leading to blackouts, cancelled train services, and to traffic congestion, draining energy from the economy and from human lives. [6] There are hospitals that can no longer care for the people they serve;[7] water supplies that dwindle as drought and growth desiccate cities and stretch the capacity of farms;[8] pleasant suburbs degraded by intensive redevelopment;[9] greenhouse gases that refuse to abate;[0 ]and a natural environment wilting under the burden of numbers.

But while stories of water shortages and degraded infrastructure abound, few of the public figures who comment on them acknowledge the role of population growth in creating these problems and making them harder to overcome. Here Mark O’Connor and William Lines have done us an important service; they have joined the dots between these social and environmental ills and our rapid growth.

From the picture they create a reader could, at first, believe that Australia’s pattern of growth was promising. It is mainly due to government immigration policy, so shouldn’t it be relatively easy to rein it in? Besides immigration is not popular; support for the post-2000 increase is minimal among both the Australia-born and migrants themselves.[11] But as O’Connor and Lines make clear, immigration in fact makes it harder to halt growth because the businesses that profit from it lobby for it, and property developers with deep pockets appear to have bought the favour of some of the politicians who create it.[12]

High migration means more customers, cheaper labour, and minimal training costs. All of these boons intensify pressures from self-interested groups to keep the numbers coming. As O’Connor and Lines put it: ‘It is no surprise that the housing industry lobbies not for the size of housing industry that Australia’s population needs but for the size of Australia’s population that the industry needs’.[13] The concentrated benefits enjoyed by special interests (on the right of the political spectrum) trump the unorganised interests of the majority who bear the costs.

At the same time many opinion makers on the left are quick to decry criticism of immigration-fuelled growth as scapegoating immigrants, even as racism.[14] As if this were not enough, business interests fund academic research into demography and immigration, naturally channeling their money towards those likely to produce results friendly to growth. This is a chilling circumstance at a time when universities are starved of money and academics are under crushing pressure to bring in research grants.[15] Other sources of research funds include state and federal government departments, most of which are committed to the growth targets set by politicians.[16] Researchers who might otherwise point to the costs of growth are unlikely to win such grants; they also risk the disapproval of their left-liberal peers.

The authors point out that the left’s fixation on seeing criticism of immigration-fuelled growth as racism is ‘a good cloak for elitism … the people must not be given power because their views are barbaric’.[17] Thus even though high migration is unpopular, a pro-growth right and a left that is anti-anti-growth mean that voters are unorganised and voiceless.

The authors marvel at the way in which the motives of the occasional reformer who questions growth are earnestly probed while no one examines the growth lobby as it enjoys the handsome profits brought to them by each plane load of new consumers. O’Connor and Lines assert that left-wing xenophobia hunters are not interested in old fashioned rent seekers despoiling the community for their own advantage; they prefer to enjoy the comforts of their moral superiority.[18]

Why must O’Connor and Lines be the ones to point to the damage done to Australia by this blend of greed and snobbery? Why have the media failed to show it to us? Here the authors have a telling vignette about Ian Lowe, a distinguished scientist who takes population seriously. He is also president of the Australian Conservation Foundation and a frequent media commentator. O’Connor asked him why he so seldom spoke out about population. Lowe replied that he often did but that when he did he was ignored. He also told O’Connor ‘how he was sacked as a columnist from one paper for insisting on it. He [Lowe] found that the most biased media were the grossly pro-growthist Murdoch papers’.[19]

Media silence on the question is not always an accidental byproduct of pleasing pro-growth advertisers while deferring to the sensibilities of the intelligentsia. It can be deliberate.[20] O’Connor and Lines argue that just as other vendors to the domestic market have a product to sell, so too do the commercial media; it is always easier to sell to a growing market rather than to compete for market share, or indeed to export. The commercial media have their own vested interests in growth. While the ABC should be immune from these interests, it is more likely to be infected with the racism virus, the infection that makes its host see any scepticism about growth as racism in disguise.[21] Nonetheless, perhaps because it does not profit from growth, the ABC has proved more receptive to Overloading Australia than have other media outlets.

Both authors are accomplished writers and the book is brief and clear; so far it has achieved a fair degree of media coverage. It was launched in February 2009 by Bob Carr, former premier of New South Wales, and a rarity among Australian premiers in that he is a critic of growth. At the launch Carr said: ‘There is a hardly any significant process at State or Federal level today that is allowed to proceed without an environmental impact statement except the pushing up of population’.

O’Connor’s account of the launch goes on to report how Carr ‘spoke of his frustration, when he was Premier, at having a vastly increased Sydney population forced upon him by decisions made in Canberra. … He was then in the invidious situation of having to destroy amenities and allow developers to invade protected areas. As he put it, people don’t want Sydney to be crowded and built up, but they also don’t want it to expand into places like Kuringai Chase and Botany Bay; yet one of those two things has to happen if a million extra people are put into Sydney’.[22]

Some of the media reports have been neutral [23] or even favourable. For example O’Connor was invited to write an opinion piece for the Sydney Morning Herald,[24] and the Adelaide Advertiser.[25] He was also interviewed on the ABC Radio National station on Counterpoint,[26] Breakfast [27] and Late Night Live.[28] But press coverage has been more ambivalent and its tenor bears out the authors’ analysis.

A former Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, said that ‘the extent to which population influenced environmental policy depended on how selfish Australians wanted to be’ and that ‘some people citing environmental reasons for reduced migration were simply opposed to immigration’.[29] Charles Berger, in a generally sympathetic piece in The Canberra Times, wrote that: ‘Overloading Australia … has sparked another round of debate about Australia’s population. Some commentators have been quick to detect a murky agenda of xenophobia hovering behind a green cloak in the population debate. They are right to be suspicious. …’[30] He did, however, go on to exonerate O’Connor and Lines.

Brigid Delaney in the Melbourne Age was not so generous. She wrote that to rein in growth was to risk ‘the development of our inner lives’ because immigrants energise their adopted countries. But there was worse:

"Environmental issues can be a handy Trojan horse with which to wheel in policies and debates about immigration that we are too squeamish to discuss baldly. After all, no one wants a rerun of Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968 that led to race riots across England, nor Pauline Hanson’s polarising comments on immigration that brought Australia to the brink of a spiritual crisis."[31]

But O’Connor and Lines do not advocate an end to immigration, just a balanced intake which would still leave room for refugees.[32] This is a humanitarian position; they write that deliberately ‘pushing up our own population … cannot be justified on environmental grounds. It could only be justified on international humanitarian grounds if we could believe that it would leave us, somehow, very much more able and more willing to help our neighbours’.[33] They also point to the immorality of Australia continuing to pirate doctors and other health workers from poor countries to compensate for our own reluctance to invest in local training.[34] Xenophobia hunters, however, are more interested in displaying their self-righteousness than in understanding and debating an opposing point of view.

How can serious advocates of a moral and sustainable position on population growth cut through in such a climate? One way is to write the kind book that O’Connor and Lines have written, well researched, cogent and readable. Another is put forward a shocking policy proposal.

This concerns both sacrifice and exploitation. We can see its outlines in debate about the Rudd Government’s proposed emissions trading scheme. This will cap Australia’s overall greenhouse gas emissions through the sale of permits to industry, but it will also set a floor under which emissions are unlikely to fall. As community awareness of this has spread many householders are dismayed; their individual sacrifices to lower emissions are not only going to count for nothing, they will actively help polluters to pollute. Private spending on solar panels, solar hot water, and on low-emission cars will do nothing to reduce greenhouse gases; it will just enable dirty industries to emit more. But the same can be said of many sacrifices that individual Australians make for the environment; they are all nullified by the extra people brought in to pander to the growth lobby.

Here O’Connor and Lines put forward their suggestion. Instead of washing up only once a day and letting the garden die, we should all waste water. Saving water just makes it easier for growthists to increase the population. (They do say that would never suggest that we waste a non-renewable resource.)[35] But why struggle to cut your shower to less than two minutes when the Government is bringing in more than 200,000 extra people a year?

The answer? Take a deep bath and bring the crisis to a head. And while you are enjoying your bath you could read this excellent book.

Mark O’Connor and William J. Lines, Overloading Australia: How governments and media dither and deny on population, Envirobook, Sydney, December 2008, ISBN 9780858812246, A$19.95

Available online from www.abbeys.com.au, www.readings.com.au and www.booktopia.com.au.

References
1 See Rudd quoted in M. Franklin, ‘Rudd warns Australia must prepare for emerging arms race across AsiaPM flags major naval build-up’, The Australian, September 10 2008, pp. 1, 6
2 P. Ruddock, ‘The Coalition Government’s position on immigration and population policy’, People and Place, vol. 7, no. 4, 1999, pp. 6–12
3 See P. Kelly, ‘Restocking the nation’, The Weekend Australian, 3 August 2002, p. 28.
4 J. Hewett, ‘Under mortgage pressure’, The Australian, 20 October 2007, p. 21; B. Day, ‘How to plan for a fiasco’, The Australian, 22 April 2008, p. 14
5 Editorial, ‘A tragic week in Australian history’, The Australian, 14 February 2009, p. 16
6 AAP, ‘Heatwave claims lives’, The Age, 1 February 2009; AAP, ‘Qld: Labor plan to cut southeast traffic congestion’, Australian Associated Press General News, 26 February 2009; J. Gordon and R. Sexton, ‘National road chaos looms’, The Age, 8 March 2009, p. 1; C. Lucas, ‘Connex hit with commuter squeeze’, The Age, 5 March 2009, p. 10
7 R. Wallace, ‘Hospitals fail to meet most targets’, The Australian, 3 October 2008, p. 7
8 G. Roberts and P. Murphy, ‘Recycled sewage “will have bugs”’, The Australian, 29 October 2008, p. 9; B. Doherty, ‘Water plan may not go far enough’, The Age, 23 October 2008, p. 1
9 M. Clayfield, ‘There’s a hole in our suburb, dear Labor, oh dear’, The Australian, 7 March 2009, p. 5
10 G. Readfearn, ‘Pollution skyrockets Coal and gas for electricity blamed’, The Courier-Mail, 12 January 2009, p. 11; T. Arup, ‘Emissions heat up in economic meltdown’, The Age, 14 March 2009, p. 4
11 See M. O’Connor and W. J. Lines, Overloading Australia, Envirobook, Sydney, 2008, p. 107.
12 Others may not need persuading. See ibid., pp. 4, 8–9, 26, 88ff, 98, 106, 145, 162.
13 ibid., pp. 125–6
14 ibid., pp. 141ff, 160, 164, 167, 172–3
15 For the role of the Scanlon Foundation with its mission to create ‘a larger cohesive Australian society’, see ibid., p. 82 and p. 205 n. 199. The Foundation believes that the future prosperity of Australia is ‘underpinned by continued population growth’. See < http://www.scanlonfoundation.org.au/socialcohesion.html> accessed 9/3/09.
16 For example academics critical of the high growth trajectory of the Victorian Government’s Melbourne 2030 strategy, and who are likely to apply to it for research contracts, are well advised to keep their criticism to themselves. A public servant conveyed this warning, as a friendly gesture, to a group that I was a member of in late 2003.
17 O’Connor and Lines, 2008, op. cit., p. 144
18 See ibid., p. 145. 19 ibid., p. 171
20 ibid., pp. 38, 133–34
21 O’Connor and Lines devote a chapter to the pro-immigration bias of the ABC. See ibid., pp. 158–164 and p. 141ff.
22 Email from Mark O’Connor to PopForum@yahoogroups.com 10 February 2009
23 See P. Ker, ‘Population Australia’s “big threat”’, The Age, 24 January 2009, p. 3; P. Ker and A. Morton, ‘Population debate booms’, The Age, 30 January 2009, p. 2.
24 M. O’Connor, ‘Many in denial over rising population’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 19 December 2008, p. 27
25 M. O’Connor, ‘Australia’s bizarrely high population growth lies behind many of our worst problems’, The Advertiser, 3 March 2009, p. 18
26 Monday 1 December 2008, audio available at < http://www.abc.net.au/rn/counterpoint/stories/2008/2434745.htm> accessed 9/3/09
27 Wednesday 28 January 2009, audio available at < http://www.abc.net.au/rn/breakfast/stories/2009/2475805.htm> accessed 9/3/09
28 Tuesday 5 March 2009, audio available at < http://www.abc.net.au/rn/latenightlive/> accessed 9/3/09
29 Quoted in Ker and Morton, 2009, op. cit.
30 C. Berger, ‘Aim for sustainable population and generous immigration’, Canberra Times, 13 February 2009, p. 15
31 B. Delaney, ‘Murky agenda behind this green debate’, The Age, 27 January 2009, p. 11
32 O’Connor and Lines, 2008, op. cit., p. 72ff
33 ibid., p. 57
34 See ibid., pp. 69, 110.
35 ibid., pp. 182–184

Source

Hyper-population growth. How far down the gopher hole?

2009-07-17T02:00:00.000-07:00

From Australia.To News:

Hyper-population growth. How far down the gopher hole?

By Frosty Wooldridge

While regular Australians battle the elite ‘growthists’, America fights for its life because we are already where Oz doesn’t want to be! As said in one Aussie letter to the editor, the ‘growthists’ expect to add more population to Sydney that lacks housing infrastructure and to Melbourne that lacks water. Growthists prove to be as silly as the laughing kookaurra bird. They don’t possess the common sense of an emu!

If you allow ‘growthists’ to win, you will suffer the same conditions now facing the United States. What are they? Read and weep!

America added 106 million people from 1965 to 2006. Demographic experts showed 300 million people living in America in October 2006. They expect an added 100 million by 2035. The consequences grow irreversible and unsolvable.

As population rises, carrying capacity drops. What is “carrying capacity?” For a quick rendition, it means, “The amount resources on a given piece of land to allow long term sustainable human, plant and animal life.”

If animals or humans exceed ‘carrying capacity’ of any given land mass, they crash in numbers by various means, i.e., famine, war and disease. Garrett Hardin, noted biologist called it, “The Tragedy of the Commons.”

For the 6.7 billion humans in the 21st century, oil resources will define that capacity quotient. Noted Geologist Walter Youngquist said, “This is going to be an interesting decade, for the perfect storm is brewing—energy, immigration and oil imports. China grows in direct confrontation for remaining oil. I think the USA is on a big, slippery downhill slope. Will the thin veneer of civilization survive?” To see how fast we grow, visit www.populationmedia.com

Youngquist continued, “Beyond oil, population is the number one problem of the 21st century, for when oil is gone as we know and use it today—and it WILL be gone—population will still be here.”

The world uses 84 million barrels daily! That’s 42 gallons to a drum! By mid century, use will top 120 million barrels per day. It will run out because of limited reserves in the ground.

Dr. Albert Bartlett of the University of Colorado said, “Present population growth rate is putting our children at risk. They will experience holes in the ozone causing serious biological effects on plants and humans. World ocean fisheries are collapsing from endless plundering. Two thirds of the world’s people will suffer from water shortages by 2025. It is not possible to sustain population growth or growth in rates of consumption of resources.”

Where is the worst overpopulation problem on the planet according to Dr. Bartlett? “It’s right here in the United States!”

Dr. Bartlett said, “Can you think of any problem, on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way, aided, assisted, or advanced, by having continued population growth—at the local level, the state level, the national level, or globally?”

How many people in the United States are enough? How far down the gopher hole do we want to dig ourselves? At what point is enough—too much? If we shut down the borders today with zero immigration, while enjoying our sustainable 2.03 fertility level of American women on average, we would still grow via ‘population momentum’ by an added 40 million.

In other words, we’re painting ourselves into a perilous corner. Once the numbers manifest, our society will suffer irreversible consequences with unsolvable problems. One visit to Los Angeles will show you they suffer toxic air, dwindling safe drinking water, gridlock to the point of insanity, water shortages, endless highways and housing development. Consider San Francisco, Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Detroit, Denver and all other large cities grow beyond the bounds of reason!

Sustainable growth, slow growth, managed growth, smart growth and all other kinds of growth are oxymoronic. There is no such thing as sustainable growth. Why? All growth exceeds carrying capacity at some point. In other words, the bubble bursts, the dam breaks, the glass spills, the balloon pops and the red-lined engine blows up.

“Population growth is given as a cause of the problems identified, but eliminating the cause is not mentioned as a solution,” Bartlett said. “We are prescribing aspirin for cancer.”

At the current rate of growth driven by immigration, America will double its population just past mid century—from 300,000,000 to 600,000,000. As long as the underlying cause of a problem is not dealt with, we, and our leaders, as a nation, perpetuate a falsehood which Mark Twain called ‘silent-assertion’: “Almost all lies are acts,” he said. “I am speaking of the lie of ‘silent-assertion’. It would not be possible for a humane and intelligent person to invent a rational excuse for slavery; yet you will remember that in the early days of emancipation in the North, agitators got small help from anyone. They could not break the universal stillness that reigned from the pulpit and press all the way down to the bottom of society--the clammy stillness created and maintained by the lie of silent-assertion that there wasn’t anything going on in which intelligent people were interested.

“The conspiracy of the silent-assertion lie is hard at work always and everywhere, and always in the interest of a stupidity (unlimited growth) or sham (unlimited immigration), never in the interest of the respectable (average citizens). It is the most timid and shabby of all lies. The silent-assertion is that nothing is going on which fair and intelligent men and women are aware of and are engaged by their duty to try to stop.”

‘Silent-assertion’ worked until it brought China, India and Bangladesh to their knees with sheer misery of numbers. How do I know? I’ve spent a lot of time in Asia and other overpopulated regions. China, even with enforced one child per family, grows by 10 million annually. India, with 1.1 billion, adds even more yearly. Bangladesh suffers 144 million people in a landmass the size of Iowa. Do you see anyone racing to immigrate to those havens of human overload?

What I ask is, do we as a nation, want millions upon millions of added people from countries already exceeding their ‘carrying capacity’? Legal immigration proves as dangerous as illegal. To think otherwise will allow that ‘silent-assertion’ to create another China or India in America. Just imagine Iowa with 129 million people and all the rest of the United States with THAT kind of population density!

Albert Einstein said, “The problems in the world today are so enormous they cannot be solved with the level of thinking that created them.”

We are no longer living in the 20th century America with only 75 million people riding horses or trains. We’re in the 21st century with cars and jets and 300 million people added to the 6.7 billion on the planet--creating horrific environmental consequences. Again, we had to change our ‘silent-assertion’ about slavery and we MUST change our ‘silent-assertion’ about population growth and economic growth. If we continue steaming full speed ahead like the captain of the Titanic, our children will be on board when we hit the peak oil, global warming, ozone holes, collapsing species, air pollution and other commensurate problems related to the overpopulation “iceberg.” Most died on the Titanic because there weren’t enough life boats.

Maybe some of us choose to maintain our ‘silent-assertion’ in the face of growing consequences, but how can any parent or grandparent be that callous to their children? That gopher hole drops mighty deep!

In this second and final part of this series, if you read carefully, you will connect the dots as to what is happening to Australia. It’s already happened to the United States.

In 1965, the ‘growthists’ in the U.S. voted for a new immigration policy that changed our 100,000 immigrants annually to 1.2 million annually. That single bill added 100 million people to the USA in 40 years. That same bill will add another 100 million in 26 years. That next 100 million will stuff our civilization into the toilet.

In the last column you read and connected the dots from Dr. Albert Bartlett as he asked questions that pertain to the ‘silent assertion’. You know this country cannot keep pretending that we can grow forever. We must stabilize our population sooner rather than later. We cannot apply 20th century solutions that will not solve 21st century challenges.

We cannot expect Third World countries to solve their own exploding populations. They grow by 77 million annually.

Noted scholar and biologist E.O. Wilson said, “The raging monster upon the land is population growth. In its presence, sustainability is but a fragile theoretical construct. To say, as many do, that the difficulties of nations are not due to people but to poor ideology and land-use management is sophistic.”

Those of us living in large cities in America can’t help but wonder: where does it all lead? Denver, where I live, suffers a ‘Brown Cloud’ so thick with toxins that every breath fills my lungs with poison air. Our traffic proves a daily nightmare of accidents, road rage and wasted hours sitting in bumper to bumper frustration. I-70 heading into the mountains makes a weekend getaway a nightmare. Returning proves a study in aggravation. Throw in our water shortages and you’ve got quality of life racing to the bottom of the sewer. Our natural gas costs jumped 33 percent this fall after they jumped 30 percent last year. Our electricity costs jumped 13 percent. Gas prices move toward five dollars a gallon. It’s already eight and nine dollars a gallon in Europe.

Because of mass immigration, we expect an added six million people into Colorado by mid century. Texas adds 12 million by 2025 while California adds 20 million by 2035. Water shortages will become water wars!

The 1993 EPA report stands as a perfect example of silent assertion’s denial of population growth as the prime culprit of our cities’ dilemmas: “Where many areas are experiencing rapid urban growth and associated environmental problems…a stronger emphasis on sustainable agricultural practices will be a key element in any long-term solutions to problems in the area.”

How friggin’ stupid is that statement? We cannot keep growing and stop destroying farmland! In Colorado, we pave 100,000 acres annually in the name of ‘growth’. Tell me how you can grow corn, wheat and vegetables on pavement! You cannot solve traffic gridlock by adding thousands of cars to the highways. You cannot solve water shortages by adding more people, lawns and toilets to flush.

The respected journalist Bill Moyers introduced another aspect of overpopulation when he asked science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, “What happens to the idea of the dignity of the human species if population growth continues at the present rate?”

Asimov replied, “It will be completely destroyed. I like to use what I call the bathroom metaphor: if two people live in an apartment and there are two bathrooms, then both have freedom of the bathroom. You can go to the bathroom anytime you want and stay as long as you want for whatever you need. Everyone believes in the freedom of the bathroom. But if you have 20 people in the apartment and two bathrooms, no matter how much everyone believes in the freedom of the bathroom, there is no such thing. You have to set up times for each person, you have to bang on the door. “Aren’t you through yet?” And so on!”

Asimov made what may become a profound observation as we head into further overpopulation dilemmas: “In the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive overpopulation. Convenience and decency cannot survive overpopulation. As you jam more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn’t matter if someone dies, the more there are, the less one person matters.”

Does anyone here think Chinese and Indian citizens enjoy their predicament? If they enjoy it, why are they fleeing their countries?

Thus, you might ponder a few of Dr. Bartlett’s Laws of Sustainability:

First Law: Population growth and/or growth in the rates of consumption of resources cannot be sustained. Persons who advocate population growth are advocating unsustainability. Such persons mislead themselves and others.

Second Law: In a society with a growing population, the more difficult it will be to transform the society to the condition of sustainability. This is caused by the phenomenon of ‘population momentum’.

Third Law: The response time of populations to changes in human fertility rate is 70 years. In other words, if we want to stabilize the population by mid 21st century, we must make changes now. For the record, the US created a stable society at 2.03 fertility level from 1970, but immigration at two to three million annually negates it.

Fourth Law: The size of population that can be sustained (carrying capacity) and the sustainable average standard of living of the population are inversely related to one another. The higher the standard of living one wishes to sustain, the more urgent it is to stabilize population growth.

Fifth Law: Sustainability requires that the size of the population be less than or equal to the carrying capacity of the ecosystem for the desired standard of living. The rate of destruction of ecosystems increases as the rate of growth of the population increases.

Sixth Law: The benefits of population growth and consumption accrue to a few. The costs are borne by the ‘many’ average citizens. That’s why politicians and developers promote growth along with real estate people. They move to other havens where they escape the ‘results’ of their labors.

Ninth Law: When large efforts are made to improve efficiency, the results are wiped out by added population.

Fourteenth Law: If humans fail to stop population growth and growth in the rates of consumption of resources, nature will stop these growths. By contemporary standards, nature’s method of stopping growth is cruel and inhumane.

One look at the March 14, 2005 Time Magazine piece that reported eight million people die annually of starvation world wide—offers a window into our future. Additionally, you can see it on many of the religious channels where they solicit money for food for millions of starving children in Africa. Notice they offer food which creates more children, so they never solve the core issue of too many humans. They need to offer birth control devices, for, without birth control, all their efforts and your money become useless as those populations explode by 85 million annually.

Nonetheless, I’ll receive hundreds of emails countering this column by well meaning people who operate via emotions, hopes and faith that it will turn out okay. Their propensities fall into the “Cassandra Syndrome”: The Cassandra Syndrome is a term applied to predictions of doom about the future that are not believed, but upon later reflection turn out to be correct. This denotes a psychological tendency among people to disbelieve inescapably bad news, often through denial. The person making the prediction is caught in the dilemma of knowing what is going to happen but not being able to resolve the problem. The origin of the name is derived from Cassandra, who, using her prescience, foresaw the demise of Troy. No one believed her.

What happened to Bangladesh, China and India, happened! Their problems relating to overpopulation create a miserable life for their citizens. As to what is happening in Amsterdam, Holland; Paris, France and Sydney, Australia from immigrating incompatible Third World cultures and languages, which resulted in violence, happened! They dug a ‘gopher hole’ they can’t escape because the ‘beast’ is inside them. It WILL and it IS happening in America unless we change course before the ‘beast’ is too big for us to stop.

I’ve covered the major laws. If you want a full and terribly sobering copy of this report, call 1 800 352 4843 or www.thesocialcontract.com. Ask for the Fall 2007 Quarterly.

We can be docile passengers on the Titanic by silently suffering our fate, or, we can stand up and speak out to the captain and crew of our ship (president and Congress). We are not lemmings or other helpless animals willing to be led over a cliff. I’m confident that millions of Americans refuse the ‘silent assertion’ mode of denial. They know their actions will be the only thing that saves America from drowning by mass immigration. They know their actions create change for their children like their parents’ action in the last century gave them the wonders of a country that provides “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Ask yourself: do you want Australia to end up like the USA, or China, or India or Mexico? I can answer that question unequivocally—NO! Not now, not later, not ever! Australia needs to pass an “Australian Population Policy” and lead the world toward population sanity.

Bob Woodruff of ABC asked input from all citizens concerning the future of our planet. Go to www.earth2100.tv for a sobering reality check as to what we face and to what I have been writing about for the past 20 years. Our ‘window’ to change to a balanced population and non-polluting energy diminishes every day we ignore the symptoms manifesting all over America and the planet.

Frosty Wooldridge has bicycled across six continents – from the Arctic to the South Pole – as well as six times across the USA, coast to coast and border to border. In 2005, he bicycled from the Arctic Circle, Norway to Athens, Greece. He presents “The Coming Population Crisis in America: and what you can do about it” to civic clubs, church groups, high schools and colleges. He works to bring about sensible world population balance at www.frostywooldridge.com

Original article

Unnecessary immigration neutralises economic stimulus

2009-07-17T01:44:00.000-07:00

From Immigration Watch Canada:

AUSTRALIA : UNNECESSARY IMMIGRATION NEUTRALIZES ECONOMIC STIMULUS

A recent study by researchers at Australia's Monash University found that the Australian government's $42 Billion economic stimulus will be neutralized by Australia's unjustified and unnecessary high immigration levels. The stimulus is intended to protect Australian workers and their jobs.

Immigration to Australia will mean a total of around 140,000 new job seekers each year---at a time when the government itself is projecting no employment growth. A major reason for the 140,000 figure is that employer-sponsored visas to immigrants are inadequately regulated. Australian employers do not have to prove that Australian workers are unavailable for jobs. Also, Australian employers do not have to pay immigrants as much as they pay Australian workers. As a result, employers are abusing the program.

The Monash University researchers recommended the following:

(1) Priority should be given to how Australian training and mobility incentives can help Australian workers relocate to areas of skill shortages, not to removing obstacles to immigrant recruitment.

(2) Immigration should be strictly limited to those skills where there is a substantiated case that the skill cannot be obtained from within Australia.

(3) The range of occupations eligible for skilled immigration should be curtailed, particularly for employer-sponsored visas.

(4) Employers should have to provide proof that Australians are not available for the jobs in question.

The report was written by Bob Birrell, Ernest Healy and Bob Kinnaird. It is titled , "Immigration And The Nation Building and Jobs Plan": CPUR Bulletin, Centre for Population and Urban Research, Monash University, Melbourne, 2009. It is available at http://arts.monash.edu.au/cpur/index.php

Source

Also see:

Rudd Govt's immigration programme a threat to Australian workers

Isn't it interesting how these findings have been almost completely ignored by the mainstream media here in Australia?

"Managing" growth

2009-07-02T01:08:00.000-07:00

From On Line Opinion (Australia):

The ubiquitous rationale of growthism

By Tim Murray
Posted Monday, 29 June 2009

It’s uncanny. Two cities on two continents, but “growthists” in Vancouver and Melbourne seem to be reading from the same playbook.

Lance Berelowitz, an urban planner who chaired Vancouver’s planning commission, praised the Mayor’s so-called “Eco-Density” initiative as the answer to the city’s ever-increasing house prices. Given that between 800,000 to one million new residents are expected to come to Greater Vancouver in the next 25 years, it can be assumed that developmental pressures on the city’s limited land base will steeply drive up land costs. It follows then, that “housing prices in Vancouver will keep going up, unless we substantially increase the housing supply to match the ageing demand.”

For Berelowitz it is unconscionable that Vancouver, currently representing about 27 per cent of the metro area’s 2.2 million citizens, continues to throw up a kind of cordon sanitaire around its perimeter and not “shoulder its load” by accepting its share of growth. To do this he offers several European solutions to shove more innovative housing units into the area. But what is interesting about his plan is that he failed to mention Vancouver’s housing surplus. Between 1991 and 2006 Vancouver grew by 126,000 people who required 15,000 new dwellings to house them. But developers built 69,000 units. According to activist Randy Chatterton, judging from BC Hydro statistics, 18,000 units are unoccupied, and MLS listings are up 26 per cent while sales are down 10 per cent. Now there are seven unoccupied apartments for every homeless person in Vancouver.

“Accepting our share of growth” is a standard line of urban planners and politicians. What they never reveal is their role in not only accommodating growth but promoting it. Developers build houses on spec. They are built on the expectation that compliant governments will continue to provide international clientele (migrants) and the monetary and tax policy necessary to lubricate investment in real estate. It is a case study of Say’s Law - supply creates its own demand. Berelowitz never once thought to question the necessity for Vancouver to grow by 45 per cent in the next quarter century. He never thought to consult Dr Michael Healey’s landmark 1997 study of the Fraser Basin ecosystem that recommended a halt to immigration and a Population Plan to defend the region and others like it from runaway population growth. That’s because the ideology of urban planning is not growth-control but “growth management”.

Former real estate developer and media mouthpiece Bob Ransford recently “despaired” of those in Vancouver with, are you ready for this old chestnut, a “drawbridge mentality”, that is, “who think we can resist the global flow of population and somehow sustain our lifestyle”. One wonders what kind of lifestyle Ransford imagines for the Vancouverites forced to live like sardines in a sardine can just so more migrants can move in and buy the bachelor suite closets that his developer friends would obligingly sell them. It seems logical that the law of physics would place a limit on the process of densification that Berelowitz, Ransford and the Mayor would set in motion, but so far they have shown no apprehension of it. And the law of “livability” would surely fall well short of that physical limit.

One wonders how Ransford would behave if he were the last of ten passengers on an elevator that safety regulations set at ten. Would he hold open the door for more people in the lobby who wanted in because he feared being accused of “Nimbyism” or having a “drawbridge mentality”? Would he suffer an urban planner who insisted that the elevator could hold 12 or 15 people, or a real estate developer who sold tickets to more people than could safely ride on the contraption? Would he listen to a human rights advocate who said that every person of colour from another country had a right to jam on board regardless of the elevator’s carrying capacity because it was a matter of social justice? If it was a matter of profit, one suspects he would. Growthists can’t grasp the concept that existing passengers, existing residents, be they of a city, or a nation, have a moral right to set limits.

Ransford ices his argument with more tired clichés. Cliché number one: “Our kids will not be able to afford to live in a city where no new housing is built.” Trouble is “our kids” aren’t buying that new housing. In Greater Vancouver 85 per cent of new housing is occupied by immigrants, while 70 per cent of new housing in other Canadian urban centres is occupied by “new” Canadians.

Cliché number two: “If we halted growth we will have a real labour shortage with our rapidly ageing population.” Fact: the C.D. Howe Institute demonstrated that it would take an unsustainable immigration rate 28 times higher than its present rate for the next 50 years for Canada to maintain its present age structure. Postponed retirements and higher productivity will greatly lessen the impact of this over-hyped bogeyman.

Lastly, Ransford recruited the words of retired planner Peter Oberlander who said that compact settlement patterns were an inevitable feature of urban growth especially where we were committed to preserving agricultural land. “The city is humanity’s supreme achievement”, he maintained, in dismissing fears about continued growth. Apparently Oberlander never heard of the failure of “smart growth” in America or the compromise of British greenbelts by developers or he might be less confident in his “compact settlement patterns.” And when it is recalled that a Greek polis was ideally imagined to consist of 5,000 citizens, one shudders to think that today a city of five million is considered a “supreme achievement”.

In a speech that could have been ghost-written by any of the aforementioned Canadian growth-a-holics, Premier John Brumby of Victoria spoke of his government’s plan to “manage growth”, because you see, growth is inevitable, and growth projections must be treated as, if anything, “pessimistic”, i.e. conservative. Thus Melbourne is going to grow at least 44 per cent by 2030, with 6.2 million people by 2020. “Demographer Bernard Salt has projected we will regain our title (sic) as Australia’s largest city within 20 years.” Note that the Premier treats a population growth plateau like a sports trophy to be raised aloft in triumph. Melbourne will regain its “title” like Mohammed Ali regained his title against George Foreman. Similarly when Victoria was “losing” people in the 1990s, presumably the state of Victoria was a “loser”. But now “the exodus has been turned around and people are now voting with their feet in favour of Victoria”. It is as if Premier Brumby is fighting an election campaign and people moving to Victoria are casting a vote for him. A commonplace illusion among Premiers, Governors and Prime Ministers

But he does acknowledge the strain that in-migration places on infrastructure and states that a million extra residents will require 380,000 new houses or apartments. Given Melbourne’s growth rate, he projects only a 17-year supply of land, and housing affordability, planning and supply issues demand full attention. He confesses that “the faster we grow the greater the demand on land supply”. Yet the one option that Brumby will not consider of course is to lobby the federal government for a severe cutback on immigration. Out comes a variant of Canadian Cliché number two: “we are facing a skills gap of 123,000 jobs over the next decade, which could curb our ability to benefit from the climate change economy.” Victoria attracts 27 per cent of Australia’s skilled migrants, and Melbourne 25 per cent of migrants of all categories. It is curious that the Premier would think that the importation of workers would be key to fighting climate change, when research clearly indicates that the best climate change fighting strategy is reducing population growth.

Certainly the Vancouver experience leads one to question the party line of housing lobby groups that releasing more land is requisite to housing affordability. Australian Property Monitors operations director Michael McNamara argues that “demand for housing is extremely flat and developers haven’t been able to sell the projects that they’ve got, let alone launch new projects - so we totally dismiss the argument that releasing more land on our cities’ outskirts is going to affect affordability”. ANZ Bank senior economist Paul Braddick says “there is no strong evidence to suggest that a lack of land supply has been driving up prices. The proof of that is house prices have gone up across the board - indicating it is not just land availability that is the culprit here.” Macquarie Bank analyst Rory Robertson attributes the fact that city house prices have grown 75 per cent faster than wages in the past 20 years to a halving of interest rates, the halving of capital gains taxes in 1999 and massive immigration which chose to settle in the eight capital cities.

Of relevance here is a study done by Bob Birrell and Ernest Healy of Monash University in 2003 entitled Migration and the Housing Affordability Crisis. While the authors acknowledge that Melbourne’s housing price spiral “cannot be attributed to recent migration levels,” they qualify their statement with significant findings. “The impact of migration varies sharply by metropolis. For Sydney the share of household growth attributable to net migration in 2001-2002 is 47.8 per cent Migration makes the next biggest impact in Perth where it is projected to contribute 33.5 per cent of household growth, then Melbourne where it constitutes 28.6 per cent of growth in 2001-2002.” By 2021, however, migration will account for 63 per cent of Melbourne’s household growth.

“Developers and builders are already heavily dependent on immigration to sustain their activities in Sydney. Within a decade those operating in Melbourne and Perth will be dependant on immigration for nearly half the underlying household growth. This will apply to Australia as a whole by 2021 when 48.4 per cent of household growth will derive from overseas migration.” It is in this context that the idea advanced by population sociologist Sheila Newman that property developers are key lobbyists for the country’s ecologically suicidal policy of high immigration becomes very plausible. As Birrell and Healy state, “It is no wonder that the housing and property industries in Australia are so keen for high migration”.

That immigration has a crucial impact on housing affordability is not immediately apprehended in any correlation of housing price increases in six major Australian cities with a given volume of migrant settlers. From 1989 to 2002 Sydney increased 30.7 per cent, Melbourne 20.5 per cent, Brisbane 45.8 per cent, Perth 23.5 per cent Adelaide 28.1 per cent and Canberra 34.8 per cent. What must be understood, however, is while certainly investors and speculators played a major role in the housing price spiral, immigration boosted their confidence, and without that the spiral would never have taken off. That is why, Birrell and Healy explain, Sydney’s housing bubble remained the strongest, for even if immigrants demanded mainly rental accommodations, “this is still vital to investors if they are to fill their properties with tenants”.

“In the case of Sydney, the intuition of residents and some politicians that immigration is a factor in the housing affordability crisis, is correct. The absence of the immigration component of household growth in Sydney would significantly reduce the underlying gap between demand and supply. There is little doubt that a reduction in the national immigration intake would improve affordability in Sydney.”

The authors conclude by saying that “Immigration is an important underlying factor shaping growth in demand for housing prices because of its role in household formation … By 2021, according to our projections, the migration component of household formation in Sydney will be around 75 per cent, in Melbourne and Adelaide 60 per cent and in Perth 54 per cent”.

As a rule of thumb, according to Albert Saiz of the University of Pennsylvania, “an immigrant inflow of 1 per cent of a city’s population is associated with increases in average rent and housing prices of about 1 per cent .” (Journal of Economics, Volume 6, Issue 2)

By that token then, immigration has added 18 per cent to the price of Vancouver real estate, or to put it another way, it has reduced the supply of housing stock available to resident buyers and the price mechanism has adjusted accordingly.

The logic of growthism calls for an increase in supply, for more housing units through more density and/or the release or development of more land. The logic of common sense, however, calls for a decrease in demand, that is, a decrease in tax incentives for real estate investors and speculators and a reduction in migrants.

Whether it be Vancouver or Melbourne, throughout the Anglophone world, the issues are the same, cloaked in the same euphemistic code language of growthism. The choices are ours to make.

Tim Murray blogs at (We) Can Do Better. He is Director of Immigration Watch Canada, and Vice President Biodiversity Canada which he co-founded. Tim is a member of Sustainable Population Australia, the Population Institute of Canada and Optimum Population Trust UK. His personal blog is at sinkinglifeboat.blogspot.com.

Original article

Indians among highest visa rule breachers in Australia

2009-06-25T23:05:00.000-07:00

From Business Standard:

Indian students have been placed in the high risk group for visa breaches in Australia along with Bangladeshis and Cambodians, a development that may result in tightening of immigration rules for them.

Based on a review of the student visa programme by the Department of Immigration and Citizenship across all applicant countries, Indians were bracketed with Bangladeshis and Cambodians as a ‘level-four’ risk, which is the second highest risk category.

The student visa programme assessment level was raised from three to four after last year’s review by the Immigration department. No nationalities have currently been placed at level-five, the highest risk category.

Experts say the upgrade may result in significant tightening of rules for Indian students and can affect the demand for their enrolments.

Under the new measure, Indians seeking education in Australia, will now have to prove they have enough funds to survive for the duration of their study and pass more stringent English language tests.

Immigration risk levels for Indian students were upgraded after a department audit that found that in 2006-07, 4.66 per cent of the 58,268 Indian nationals granted visas breached their conditions, compared with an average rate among foreign students of 1.32 per cent, an Immigration department said.

The number of Indian students studying in Australia has risen dramatically in recent years, from 11,313 in 2002 to 96,739 last year, Immigration department spokesperson added.

In 2007-08 the unlawful rate among Indian students was 1.48 per cent of a total 87,145 Indian visa-holders, compared with 0.99 per cent for the average foreign student.

While in May this year offshore applications for Indian students grew by 20 per cent as compared to last year, statistics for this month have till date remained the same as compared to June last year despite the attacks on Indian students being widely publicised.

The number of Indian students enrolled in Australia stood at 47,639 in the period between July 2007 to June 2008. The number was 38,162 in the period between July 2008 to February 2009.

Original article

"The number of Indian students studying in Australia has risen dramatically in recent years, from 11,313 in 2002 to 96,739 last year, Immigration department spokesperson added."

Gee, I wonder if that has anything to do with the changes made by the former Howard Government which made it easier for foreign students to apply for permanent residency after they graduate?

As Monash academic Bob Birrell explained in a 2006 article:

In 1999, the Australian Government introduced a suite of reforms to its skilled migration selection system. Among the most important of these was the granting of incentives to former overseas studentsto encourage them to obtain permanent residence on completion of their courses. These incentives included additional points for Australian training and the waiving of the job experience requirement that skilled migrants applying offshore had to meet.

Policymakers thought that persons who had been trained in Australia, in English, would be more attractive to Australian employers than their counterparts trained overseas, especially if the overseas training had been conducted in a foreign language in a non-western educational setting. In mid-2001 new onshore visa categories for overseas students were introduced which permitted foreign students to apply for permanent residence without having to leave Australia, as long as they applied within six monthsof completing their training.

...

In a numerical sense these policy initiatives have been spectacularly successful. There were 5,480 onshore visasissued to principal applicants who were former overseas students under the three student visa subclasses in 2001–02. By 2005–06, this number had grown to 15,383.

These changes, quietly introduced without any public consultation, have effectively transformed Australia's higher education institutions into "visa factories" for foreigners seeking permanent residency. Australia's universities, starved of public funding, have welcomed and encouraged this influx of full fee-paying foreign students. As Dr. Peter Wilkinson noted in his book The Howard Legacy (2007), "the universities market themselves as providing education but they know, and certainly their prospective applicants know, that they are marketing permanent residency visas."

Educational standards have predictably dropped as the universities prostitute themselves for foreign cash. As several reports have pointed out, many of the foreign students granted permanent residency are largely unemployable in their particular fields due to poor English. This means that Australia loses out both ways by accepting sub-standard foreign workers while also degrading the quality of its domestic degrees. Worse still, the selling of permanent residency to foreigners also degrades the value and undermines the meaning of Australian citizenship, given that permanent residency provides an almost guaranteed path to naturalisation.

The cost of mass immigration

2009-06-25T05:35:00.000-07:00

From Australia.To News:

Australia facing loss of its language, culture and environmental sustainability to mass immigration

By Frosty Wooldridge

While I write about degrading conditions in the United States, the Internet allows my work to travel all over the planet. As you know, relentless immigration endangers America, but also Australia.

Incomprehensible forces push for more population additions in both our countries. Those ‘growthists’ at the power positions operate in a mindless vacuum. They create a Faustian Bargain with the only outcome manifesting in Hobson’s Choice.

Yet, a glimmer of hope exposes average citizens to their dilemma. Mark O’Connor and William Lines wrote Overloading Australia to give everyone an idea of the calamity engulfing Oz.

In the USA, I wrote a piece, “America Losing its Language & Culture without a Whimper” for my fellow citizens. It appears that an Aussie picked it up from the Internet. You may appreciate his response:

“Frosty, you are absolutely spot on! Unfortunately I am seeing the same thing happening in Australia, most of my country men are either walking around in a "fog" or are too caught up in materialism or have been sucked in by the crap being pushed by the multi-cultural/multi-racial industry,” Robert said.

“Over the last two weeks in Melbourne & Sydney there have been large protests (several thousand strong) by foreign Indian students claiming lack of action from government and police to protect them from violent attacks. There have also been protests in India where effigies of P.M. Kevin Rudd were burnt. Indian newspapers have been running stories about Australian racism and saying that the attacks could threaten the income Australia gets from foreign students. The funny thing is: video surveillance tapes and recent arrests have identified the culprits as being of Middle Eastern identity.

“Large groups of India students have taken to the streets of Melbourne armed with clubs and attacked young men of Middle Eastern appearance. The Middle Eastern community is now asking for protection, meanwhile our politicians and self appointed ethnic spokesman are claiming the attacks aren't racially motivated. The average Aussie of European decent is sitting back scratching their head wondering what the bloody hell is going on?

“Regarding fee paying foreign students, I noticed that this is just another back door scam for residency in Australia for Third Worlders, once they complete their University or a basic Cooking, Hairdressing or Assistant in Nursing course at a ”shonk" so called Technical School they get bonus points towards residency status as they are considered skilled workers. At the same time local kids can't get placements at University, the management of Universities prefer the foreign students because they pay higher fees.

“On other matters Sydney's first Water Distillation Plant will be online soon to cope with our demand for more fresh water, the politicians are still blaming Global Warming as the reasons for building the plant, they refuse to acknowledge the demands that an increasing population is placing on our environment, health care system and life style.

“Since retiring, I have been doing a bit of casual work in a hospital, I can't believe the number of elderly people from Third World countries who are using our system and costing the taxpayer a bomb! Most of them have come here under the Family Reunion Program, the taxes their children pay could never cover the cost of providing health care and welfare for their parents.”

Australians must ask themselves if they wish to import the poor of the world to become the new entrenched poor of Oz. In the USA, we’re importing two million poor annually and they are breaking our medical, educational and prison systems. They cannot be educated as their numbers overwhelm our educational systems. Additionally, every poor teenage girl becomes pregnant faster than a hummingbird can flap its wings.

Additionally, those poor immigrants seeking a better life in the U.S. cost our taxpayers $346 billion annually in housing, food, medical, educational and resettlement costs. Immigrants must be costing Oz a bundle of cash too!

Australians may well look toward a total moratorium on all immigration before they find their country devolved into a multi-cultural and multi-lingual polyglot of incoherent mush.

One scholar, Seymour Martin Lipset, put it this way: “The histories of bilingual and bicultural societies that do not assimilate are histories of turmoil, tension, and tragedy. Canada, Belgium, Malaysia, Lebanon-all face crises of national existence in which minorities press for autonomy, if not independence. Pakistan and Cyprus have divided. Nigeria suppressed an ethnic rebellion. France faces difficulties with its Basques, Bretons, and Corsicans.”

Kant said, “Religion and language are the two great dividers.”

The fact grows more apparent daily: multiculturalism and multilingual societies cannot and do not maintain a cohesive or viable future. Australia will become a nation of strangers.

Frosty Wooldridge has bicycled across six continents – from the Arctic to the South Pole – as well as six times across the USA, coast to coast and border to border. In 2005, he bicycled from the Arctic Circle, Norway to Athens, Greece. He presents “The Coming Population Crisis in America: and what you can do about it” to civic clubs, church groups, high schools and colleges. He works to bring about sensible world population balance at www.frostywooldridge.com

You can also read Wooldridge's review of Overloading Australia here.

Watering down the citizenship test

2009-06-25T01:36:00.000-07:00

The following article was first published in early 2008, prior to the Rudd Government's watering down of the citizenship test.

From The Independent Australian, Issue No. 14 (Summer 2007/08):

Ethnic Leaders Attack Citizenship Test

A new chorus of opposition to the citizenship test introduced by the former Howard Government late in 2007 has predictably arisen from ethnic leaders now that Labor is in power in Canberra, writes Alan Fitzgerald.

The push is on for the new government to dismantle the Citizenship Test. Much is made of the fact that 20 percent of those who sit the random choice test fail, which actually suggests that the test is working. Labor's Immigration Minister Chris Evans has said that in view of the failure rate he would review the test with the intention of making substantial changes to it.

Surely, if the Minister's aim is to ensure a 100 percent pass rate then it would not be a test at all.

Ethnic Communities Council of Victoria chairman Sam Afra said his organisation always believed the new test was discriminatory (what a surprise!) and would stop many lawful migrants from becoming Australian citizens.

"The news that 20 percent of applicants are failing the test confirms our fears", he said.

However, these critics often do not mention that a person who fails the test can continue to sit for it as many times as they want to, until they pass.

The questions, chosen at random from a resource book, are hardly difficult. If you aspire to be a citizen of this country, out ought to know the date Australia came into existence as a nation, the name of the city where the Commonwealth Parliament is located, or the colours of the Australian flag. To pass the test you are required to correctly answer 12 of the 20 questions that are drawn at random from a pool of 200 questions. As they say, "it's not rocket science" [But it was evidently still all too hard for some of the "skilled", "hard-working", "intelligent" immigrants arriving on our shores - R.E.]. Migrants under the age of 18 to 60 years of age and older do not have to sit for the test, and there exemptions for persons with physical or mental incapacities. Illiterate migrants may take the test in an alternative format.

The questions are selected at random to prevent those sitting the test from learning the answers by rote. One enterprising company is charging migrants $20 to sit 15 mock exams over 90 days online in preparation for the real test. A migrant is eligible to take the test after four years residence in Australia [In most other immigrant-receiving countries, it is at least five - R.E.]. Failing the test does not affect their residency rights but means they cannot take the oath of citizenship until they pass the test.

Further, Australia is not alone is asking potential citizens to demonstrate they know something about the nation that is offering them the benefits and privilege of citizenship. The USA, Canada and the UK all require persons to sit a test.

Critics of the test appear to be quite happy to misrepresent it. Joseph Wakim, a former multicultural affairs commissioner and founder of the Australian Arabic Council, claimed that if the test had been around when his family arrived in Australia, his mother being illiterate would have failed the test, and therefore "I would have not here to tell this story". This is rubbish [And thankfully so. Just think, where would Australia be without such perennially aggrieved ethnic minority activists? - R.E.]

Academic Dr Gwenda Tavan claims the test indicates a narrowly conceived cultural-nationalist model of citizenship that undermines the appeal and advantages of citizenship by defining social membership in overly exclusive, vague and sometimes facile ways.

NSW Anti-Discrimination Board president Stepan Kerkyasharian said the test should rely less on culture and more on practical knowledge of Australia, "not about what happened 20 years ago in some cricket match."

Max Jeganathan, spokesman for Civil Liberties Australia, claimed the test was an attempt to promote Anglo-Celtic culture as being the dominant part of the overall Australian culture at the expense of multicultural identity.

Objection to the test seems more to do with objection to the idea that Australia has a culture of its own and that the nation's institutions, laws, politics, flag and history reflect that reality. The multicultural lobby would argue that mainstream Australian culture has nothing to offer them, but they have everything of value to offer Australia.

Which begs the question of why are they here in the first place?

There is no doubt that some minority cultures reject Australian values in favour of their own traditions which they are determined to maintain. For them, being in Australia - if not being an Australian citizen - is a matter of convenience. For them citizenship is just a ticket to social welfare benefits, job and educational opportunities and a guarantee against deportation should they or their kin embark on a career of crime.

Historian Ann-Mari Jordens (The Age, 10 January 2008) points out that citizenship for migrants involves a cost-benefit analysis. A sizeable proportion of migrants saw no tangible advantage in "making the leap". If migrants think so little of Australian citizenship - other than its economic aspects - who is to blame? Has Australia made it too easy for migrants to take up citizenship without demanding a real commitment to Australia? [The answer is, of course, yes. As Geoffrey Blainey once remarked, Australia hands out citizenship like fast food. - R.E.]

The absence of many persons of ethnic minority backgrounds in our armed forces and volunteer organisations suggests it is Australia which is being taken for a ride, not the migrants.

The Australian Government's embrace of dual citizenship only compounds the problem. Where do the newcomers' loyalties really lie? If they are only here for the money, where will they be in times of adversity? If they don't embrace Australian values - democracy, equality, freedom of religion, secularism - would they be prepared to embrace them let alone defend them if they came under attack?

To claim as the multiculturalists say, that there is nothing unique about Australian values is to deny reality. In most of countries of the world, from which we draw our migrants, these very values are either absent in the body politic or only honoured in the breach. How much democracy exists in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, or South America? The "all cultures are equal" mantra of the multiculturalists would leave a vacuum at the heart of the Australian story.

Objection to the citizenship test is a symptom of a larger problem - Australia's failure to promote its national story to its citizens - both native born and naturalised - through educational and cultural institutions. The idea that telling the national story - its achievements and failures - will cause newcomers to feel left out and alienated is a nonsense.

The 'progressive' left liberals who infest our universities and teaching professions are more at home in a global world than in a nation-state. To them national identity and culture are to be denigrated in favour of some woolly, basket-weaving world of cultural relativism.

The majority culture - the core culture of the nation - is entitled to its pre-eminent position for without it there wouldn't be a nation but a collection of tribes. To promote it is not to make newcomers unwelcome but hopefully remind them of why they chose to come in the first place.

Mass immigration and the intolerance of Western liberalism

2009-06-01T13:36:00.000-07:00

British journalist Anthony Browne on mass immigration and the intolerance of Western liberalism:

The People Flow authors make a mistake common among pro-immigration advocates: seeing a nation as nothing more than a geographical entity with a functioning economy and a legal system. But a nation is first and foremost its people. It is the French people that define what France is, not lines on a map.

The pro-immigrationists are effectively trying to abolish nationhood, denying a country the right to sustain its own culture.

British-born white people, the progeny of the generation who survived the Nazi attempt to obliterate Britain as an independent nation state, now account for only 60% of the population of London. England has for more than 1500 years been a Christian country – its flag is a cross, its head of state is head of the national church – but in its second city Birmingham, Islam is now more worshipped than Christianity. In two boroughs of London, whites are already in the minority, and they are expected to become a minority in several cities in the coming decade.

If current trends continue, the historically indigenous population of Britain will become a minority by around 2100. Islam is the fastest growing religion, and much immigration to Britain comes from Muslims fleeing Muslim lands – around 75% of intercontinental asylum seekers are Muslim. But where are the limits? In an extreme example, would British Christians have a right not to live in an Islamic majority state?

For an answer to this, consider what that most liberal of American writers, Gore Vidal, said in a lecture in Dublin in 1999:

“A characteristic of our present chaos is the dramatic migration of tribes. They are on the move from east to west, from south to north. Liberal tradition requires that borders must always be open to those in search of safety or even the pursuit of happiness. But now with so many millions of people on the move, even the great-hearted are becoming edgy. Norway is large enough and empty enough to take in 40 to 50 million homeless Bengalis. If the Norwegians say that, all in all, they would rather not take them in, is this to be considered racism? I think not. It is simply self-preservation, the first law of species.”

But at what point are people of the west allowed to say that enough is enough, it is time for us to be allowed to preserve our culture? This is an issue of almost total, mind-numbing hypocrisy among western governments and political elites. They defend the inalienable right of other peoples – the Palestinians, Tibetans, native Americans – to defend their culture, but not the right of their own peoples.

It is vital to emphasise that mass immigration and the remarkably intolerant ideology of multiculturalism are exclusively western phenomena. Indeed, the striking thing about the global immigration debate in the west is its determined parochialism. If people in India, China, or Africa were asked whether they have a right to oppose mass immigration on such a scale that it would transform their culture, the answer would be clear. Yet uniquely among the 6 billion people on the planet, westerners – the approximately 800 million in western Europe, North America and Australasia – are expected by the proponents of mass immigration and multiculturalism to abandon any right to define or shape their own society.

Full article

Rolling out the red carpet for illegal immigrants

2009-06-01T13:31:00.001-07:00

From The Daily Telegraph:

Rolling out the red carpet for illegal immigrants

Piers Akerman
Monday, April 27, 2009 at 06:09pm

THE stream of unlawful boat arrivals has shown the Rudd Government’s claim to a “deterrent” factor in its immigration policy is false.

Far from deterring arrivals, the Rudd Government, through Immigration Minister Chris Evans’ department, is encouraging people smugglers.

When the temporary protection visas (TPVs) and temporary humanitarian visas (THVs) were abolished by the Rudd Government last August, those affected were given protection visas called resolution of status.

They were told they had immediate access to the same benefits as a permanent protection visa holder, including Newstart and youth allowances, the adult migrant English program (AMEP), the age pension, disability support pension, family tax benefit and childcare benefit.

They were also given travel rights, eligibility for travel documents and the ability to sponsor their family through the Offshore Humanitarian Program.

The Howard government’s Pacific Solution was introduced in 2000-2001 following 54 boat arrivals. A further six boats arrived the following year but there were none in 2002-2003.

There were fewer than 100 the following year, zero in 2004-2005, 56 people in four boats in 2005-2006, 135 in five boats in 2006-2007, just 25 in three boats in 2007-2008, and in the current year 500-plus and climbing.

On the department website, the Rudd Government acknowledges TPVs were introduced by the previous government to discourage people smuggling and to discourage refugees leaving their country of first asylum.

That is correct. Moreover, Senator Chris Evans did not oppose TPVs when they first came before the Senate.

The department makes the further blatantly political comment that “the evidence clearly shows, however, that TPVs did not have any deterrent effect. Indeed, there was an increase in the number of women and children making dangerous journeys to Australia”.

That is sophistry. There was an initial blip, but as the numbers show, attempted arrivals dwindled until the new policy came into effect.

That policy was not crafted as a deterrent. It was formulated as a sop to shrill asylum-seeker activists.

It delighted them, the Fairfax Press and the ABC, as well as limp elements in the Liberal Party such as Petro Georgiou, Judy Moylan and Bruce Baird, along with scores of people smugglers and thousands of their potential clients.

That deterrence is gone is made clear on the department’s website: “Detention is only to be used as a last resort and for the shortest practicable time”.

Further, it is clear that the department will do everything possible to make the necessary stay for health, identity and security checks, as acceptable as possible.

Under the Rudd Government, the presumption is that a person who arrives unlawfully should be placed in the community as soon as practicable, the onus of proof is now on the department to justify why they should be detained.

When they must be held, there must be facilities available for recreational, educational and religious activities, specialist medical treatment must be made available as well as multi-language libraries and outdoor sporting facilities.

People in immigration detention can request excursions and departmental policy is to “ensure that evaluation of the request is progressed quickly”, with assurance that “given enough lead time, there are few restrictions”.

And, of course, detainees have access to internet facilities so they can let relatives know they are being cared for.

If they’re unhappy with their treatment, officials are to encourage them to complain. Promotional material in several languages (including Arabic, Hindi, Mandarin and Vietnamese) is displayed informing people in immigration detention that complaints may be made to departmental staff, DSP staff, the Ombudsman’s Office, the Australian Human Rights Commission and the Australian Red Cross about any aspects of a person’s detention and that relevant processes are in place to receive and respond to those complaints.

With all the evidence indicating that the Rudd Government has opened the door, it now needs to set up a complaints department for the residents of Christmas Island where those who arrived on unlawfully aboard the growing armada are housed.

The Christmas Island Shire human resources and policy officer Keith Ravenscroft says shipments of fresh food have been raided to feed the 266 asylum seekers currently in detention and to provide for the big number of security staff, immigration and quarantine officers managing the asylum seekers.

“The local people here are not being looked after and their basic fresh food needs are not being met because the asylum seekers get priority over us,” Mr Ravenscroft told The West Australian. “They are eating better than us and yet we (taxpayers) are paying for their food.”

Deterrence? You have to be kidding.

Original article

Visa changes an invitation to illegal immigrants

2009-05-28T13:16:00.000-07:00

From the ABC:

The Federal Opposition says a proposed overhaul of the bridging visa system would further soften Australia's border protection policies, sending the wrong message to people smugglers.

A Parliamentary inquiry says there need to be changes to how the system works, including offering applicants increased assistance to health care, legal services and accommodation.

The Greens say the changes do not go far enough, the Opposition's immigration spokeswoman Sharman Stone says the recommendations would allow people into the community before they have had their identity and security status checked.

"That is just another message right now that I think is very unhelpful as the people smugglers literally get bigger and bigger boats, and become more and more active in what is a very dangerous and inhumane trade," she said.

"The message says, 'Look, we're not even going to complete all of your identity checks before we pass you into Perth or Adelaide or some other community where you can work, where you'll be given unemployment benefits if you can't get a job, where we'll find you decent accommodation'."

Original article

New boat sparks island tensions

2009-05-28T12:29:00.000-07:00

From The Australian:

New boat stokes island tensions

Paige Taylor and Nicola Berkovic | May 25, 2009

AUTHORITIES on Christmas Island were yesterday preparing to process a boatload of 73 suspected asylum seekers - the 20th arrival since September - fuelling tensions among local residents over food shortages exacerbated by the island's swelling population.

The boat was intercepted off Ashmore Island at 7am yesterday, as new figures were released showing the number of skilled overseas workers coming to Australia on temporary 457 visas had plunged to its lowest level in four years.

Home Affairs Minister Bob Debus did not give details of where the passengers and four crew were from. They are due on Christmas Island by the end of the week.

The flood of asylum seekers has swollen the island's population by almost 60 per cent forcing the Department of Immigration to employ a community liaison officer to ease ongoing tensions on the tiny territory.

Immigration officials were confronted for more than two hours at a community meeting last week by about 150 angry residents demanding to know how the Rudd Government intended to ease pressure on the resources of the small island, whose population of 1200 regularly endures supply shortages as a result of late shipments from Perth.

There are currently 464 detainees on Christmas Island and 226 immigration workers, contractors and service providers. The presence of the fly-in, fly-out workforce - many of whom have a daily allowance of about $80 for food on top of their wage - has led to recriminations over scarce and expensive fruit at the local store.

Fresh food flown in from Perth is many times more expensive than in mainland stores - one man claimed last week to have paid $21 for three capsicums.

Some residents have grown resentful that the 29 asylum seekers living in community detention on the island are able to buy fruit on store credit provided by the department.

The department moved quickly to squash rumours that asylum seekers were living on unlimited credit. It issued detailed information showing a family of four asylum seekers on Christmas Island would receive $766 in store credit each fortnight and $300 cash.

Full article

"Fate Keeps On Happening": Australia, Boat People, And The Repressed Immigration Issue

2009-05-28T08:00:00.001-07:00

From VDARE.com:

“Fate Keeps On Happening”: Australia, Boat People, And The Repressed Immigration Issue

By R. J. Stove
May 27, 2009

Australia’s leftish Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has displayed a fairly formidable range of literary awareness, running the gamut from free market economist F. A. Hayek (whom he resents) to theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (whom he reveres). This daunting curriculum, though, appears never to have included Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

A pity. Because Rudd’s current political plight calls to mind the maxim of that novel’s intrepid but pragmatic heroine Lorelei Lee: "Fate Keeps On Happening".

The "fate" in question is the 2001 national election, which should have been a disaster for conservative John Howard, head of Australia’s government since 1996. Opinion polls for most of 2001 had Howard well behind.

Then two things happened to save Howard’s career. Most spectacularly, 9/11 helped frighten the electorate into having doubts about the advisability of changing horses in mid-stream. But even before that, in August 2001, there was the MV Tampa affair.

The MV Tampa was a Norwegian cargo ship carrying more than 430 (exact numbers are variously given) Third World asylum seekers, mostly Afghans. Howard—fearful of an anti-immigration backlash led by Pauline Hanson, then at the height of her fame—refused to permit the Tampa to enter Australian waters.

This decision, of course, inspired profuse moaning from the commentariat, international as well as local, about Howard’s "xenophobia”. Such moaning increased in its intensity when he proclaimed: "We will decide who comes to this country, and the circumstances in which they come."

On Election Day, the opposition didn’t have a prayer. Howard returned to office with an increased majority, the first of his country’s Prime Ministers to manage this feat since Harold Holt in 1966.

No adult Australian, least of all in Rudd’s Labor Party, has forgotten the humiliation of this defeat. It has burnt its way into Labor’s collective soul, in a way that other, still more severe Labor losses (such as Gough Whitlam’s landslide routs in 1975 and 1977) failed to do.

Consequently immigration hardly figured in the 2004 election campaign. Labor’s leader that year, Mark Latham, was spectacularly erratic in many respects. But on a few themes he possessed a certain native horse sense. He compelled his party to accept a policy of increased penalties for people-smugglers and for those who overstayed temporary visas. No way was Latham about to tolerate accusations by Howard of being soft on illegals.

Suitably impressed by the resultant bipartisan front against illegals getting special privileges, most people-smugglers ceased attempting to ply their noisome trade in Australia’s vicinity.

Until now.

In 2009, an exclamation by the late Heather O’Rourke in Poltergeist II is newly appropriate to describe the advance of boat people: "They’re baaack!"

On April 16, a fishing boat containing Afghan illegals caught fire, killing five people—not three, as originally reported—and injuring 40 more, many of whom were taken to Royal Perth Hospital. (For footage of the fire, see here.)

In the aftermath of this tragedy, the Rudd Government has been left looking much more rattled than at any time since it stormed to victory at the 2007 election. (At that election, it had deprived Howard not only of the Prime Ministry but of his own parliamentary seat in Sydney. Not coincidentally, Howard had not raised the immigration issue again.

The post-Howard "conservative" Liberal Party opposition, led by Malcolm Turnbull—a prize instance of the pseudo-Catholic pro-abort pol with whom Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and John Kerry have made Americans depressingly familiar—has the scent of blood in its nostrils, for the first time since 2007. Turnbull is accusing Rudd and his cabinet ministers of covering up information about the explosion and its aftermath.

"They know full well what’s happened", Turnbull insists. "They’ve known for some time. They should tell the truth. That’s all we’re asking them to do." [Rudd Braces For More Boat People, By David McLennan, The Canberra Times, April 21, 2009]

Turnbull’s critique is purely technical, however. He has specifically repudiated the Howard era’s border protection policies, which alone, if re-established, might have some chance of restoring the situation to the 2001-2007 status quo. In essence, he is emulating John McCain’s shunning of the issue that hurt McCain so badly with the Republican base.

This is a problem, because while no-one in authority will confirm as yet whether the explosion occurred deliberately or accidentally, what remains indisputable is Prime Minister Rudd’s personal anger at people-smugglers.

Such anger makes a conspicuous contrast with his usual public persona (periodically likened to Harry Potter) of cherubic blandness. But he recently called people-smugglers "the vilest form of human life" and hoped that they would "rot in hell".

Whereas in 2001 it was Labor which found itself trapped in a "damned if it does, damned if it doesn’t" vise apropos illegals, now this unenviable victim status is firmly maintained by Turnbull’s Liberal-National coalition. Turnbull’s natural aggression means that he cannot be seen to agree with Rudd’s policies regarding the illegals, or anything else. This aggression has made him publicly hated without being even remotely respected, a fatal combination in politics, as Machiavelli long ago explained.

Meanwhile, opinion polls (carried out, admittedly, before April 16) had Rudd coasting along on a 74 per cent popularity rating. Those who preferred to see Turnbull take over from Rudd as Prime Minister constituted a grand total of 24 per cent.

The same polls found that the usual mid-term blues had simply failed to occur. Rudd’s own party has been not just unscathed but, rather, strengthened. Labor led the Liberal-National coalition by 58 per cent to 42 per cent. That was actually six points better than the result with which it won office two years ago. (A subsequent poll, reported on May 4, showed a slight decline in Rudd’s popularity. Still, 64 per cent of respondents continued to prefer Rudd over Turnbull.)

So on present trends, Rudd is unlikely to lose the next election, due no later than 2010. Besides, incumbency gives a much greater advantage to first-term Australian Prime Ministers than it does to first-term American Presidents.

To find an Australian national leader who lost office after a single term, à la Jimmy Carter or George H. W. Bush, we must go back to the hapless James Scullin, flung out of the Prime Ministry in 1931, during the Great Depression’s depths. (For newsreel footage of Scullin, see here.) Even Whitlam, chaotic administrator though he was, secured for himself a second term, in 1974.

If the boat people issue continues for long enough to do Rudd serious damage, Australia’s conservatives might have a chance at winning power. Or, who knows, they might even raise the issue of legal immigration, effectively kept out of politics by the usual bipartisan consensus since Hanson’s implosion.

But probably, like the GOP in the U.S., they will opt to play the political game in the approved way—and lose.

R. J. Stove lives in Melbourne, Australia.

Original article

Although it may have criticised the Rudd Government for its soft stance on illegal immigration, it is highly unlikely that the Coalition would ever risk raising the ire of its corporate sponsors in the pro-open borders business community by coming out in favour of lower levels of legal immigration.

The only thing that could possibly force the Coalition to re-assess its blind committment to mass immigration would be the realisation that immigrants, especially those of the non-European variety, overwhelmingly vote for the ALP. As this article points out, John Howard lost his own seat at the last federal election largely due to Bennelong's large Asian immigrant population. The role of the ethnic vote in toppling Howard in Bennelong should have sent a wake-up call to the Coalition that demography is destiny in politics. As Australia's ethnic makeup changes due to immigration, and the non-European minority population soars, the Coalition may find its share of the vote, like the European share of the population, in irrevocable decline.

The cultural costs of immigration

2009-05-26T04:20:00.000-07:00

In an article published back in 1994, U.S. conservative pundit Lawrence Auster warns of the threat mass Third World immigration poses to his country's culture and identity. It is a sobering read, and especially relevant to Australians given that we are facing the same threats in this country.

Massive immigration will destroy America
by Lawrence Auster
INSIGHT ON THE NEWS,
Oct 3, 1994

The current immigration debate, although a welcome change from the politically correct silence of earlier years, is still far too narrow in its focus, dwelling on largely technical matters such as methods of border control, the welfare and health costs of immigration, or the impact of immigration on the economy or on minority employment. As important as those issues are, they distract us from a much greater and more difficult question: What is the impact of immigration on the whole society--on America as a civilization?

To deal seriously with that question in today's climate is to provoke charges of nativism, racism and demagoguery. As immigration advocates are fond of pointing out, fears that immigration would undermine America's national culture were raised in the early 20th century--indeed they were raised against the grandparents of many of the people now opposing immigration. Since that threatened disaster did not occur, the advocates continue, similar warnings are utterly invalid now.

This ahistorical argument ignores the profound and decisive differences between immigration at the turn of the century and today. In the early 20th century, America had a vital and confident core culture and insisted that immigrants assimilate. The immigrants were predominantly European, sharing--despite ethnic differences--a common civilizational heritage with Americans. Most importantly, the great immigrant wave was drastically reduced after two or three decades, ushering in a long period of ethnic equilibrium and social peace. None of those factors obtains today.

The current legal and illegal immigration in excess of 1 million people per year, more than 90 percent of whom are non-European, combined with the higher birthrates of immigrant groups, is rapidly turning America into a multiracial country, with no racial majority, no common culture, and a population doubling to half a billion during the coming century. Despite the fact that many immigrants are good people who want to be part of this country, and despite the fact that immigration may provide some discrete and localized benefits, the overall result of this unprecedented demographic event is the erosion--and ultimately the submergence--of every defining aspect of American civilization.

Foremost of these is our tradition of individual rights. The growing numbers of minorities with distinct ethnic and cultural identities has led to a huge increase in race conflict and race consciousness in America. Each minority group is seeking official recognition and proportional representation as a group--in election districts, in employment, in education, in every area of life--and any failure to reach this utopian "cultural equality" is seen as further proof of America's inherent racism and of the need for ever-expanding state power to uproot the racism. While the problems of American blacks provided the original pretext for group rights, other minorities have acquired their own piece of the multicultural pie. Thus our newly multiracial society is becoming a multinational society, with the perpetual instability, conflict, suspicion and loss of freedom that characterize so many balkanized and Third World countries. Although proimmigration conservatives passionately insist that this shouldn't happen (since they believe that America is defined solely by universal ideas), the point is that it is happening. The assimilation into a common citizenship that was possible for people of European background is not happening for vast numbers of non-Europeans.

Next to pandemic violent crime, nothing so delegitimizes the social order as the presence of millions of persons residing illegally in this country and drawing on public assistance--combined with the government's inability or refusal to do anything about it. The more illegal aliens there are in a given city, all of whom have a powerful interest in the law's not being enforced, the more local officials accede to and even publicly welcome their presence, as Mayor Giuliani has recently done in New York City. When Orange, Calif., was overwhelmed in the early 1990s by a large illegal alien population standing on street corners seeking work, and living crammed into houses in numbers far above zoning limits, local authorities gave up enforcing the law and began instead to accommodate the illegals, building a hiring hall for them, refusing to cooperate with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, even firing a zoning officer who tried to do her job.

The rule of law is being further eroded by the fanaticism and violence characteristic of Latin American politics. When a federal investigator in San Diego County uncovered massive welfare fraud by illegal aliens and the welfare department, he was threatened by Hispanics and attacked as a "racist" by a Hispanic supervisor. Citizens in California, Texas and Florida who have spoken out against illegal immigration have received death threats and had their automobile tires slashed as a warning. As one border-control activist in California said, "It's war out here."

The loss of the rule of law goes hand in hand with the loss of national sovereignty. There are parts of the country, such as New York City's Chinatown and Washington Heights, that are already controlled more by foreign-based criminal gangs than by U.S. authorities. Crime networks from many nations, including Nigeria, Russia, Japan and Jamaica, are operating almost at will in this country. Meanwhile, many immigrant and ethnic leaders--including elected officials--openly state that because of its historic "sins" the United States has no right to control its borders.

The close proximity of widely divergent cultures, many of them lacking Western concepts of rationality, makes it difficult for people in this country to reason together or cooperate as citizens. As reported in the Los Angeles Times, juries in major criminal trials in southern California have been deadlocked because multicultural jury members did not share basic assumptions about right and wrong. Meanwhile, under the concept of "cultural defense," some immigrants charged with murder and rape have been let off with light sentences on the basis that people from non-Western cultures should not be held to Western standards.

On a deeper level, America's mind-blowing heterogeneity has helped undermine any common conception of human nature. Replacing the classic and Judeo-Christian allegiance to a moral truth higher than the individual, the mindless celebration of diversity has become America's new religion.

Thus Richard Barbieri, the head of the Independent Schools Association of Massachusetts, writes: "The essence of multicultural change is to listen to the uniqueness of others and to change our uniqueness to accommodate theirs.... True diversity will involve being humble, first of all, humble before the knowledge and experience of others." In a multicultural manifesto for the virtually all-white city of Dubuque, Iowa (pathetically titled "We Want to Change"), Dubuque's leaders declared: "Diversity calls us into a world that focuses on the many-splendored beauty of others." In all these calls to multicultural transformation, white Americans are never told why they must embrace the "experience," the "knowledge," the "beauty" of others. The diversity of others is supposed to provide some new and wonderful value--but what is that value? Well, the fact that the "others" are not like "us." They exist, therefore we must yield to them. Multiculturalism turns out to be a kind of mysticism.

Yet even as whites worship at the shrine of otherness, Third World advocates openly boast of their hatred for Anglo society and of their intent to destroy it. The publication Border Watch reports that a Hispanic activist told a California woman, who had publicized the problem of illegal aliens receiving in-state college tuition, that "You are the one that needs to go home. This is a Latino home. You people need to go back to wherever you came from.... Get with it. People of color are going to take over sooner or later." Third World intellectuals provide a more sophisticated version of the same message. "The great power of Latin America is its culture," says Gabriel Garcia Marquez in an interview. "We don't spend a dime trying to penetrate culturally, yet we're changing the United States.... We're changing the language, the food, the music, the way of being. We're changing you into a Latin country." Novelist Bharati Mukherjee--a multicultural "moderate"--speaks of Third World immigrants as "we, the new pioneers, who are thinking of America as still a frontier country." Enlarging on her imperialistic reverie, Mukherjee told Bill Moyers, "I want to conquer, I mean, I want to love and possess this country."

What such "possession" means in actual terms can be seen all over America. Areas dominated by immigrants from Third World cultures with low levels of skills and civility have ceased to be part of what most Americans think of as civilization. Vast stretches of Los Angeles, New York and Miami, have become Latin American or Caribbean slums, with deteriorating infrastructure, cheap wares sold on the sidewalk, cars fixed on the street, men loitering about all day in public, and high levels of noise, dirt, disease, disorder and violence. In step with this process of Third Worldization, there is an exodus of whites (and middle-class nonwhites) from immigrant-intensive states and regions. Thus, even as we are admitting more than a million immigrants and refugees into the United States every year, we are turning hundreds of thousands--and soon to be millions--of embittered and traumatized whites into refugees in their own country.

In cities with large Third World populations, the traditions of Western high culture--classical music, ballet, theater and libraries--are dying out through lack of support or face political pressures to change their entire character. Theater critic Thomas Disch writing in the Atlantic Monthly has said that a leading factor in the decline of the Broadway theater is that, as a result of New York's exploding ethnic and racial diversity, there is no longer a common culture to support the theater. Adapting to the demographic changes, America's powerful arts-funding organizations have given top priority to Third World folk arts, while withdrawing support from high-arts institutions such as symphony orchestras.

The erosion of English as our common language (and our link with our historic and literary roots as a nation) is not merely due to ethnic elites forcing so-called bilingualism down immigrants' throats, as proimmigration conservatives argue. It is a direct outcome of the growing size and power of the non-English-speaking population, as could be seen last year when Hispanic-dominated Dade County, Fla., repealed an existing statute--passed by the former Anglo majority--that had made English the sole language of government. The lesson is clear: "Official English laws" by themselves are useless without restriction of immigration.

As a result of immigration, American national culture is being supplanted by Third World cultures. We are now experiencing the following phenomena in this country: a 25-foot-high statue of the Aztec god of human sacrifice is being erected in a public square in the Hispanic-majority city of San Jose, Calif.; Santeria, a cult that practices animal sacrifice, is now constitutionally protected under the First Amendment; huge festivals awash in pagan symbols celebrating "West Indian Day" and "Hispanic Day" regularly disrupt life in major cities; the passionate assertion of Latin American national symbols and myths are exalted by students and teachers in American public schools. At the same, time traditional American symbols and images are being discarded because they don't "represent" our new, non-Western population. Historical art works, such as a statue of a 19th-century pioneer family commissioned by the state of Oregon, and classic plays, such as Peter Pan, have been purged. The Alamo is reconceptualized as a Hispanic monument. The Pearl Harbor memorial is relativized so as not to offend Japanese-Americans.

The most significant change brought by multiculturalism is the total bowdlerization and rewriting of American history from an anti-Western, antiwhite perspective. Exposed to such "reeducation" through all their formative years, young white people coming out of the schools today have no sense of themselves as heirs of a historical nation and tradition--only ignorance and a pervading mood of estrangement. "We have come a long way from schooling that made Europeans into Americans," writer Jared Taylor has remarked. "We now make Americans into nothing at all." In the final stage of this process of dispossession, whites will follow the example of Kevin Costner in the film Dances With Wolves and spiritually abandon America for a non-Western culture.

There are many features in the unique complex of habits and institutions we think of as the American way of life: prosperity, well-functioning private and public institutions, a stable and democratic political system, liberty under law, respect for individual dignity, a high level of philanthropy and social cooperation, the sense of fair play, and the belief in reason and common sense. Multiculturalists may sneer at these values as mere masks of "white hegemony," but one thing is certain. These values have only flourished in white-majority societies, particularly in societies with an Anglo-Saxon cultural basis. As whites lose their numerical, political and cultural dominance, American civilization with all its constituent virtues will also come to an end. That process, already well advanced in our major cities, will only accelerate if America continues to receive a mass migration several orders of magnitude greater in scale and diversity than that which submerged the Roman empire.

Original article

Like in the United States, unfettered immigration into Australia threatens to bring about a massive increase in the size of our population, a radical change in our national culture and identity, and the gradual submergence of our current population by Third World peoples. Put bluntly, continued mass immigration threatens to destroy our nation as we know it.

Surely it is incumbent upon the Australian people to discuss whether or not they want their nation to be radically transformed through mass immigration. Immigration policy should not be decided solely by perfidious, short-sighted politicians, unelected bureaucrats, and self-interested business and ethnic minority lobbies. As Geoffrey Blainey wrote: "Immigration is everyone's business: it is one of the most important national issues. The idea that it is too dangerous to be debated is a mockery of democracy. It is too important not to debate."

Legrain strikes again

2009-05-25T04:53:00.000-07:00

Remember Philippe Legrain? The author of the puerile Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them (read Peter Brimelow's scathing review here) is back in the Antipodes once again, preaching the usual open-borders dogma. This time, however, he is in New Zealand.

Michael Courtman of NZ Conservative writes:

Immigrants can't find jobs, so increase immigration

The Press reports that a visiting international economist Philippe Legrain has told New Zealand that it shouldn't cut immigration during the recession

At a Department of Internal Affairs-sponsored meeting in Christchurch, Mr Legrain spouted the usual Economist-style arguments about immigrants boosting creativity and being essential to economic growth, without providing any evidence of how such growth is supposed to boost the living standards of existing citizens.

Instead of trying to protect their jobs by calling for a slowdown in immigration, he said local workers should take it on the chin and direct the blame on "the bankers in the United States," (I wonder if that includes those who lent too much money to recent minority immigrants).

He also said that New Zealand needed more Asian immigration so it could take advantage of the expanding markets in East Asia, while overlooking the fact that the country already has thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of well-educated Chinese, Japanese and Korean speakers, should our export companies require their services.

To illustrate his total disregard for the concerns of local workers, he even admitted that thousands of recent skilled immigrants are struggling to find work as it is:

"During the two weeks he has been in New Zealand, Legrain said he had heard a lot of stories that highly-skilled migrants were unable to get jobs in New Zealand either because their qualifications were not recognised here or companies wanted people with New Zealand experience."

If recent immigrants are already being passed over by local employers, then maintaining high immigration levels during a recession will only make it even more difficult for them to find jobs.

What I think Mr Mr Legrain is really saying here is that because many immigrants are failing to find suitable employment, the country needs to bring in more immigrants to compensate for these lost "units of production," so as to maintain a high rate of economic growth that enriches our elites and avoid any empty berths in Auckland's yacht marinas.

Of course immigration-based economic growth doesn't increase per capita income unless it also lead to an increase productivity levels, and there's little evidence that productivity levels have increased much since National's neo-expansionist immigration drive began in 1990. This can be seen most starkly in the relationship between house prices and wages - since 1990 median house prices have almost tripled, while the average wage has only increased by about 40 percent.

Unfortunately while most people probably aren't particularly impressed by Mr Legrain, John Key apparently is. Recently he announced that National won't be aiming to cut immigration during the recession, and will be sticking with its expansionist target of 45,000 immigrants per year.

That may not sound a lot to overseas readers, but for a small country of 4.2 million, it represents a higher figure than most other developed countries, particularly for one which has little labour intensive industry and derives most of its income from primary production and tourism.

Immigration cutback is pure spin

2009-05-25T04:08:00.000-07:00

From WA Today:

Congratulations Immigration Minister Chris Evans for the best spin since Shane Warne was at his peak, but I suspect the Minister himself might be surprised at how easy it's been to befuddle most of Australia's media - they make Mike Gatting look like Don Bradman.

The "leaking'' of the "14% cut" in skilled migration on Sunday worked a treat, capturing all the headlines on Monday and getting a second run with the official announcement that night on the box and in Tuesday's fishwrappers. Oh, wasn't it lapped up, especially by the tabloids - just that little touch of xenophobic nationalism about it that so appeals.

And nearly all of it, as Chris Evans well knows, was misleading nonsense, just throwing the CFMEU a bone to protect a few construction and building tradies, being seen to be doing something about rising unemployment, while actually having no meaningful impact on this year's record migration surge.

Yes, Mr Evans did announce a reduction of 18,500 in the skilled permanent migrant category, "slashing'' the intake by nearly 14% to 115,000.

The Minister might not have mentioned that that still means a 12% increase on the previous year's skilled permanent migrant intake - and that it represents a bare 5% impact on total migration this year, that's running close to 350,000 people. Maybe make that 332,000 now - still a record high.

Full article

There are a couple of things we can deduce from this article.

The first is that Chris Evans is disingenuous.

The second is the vast majority of the journalists who reported the Rudd Government's "immigration cutback" are incredibly obtuse.

And the third is that unemployment levels will inevitably rise as a result of the massive flood of immigrants that the Rudd Government has decided to unleash upon the country.

You can see just how unbalanced federal immigration policy has become against the interests of the Australian people when the immigration doors are opened even wider during the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression.

Book Review - "Overloading Australia"

2009-05-10T00:54:00.000-07:00

From The Independent Australian:

OVERLOADING AUSTRALIA - How Governments and Media Dither and Deny on Population

Mark O’Connor and William J. Lines.
Envirobook. 2008. 241 pp. RRP $19.95
Reviewed by Geoff Mosley.

Mankind is suffering from an addiction to economic and population growth which at this stage it appears only nature can cure. The justification given by the sufferers is that both forms of growth are necessary for prosperity as a result of the ever growing consumption they deliver. The fact that endless growth is impossible because the earth’s resources are finite is conveniently ignored. Discussion of the subject of growth is taboo in government circles and is rarely discussed in the media.

Sooner or later, but perhaps only when nature’s retribution becomes more obvious, people will understand the error of their ways and seek an alternative to endless growth. In the meantime there will be a few who will document and examine the contradictions inherent in the present situation and an even fewer number who will provide an outline of a broad alternative way of life to growth.

Mark O’Connor and William Lines focus on the former task, providing a text which is both an encyclopaedia and a bible on the subject of Australia’s overpopulation. Their book provides all the statistics on facts, trends and costs that the reader will need to become informed on the topic and makes the central point that it is the relatively high net immigration levels that are responsible for well over half of Australia’s high population growth, standing at 1.6% per annum in 2008.

Where the book excels is in recording how governments, the media and environment groups have dithered, distorted and obfuscated. In the case of government the main explanation given is their short term outlook and compliance with business interests. The Commonwealth Government avoids developing an open policy by means of electoral and other consultative mechanisms, preferring instead a de facto policy. State governments take population growth as a given.

According to the authors, both the media and green groups have been muted by the playing of the ‘race card’ by business interests.

Why though have environmentalists been so easily put off their stride? The development of a longer term, big picture, view depends upon the effectiveness of the conservationists. According to O’Connor and Lines these groups have fallen victim to the short term concepts of human welfare of the ‘New Class’. So while the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) has had a policy which calls for nil net immigration since 1978, for many years now it has been reluctant to show leadership in promoting it.

The book essentially concentrates on its stated aim - ‘to clear the intellectual deck of twaddle and rubbish’ - but does mention the immediate solutions of abandoning pro-natalism and limiting immigration (with greater preference given to refugees); preparing the ground, it is hoped, for more comprehensive solutions addressing every major facet of the way we live.

The book also performs a valuable service in pointing to the counterproductive nature of merely attempting to mitigate problems in a way which ignores population growth. In the case of water they recommend a protest movement involving non-compliance with water restrictions. Otherwise, reduced consumption levels will be seen as an open sesame to growth. A similar point is made with regard to those overseas aid efforts which help maintain unsustainable population levels.

Saving water will of course save you money but endless growth of population will cost you the earth. Getting people to pay for deadly overpopulation is one of the biggest confidence tricks ever perpetrated on the public.

There are a few errors. For instance the 1996 State of the Environment Report was Australia’s second, not its first, and the idea that the ACF may now provide leadership on the immigration issue appears to be wishful thinking given that the Foundation is currently in the process of removing the nil net migration objective from its policy statement. These are minor quibbles compared with the value of this book. Perhaps a future edition would help the reader more if it included a time line of all the past major events relevant to the book’s thesis.

Geoff Mosley is the Australian Director of the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy. He is a former Executive Director of the Australian Conservation Foundation and former member of the National population Council.

Original article

*UPDATE*

You can read another, more comprehensive review of Overloading Australia here. The review is by sociologist Dr. Katharine Betts, author of many articles and several books on the immigration issue.

Time to tell the truth about asylum seekers

2009-05-10T00:44:00.000-07:00

From The Australian Conservative:

Time for the Rudd Government to tell the truth about the asylum seekers

Cory Bernardi | May 1 2009

Almost every day, of every week, of every month, I receive at least one email contrasting the payments made to Australian asylum seekers with the payments made to Australian pensioners. Perhaps you too have seen them as part of a viral information campaign. These emails suggest that illegal asylum seekers receive more government assistance than an Australian pensioner.

Indeed, I have raised this with the Minister for Immigration during Senate Estimates and have been advised that the email campaign is absolutely false. On that assurance, I too have rejected the legitimacy of the emails circulated, confident in the knowledge that they couldn’t possibly be true.

Now I am not so sure.

Two days ago, I read a report that the illegal immigrants who are detained on Christmas Island are receiving thousands of dollars in benefits from the Australian Government for breaking Australian law by breaching our border security.

One report has a family of four receiving $1066 per fortnight for food - more than many Australian resident families would receive from the Government when faced with extreme economic hardship.

Of course, the payment made to the illegal arrivals reportedly doesn’t include the free accommodation (yes that’s right - a house in the community, not a jail cell!), internet access and an unrestricted phone card so they can contact family and friends . One can only imagine the reports of the land of milk and honey during these taxpayer funded phone calls.

Frankly, at the risk of being condemned as heartless, I am appalled by this information. These people, who may or may not be legitimate refugees, have already shown themselves to be criminals by breaking the law to enter Australian territory.

Of course there will be the usual cries that the queue jumpers were so desperate to escape a life threatening situation they were forced to take the illegal and risky venture of coming to Australia in a leaky boat. I say that is absolute nonsense.

I cannot recall a single instance where an illegal boat person entering Australian territory had embarked, uninterrupted from their original country of residence. Recent reports are of Afghani or Iranian citizens who have travelled through Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia before paying a people smuggler tens of thousands of dollars for illegal passage to Australia. Hardly the conduct of someone fleeing for their life.

Indeed, recently a group of seventy Afghans were detained in a hotel in Indonesia because they were abandoned by the people smugglers whom they had paid for passage to Australia. One can just imagine their hardship, lounging around the pool, watching satellite TV, waiting for the chance at the good life in Australia.

Of course, the Rudd Government denies that their policies have encouraged the new wave of illegal arrivals into our territorial waters. Perhaps it is just a coincidence that since the immigration laws were softened there has been an influx of boats. Most recently, one of these voyages has met with the tragic loss of life and reinforced the perception that the Rudd Government is not being straight with the Australian people.

I say enough is enough. It is time for a reality check. We have more boats, filled with illegal immigrants, coming every week. Alarmingly, there are reports that when they arrive here, the passengers are offered greater financial support than some Australian citizens and still the Government is in denial.

The Australian people deserve to know the truth of what is causing this influx of illegal immigrants and exactly how their taxpayer dollars are being spent.

We need an independent inquiry to establish the facts surrounding illegal boat arrivals and the use of taxpayer funds that seem to act as an incentive for them to come here.

Cory Bernardi is a South Australian Liberal senator.

Original article

The rise of the global suburb

2009-05-02T00:59:00.000-07:00

For several decades now, Australia and Canada have been seemingly competing with other for the unenviable title of the country with the highest per capita immigration intake in the world. The huge, unrelenting immigration inflows into these countries essentially make them freaks among the world's nations.

The following article by Canadian academic Stephen Gallagher explores some of the immigration-related problems facing Canada, specifically the threat that sustained, mass Third World immigration poses to Canadian national identity and unity. As one reads the article, one could be forgiven for thinking that Gallagher was describing the situation here in Australia, especially when he talks of a country "with little underlying coherence in the sense of sustaining a primary national identity aside from being a desirable place to settle." As Gallagher explains, far from "enriching" the character of the host nation, the massive Third World immigrant deluge now swamping Australia and Canada threatens to eradicate the remnants of those countries' distinct identities and sense of nationhood.

From Immigration Watch Canada:

Canada and Mass Immigration: The Creation of a Global Suburb and its Impact on National Unity

Stephen Gallagher
McGill University

Recently, the National Post ran a contest to describe Canada “in six words or less.” The winner of this ‘motto contest’ was: ‘Canada – a home for the world’. Given the arrival of 10 million immigrants of diverse origins since the end of the Second World War, this motto is revealing of the new Canada. This is Canada perceived as a country with little underlying coherence in the sense of sustaining a primary national identity aside from being a desirable place to settle. This is Canada viewed as a home away from home for a range of peoples whose identities are rooted not in Canada but in countries and regions of origin. It foresees Canada’s evolution into a global suburb; a comfortable, secure and tolerant bedroom community.

The question I am asking here is how Canada came to have such permissive and non-controversial migration policies and practices. Of course, Canada is not alone in sustaining a mass immigration policy but it stands alone in the world as a country where mass immigration is so fully accepted as a policy norm. I also want to examine some implications of mass immigration for national unity and identity in Quebec and the Rest of Canada (ROC).

To begin with, Canada is not unique in having a contemporary policy of mass immigration although in comparison with other countries of immigration its flow rate is higher. On a per capita basis in 2007, Canada is estimated to have a net migration approximately four times that of the EU, double the US and a third greater than Australia. In addition, Canada’s annual flow of around 250,000 immigrants is very diverse in terms of origins and ethnicity unlike the US where the Latin American influx makes up more than half. With respect to Australia, immigrants from UK and New Zealand made up about 30% of the inflow. As a result, in other words, Canada is undergoing a social and demographic evolution that is much more rapid and profound than that in the other immigrant-welcoming countries. Toronto and Vancouver have majority populations that do not trace their primary roots to Canada prior to the Second World War. In 2006, 46% of the population of Toronto and 40% of Vancouver were born outside Canada and, according to Statistics Canada, it is very likely that in less than ten years from now, Toronto and Vancouver will both have majority ‘visible minority’ populations. Of course the US also sustains a large immigration influx, so fundamental demographic change is also occurring albeit at a slower rate. For example, according to a recent demographic study published by the Pew Centre, if present trends continue by 2050 the non-Hispanic white population will be a minority of the US population.

In Canada, the implications of social and demographic change have not been the subject of much political or public discussion and little effort has been expended considering what Canada will look like 20, 50 or 100 years in the future. Basically, a commitment to a high flow rate constitutes the sum total of Canada’s ‘population policy’. The situation is so unmanaged that studies of new census reports are greeted with careful media review and even amazement as if demographic change was some uncontrollable natural process as opposed to the result of an identifiable public policy.

Regardless of its unmanaged nature, unlike the situation in other developed countries, a review of opinion polls suggests that, in general, the Canadian public appears to support mass immigration.

Also unlike the situation in other developed countries, immigration has not been a significant election concern. In Canada’s most recent election (2005), the governing Liberal Party reiterated its commitment to raise Canada’s immigration intake, from around .7% of the nation population, to 1% of the population. This rate would see an immigration intake of over 300,000 which would be proportional to a French or UK annual intake of 600,000 or an American annual intake of approximately 3 million. An election promise such as this would be political suicide in these countries. The Conservative Party did not challenge the Liberal party on this issue and won a minority government focusing on unrelated issues.

Why is this? I would argue that with the exception of francophone Quebec, the importance, need for, and acceptance of immigration has become an article of faith and almost a litmus test of Canadianism. In other words, immigration acceptance is part of a new Canadian creed. This creed includes the protection and promotion of openness, tolerance and diversity which is operationalized programmatically in a policy of mass immigration, multiculturalism and the defence of human rights viewed broadly.

As a result, mass immigration is celebrated in ROC without much evidence of the fundamental intellectual engagement on these questions taking place in the rest of the developed world.

So the questions I want to address is given Canada’s objectively astonishing migration rates, why is it that immigration-related discussion is marked by a level of passivity which has no parallel in the developed world?

First, there is no political leadership on migration-related issues essentially because Canadian politicians have shown an unwillingness to talk about immigration costs and trade-offs. The foremost reason is straight electoral expediency. The Liberal party has in recent years strongly supported policies of mass immigration and holds the ridings in Canada’s largest cities where most new Canadian communities are centred. In order to form a majority government, the Conservative party needs these ridings and must compete for these votes by delivering benefits to these communities. In addition, the slightest slip up and the Liberal party will paint the Conservatives as intolerant, racist and extremist which will hurt the Conservatives in their own areas of support outside urban areas where there are relatively few immigrants. This is because, as I said before, Canada’s identity is now strongly associated with acceptable immigration-speak. Name calling attacks on the Conservative party and any who question immigration policy are clearly thought to be effective. Otherwise they would not be such a regular feature of the Canadian political landscape.

A second reason there has not been much opposition to mass immigration is that there has been relatively little questioning of Canada’s immigration policies in the media or academia. On certain issues such as security and Canada’s refugee system, there has been a degree of concern expressed, but in terms of connecting this to the core reality of mass immigration, there is hardly a mention. The fact is that the media in Canada broadly and consistently views immigration positively. Even the National Post, which is generally perceived to take a conservative approach to issues, responded to a Statistics Canada report that showed significant immigration-driven demographic change with an editorial entitled “Statistics Canada counts our blessings”.

As for academia, it is awash in government money but little attention is given to assessing the real social, economic and political impact of entry flows. Also, little effort is made to seek out ways to more effectively and efficiently manage the flow in order to optimize the benefits for all Canadians. Instead, academics are primarily focused on concerns related to integration, social justice and the battle against intolerance. From this perspective, nationalism with a focus on the national interest is generally viewed with suspicion and is often associated with xenophobia or racism. In fact, the current head of the Canadian Political Science Association, Keith Banting, argues that this struggle may have ‘reinvigorated’ the left which has been in somewhat of a funk given the success of neo-liberal economic policies. Overall, the preponderance of migration-related Canadian academic activity has come to assume an aggressive ‘progressive’ orientation.

Thirdly, the basic facts about the costs and trade-offs related to immigration in Canada are not commonly known, nor have governments made much effort to make such information available. In the absence of such data, debate more easily spirals from trade-offs to name calling which in turn discourages political and public discussion.

In the US and UK, there is a vast literature on the costs and benefits of immigration. When the US Senate passed Comprehensive Immigration reform in 2006, the Congressional Budget Office produced a cost estimate. In the UK, a special committee of the House of Lords has just completed an extensive public investigation of the costs and benefits of immigration.

Certainly in the past, many countries of the developed world held an elite consensus on the need to depoliticize immigration issues. Academics refer to this as an ‘antipopulist norm’. In such an environment, the dissemination of statistical and cost information was purposefully limited. But the logic of this consensus is premised on migration policy being a relatively peripheral concern which could be managed effectively, more or less, administratively. These conditions no longer hold in most of the developed world and in the Canadian context, the absence of cost data simply limits the transparency of the issue area and works to the advantage of those that resort to emotional appeals. According to James Freeman, evidence suggests that emotional appeals are generally to the advantage of those seeking to maintain a permissive migratory environment.

Fourth, there is the impact of professional advocates: lawyers, rights activists, interest groups, many of whom represent new Canadian communities or service organizations. They all work hard to keep the door open. Immigration is a big industry in Canada. The effectiveness of this lobby can be seen in the general incapacity of the government to effectively legislate, regulate and manage the immigration system. The build up of a backlog of nearly a million approved immigration applications is a symptom of this incapacity. I’m sure the immigration industry will be looking for some kind of one time massive expansion of the immigration intake to clear the backlog. But I would agree with Joe’s (James Bissett's) proposal that we should simply put in place a moratorium on new applications until the backlog is cleared.

Canada simply does not have a high profile immigration advocacy or research organization which questions the need for a mass immigration policy.

So what does all this mean for Canada’s national identity and how does it affect national unity? I would argue we are approaching a crossroads because the implications of Canada’s transition into a diasporatic country are so profound and manifest that the current studied disregard coupled with on-going fundamental demographic change is not sustainable. The implications of this transformation can be broken into the reality in Quebec and the ROC. In ROC , the rooted British and ‘northern’ connected identity has been largely buried and forgotten.

But Francophone Quebec has not forgotten its roots. In Quebec, collective memories, stories and symbols are deeply rooted and the French language constitutes a formidable nexus of identity. In addition, given sovereignty fears and general economic sluggishness, Quebec has not been a relatively attractive destination for immigrants. Therefore, compared to Toronto and Vancouver, Montreal with 20% foreign born population in 2006 has better preserved its rooted character. Overall, unlike in the ROC, the national re-branding exercise of the sixties and seventies with its new Canadian creed and Charter of Rights did not replace the admittedly evolving Quebecois identity.

In Quebec the majority of rooted francophone Quebecers have recently and clearly woken up to the implications of mass immigration on their lifestyle and identity. By setting up the Bouchard-Taylor Commission, the Charest Government inadvertently gave the Quebecois majority an unmediated forum to speak their concerns which, if not pretty, has led to a substantial lifting of public consciousness on migration-related issues. Now both the Parti Quebecois and Action Democratic (ADQ) appear to be considering following in the footsteps of numerous European populist parties that have gained control of their Parliaments on a platform of control of migration which has clearly been identified as the main factor in the decline of the use of French especially on the island of Montréal. This is not surprising because there are real similarities in the demographic situations of the Quebecois, Danes, Dutch, Flemish and others. No low-birth-rate/smaller-population nationality wants to ‘go gentle into that good night’.

The ADQ has recently advocated cutting immigration numbers and both the ADQ and the PQ have argued for the need to assess immigrants based on their capacity to integrate and for the use of ‘integration contracts’ for new arrivals. For its part, the Liberal government of Jean Charest has not been slow to insinuate that the policy proposals of the opposition parties are “driven by fear and intolerance”. At the same time, Charest has not avoided expressing the same sort of concerns and has also proposed a robust range of measures to address the perceived erosion of the French language in Quebec.

In the Canadian context, all this has real implications for national unity. Immigration has already relegated ‘British North America’ to the history books and more recently rendered national bilingualism and biculturalism unrealistic.

The danger for Canada’s national unity lies in the possibility that both conservative and socialist nationalists in Quebec will reach the conclusion that the French language and culture is more secure outside of Canada than in it.

Overall, at some point at current rates of immigration, Canada will cease to be anything approximating a nation and be best described as a global suburb. Canada is becoming a prosperous and secure home in a nondescript neighbourhood which makes no effort to assimilate new-comers because real identity is associated with the country and/or region of origin. Integration, on the other hand, is very much encouraged and the indicators of success relate to the incomes of new arrivals compared to earlier arrivals. Therefore, capacity in English or French, acceptance of rules and regulations and a commitment to consumption are the touch-stones of success. Perhaps by giving up all pretence to cultivating a separate and unique society, Canada is truly leading the way to the dissolution of the nations system on the road towards a global culture and citizenship. Success in this project might enhance the possibility of international peace and security.

But I have several concerns about this model of Canada, the first being that history is full of examples of societies in which even small cleavages have resulted in major problems. Given the stakes, one would think that, at the very least, prudence would be advised. Regardless, current policy sees a very diverse population equal to that of Manitoba’s arriving in Canada every four years.

Secondly, although Canada is certainly a leader in promoting cosmopolitan objectives, there appear to be few if any enthusiastic followers. Certainly tension, debate and reflection on the need for migration controls and a strengthening of integration policies which cross over into assimilationism are mainstream preoccupations in Australia, UK and US. For continental European countries and Japan, the draw bridges are up when it comes to mass immigration and diasporatic communities are being strongly directed towards full integration. This should give Canadian decision-makers pause and stimulate a thorough review of the issues related to immigration, integration and citizenship.

Finally, Canadian national unity may be endangered by unmanaged immigration. There is an emerging sense among Francophone Quebecers that the French Fact in America may not be compatible with high levels of immigration. At one level, there is a concern that new-Quebecers tend to assimilate into English cultures. This may not be objectively true but regardless, should a consensus arise among rooted Quebecers that participating in the new Canada (with its new creed and demographic reality) is endangering the French language in Quebec, then national unity will indeed be threatened.

In conclusion, I believe that Canada is going to have to come to grips with the implications of mass immigration. This should be done sooner rather than later. Issues related to citizenship, integration, composition, disposition, asylum and enforcement need to be addressed. Overall, Canada needs to understand what it has become to allow for the development of a much needed population policy. Furthermore, Canada must find a way to discuss the many implications of mass immigration in a fashion that transcends the superficiality of progressive advocacy and disconnects the objective and long-term needs of the country from the cut and thrust of partisan politics.

Original article

Melbourne feeling the strain of record immigration

2009-05-02T00:26:00.000-07:00

From The Herald Sun:

Record population growth strains transport system

John Masanauskas
April 24, 2009 12:00am

MELBOURNE had record population growth last year, with the extra 74,600 people putting further strain on roads and public transport.

The city's addition in 2007-08, easily outstripped Sydney's growth of 55,000.

Leading the surge were suburbs such as Hoppers Crossing, Werribee, Cranbourne, Narre Warren and Melton.

The City of Wyndham, which includes Werribee, increased by 8900 -- the biggest growth of any municipality in the nation, according to an ABS report released yesterday.

Other high-growth council areas were Casey on the city's southeast fringe, Melton in the west and Whittlesea to the north.

*snip*

Overall, Melbourne's population grew by 2 per cent to 3.9 million -- the largest growth of any capital city, according to Regional Population Growth Australia 2007-08.

Monash University demographer Dr Bob Birrell said the city's startling growth reflected record high migration. "It shows that the (growth) gap between Melbourne and Sydney has opened up even further than was the case in the last few years," he said.

The rapid population surge in outer suburbs was consistent with State Government policy to open up new land, especially in the west and north.

"This extraordinary expansion will significantly add to transport problems with rail and road systems we're already experiencing," he said.

"The number of people in these areas is way above the number of jobs there, so people are travelling across the city for work."

Victoria's population increased by more than 92,000 to 5.31 million as of June last year.

Some regional areas, including the Rural City of Benalla and the shires of Yarriamback, Hindmarsh and Northern Grampians, recorded slight decreases.

Original article

The inconvenient truth about immigration

2009-04-09T10:19:00.000-07:00

Sydney Morning Herald columnist Ross Gittens on the folly of the Rudd Government's massive immigration program:

The third point in Mr Rudd's five-point plan to fight inflation is to "tackle chronic skills shortages", and part of this is to do so through the immigration program. Clearly, the Government believes high levels of skilled migration will help fill vacancies and thus reduce upward pressure on wages.

That's true as far as it goes. But it overlooks an inconvenient truth: immigration adds more to the demand for labour than to its supply. That's because migrant families add to demand, but only the individuals who work add to supply.

Migrant families need food, clothing, shelter and all the other necessities. They also add to the need for social and economic infrastructure: roads, schools, health care and all the rest.

Another factor is that their addition to demand comes earlier than their addition to labour supply. Unemployment among recent immigrants is significantly higher than for the labour force generally.

Admittedly, the continuing emphasis on skilled immigration - and on the ability to speak English - plus the fact that many immigrants are sponsored by particular employers, should shorten the delay before they start working.

Even so, we still have about a third of the basic immigration program accounted for by people in the family reunion category. You'd expect the proportion of workers in this group to be much lower. So though skilled migration helps reduce upward pressure on wages at a time of widespread labour shortages, immigration's overall effect is to exacerbate our problem that demand is growing faster than supply.

The Rudd Government professes to great concern over worsening housing affordability. First we had a boom in house prices that greatly reduced affordability, and now we have steadily rising mortgage interest rates.

The wonder of it is that, despite the deterioration in affordability, house prices are continuing to rise strongly almost everywhere except Sydney's western suburbs.

Why is this happening? Probably because immigrants are adding to the demand for housing, particularly in the capital cities, where they tend to end up.

They need somewhere to live and, whether they buy or rent, they're helping to tighten demand relative to supply. It's likely that the greater emphasis on skilled immigrants means more of them are capable of outbidding younger locals.

In other words, winding back the immigration program would be an easy way to reduce the upward pressure on house prices.

Finally, there's the effect on climate change. Emissions of greenhouse gases are caused by economic activity, but the bigger your population, the more activity. So the faster your population is growing the faster your emissions grow.

Our immigration program is so big it now accounts for more than half the rate of growth in our population.

It's obvious that one of the quickest and easiest ways to reduce the growth in our emissions - and make our efforts to cut emissions more effective overall - would be to reduce immigration.

Of course, you could argue that, were we to leave more of our immigrants where they were, they'd still be contributing to the emissions of their home country. True. But because people migrate to better their economic circumstances, it's a safe bet they'd be emitting more in prosperous Australia than they were before.

My point is not that all immigration should cease forthwith but, leaving aside the foreigner-fearing prejudices of the great unwashed, the case against immigration is stronger than the rest of us realise - and stronger than it suits any Government to draw attention to.

Full article

Getting residency via the kitchen door

2009-04-01T01:16:00.000-07:00

Another day, another immigration racket. From The Age:

Cooking up a foreign storm

John Masanauskas
April 01, 2009 12:00am

TOO many foreign cooks are spoiling the broth for locals seeking jobs in hospitality, says a Monash University study.

New figures show that the annual number of overseas students who did cooking courses in Australia and then gained permanent residency had more than tripled to 3250 in just two years.

This compares with only 2300 Australians who completed cooking apprenticeships in 2007.

The Monash report, to be released today, says many of the private operators that are providing the one-year courses have poor standards and are an easy route for immigration.

Thousands of students, mainly from India, attend cooking schools in Melbourne as part of an international student boom worth $11 billion to Australia.

So competitive is the industry that overseas students are stopped on city streets and offered laptops and discounted fees to change schools.

In leaflets obtained by the Herald Sun, agents for the schools boast of their success in getting residency visas while offering weekend classes with no exams.

The Monash report, The Cooking-Immigration Nexus, was written by migration experts Dr Bob Birrell and Dr Ernest Healy, and labour market researcher Bob Kinnaird.

The authors said that despite the Rudd Government's moves to tighten the skilled migration program, it was failing to stem the rising tide of foreign students trained as cooks in Australia.

While cooking had been removed from the list of critical skills needed here, foreigners with minimal work experience could still be sponsored by employers, they said.

"Employers have an incentive to take advantage of the relatively low wages and conditions former overseas students will accept in return for a permanent residence sponsorship," the report said.

The report is published in the latest issue of People and Place, the journal of Monash's Centre for Population and Urban Research.

These permanent residency visa factories masquerading as "cooking schools" are just another example of the kind of niche businesses that comprise Australia's flourishing "immigration industry". It is a parasitic, largely unregulated "industry" infested by unscrupulous people who specialise solely in the sale of Australian permanent residency and, thus, citizenship. Much like those small, impoverished Pacific Island states which openly sell their citizenship to foreigners, Australia is allowing its citizenship to become a commodity that can be bought, except that the price is actually lower in Australia compared to those Pacific Island countries. Moreover, in those Pacific Island nations, the Government actually profits for the sale, compared to the situation here where it is some shady "migration agency", "cooking school" or even university which makes an easy buck by crassly and shamelessly providing a pathway to Australian citizenship.

UPDATE

Popular columnist Andrew Bolt has picked up on this story over at his blog. Some of the reader comments are worth reading.

Why doesn't Australia have local labour market tests?

2009-03-19T05:03:00.000-07:00

From The Australian:

MORE jobs could be preserved if the Rudd Government introduced a local labour test before allowing employers to sponsor migrant workers in permanent jobs, a top demographer said yesterday.

Bob Birrell, from Monash University's Centre for Population and Urban Research, said the Government's decision on Sunday to cut the annual intake of skilled migrants by 18,500, or 14 per cent, over the next three months was necessary in tough economic times.

The downturn's severity has forced the Government to remove construction workers, including plumbers, bricklayers and carpenters, from the list of skilled workers employers can bring in on the 457 visa scheme.

"It's a significant policy shift because it implies the Government will restrict skilled migrant programs to employer-nominated permanent jobs and what remains on the critical skills list," Professor Birrell said.

"But the way the rules are written, there is no requirement an employer establishes that before he sponsors a migrant no one in the domestic labour market could do it," he said. "In 2007, there were over 8000 such permanent jobs, and while some were high-end corporate-type sponsored jobs, many weren't."

Others were less convinced of the need for such a sharp cut in skilled migrant numbers, although Immigration Minister Chris Evans said he would go deeper if the downturn warranted.

However, Senator Evans said he did not anticipate further cuts to the program this financial year.

"I think the cabinet will make a decision on next year's program as part of the budget and again, I would expect us to run a smaller program than we started out with this year," he said.

One of Kevin Rudd's closest allies in the business community, Australian Industry Group chief executive Heather Ridout, said now was not the time to cut back.

"While pressures are building on employment, shortages remain critical in a number of skilled trades," she said.

Australian National University demographer Peter McDonald was also wary. "A 14 per cent reduction in the current economic climate is understandable and manageable, but the Government needs to bear in mind the importance of migration to meet long-term skilled labour demand, particularly when the country starts to pull out of its financial difficulties," he said.

ACTU president Sharan Burrow described the decision to cut the quota as prudent, given the economic conditions.

"It's a chance to get the balance right to make sure that there is optimism to be able to get a job, earn a living wage for migrant workers," she said.

Perth builder Gerry Hanssen said his 457 workers helped his business through the boom and he believed their contribution to the state entitled them to stay.

Among them is welder Daniel Gucor, who came to Perth from The Philippines three years ago and dreams of citizenship.

Foreman Senan Amjedi-Effendi made Mr Gucor his employee of the month a few weeks ago and says the 28-year-old "is worth 10 other workers".

Why doesn't Australia have any labour market tests? While other immigrant-receiving countries require labor market tests and/or strict quotas before admitting overseas workers, Australia doesn't. These lax requirements mean that the system is wide open to exploitation by employers seeking access to cheap labour. Such easy access to foreign labour not only serves to drive down domestic wages, it also acts as a disincentive to recruiting and training Australian workers. Access to a never-ending stream of foreign workers also serves as a disincentive to labour saving investment. The same labour saving investment which drives innovation and productivity, both of which are sorely lacking in Australia at the moment.

Also take note how immigrant minorities prefer their own kind over native-born Australians. Senan Amjedi-Effendi, himself obviously coming from an immigrant minority background, claims that Philippino immigrant Daniel Gucor is worth ten (presumably Australian) workers. Why exactly is that? Because he is prepared to work for less and accept lower working conditions?

Of course, we are meant to feel sympathy for Daniel Gucor who dreams of one day gaining Australian citizenship. Personally, I feel more sympathy for those native-born Australians now directly competing for jobs against immigrant workers from the Third World.

High immigration fuels record population growth

2009-03-19T04:43:00.000-07:00

From The Australian:

AUSTRALIA is experiencing a population boom not seen since the 1960s - but it is not a baby boom. High levels of immigration are fuelling record high population growth.

Australia's headcount increased by almost 400,000 last year to 21.5 million, fresh data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) shows.

More than half of the new arrivals, or just over 230,000 people, were immigrants.

The rest were babies born in Australia.

The Federal Government this week moved to cut back immigration, reducing the skilled migrant intake by 14 per cent in response to the economic crisis.

The rate at which the population is growing has surged 50 per cent over the last five years. It is now growing at just under 2 per cent a year.

"The last time Australia experienced higher growth rates was in the 50s and 60s as a result of post-war migration and high birth rates," the ABS said in a statement.

Western Australia and Queensland attracted the most new people in the year to September 2008 but Tasmania was spurned.

For people moving within Australia, Queensland was the mecca, while people from NSW appeared keen to leave their state.

Immigration and population growth is up, GDP per capita is down. Good work, Chris Evans and Kevin Rudd!

Columnist Andrew Bolt comments on the immigration-fuelled population explosion:

Can we build a new Adelaide every three years?

Andrew Bolt – Thursday, March 19, 09 (09:02 am)

We’re adding more than the population of Adelaide every three years:

Australia’s headcount increased by almost 400,000 last year to 21.5 million, fresh data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) shows.

More than half of the new arrivals, or just over 230,000 people, were immigrants… The Federal Government this week moved to cut back immigration, reducing the skilled migrant intake by 14 per cent in response to the economic crisis.

Cut back, but only to levels that are still a record. I’m also surprised that the intake last year was way over the targets set by Government. More when I find out why.

But here are the bottom lines:

1. Why are we importing so many people when we’re running out of jobs?

2. Why are we importing so many people, when our governments have lost the will to provide the people here already with enough power, water, land, freeways and public transport?

3. How many more people until we’re too crowded?

4. Exactly how many people does the Rudd Government think is enough?

UPDATE

Pro-immigration Michael Pascoe congratulate Immigration Minister Chris Evans for some typical Rudd-type spin - of saying one thing, but doing another:

Yes, Mr Evans did announce a reduction of 18,500 in the skilled permanent migrant category, “slashing’’ the intake by nearly 14% to 115,000.

The Minister might not have mentioned that that still means a 12% increase on the previous year’s skilled permanent migrant intake - and that it represents a bare 5% impact on total migration this year, that’s running close to 350,000 people. Maybe make that 332,000 now - still a record high.

UPDATE 2

The reason the actual immigration intake is so much higher than the official government target is that “net overseas migration”, as measured by the ABS, is any person coming in or out of Australia “long term” - with “long term” defined as a minimum of one year. So this would include students, people moving countries to work or temporarily live, and temporary workers on 457 visas.

The ABC's pro-immigration bias on full display once again

2009-03-16T03:10:00.000-07:00

In a report about the Rudd Government's recent announcement that it was making some modest cuts to Australia's skilled immigration intake, the ABC's Richard Lindell states:

"Skilled migrants have been one of the key drivers of economic growth over the past decade.

In fact, an Access Economics report for the Government forecast that this year's intake will add more than $800 million to the economy."

Notice how Lindell makes the completely unsubstantiated claim that immigration has been one of the prime drivers of economic growth over the last decade, and then proceeds to cite an Access Economics report as evidence of the economic "benefits" of immigration. However, put in its proper perspective, we find that these "benefits" amount to a $800 million increase in gross domestic product in a $824.9 billion economy — an increase of 0.08 percent. That works out to be a whopping increase of about $36 for every person in Australia. And when balanced against some of the substantial costs of immigration, such as downward pressure on wages, higher housing costs, increased consumption of natural resources, a larger current account deficit, and increasing welfare and tax burdens on state and local governments, these "benefits" disappear.

Also note how Lindell quotes some economists, both of which are employed by firms which have a strong financial interest in ongoing immigration, who complain, among other things, that less immigration will ease pressure on housing, thus making it more, shock horror, affordable! We can't have that, now can we?

Given that our public broadcaster has allowed itself to become a mouthpiece for the growth lobby, it is no wonder that many Australians have been duped into putting up with ridiculously high immigration levels for so long.

Immigration-driven population growth responsible for declining GDP per capita

2009-03-12T04:53:00.000-07:00

From Sustainable Population Australia (SPA):

GDP per person falls in every state of Australia because of population growth

Despite figures showing economic growth in some states, per capita GDP has fallen in every state in Australia, according to Sustainable Population Australia Inc (SPA).

Dr John Coulter, National President of SPA, says residents of those states in which gross GDP has risen have had their apparent advantage wiped away by population growth.

"Most economic commentators assume that changes in GDP are proxy measures for changes in human welfare," says Dr Coulter. "Accepting for the moment that this is the case, then change in GDP per person, rather than gross GDP, is actually a better measure of welfare.

"If we look at per capita rather than gross GDP, then all states show negative growth for the December quarter."

Dr Coulter notes that Tasmania, with the lowest rate of population growth, showed the least negative economic growth with only a 0.1% fall per capita. Western Australia, which had the highest rate of population growth, shows the second largest fall in per capita GDP at almost 2%.

"Queensland is in a similar position,' he says, 'sharing with the Northern Territory the second highest rate of population growth but having the third largest fall in per capita GDP. South Australia has the biggest drop in GDP, a high rate of population growth relative to the economy and the largest decline in per capita GDP at 2.5%."

Dr Coulter says the figures indicate no economic or welfare advantage from a growing population.

"They confirm calculations I have made over many years comparing OECD countries. These calculations repeatedly show no statistically significant correlation between population growth and growth of per capita GDP. They parallel the conclusion of the Productivity Commission report which showed that, despite excluding many of the environmental costs of a larger population, there was no demonstrable link between increase in immigration and per capita economic growth."

With respect to tackling climate change, Dr Coulter notes that the Rudd Government clearly accepts that there are considerable environmental costs from a growing population.

"In fact, there are a host of other environmental costs from population growth,' he says.

"It is long past the time for all Australian Governments to adopt population policies aimed at environmental sustainability, rather than the mirage of economic and welfare benefits from a growing population."

So, far from raising GDP per capita, immigration is only making us poorer. Is anybody really surprised?

Australia's bizarrely high population growth lies behind many of our problems

2009-03-12T04:43:00.000-07:00

From Adelaide Now:

Australia's bizarrely high population growth lies behind many of our worst problems

By GUEST COLUMNISTS
March 03, 2009 12:00am

IN Australia, Right-wing "growthists" demand endless growth of the economy backed by endless growth of population. Forced since late 2006 to accept a serious public debate about water supplies and about how to maintain "growth" without more greenhouse gases, they are nevertheless determined to scotch any discussion about limiting population.

Many on the Left also refuse to debate population matters. They confuse immigrants with refugees and make absurd claims that limiting immigration would tumble us into fascism.

Various Lord Nelsons of the media will put the telescope to their blind eye and discern individual problems - unaffordable housing, environmental destruction, urban crowding, out-of-control greenhouse emissions - while somehow managing to not see any connection to population numbers.

Yet when I turned to the email news group run by the admirable society, Sustainable Population Australia society (www.population.org.au), it was the reverse.

I was inundated with evidence of how our bizarrely high levels of population growth lie behind many of our worst problems.

How could politicians and journalists, and even ordinary acquaintances, keep asserting that we had a falling population when they saw new suburbs going up everywhere? How could they raid the public purse for "baby bribes", claiming that births were not keeping up with deaths, when Australia has twice as many births as deaths?

During the 2006-07 drought, some folk gave up pretending Australia wasn't overpopulated. In fact, Bob Hawke and Bob Brown, two politicians who had long seemed determined to suppress concern about population growth, signalled a seeming change of heart.

In general, Australia's growth lobby might be best described as a well-organised stuff-up. However, not only can it be shown why this group's claims are false but also how and why it deceives itself. It can also be demonstrated why it is necessary to cap Australia's population growth, and that it is perfectly possible to do this without policies that are inhumane towards families and immigrants.

The population debate is a debate that we can no longer avoid.

Getting it wrong - as almost all government and business policies currently do - will lead to disaster. Getting it right will make a huge difference to the quality of life of our children, and also to those other species with which we share this unique continent.

Australia's population boosters continue to spread the myth of an empty land. In 2001, a growth-obsessed lord mayor of Brisbane, Jim Soorley, told the press Australia needed to triple its population in 20 years. Former Victorian premier Steve Bracks unveiled plans to increase the state's population by one million by 2025. South Australian Premier Mike Rann planned to raise immigration to SA to 50,000 a year and lift the population half a million by 2050.

Such boosters stand in a long tradition. They manage to believe that the world as a whole may be overpopulated, but Australia is a special case and actually needs more people. Overpopulation, they argue, is always over there. Who cares if the Coorong dies?

This belief that Australia has no limits lies deep in our culture. Yet population growth lies behind most of our troubles: Congested cities, bizarre housing prices that turn couples into mortgage slaves who work absurd hours and neglect their children, the endless ongoing destruction of environments and other species, water shortages, falling food security, greenhouse emissions. The list goes on.

I determined to write a book that would refute the boosters, and show why and how we can safely and humanely cap Australia's population.

BIGGER BUT NOT BETTER

• There is a powerful lobby concerned not with whether human life (or that of other species) would be better in a "larger" Australia, but with profits.

• Profits are likely to be much larger in a more populous Australia. More people means more customers, and more sales.

• In fact, this lobby insists that Australia, a First World country, must grow at faster than the average population growth rate of Asia (now 1.1 per cent a year).

• Australia is now growing at 1.7 per cent a year, on course for 42 million by 2050, and more than 100 million by 2100.

This is an edited extract from Mark O'Connor's preface to Overloading Australia: How governments and media dither and deny on population, published by Envirobook.

Original article

Immigration: A Public Health Risk

2009-03-01T00:49:00.000-08:00

In response to this post, a reader commented:

As a doctor I was shocked when I recently had a patient come in and request medications to treat her active TB. She had just arrived from India within the last week. I thought this was screened for prior to letting these people in. Also a foreign doctor I worked with has recently been disgnosed with TB.

I also worked in the infectious disease clinic at the hospital during my training. Nearly every care was Hep B in an asian migrant.

Keep up the good post.

I think we will be making alot of progress in fighting this immigration/multicultural disease as the recession/depression hits harder. Australians will begin to fight back as times get tougher. Other countries I read are already cutting back on their immigration policies.

How many Australians are being exposed to diseases such as TB thanks to mass Third World immigration?

When Skilled Immigrants Aren't So Skilled

2009-02-28T23:35:00.000-08:00

From The Independent Australian, Issue No. 13 (Spring 2007):

When Skilled Migrants Aren't So Skilled

Australia last year granted almost 150,000 permanent visas to migrants, of which about 100,000 were allocated to the "skilled migrant" category. While the definition of "skilled" is very broad, reaching down to hairdressers, the professional skills of many migrants are not necessarily what they seem, writes Alan Fitzgerald.

The top 10 industry classifications for 457 visa skilled workers in 2006-07 were health and community services (17%); property and business services (10%); communication services (10%); construction (9%); mining (8%); personal and other services (6%); accommodation, cafes and restaurants (6%); finance and insurance (4%) and education (4%).

These applications were approved to fill 'gaps' in the skilled workforce with the employers sponsoring the workers.

Yet, you hear stories of earlier migrants - accountants, IT specialists and engineers - reduced to driving taxis because of Australian employers' prejudice against employing them but it is their skill levels, not their ethnic origins, that is the problem.

Anthony Parsons, first assistant secretary of the temporary migrant division of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, told a parliamentary inquiry that increased evidence of "fraudulent documentation" had slowed the processing time for lower skilled workers under the 457 visa scheme. The average for higher skilled workers was 27 days.

The mining industry isn't happy about the delays. It is urging the Government to "fast track" its 457 sponsored workers by cutting red tape and bureaucracy that comes with importing overseas workers on a temporary basis.

However, there are security concerns about bringing in thousands of workers from developing countries with scant background checks. Apart from falsification of qualifications, fake degrees and diplomas, there is also the problem that many of these skilled workers' homelands have second rate educational institutions.

A McKinsey study in the U.S. in 2005 found that only 25 per cent of Indian-trained engineers have the skills required to work for an international company. It was just as bad in the finance and accounting professions, where only 15 per cent of Indian graduates had the required skills.

Arts and humanities graduates were even lower down the scale, with 10 per cent being employable by an international company. If anything, the proportions for Chinese graduates are worse.

Recently, as both India and China have enjoyed prosperity, an expanding young "middle class" of professionals have emerged who are eager to acquire a Western lifestyle and salary to match. To underline this change, much emphasis has been placed on the huge turnout of graduates from their universities.

This pool of allegedly well qualified graduates and post-graduates is seen as the answer to the skills shortages in such fast growing countries as Australia, or to the ageing population of Europe.

A study by two academics at Duke University (Gary Gereffi and Viek Wadhwa) suggests otherwise. The study has found that the numbers of professional graduates in both India and China has been grossly exaggerated because all types of diplomas and informal certificates were counted.

The real number emerging with the full engineering degrees in India (112,000) and China is 351,000. The figure to compare these with in the U.S. is 137,000. While the totals appear significant, the Duke University study finds that apart from a handful of elite institutions in China and India, the quality of tertiary education is poor.

Another study by MeriTrac, quoted by Sanjeev Sanyal, Deutsche Bank's chief Asian economist, found that in the field of post-graduate degrees, the Asian giants left much to be desired. Only 23 per cent of Indians holding a Masters of Business Administation were employable, even by local Indian companies.

As the economies of both India and China expand, they are facing a skills shortage that will only compound the global skills shortage.

Australia has only itself to blame for the skills shortage here caused by under-investment in education and a belief that "buying in" migrant skills is a quicker and cheaper solution than producing our own professionals.

Take the doctor shortage. The Australian public health system is now heavily reliant on overseas trained doctors because the Federal Government set out to save money by cutting back on the number of university places for domestic medical students. The result is a shortage of doctors.

The quality and training of some of these overseas trained doctors is questionable. Apart from the notorious case in Queensland of medical incompetence leading to the deaths of 40 patients by an Indian doctor who fled to the U.S. to avoid prosecution, there are other cases that emerge from time to time when inquests are held.

Even worse, the State Health Departments are accepting into hospitals doctors trained, for example, in Saudi Arabia and paid by Saudi Arabia while they acquire additional expertise practising on Australian patients in Australia. This extraordinary situation came to light when the competence of a Saudi specialist at Westmead Children's Hospital in NSW was raised following the death of a teenager who had been struck by a golf ball. The patient had been given the wrong treatment and dosage of medication.

Of course, State Health Departments, trying to manage their budgets, will accept doctors whose wages are paid by someone else. But isn't this getting a bit too thrifty when it is the patients who may have to pay the ultimate price? The bureaucrats aren't held to account.

We may be concerned about the competence of imported professionals but our own universities' standards appear to be lower than they used to be since they now depend on income generated by foreign students. Despite protestations by indignant vice-chancellors, every fee-paying student gets to pass. That's what they are paying for - a piece of paper that says they are qualified.

The University of New England admitted in August that an audit of 210 overseas students enrolled in postgraduate IT studies had uncovered substantial evidence of plagiarism. The plagiarism involved the lifting of material from the internet.

This is only the latest case of plagiarism to emerge. In recent years there have been allegations of plagiarism in Australian universities around the country, most involving full fee paying foreign students. Tutors have alleged that pressure is applied to overlook the students' transgressions because too high a failure rate could only affect the flow of overseas students.

Somewhat disingenuously the National Union of Students president Michael Nguyen said foreign students were more likely to plagiarise material because they were not familiar with academic standards required by Australian universities. He said simply stripping the UNE students of their degrees would not solve the systemic issue.

Frankly, cheating is cheating. If a student who aspires to be a professional, particularly one aspiring to work in a Western country such as Australia, and can't recognise the difference between submitting his own original work or plagiarising slabs of text and passing it off as his own, then he shouldn't be rewarded by entry into the profession of his choice. A post-graduate student could hardly be unaware of the ethical difference.

The universities talk of counselling students, marking-down their contributions or failing a subject but it is doubtful if few or any students have been stripped of their degrees no matter how blatant their plagiarism. It's all about money rather than academic standards.

Even the Federal Education Minister, Julie Bishop, has belatedly got around to warning of the damage plagiarism could do to the reputation of Australian universities.

However, if the Federal Government invested more in tertiary education, there would be less reason for our universities to prostitute themselves for the income stream that overseas students provide. But as successful foreign students can now apply for permanent residency and look for a job on graduation, some of these poor students may enter the professions in this country with dubious ability, no matter what formal degrees they possess from an Australian university.

Australia appears to lose in both ways - importing sub-standard overseas professionals and in diluting the quality of our domestic degrees.

Peter Taylor, chief executive of Engineers Australia, warned the Government against using large numbers of skilled migrants as an easier alternative to overcoming skills shortages than by educating and developing the skills of Australians.

Speaking at an International Public Works Conference, Mr. Taylor said: "Engineers Australia believes that individuals should not be eligible for a 457 visa unless they have successfully undergone a skills assessment to confirm the level of their engineering qualifications and experience."

"Skilled migration must not become a replacement for a reliable and valued Australian skill base."

"The basis for enhancing and expanding Australia's engineering skills base needs to start in primary schools. Australia's children are losing interest in maths and science mid-way through primary school and at the end of secondary school fewer than 15 per cent are studying advanced maths and science that would lead to the oppportunity to take up careers like engineering."

Mr. Taylor said solutions to the underlying problems had to be found now if Australia was not to become simply a source of raw materials for the value-adding, productive world.

Gillard: The immigration juggernaut will not be stopped, despite rising unemployment

2009-02-20T22:22:00.000-08:00

An update on this story.

From The West:

Govt rejects call to cut immigration

20th February 2009, 10:14 WST

The federal government has rejected research which shows its $42 billion economic stimulus package will not save jobs unless Australia's immigration intake is slashed.

In a paper to be released on Friday, demographic experts warn that new permanent and temporary migrant workers will soak up the 90,000 jobs the package is supposed to support.

That is because the immigration intake will exceed the number of jobs the commonwealth was trying to protect, The Australian Financial Review reports.

The experts advocate cutting the skilled intake to between 40,000 and 50,000 visas - down from a projected 133,500 - and forcing employers who want to import staff to prove that local skills are not available.

"It seems to me that this research could not be right," federal Employment Minister Julia Gillard told ABC Television.

"We are expediting the immigration of people who have the skills that we need."

Meanwhile, a key employer group says the research recommendations amount to a form of protectionism.

"The skilled program... can't be turned off and on," Australian Industry Group (Ai Group) chief executive Heather Ridout told ABC Television.

The government needed to be very careful about "chopping" immigration numbers, she said, adding that employers were committed to current intake.

"If we do not keep the immigration scheme robust our economic growth potential will be much reduced."

Original article

"It seems to me that this research could not be right."

Notice how Gillard dismisses the research out of hand, without even bothering to provide any evidence that the research is "not right", simply because she doesn't like the conclusion. Gillard's comments show that the Federal Government is committed to immigration irrespective of its effects on the existing Australian population. It is not prepared to even consider the possibility that importing record numbers of foreigners during a period of economic contraction and rising unemployment is a bad idea. In Gillard's words, immigration will continue, even if it means large numbers of Australians being forced to compete directly against foreign citizens for a declining number of jobs.

"We are expediting the immigration of people who have the skills that we need."

Oh, like more hairdressers and unemployable non-English speaking accountants?

"The skilled program... can't be turned off and on."

Yes, it can. The Government could slash immigration numbers tomorrow if it wished to.

"The government needed to be very careful about "chopping" immigration numbers, she said, adding that employers were committed to current intake."

I'm sorry, Heather Ridout, but I wasn't aware that Australia's immigration programme existed for the sole benefit of employers who only care about ensuring the uninterrupted influx of cheap labour.

"If we do not keep the immigration scheme robust our economic growth potential will be much reduced."

Wrong. Advances in productivity and technology, not increased labour inputs, are critical to economic growth.

The Howard Legacy

2009-02-20T22:04:00.000-08:00

For those who haven't heard of this book yet, I recommend picking up a copy of The Howard Legacy: Displacement of Traditional Australia from the Professional and Managerial Classes by Dr. Peter Wilkinson (you can read a review here).

Below is an extract from the book:

In 1994 the acerbic Lee Kuan Yew, then Prime Minister of Singapore, forecast that Australians were destined to be the poor white trash of Asia. Today one can say that white Australians are destined to be the poor trash of Australia.

What is the enduring contribution that Prime Minister John Howard’s regime has made to the future of Australia?

The scope and nature of taxation, industrial relations and so on can be changed, all in the space of a few years. There is one change that can not be reversed in less than many generations. That is demographic change.

This book is about the impact of the Coalition’s selective immigration policies. In selecting skilled immigrants, those who have done a degree in Australia receive bonus points in the criteria for acceptance for residency. In effect the policy selects those Asians who have higher cognitive ability, predominantly ethnic Chinese. In the ‘knowledge economy’ of today a premium is paid for qualifications and cognitive ability. They and their children (who will inherit their higher intelligence) will fill the professional and managerial ranks in Australia. They will dominate the cognitive class and hence have disproportionate influence in the country. This has important ramifications for both internal and external policies as ethnic demographic change continues.

The Chinese have been described as the Jews of Asia, but they are more than that. Throughout SE Asia and Oceania they are overwhelmingly dominant in the commercial and financial fields, less successful in the professional fields, because there is often discrimination to offset their superior performance in examinations. They form the ‘market dominant minority’, a term used by Amy Chua (Chapter 7). In this book the term ‘economy dominant minority’ is used to describe the equivalent in advanced knowledge economies. In such nations, and in underdeveloped ones where they have the opportunity, the Chinese have moved smoothly into the professions.

Affluent established nations over the centuries have allowed in unskilled manual workers at the expense of the host countries’ own cohort of people who have least economic advantage in terms of skill and/or IQ. Aggressive reaction can occur. In many underdeveloped countries where immigrants, who have above average commercial and cognitive ability, have been introduced, usually by a colonial/commercial power, violent reaction has occurred frequently and continues to do so.

Under John Howard Australia has become the first ethnic European nation to openly invite in distinct ethnic groups to provide the skills required in today’s knowledge economy. The need arises because governments have not been prepared to provide the necessary finance and motivation to sufficiently educate our own children. They have allowed ideologues in the education system to persuade parents and children that achieving certain skill levels does not matter. Recent arrivals are not fooled, they exploit existing Australian human and physical capital at the expense of the long standing Australian families in our schools and universities. The intergenerational transfer which has been an integral part of our society has been denied to many long established families without them realising it.

How has this come about when Prime Minister Howard has been stigmatised as ‘racist’ by the multicultural/left lobbies? There are no reports of groups participating in a ‘grand plan’1 to introduce a dominant ethnic minority. It seems to have happened through the combination of a number of Government policies, at both the Federal and State levels. Maybe the need for Howard to hold on to his own seat is a contributing factor. Significant changes in selective immigration policies happened over the period when Philip Ruddock, another hate figure of the Left over immigration matters, was the Minister responsible for immigration (1996 to 2003). Ruddock consistently opposed having a population plan. It is difficult to believe that Ruddock and the highest levels of DIMA were not aware of the implications described in this book.

Political correctness has meant that these topics are rarely raised2. Silence on the issue occurs because key players such as the universities, and increasingly the schools, are financially locked in. Few staff raise the question because they will be censured or sacked, since cries of discrmination/xenophobia/racism will be raised, leading to the fear that foreign enrolments will fall creating financial disaster for their institution.

After only five years of the selective immigration policies the results are apparent. In the 18 selective schools in NSW, 12 have more than 50% non-English speaking background, one over 90%. At the UNSW, students who are recent arrivals, Asian or Chinese, are 52%, 44% and 35% respectively. With recently announced increasing immigration and higher skilled quotas this disproportionately high over-representation will accelerate throughout the entire education system. It is true that signs of a significant number of Chinese were moving into the cognitive class before the Coalition took office, largely as a result of the Hawke decisions to allow students to stay after the Tiananmen massacre. But now it is a flood.

Australian politics has a set of largely unspoken bipartisan beliefs and policy directions whereby:

• We believe that our own citizens do not have sufficient innate ability to make Australia a prosperous knowledge economy, so we need immigrants of high cognitive ability.

• We can skimp on educating our own children and compensate by bringing in immigrants with the advanced education which is necessary for the knowledge economy.

• Even better, they must pay for that education in Australia, so that the government can cut grants to the universities for educating Australians.

• We are comfortable with letting the children of recently arrived immigrants have unfettered access to our premium schools and universities, displacing children of long standing Australians from the prestige universities and the lucrative professions.

• We are not concerned that universities discriminate against Australian students by lowering the standard for overseas students, who can then apply for a visa on the basis of the conceded pass.

• We are comfortable with introducing an economy dominant ethnic minority at the expense of long established families.

• We are not concerned that the combination of the economy dominant Chinese and increasing trade pressures will place Australia under the influence of super-power China rather than the USA.

The ALP has a policy to further discriminate against Australians. They would not allow them to enter fee-paying courses leading to prestige and lucrative courses, while overseas students would be free to do so and then apply for residency.

These are issues which need to be discussed prior to the election. We are already at a stage where the Chinese community is influencing immigration policy. In the seats of Bennelong (Prime Minister John Howard) and Watson (Shadow Minister for Immigration, Tony Burke) nearly one-fifth claim Chinese ancestry. Indeed, with less than one-third of his constituents speaking English at home, Burke is better styled the ALP Shadow Minister for Immigrants.

The crucial hold that the ethnic Chinese have over Howard in Bennelong means that the Coalition is unlikely to proclaim any changes. Indeed Howard has promised his Chinese constituents more of the same (see Chapter 12). Burke has no option but to remain silent, in keeping with the ALP strategy of bipartisan-ship on major issues leading up to the election. Kevin Rudd spent time in China, is a noted Sinophile, Mandarin speaker. Is Rudd the Manchurian candidate3 to lead us under the Chinese sphere of influence?

The Abandonment Of Intergenerational Transfer And Displacement Of The Traditional Australia.

"If ever there was a migrant success story, the life of 19 year old Tianhong Wu must be it."

So starts an article by education writer Chee Chee Leung in The Age 13 December 2006.

Tianhong Wu had just scored a perfect ENTER and had applied to Monash University to do medicine. As she had just received citizenship, she would be eligible for HECS. She came to Australia from China five years ago and attended Glen Waverley Secondary College (which is a de facto selective high school). Her English was poor on arrival, and her mother is less fluent. There is no mention of the father in the article, but the mother, a computer science teacher in China, works part time in a fashion house and has applied to do a laboratory skills TAFE course next year. She is applying for citizenship. The tone of the article is that by applying language skills tests to prospective migrants we would be denying Australia the benefits of having Tianhong Wu.

Let us look at her story from another perspective.

Taxpayer subsidized places at medical schools are Government limited. Somebody missed out. Since nobody can specifically claim to have missed out, let us construct a picture of a candidate who just missed out.

Jenny Smith is member of a family long established in Australia. Jenny lived in an outer suburb, one where the school facilities are run down, freely admitted by the Victorian Government. Students in schools in these suburbs are disadvantaged in following academic pathways as shown by declining success of such schools in university enrolments4.

The top matriculation teachers had transferred to de facto selective schools like Glen Waverley. Jenny’s parents did not have a tertiary qualification and did not realise the necessity to shift to another school zone. Besides, they had other kids and relocating costs are considerable. At Monash University, at equal ENTER, students from ordinary public schools perform better than those from selective schools (see Chapter 3), so Jenny was innately superior to some of those who made it, but she didn’t get a chance to prove it.

Jenny’s parents (maybe grandparents, and even further back) have dutifully paid their taxes for many decades, funding the considerable capital, human and financial, that has gone into building up the first class institutions such as Glen Waverley and Monash University. Tianhong’s mother has contributed virtually nothing to this during her short stay. Furthermore the medical course, and the TAFE course for her mother, will be part paid for by Jenny’s parents. Tianhong Wu will study medicine at a Group of 8 university, which guarantees her a very comfortable income for life. Her mother will build up very little super and so will be eligible for a pension.

If Tianhong Wu had never come to Australia, her position would have gone to Jenny. Maybe Jenny is committed to the health professions; then she can apply for the lower status, less well paid profession of nursing.

In effect the traditional Australia is being displaced. Their birthright is being handed to the overseas born on a platter. Not one letter published in The Age made this point in response to Leung’s article.

Immigration policy and health care costs in Australia

2009-02-20T21:34:00.000-08:00

From The Social Contract:

How Long Is a Public Purse String?

Immigration policy and health care costs in Australia

By Denis McCormack
Volume 14, Number 1 (Fall 2003)

Try this from a bygone era of Aussie public health pragmatism. It's an item from Melbourne's The Age dated 24 August 1896.

"Leprosy in New South Wales: Chinese patients shipped to Hong Kong"

"Arrangements were recently carried out whereby 19 of the 20 Chinese lepers in the Little Bay Lazarette [hospital in Sydney] were shipped on board a vessel, and they are now on their way to Hong Kong... but one of them managed to hide himself and could not be found in time... Everything has been done to make them comfortable... now in [the] charge of an experienced warden... a small sum of money has been given to each so that on their arrival in Hong Kong they will have means to go to their respective districts. It has been ascertained that no trouble will be experienced in landing the lepers in Hong Kong... Some two years ago a leper was deported from Victoria to China at great expense..."

Contrast the above with today's public health/immigration insanity. I'm listening to radio news as I write (6 August 2003) and by coincidence it carries a report of Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock having exercised his lawful but controversial "discretionary powers" to intervene in a "humanitarian" case in favour of allowing an African with AIDS to be reunited with family already in Australia. One could be forgiven for thinking this is just a bit of image softening from a government lashed for and to its tougher border protection policy of recent times, but the facts would suggest a wider set of problems arriving.

"African migrants will double this year with 5206 expected... African refugees will make up 43% of Australia's humanitarian intake."(1)

It's just this sort of no-brainer from a supposedly conservative government that drives reasonable people nuts in this country. We the reasonable majority who read of police services mobilizing against nascent African gangs (2) are supposed to continue supporting the "conservative" Government of John Howard because the Labor Party Opposition tells us that they would be even more "compassionate" on refugee/asylum issues should they take government at the next election. Heads they win, tails we lose, but I digress...

Unraveling immigration's costs to full length, to separate and identify the many strands, to tease them out and run the micrometer over the cascading, inter-twined masses of fibers, is a forensic accounting task which can be accomplished, but only by a willing bureaucracy directed to do so by government at all three levels in a federal, state and local government system.

In 1991, impatient of successive governments ever undertaking such purse string measurement and analysis, Stephen Rimmer, a senior economist knowledgeable on all three levels of administration, wrote a no-nonsense booklet, "The Cost of Multiculturalism" which was briefly reviewed in The Social Contract (vol. II, no. 4, Summer 1992, p.251). Having had an arms-length hand in editing, proof reading and funding the first print run of Rimmer's booklet, I wasn't surprised to see the consternation it attracted from all the usual suspects in the mainstream Australian press and the immigration industry at the time. Happily he was given right of reply in the press, nor did he lose his job.

A point he was at pains to make on page one was the difficulty in cost separation when tracking Federal funding of immigration and multiculturalism once those funds are added to, atomized by, and filtered through:

"Hidden expenditures by other state and local governments... The control of information is designed to minimize public debate and allow governments to hide from the public the economic costs... In addition the indirect costs... including the growth of organized fraud against governments; organized crime; terrorism; declining community health standards and affirmative action policies."

He even touched taboo topics like migrant workplace accident and motor accident insurance fraud. It was a punch-packed 71-page booklet not since bettered, and for the above good reasons laid no claim to be comprehensive. It begs statistical update and reissue for its shock value alone.

Here is what Rimmer had to say on "Community health and the policy of multiculturalism... Measuring the indirect economic costs" pp. 48, 49, 53, 57 about which little has changed:

"For instance, in the 1980s the Federal government assured the Australian community that all migrants and refugees settling in Australia were medically screened prior to migration (Senate Hansard 22 August 1988). However, throughout the 1980s State governments and medical professionals publicly claimed on numerous occasions that such medical screening of immigrants was ineffective.(3)

For example, in 1986 Dr Streeton, Adviser to the Victorian Public Health department, indicated that of the 246 cases of tuberculosis in Victoria, sixty percent were migrants and most had not been effectively screened prior to entering Australia. Professor Boughton, a leading figure in the development of the hepatitis vaccine, claimed in 1988 that approximately 10 percent -- or 4000 -- of Asian migrants who came to Australia each year carried the hepatitis B virus (Daily Telegraph 1988).(4) In addition, the incidence of syphilis had increased dramatically in Australia since the 1960s, when there were tougher health screening procedures for migrants. However, a spokesman for the Minister for Immigration, Mr Holding, said that health screening procedures were considered adequate by the Federal Government (Messina 1988a).

In 1987 the Australian Health and Medical Research Council said that large numbers of immigrants with active cases of leprosy and tuberculosis had passed through Federal Government medical screening tests without their condition being recognized. The Council recommended that the immigrants from high-risk areas be screened prior to reaching Australia by the Federal Government, and evaluated again when they reached Australia. (Sun, 1987). This finding was confirmed by the "Medical Journal of Australia," which expressed alarm about the number of immigrants and refugees entering Australia with infectious diseases (1987).

In 1988 the Victorian Health Minister, Mr White MP, called on the Federal Government to upgrade medical screening of migrants for infectious diseases. He argued that because of the ineffective screening Australia faced the threat of existing and eradicated diseases being reintroduced and Australian children contracting and spreading the diseases further (Messina 1988b). Consequently, large numbers of migrants with infectious diseases such as hepatitis A and B; AIDS; tuberculosis (TB); leprosy; malaria and syphilis are reported by such authorities to have been allowed into Australia over this period.

However, the Federal Government appears to have ignored these pleas, arguing that only a small number of persons with infectious diseases slip through current screens. By 1989, 238 cases of tuberculosis were reported in Victoria and 73 percent of these were migrants. Dr Jonathon Streeton, who co-authored a National Health and Medical Research Council report on TB, indicated that unless effective screening measures were implemented, TB would be spread throughout the community (Australian 1990b). In addition, in 1989 Dr Rouch, Victoria's Chief Health Officer, claimed that 10 migrants from Africa, who had settled in Victoria, had been found to have AIDS shortly after migrating to Australia. He indicated that both the Victorian and NSW State governments had consistently urged the Federal Government to introduce more widespread medical testing and stated that: "Its really high time there was an adequate policy for screening migrants" (Allender 1989).

In 1991, the Medical Journal of Australia again expressed concern about inadequate screening of migrants, who were contributing to the spread of TB. While there was an apparent shortage of statistics available to health researchers, some 225 of the reported 290 cases of TB in NSW in 1986 were migrants. While the United States government was campaigning to eradicate this disease by 2010, negligence by Australian governments had seen cases of the disease increase rapidly to the point where it might become common. The journal stated that: "It would be an indictment of our public health system if a disease of yesteryear, so close to elimination, returned with its resultant human and economic costs" (Canberra Times 1991b). The Medical Journal of Australia was also reported to have found cases of migrants entering Australia with live roundworms as long as 13cm in their bodies. It was claimed that the worm had infected 1.3 billion people worldwide and that immigrants who tested positive were not routinely treated, as it was felt that the parasite did not pose a significant risk (Canberra Times 1991c).

It has to be taken into account that medical screening of migrants, foreign tourists and students will not be effective in all instances, because of the nature of the diseases and the inexperience of many health professionals in identifying the early signs. However, it is also clear that throughout the 1980s the administration by governments of health screening of migrants has been negligent. Australian governments appear to have displayed an arrogant disregard for the health of current and future generations of Australians, regardless of ethnic background. The policy of multiculturalism has assisted governments to ignore pleas by health professionals over the last decade to implement effective health screening in the national interest...

While the economic cost of ineffective screening of immigrants are unknown, Mr Paul Gross, Director of the "Institute of Health Economics and Technology Assessment" estimated that in 1987 Hepatitis B, which is far more infectious than AIDS, cost the community over $50 million per year diagnosis and treatment costs and indirect costs such as lost productivity and premature death. The cost per patient was estimated to be more than $22 000 (Romei 1987). Given that approximately four thousand migrants are reported to come to Australia each year with this disease alone, the estimated cost to the community of ineffective health screening for Hepatitis B is $88 million per year, expressed in 1987 dollars. However, the cost of other infectious diseases imported into Australia by legal and illegal immigrants, foreign students and tourists cannot be ascertained. Nor can the cost of Australians infected with such diseases be ascertained. Clearly, a conservative estimate of these costs would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars each year - the total cost is likely to be several billion dollars higher than the estimate provided here."

It is fair to say that over the last decade or more as increasing numbers of Asian, Sub-continental, and Middle Eastern immigrant doctors have become more established across the Australian medical scene, one sees and hears less of the criticism catalogued by Rimmer above. Can professionally prudent self-censorship in the service of "community harmony and understanding" be more accurately described as institutionalized cowardice leading to abrogation of responsibility and duty of care?

Three years after Rimmer's booklet, The Age of 5 December 1994 carried the article "Migrants more likely on welfare" by Karen Middleton reporting unsurprising but surprisingly-admitted findings of the then Labor Government created and funded pro-immigration think-tank, the Bureau of Immigration and Population Research (now defunct):

"A higher proportion of migrants receive age or invalid pensions, sickness benefits, and the dole than do people born in Australia..."

According to a report in The Australian Doctor, 4 April 1997, "HIC swoops on medicine exports at airports" by Christina Anastasopoulos, a one-day search operation of passengers' luggage run jointly by the Health Insurance Commission, Federal Police, and Customs Officers at Sydney International Airport in November 1996 resulted in 24 people being charged under the National Health Act for attempting to illegally take medicines overseas which had been obtained through the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (read public purse):

"All travelers involved were boarding flights bound for the Middle East or South East Asia."

Multiply by number of international airports, times 365 days, by how many years? (5)

Most recently a Melbourne University study of increased welfare dependency over the last twenty years reported in the Australian, 11 July 2003 by Christine Wallace said:

"Most of the increase appears to have occurred after 1989-90 and has been most pronounced among single males, particularly those born outside Australia."

Worry as we should about immigration's day-to-day public health costs, they are minor in the order of things most concerning about immigration. Think about the mass mental health implications for frustrated dwindling white majority societies whose well-founded and well-documented fears about our ongoing multiracial immigration continue to be flatly ignored by their elected governments, decade after decade. To what degree does the generalized repressed frustration and resentment so generated feed into mass subliminal post-modern apathy and political disengagement? Think about rising levels of despair, depression and dysgenic behavior -- conspicuous consumption, substance abuse, below replacement fertility. For too many people who have never considered the culture/history/curricular wars to be their business, life seems naturally disconnected from their past or future. As life's passengers they work, shop, eat, drink, watch TV, party, and too often holiday right on past family and children, trying to be merry today -- for tomorrow, continued bipartisan immigration policy ensures displacement, and eventual replacement by Third World immigration. Although a whole range of demographic and social indicators don't look good at present, these trends need not be terminal -- which reminds me of an alternative title I considered for this article, "Immigration Overdose: When tonic turns toxic, STOP!"

For the hyper-informed readership of activist newsletters and journals such as The Social Contract, the daily deluge of bad news from the mainstream media continues to confirm our worst fears about where immigration is taking us. We sift and clip, copy and fax, post, email, download and quote, discuss, catalogue, file, and otherwise integrate and incorporate the latest details into a broader more intricate mental landscape of related information. Sometimes for we realists, it may all seem a bit daunting or depressing even, but that's only to be expected:

"Indeed some studies have postulated the existence of 'depressive realism,' on the basis of evidence which suggests that depressed people have a more realistic assessment of both their level of control over events and their likely future circumstances than the non-depressed... those who are in a condition of mild depression that tend to see themselves and their world with the least amount of cognitive distortion." (6)

So there you have it -- our well-earned excuse to wallow in the occasional downer. Yet, irrepressibly, we are the types who leap at the letterbox on arrival of the latest edition of expert distillations on our collective predicament. We read in wonderment the detailed mirroring of our local immigration-derived problems reflected from around the world. We observe increasing numbers of journalists who are no longer able to so comprehensively avert their gaze from immigration's multifaceted downside. They signal an awakening that is as yet inchoate as it is general among Europeans worldwide: that Third World mass immigration and multiculturalism are unfolding disasters, only brought into sharper focus and magnified since 9/11. As social capital heads south along with social cohesion in increasingly multiracial "western" countries, collective white survival anxiety must eventually rise as a result. But what of the white masses around the world right now? Do they not fret as we do over the immigration/multiculturalism/demographic bad news stories sprinkled throughout the media? Do they not ponder a dim future for them and theirs? As T.S. Elliot observed in his Four Quartets, "humankind cannot bear very much reality," a concept perhaps reflected by some recent research:

"Humans possess a psychological immune system that allows negative events to fade from memory much faster than positive ones...� Researchers have found the human memory to be heavily biased toward the positive. But far from simply being in denial, the study says our memory systems process pleasant and unpleasant emotions differently. The study to be published in the Review of General Psychology says that the fading of negative memories faster than positive ones should be viewed as a 'healthy coping process.'" (7)

"Perhaps that might be one explanation..." -- so mused Jean Raspail through his narrator (more than once) in The Camp of the Saints when pondering the docility of the "paralyzed west" facing imminent immigration inundation. (8)

Having blacked out for too long under the accelerating G force of immigration-induced social change, more of our opinion makers and leading writers are awakening in white-knuckled fright to an imminent civilizational psycho-sonic boom-crash scenario. With immigration's reality kicking in so rudely and widely, some of print and TV journalism's long-embedded left are turning right. In Britain especially (9) they are stimulating the release of more adrenaline fueled "future fear" into the white English-speaking world than has been pumped into its mainstream organs since Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes, along with President Woodrow Wilson, won their unorthodox tag-team TKO at the post-WWI Paris Peace Conference. Against the odds, and at times each other, these two men prevailed to ensure immigration restriction and regulation remained in the domestic policy domain of sovereign nations. They stopped immigration becoming the plaything of internationalist do-gooders in Paris and thereafter at the soon forthcoming League of Nations.

We live in hope. It's only the end of the beginning. The fat lady is merely clearing her throat. There is every chance that eventually she'll be singing our song, in harmony with a growing chorus of those who are now hurriedly rehearsing to make the lyrics their own.

Denis McCormack is Australian correspondent for The Social Contract.

Notes:

1. Melbourne's Sunday Herald Sun, 25 May 2003, "African intake to rise."

2. The West Australian, 23 July 2003, "Police plan gang squad." "It will respond to the bloody machete and knife fights between the Asian gangs... the unit will also target the predominantly Lebanese gang the Sword Boys and smaller groups including an African gang with the potential to develop into a powerful..."

3. On the Australian Government website covering immigration health clearances updated to 30 June 2003, all the predictably exculpating caveats are cited including:

"Australia's health requirements are designed to:

a) Minimize public health and safety risks to the Australian community;

b) Contain public expenditure on health and community services including Australian social security benefits, allowances or pensions... No health condition with the exception of tuberculosis automatically precludes the issue of a visa...where signs of earlier infection, however small or old are apparent...you will not be permitted to visit Australia until you have completed recommended treatment and successful re-testing" Needless to say, cases of TB x-ray substitution fraud are not unknown."

4. Australians Against Further Immigration with Graeme Campbell, former Federal MP for Kalgoorlie, expended great effort and attracted much P.C. flack for politicizing the immigration -- Hep B connection as spelled out herein by the medical profession heavy-weights. A Federal Government recommendation for childhood Hep B immunization was eventually declared in May 2000 with little fanfare and no public acknowledgement as to Asian immigration being the driver of the belated recommendation.

5. Cited from an Australia First Media Release by Campbell and McCormack, 6 April 1997.

6. Cultural Pessimism: Narratives of Decline in the Post-modern World by Oliver Bennett, Edinburgh University Press 2001, pp.194-5.

7. Melbourne Age, 10 June 2003 "Bad News? Forget it, we all will."

8. The Camp of the Saints is available from The Social Contract Press.

9. There is next to no daylight between what the top end anti-immigration literature has been saying for fifteen years and the recent anti-immigration writings of widely published British journalists like Anthony Browne, Melanie Phillips, Peter Hitchins et al. Sample Anthony Browne in The Spectator, 2 August 2003: "Some truths about immigration" (or "Britain is losing Britain" also by Browne in The Times, 7 August 2002) in which immigration/public health concerns are worked in well with all the usual themes. British tabloids such as The Daily Telegraph, Daily Express, and Daily Mail have been pounding the Blair Government on immigration's downside, including its impact on the National Health Service. For a good summary see Spearhead, September 2003, "The great health scandal" by Rob Smyth. Also a very useful and welcome change has been BBC Radio World Services' frank reportage on immigration. Ethnic demographics, multiculturalism's dilemmas, and mounting asylum problems are now getting something closer to the coverage they deserve on BBC radio which is in stark contrast to their previous studied neglect of these issues.

Original article

The Murdoch press on immigration

2009-02-20T16:50:00.000-08:00

From CanDoBetter.org:

Murdoch media contradicts itself on immigration

Posted February 18th, 2009 by James Sinnamon

Rupert Murdoch never misses an opportunity to preach to his captive Australian audience that this country must continue rapid immigration-driven population growth.

He usually does so through his media outlets controlled by editors who apparently know instinctively what their master wants the Australian public to think. On other occasions he will do so in person, as he recently did on the occasion of a dinner in honor of immigrant Frank Lowy:

"In my recent Boyer Lectures I spoke of the importance to Australia's future of a liberal immigration system,' Mr Murdoch said.

"'Few other Australians embody the breadth of achievement or the contribution to Australia's prosperity made by immigrants in this country than Frank Lowy."

One of Frank Lowy's more visible contributions to Australia has been the erection, by his Westfield Corporation, of massive sprawling shopping mall complexes in almost every substantial urban agglomeration in this country. Rupert Murdoch evidently fears that, if Australia's current record immigrant influx is not maintained, future generations of Australians will not be able to enjoy equivalent contributions from the potential Frank Lowy's that would be prevented from coming here.

In one of his Boyer Lectures referred to in his speech, Rupert Murdoch stated:

"In my view, Australians should not worry because other people want to come to our country. The day to worry is when immigrants are no longer attracted to our shores."

A possibility not acknowledged by Rupert Murdoch is that overcrowding this country may be precisely what will eventually make this country unattractive to immigrants, or, indeed, to people already living here. This was implicitly acknowledged in an editorial of 18 March 2008 "Queensland faces a tougher job on regional development", which stated:

"... much of (Queensland's) growth comprises city refugees making a sea change ..."

If high immigration is as beneficial as Rupert Murdoch insists, why is it that so many of Australians need to flee from the cities into which most immigrants have settled?

The story "English expats make Moreton the only Bay in the village" in Rupert Murdoch's Courier Mail newspaper of 10 January 2009 states:

"ESCAPING the overpopulated boroughs of the UK, British immigrants are moving to Brisbane's bayside suburbs, creating their own Little Britain by the Bay."

In the story one women stated, "I would never raise my kids back in England." Another stated " Back in the UK, five-year-olds ... don't know how to play any more."

The overcrowding of both England and the larger southern cities of Australia are precisely the consequence of governments having accepted similar such gratuitous advice in the past from the likes of Rupert Murdoch.

As a consequence, not only have living conditions become intolerable for many, but our very capacity to sustain any sizable population in the longer term, is under threat by runaway population growth brought about to satisfy the insatiable short-term greed of the property speculators and related concerns, whose interests Rupert Murdoch's media promotes.

Original article

The reality is that by most standards, Australia's major cities over the last few decades have become immeasurably worse places to live due to the very high levels of immigration that Murdoch and his fellow immigration enthusiasts have been championing. But don't expect them to ever openly admit the link between sustained high levels of immigration and Australia's rapidly declining quality of life.

Aim for a sustainable population

2009-02-20T06:54:00.000-08:00

Aim for sustainable population and generous immigration

CHARLES BERGER
13/02/2009 9:25:00 AM

Last October, the Commonwealth Treasury released modelling intended to inform the design of the Government's carbon pollution reduction scheme. The modelling assumed net migration to Australia of 150,000 people a year through to 2050, which would result in an Australian population of about 33million by 2050.

Operating on an assumption of 200,000 a year in the last half of this century, Treasury's modelling envisages about 45million Australians by 2100.

Pause for a moment to consider whether you support an increase in Australia's population that would, among other things, transform Melbourne and Sydney into mega-cities of 10 million residents each.

Now consider that the Treasury's assumptions about Australia's population in advising the Government on climate change were woefully on the low side.

Australia's actual net migration in 2006-07 was 177,600, the highest on record at the time. The preliminary net migration figure for 2007-08 is 213,500. Because the Government further increased skilled migration numbers in 2008, it is likely net migration for 2008-09 will be higher still. In fact, we are now roughly tracking a ''high-growth'' scenario developed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2006, which projects an Australian population of more than 62million and growing by 2100.

There is a real difference between an Australia with a stable population of perhaps 25 million to 30 million people and an Australia with twice that number and still growing fast. Our ability to cope with climate change and manage our environment sustainably is vastly improved with a lower, stable population.

It is not only the Treasury assumptions for its climate change advice that now appear completely superseded by population growth. Most state planning frameworks, including Melbourne 2030, were based on population estimates that are now laughably out of date, largely due to the massive increase in migration begun by the Howard government and accelerated under the Rudd Government.

As a result, state and local planning schemes for housing, water supply, electricity, health care, education and transport are becoming redundant almost before the ink is dry on them. Victoria's latest State of the Environment report concludes that development on Melbourne's urban fringes is driving the loss of natural habitat and biodiversity, degrading waterways, taking up good agricultural land and creating a host of other pressures.

In this context, the release of the book Overloading Australia by Mark O'Connor and Bill Lines has sparked another round of debate about Australia's population. Some commentators have been quick to detect a murky agenda of xenophobia hovering behind a green cloak in the population debate. They are right to be suspicious. Population control movements have been associated in the past with anti-migrant agendas and coercive birth control policies in developed and developing countries. In light of this dark history, it is critical for those who advocate population stabilisation to reject any such association unequivocally.

And yet it is possible to argue for a sustainable population policy that includes some limits on migration without being anti-migrant. When I was in law school in the US, I spent many late hours volunteering at a legal clinic that represented refugees making application for asylum. I feel deeply that one of the true measures of a society's ethics is how it treats refugees and others on the wrong end of the modern global economy.

Many people may not realise that in recent years more than half of Australia's permanent migrants have been through the skilled migration stream, compared with only 7 per cent of the total being humanitarian migrants and 25 per cent family migrants. So having a sound population policy that brings migration back down to reasonable levels does not mean shutting the door on refugees. In fact, Australia could even increase its refugee intake, while still tracking for stabilisation of the overall population by about 2050, if we reduce skilled migration substantially.

Since most of the recent increase in migration is attributable to perceived economic requirements, not humanitarian or family obligations, perhaps we should scrutinise more closely the claims by industry that they are needed to meet ''skills shortages''. One wonders whether such claims are really just code for ''lower wages''. The truth is, the rapid increase in skilled migration is being used as a crutch for the economy, a way of providing a short-term boost to things like housing construction and retail demand but without any serious reckoning of the long-term consequences. Relying on migration to prop up sectors of the economy also diverts us from the task of devising more sustainable solutions.

In trying to ease the pressure overpopulation and excessive consumption are having on our planet and its ecological systems, we must debate immigration and demographic patterns while keeping Australian values of justice, equity and fairness front and centre.

Those who are sceptical of calls for a sustainable population policy are also fond of pointing out that our modern, high-consumption lifestyle is the most pressing cause of our environmental problems. They are correct that we must tackle our high pollution and consumption levels and shift to a more sustainable lifestyle. According to the World Resources Institute, Australia's greenhouse pollution level of 26tonnes of CO2-e per person per year is double Germany's, six times China's and 11 times Indonesia's.

But, while a lower-impact way of life must be a top priority, we must also understand that a rapidly growing population will make that transition much more difficult. For instance, in 2002, a CSIRO report analysing the possible consequences of different population levels for Australia found a 28 per cent increase in the nation's population by 2050 would lead to 20 per cent more energy use and greenhouse pollution, 25 per cent more urban water use and higher food import requirements (especially for fish and vegetables), among many other impacts. The sobering reality is that the growth of a consumption-intensive population in Australia is seriously damaging our environment. Despite these pressures, Australian governments have continued to pursue high-population-growth strategies or have had no coherent demographic policy at all. The baby bonus (or the new plasma screen bonus, as they call it at one major retailer) is an example of such a misguided policy.

Australia now needs to shift its focus to policies that seek to match human populations and consumption levels within nature's carrying capacity, while transforming our economic and social systems to function within the limits of ecological systems.

We should also support programs in high-fertility countries that improve education and maternal and child health care as well as provide sustainable economic opportunities. The good news is, these programs are the most effective means of reducing fertility and promoting sustainable development. We can achieve a sustainable population while discharging our ethical obligations to accept refugees and play a positive role internationally. It is not only achievable: our future may depend on it.

Charles Berger is director of strategic ideas at the Australian Conservation Foundation.

Original article

I found some of the reader responses to this article interesting.

One reader called "Katherine" commented:

It is absurd that our Government is pursuing high population growth while, at the same time, having no population policy at all. It is also odd that the motives of environmentalists who question immigration-fueled population growth are sometimes deemed suspect. In contrast the business interests that profit from population growth (and lobby for it) are seldom subjected to scrutiny.

I would argue that the Government does have a tacit population policy: import as many people as quickly as possible!

As for the question of motives, Mark O'Connor and William Lines made this point in their book Overloading Australia:

"In general, rather than opponents of high immigration having a hidden agenda, it is immigration's advocates who have a personal or institutional vested interest, whether they are are ethnic 'leaders' seeking to increase their 'market share', industry groups seeking to increase their business opportunities, or New Class intellectuals expressing their moral superiority."

Another reader called "Milly" wrote:

We in Australia have a right to control who comes here to live, and how many. It is not about being "anti-migrant" or discriminating according to nationality. It is about numbers. Without people emigrating, our gross numbers are increasing, and already our environment is under stress. Garnaut's report is being virtually ignored, and the threat of losing our MDB food-bowl is not even making any impact in Canberra! Kevin Rudd is denying and ignoring climate change. We cannot reduce our greenhouse gas emissions or have any real conservation while our numbers are increasing, deliberately. Only few people benefit from our heavy immigration program. With contradictory policies from our government, they are obviously not taking our environment seriously and future generations will pay the price for their short-sightedness and greed.

Milly is correct. For conservationists (which I am not even though I obviously share their concerns about the ruinous environmental impacts of population growth), the issue is about numbers and numbers only.

To quote O'Connor and Lines again:

"Questioning population and especially immigration will always attract controversy. But conservationists need not involve themselves in debates as to whether our national identity benefits or suffers by a very large influx of people with different cultures or values. (Although this is an important debate to have.) Conservationists need not even be interested in the effects on living standards, life-style, house prices, or security from terrorism. The conservationist's main point is that all groups coming to Australia aspire towards the same high-consuming material culture and lifestyle. In terms of their impact on nature in Australia, differences in language or ethnicity are irrelevant. Numbers, not culture, count."

Rudd Govt's immigration programme a threat to Australian workers

2009-02-20T05:55:00.000-08:00

From the Herald Sun:

Sponsorship system open to exploitation, say academics

John Masanauskas
February 20, 2009 12:00am

AUSTRALIA must slash migration to protect local jobs, argues a Monash University report.

The report said the Rudd Government was running a record high migrant intake while job prospects for locals were bleak amid the global economic crisis.

"On the face of it, Labor's migration program constitutes a direct challenge to the interests of domestic workers," the report said.

"It will add a huge influx of job seekers at a time when the bargaining power of domestic job seekers has taken a turn for the worse."

The report, Immigration and the Nation Building and Jobs Plan, will be released today by Monash's Centre for Population and Urban Research.

Authors are demographers Dr Bob Birrell and Dr Ernest Healey, and labour market expert Bob Kinnaird.

Last year the Government increased annual permanent migration by 37,500 places to about 200,000 people.

That's about the same number of Australian school leavers and uni graduates who will be looking for work over the next year.

The number of temporary skilled migrants sponsored by employers has also grown rapidly, reaching almost 60,000 last year.

The report said the Government's $42 billion stimulus package to protect Australian jobs was compromised by high migration figures.

"If the migration program is not cut sharply, the growth in migrant job seekers will exceed the number of jobs the stimulus plan proposes to protect," the authors said.

They also called on the Government to crack down on employer sponsorship of skilled migrants, claiming the system was open to exploitation.

"There are no rules stopping sponsors from recruiting migrants instead of locals, or even of retrenching locals ahead of temporary visa holders," the report said.

It also recommends the range of jobs eligible for migrant sponsorship be reduced and that bosses give proof locals can't be found at market rates of pay and conditions.

Original article

No surprises here. Bringing in record numbers of immigrants, many of them with dubious skills, during a period of growing unemployment is sheer stupidity. But, then again, the Rudd Government's immigration policy never made sense in the first place, even before the economy nose-dived.

Melbourne "wrecked" and "full"

2009-01-29T20:48:00.000-08:00

In a column entitled "Melbourne is wrecked, and full", Andrew Bolt makes the link between high immigration and Melbourne's declining quality of life.

He writes:

It’s bad enough that we’re already struggling to keep our most basic services running.

But now consider this: at the rate we’re being growing lately, Victoria will add at least another 1.5 million to its population over the next 20 years.

In fact, it could well be more. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd last year cranked up our immigration intake to a record high - more than 330,000 a year, if you include workers on temporary visas. And that’s not yet counting new births.

A year ago, even before Rudd opened our door even wider, the Australian Bureau of Statistics noted Australia’s population was now growing by 1.6 per cent a year, which means that if we don’t stop this madness, there will be half as many of us again by 2050.

And, of course, most of these new people will be trying to squeeze into our cities. Like Melbourne.

Imagine Melbourne growing 50 per cent bigger in your children’s lifetime, if not your own. That’s 50 per cent more people, cars, houses, gardens, air-conditioners and train travellers. Everywhere where’s there’s two, imagine three by 2050.

Forget the social stresses of simply getting on with so many more immigrants, or of trying even to find a little elbow room.

Consider this more basic problem: how on earth are we going to give all our new neighbours power, water, roads, land and trains when we don’t have enough for the people here already?

*snip*

Kicking out this government may not be enough to stop our slide. After all, there is little evidence yet that the Liberals would be any better.

But one thing is clear and urgent: until we learn once more how to give our citizens power and water, trains and roads, we must cut immigration.

After all, why inflict on two million more strangers what we’ve just endured ourselves? We’d only double our pain.

Full article

Rudd evading the question of population

2009-01-27T20:14:00.000-08:00

From Online Opinion:

Population pressures

By Barry Naughten
Posted Thursday, 22 January 2009

The Rudd Government has allowed vested interests to veto serious action on climate change.

Rudd himself has rationalised this with an argument about rapid population growth but evades the question of population policy. This comment takes up aspects of the nexus between population policy and climate change.

The White Paper’s conditional target for 2020: the backdown
In its December 2008 White Paper on CO2 reduction schemes, the Rudd Government failed to adopt the “conditional” abatement option of 25 per cent reduction relative to 2000 levels by 2020, as recommended in the Garnaut Report. Instead, the Government has adopted the far more modest target of 15 per cent reduction for 2020.

A reduction commensurate with the 25 per cent cut would be required internationally if global concentrations in the atmosphere were to be held to no more than 450 ppm CO2e, thereby significantly reducing the risk of “dangerous” climate change. Such a path would also require countries such as Australia to adopt 90 per cent emission reduction by 2050.

Other examples of weakening resolve evident in the White Paper included its excessive allocation of free emission permits to trade-exposed industries and unconditional payments of as much as $3.9 billion in free permits to coal-fired generators.

Professor Garnaut has harshly criticised the Government for caving in to the pressure from vested-interests in what has been the most expensive, elaborate and sophisticated lobbying pressure on the policy process ever.

In the White Paper, a lower, “unilateral” target of 5 per cent reduction for 2020 is based on an assumption of no comparable burden being accepted by other countries. The purpose of the higher “conditional” rate is to enable Australia play its part in encouraging a sufficient and co-ordinated response from the rest-of-the-world.

The next major step in these international negotiations is in Copenhagen on December 7-18, 2009 at the United Nations Climate Change Conference. This will be the first test for the most critical player, the United States under the new Obama Administration.

The urgency of such action is heightened by indications that an Obama Administration may systematically conflate climate change with a bogus campaign - supported by neo-conservatives, “oil hawks” and others - urging US independence of “foreign” oil.

Rudd’s “population gambit”
Prime Minister Rudd’s rationale for rejecting the “conditional” 25 per cent abatement option is that Australia’s population growth is high relative to Europe’s. His claim was that “If the Europeans were to embrace the same per capita obligations that we're about to embrace, then you'd be seeing European reductions of the vicinity of 30 per cent”.

Consistent with this claim, the White Paper states that the 15 per cent cut in Australia’s emissions is equivalent to a 34 per cent cut in per capita emissions. Similar calculations show the 25 per cent cut to be equivalent to a 42 per cent cut in per capita terms, in both cases assuming a projected population of 24.6 million in 2020.

This 2020 population projection amounts to as much as a 44 per cent increase on the 1990 level, or a 29 per cent increase on the 2000 level. The Bureau of Statistics (ABS) projects that by 2056, Australia's expected resident population (ERP) could be between 31 and 43 million people. These are extraordinarily high figures for a fragile land under increasing stress, as documented for example in Jared Diamond’s chapter on Australia in his book Collapse.

We do need debate about the nexus between population and climate change
Clearly, a lower projected population growth to 2020 and beyond would ease Australia’s burden in meeting a tighter emission target. But what Rudd’s rationale for “15 per cent” ignores is the absence of any explicit population policy that takes into account Australia’s limited “carrying capacity”, especially given climate change that is already “inevitable”.

Yet there is a lack of informed public questioning of Australia’s population goals.

That said, prominent environmentalists such as Ian Lowe and Tim Flannery have long argued the ecological dangers of excessive population growth, not least as one major determinant of unsustainable forms of economic growth.

By contrast, in his comments on the deficiencies of the White Paper, Ross Garnaut says:

Our population grows strongly because, for good reasons, we choose to keep our doors open to people from many lands. Our new citizens need transport, a home with Australian accompaniments and access to employment income - all of which generate greenhouse gas emissions.

Other environmentalists such as George Monbiot also discount population growth as an issue comparable to, and relevant to the excesses of consumerism or “affluenza”.

Indeed, the role of population growth, whether due to natural increase or to immigration, is “difficult” for many reasons - political as well as technical.

With respect to natural population increase, it is generally agreed that improved living standards, personal security and education, and especially the empowerment of women, tend to reduce family sizes. But impacts on population growth will also depend on factors such as longevity and age-specific death rates.

The case of “dangerous” climate change shows that affluent states can impose burdens on the less affluent majority of the world’s population. Along with pricing emissions and a variety of other “complementary” mechanisms and abatement policies, this burden can be lightened by curbing excesses of both per capita consumption and of population growth, especially in the affluent countries.

“Lifeboat earth” and right-wing politics of climate change
Immigration and population movements also encompass controversial aspects of population debate.

On the extreme isolationist and elitist right-wing of environmentalism is Garrett Hardin’s notion of “lifeboat ethics”. This envisages the inhabitants of affluent states, having heedlessly created a global environmental crisis such as “dangerous” climate change, then withdrawing behind their own borders to repel environmental refugees by all means deemed necessary. The image is of a “lifeboat” that will capsize if too many boarders are admitted. The Howard government was not averse to playing on such xenophobic fears, when electoral advantage could be had.

Climate change denialists and the “adaptation only” policy pessimists alike can offer only a business-as-usual scenario, both groups failing to support strong abatement of global greenhouse gas emissions. In such a business-as-usual scenario, the affluent states - having predominantly caused the problem - can use their wealth to adapt to such climate change as impacts on their own regions, at the same time choosing to ignore the consequences for the more vulnerable and less self-reliant rest-of-the-world.

Repelling environmental refugees by force - the lifeboat image - is just one component of such a business-as-usual strategy, albeit one rarely highlighted publicly. The Canadian journalist Gwynne Dyer has documented military establishments around the affluent world more-or-less secretively planning for just such an eventuality.

Whatever their views on population policy, part of the reason that progressive environmentalists push for sufficient action on abatement of global greenhouse gas emissions is precisely so that such a “Hardin” scenario, catastrophic for human civilisation and humane values, will not come about.

Conclusion
The main conclusions are twofold.

First, the Rudd Government’s rejection of the 25 per cent reduction proposed in the Garnaut report is reprehensible. This is especially so in a political sense, with the Government having rejected any notion of blocking with the Greens on the issue, instead openly seeking to negotiate just with the Coalition, a strategy that risks even further dilution of targets, and offers little prospect of dividing the main political adversary.

Second, Rudd’s population gambit has, if inadvertently, highlighted the role of population growth, not least in magnifying greenhouse gas emissions. Like most of its predecessors, the Rudd Government has sought to keep population policy off the agenda. Its rational and balanced discussion should not be inhibited by “elaborate and sophisticated lobbying pressures” such as those identified by Garnaut.

Barry Naughten was a senior economist with ABARE, specialising in technology-based energy systems analysis. Currently he is at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies (CAIS), ANU, Canberra.

Original article

The threat of population growth

2009-01-27T20:08:00.000-08:00

From The Age:

Population Australia's 'big threat'

Peter Ker
January 24, 2009

PROMINENT Australians have thrown their support behind a controversial new book which argues that population growth is the biggest threat to environmental sustainability in this country.

In a provocative attack on water conservation schemes, such as Melbourne's Target 155, the book Overloading Australia urges Australians to ignore water conservation, forcing politicians to rethink population and immigration policy.

Focusing on perhaps the most taboo aspect of environmental debate, authors Mark O'Connor and William Lines have argued that pro-immigration and "baby bonus" policies are at odds with plans to reduce carbon emissions and secure water supplies.

"The task of simultaneously increasing population and achieving sustainability is impossible," the book argues.

Predicting Australian cities will suffer more congestion, pollution, loss of biodiversity and diminished services, the authors argue there is no point conserving water "until we get restraint in population".

O'Connor said his background was largely in poetry, yet despite his lack of conventional expertise in demography and population studies, his book has struck a chord with prominent Australians and increasingly echoes the views of leading environmentalists.

Former New South Wales premier Bob Carr has agreed to launch the book next week, and has lauded O'Connor's previous books about the perils of unchecked population growth.

The Australian Conservation Foundation has also called for a "substantial reduction" in the nation's skilled migration program in this year's budget.

In its budget submission, the foundation said Australia's population needed to be stabilised at "an ecologically sustainable level".

"Population increase makes it harder for Australia to reduce carbon pollution levels and is placing immense stress on state and regional planning, infrastructure and ecological systems."

The comments will resonate with the Brumby Government, which has presided over an increase in total emissions in recent years, despite improvements in emissions on a per capita basis.

Monash University population expert Dr Bob Birrell, who has read Overloading Australia, said despite the global nature of the emissions problem, national borders still mattered because people tended to adopt the typical emissions profile of the nation they lived in.

"When you add an extra million in a society like ours you are imposing a very considerable additional burden, there is no way of escaping it, and that's the key to understanding why the population issue is so serious in Australia; we live very high on the hog," he said.

Australia will welcome a maximum of 203,500 new migrants this financial year, with skilled migration accounting for 133,500 of those places, and refugees just 13,500.

A spokesman for Immigration Minister Chris Evans said the Rudd Government had started developing a longer-term migration plan that would consider "net overseas migration rates and the impact of demographic changes".

Victoria has swelled by about 1500 people a week in recent years, a rate that Premier John Brumby has described as "about as fast as we want to go".

Original article

How the growth lobby threatens Australia's future

2009-01-26T21:11:00.000-08:00

From Candobetter.org:

How the growth lobby threatens Australia's future

Posted January 24th, 2009 by James Sinnamon

Why is it that the Australian government, and other governments, principally in the Anglophone world, deliberately encourage population growth when common sense and intuition, not to mention the hard evidence, tell us that a larger population cannot possibly be in the interests of the current inhabitants of this country or of the rest of the planet?

We are long past the point where adding extra numbers in any way increases the synergy of the inhabitants of this country. Consequently any additional population growth must necessarily make each and every one of us poorer on average as the per capita access to natural resources necessarily decreases in proportion to the increase of the numbers of people.

However, it gets even worse than that, because of the dis-economies of scale inherent in large populations. An obvious example is that Australians are paying extra water rates to finance costly water desalination and sewage recycling plants required to provide water for additional people.

Had we stabilised our population, this would have been totally unnecessary. We could all have been adequately supplied by our existing less unnatural and less technologically complex water infrastructure.

Similar points could be made about transport, electricity, health, education and other services.

To cope with increasing numbers, it is necessary to destroy ever greater tracts of native bushland, to abuse our topsoil and waterways, and to unsustainably dig up ever more of our finite endowment of mineral wealth.

Three and a half decades of extreme 'free market' economic policies have further compounded these problems. These policies hinder governments from making use of what economies of scale are possible. They prevent effective planning in the interests of all members of society. Obvious examples include the huge inefficiencies of the private property market and the shambolic state of Australian urban planning, a result of the dismantling of Whitlam's Department of Urban and Regional Development (DURD) by Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser in the late 1970's.

In some ways it may be the case that immigration does indeed enable the transfer of wealth into, as well as out, of Australia:

• The purchase of a home by wealthy or middle class immigrants as a means of buying Australian citizenship, which is effectively a transfer of wealth from the source country into Australia;
• The poaching of skilled workers, often trained at the expense of taxpayers of other countries, including of poor third world countries - a practice, for which the Queensland Bligh Government has become infamous;
• The selling of Australian university degrees and vocational training, which has notoriously become yet another means of purchasing Australian citizenship.

Little, if any of this wealth trickles down to ordinary Australians and whatever benefit they do gain is more than negated by the loss of previously available educational, training and employment opportunities, and consequent housing inflation (also discussed below). Even if it can be shown that Australia, as a whole, gains, rather than loses wealth through immigration, that wealth will most likely evaporate within this generation.

In any case, on a global scale such wealth transfer is a zero-sum game, at best.

All things considered, it seems far more likely that we are not only becoming more impoverished, but we are becoming even more impoverished than we might expect to be if we had simply divided the existing wealth amongst larger numbers of people!

In a perverse way, it seems to me that this may have actually made it harder, rather than easier, to argue the case against population growth and immigration.

Whilst I can't know for certain if this was true for others, I will try to summarise some of the ways that this fed into my own conscious and sub-conscious thought processes and caused me to avoid questioning our high immigration policies for many decades.

My own intuition caused me to conclude that, if, somehow, immigration made us worse off on the whole, it would surely be harder, rather than easier, for any group to gain from immigration. Therefore, when faced with the strident assertions from all the seemingly credible authorities that immigration was economically beneficial, I found it easier to deny my own gut instincts and not to make the considerable investment of emotion and time necessary to question this pervasive message. Instead, I just quietly hoped that the advocates of immigration, who promised me a more prosperous, vibrant, interesting and sophisticated society, were right.

Alternatively, on occasions when the economic arguments did not seem to quite ring true to me, then the only other likely plausible motive would have been an underlying altruism of an enlightened elite more willing, than the ordinary, backward, redneck, xenophobic masses, to share the wealth of this country with others less fortunate than ourselves.

However, the conclusive evidence, after many decades of this social engineering, is that Australia has, instead, become a poorer and more dependant country as consequence and this has not been brought about because Australia's elites are self-sacrificing and altruistic.

Contrary to what I expected, a small group has, paradoxically, not lost, but rather gained from this chaos and suffering, at our expense. That group is the growth lobby. It is really a group of land speculators and landlords operating in an organised way on a corporate level.

Land speculators and landlords openly welcome the way that growing demand increases the price of vital resources over which they have acquired a monopoly. They profit from commodifying and then controlling access to resources and services which include water, land, power, housing, roads, food production and transport, which each one of us needs in order to live a dignified life, or even simply to live.

As one consequence, in Brisbane at the start of 2009, even previously well-off professionals are being impoverished by insatiably greedy landlords, who exploit these circumstances to increase rents at every possible opportunity. A surveyor, who lives near me (who acknowledges that his own work entails the destruction of bushland to build new housing developments to cope with population growth), told me how he was unable to travel back to Germany this year for his holidays, because of being personally affected by recent rent increases.

The growth lobby also includes property developers, financiers, building companies and suppliers of building materials. There are also others that gain from population growth through high immigration, such as immigration lawyers, employment agencies and cheapskate employers.

Whilst these activities may provide a facade of economic prosperity, none are capable of increasing the underlying ability of this society to provide for its own needs.

Queensland Premier Anna Bligh in April 2006, then Deputy Premier, ludicrously defended population growth on the grounds that it was necessary to keep people in the construction industry employed.

How could Premier Bligh, supposedly an intelligent person, have failed to ask herself the obvious question: How are those additional people then to be employed? Must we build yet more houses to keep them employed and import yet more people to Australia in order to provide a demand for those houses?

At some point such 'growth' has to end and Queenslanders must be able to find gainful employment by meeting the needs of other Queenslanders instead of future inhabitants.

The longer Australians put off stabilising our population and establishing a steady state economy, the worse will be our circumstances.

But the growth lobby wants this situation to continue indefinitely. To ensure that the forced march to dystopia continues, the growth lobby pours funds into the coffers of Australia's major political parties, including Anna Bligh's Labor Party. It creates obligation and dependency in our political parties and governments. In turn, our governments endlessly facilitate the real-estate economy, in the face of every democratic objection, merely to keep themselves in Government.

If we are to hope for any kind of a decent future for ourselves and our children, these corrupt arrangements must be brought to an end and the power of the growth lobby must be broken.

Original article

Migrant accountants fail English test

2009-01-18T00:18:00.000-08:00

From the SMH:

OVERSEAS accountants are flocking to Australia under the skilled migration program but few pass the English requirements to work in the sector, leaving labour shortfalls unmet, a study into immigration policy has found.

There are now more overseas accountants gaining visas each year than there are domestic graduates in the field, a study in the upcoming edition of the People And Place quarterly journal has found.

But the occupation remains on the critical skills list because students using Australian accounting courses to gain permanent residency do not find work.

"The main reason is poor English skills," said the director of the Centre for Population & Urban Research at Monash University, Bob Birrell. Of the 9107 foreign accountants granted visas in 2007-08, more than two thirds studied at Australian institutions.

"The fact that such a large majority of overseas student graduates possess poor English indicates that Australian universities are conferring graduate credentials on students who do not have the skills needed to practise their profession," Professor Birrell said.

The study that Professor Birrell wrote with Ernest Healy uses the "abysmal" employment experience of overseas accountants, by far the largest group in the skilled migration program, to illustrate the program's shortcomings.

For example, the accounting firm KPMG said substandard English resulted in less than 1 per cent of former overseas student applicants landing a job in the company's entry level program.

"This experience indicates the potential for pruning the current program without damage to its core objective of filling skills shortages," the paper said.

The number of skilled migrants entering Australia is at a record. The Minister for Immigration, Chris Evans, has said a small cut to the yearly intake of 133,500 was "more likely than not" when numbers for 2009-10 were adjusted in the May budget to factor in the global financial meltdown.

The mismatch between accounting graduates and available jobs exposes a problem that was allowed to brew for a decade, the paper said.

From 1996 to 2007, the Coalition government tied only a small number of new university places to accounting studies. At the same time, universities hungry for the bigger financial returns of full-fee-paying students gave priority to overseas students, it said.

Part of the solution was for the Department of Immigration and Citizenship to raise the English language standard for student visas and demand higher standards of accrediting bodies, the paper said. "DIAC is fully aware of the dire employment situation of migrant accountants and of the role of English language skills in producing this outcome."

Full article

More:

Degrees still lure low-skill migrants

Bernard Lane | January 14, 2009

AUSTRALIA'S misguided trade in selling accounting degrees to migrants seeking permanent residency visas should be tightened up yet again and locals should be trained to fill severe shortages in the profession, says Monash University researcher Bob Birrell.

Dr Birrell, whose earlier work on the visas-for-degrees industry has inspired sharp debate and partial reform, will release this week new, more complete figures showing that more than a third of overseas students who secured visas as Australian-trained accountants had worryingly low English language skills.

"I regard the 2006-07 data as the best indication yet of the standards of Australian universities ... they're nowhere near the standards required by the profession," Dr Birrell told the HES.

In a paper to be published by People and Place journal, he and co-author Ernest Healy use updated figures and a new breakdown of nationality and occupation to show that accountancy as an easy route to permanent residence is especially attractive to the weaker English speakers among mainland Chinese students.

On the English language test known as IELTS, 45 per cent of mainland Chinese given visas as accountants did not manage a score of six (see tables, page 26). The percentage for mainland Chinese awarded visas across all university disciplines was 37 per cent while the figure for all nationalities given visas as accountants was 38 per cent.

Dr Birrell argues that even an IELTS score of six is not good enough for genuine university study while professions that take communication seriously demand a minimum score of seven, a standard adopted by large accounting firms such as KPMG.

Poor English is commonly cited by employers when asked why so few overseas graduates accepted as skilled migrants manage to secure jobs as accountants at a time of chronic shortages.

"The (former overseas) students who have struggled in the boom years are almost certainly going to go to the back of the queue as the economy slows," DrBirrell said.

"(Universities) are going to come under pressure from the students who are looking for permanent residency - that they can actually achieve this result from their heavy investment of time and money."

Dr Birrell pointed to a "wilful neglect" of domestic training of accountants and cited Curtin University of Technology as a dramatic example of an imbalance whereby overseas students greatly outnumbered locals (see tables).

He hoped the Bradley review would lead to more local opportunities in the medium term but urged the federal Government to complete the reform of the visas-for-degrees market started in September 2007 and revisited last December.

Little improvement would be found in the 2007-08 figures given the "very long pipeline" of former overseas students in the system. He said the 2007 and 2008 rule changes meant many overseas students pursuing the accountancy route to permanent residency would take up the soft option of a new professional year, the Skilled Migrants Internship Program, because it did not stipulate any English language requirement.

"What happens if people finish their professional year and (get a visa but) but still don't have level seven (in IELTS), which is quite likely?" he said.

Full article

If the Department of Immigration and Citizenship is aware of the situation, as the authors of the report claim, then why hasn't it acted to rectify the problem? Why does it continue to allow the universities to serve as permanent residency factories* for non-English speaking foreign students? Why has the Department allowed this to continue even though the students in question are virtually unemployable and, thus, no benefit whatsoever to the Australian economy?

* See chapter six of Dr. Peter Wilkinson's book The Howard Legacy (2007) for a detailed look at how Australia's universities have allowed themselves to be exploited as visa factories. As Dr. Wilkinson notes, "the universities market themselves as providing education but they know, and certainly their prospective applicants know, that they are marketing permanent residency visas."

Economic growth needed to employ immigrants?

2009-01-03T21:43:00.000-08:00

From the October 2008 SPA Newsletter:

Economic growth needed to employ immigrants

For some time now we have been told that we need immigrants to this country to fill the enormous number of job vacancies left unfilled. However, it seems we have been fed ‘spin’ by the business leaders and economic consultants.

The story line goes that the gowth in immigration from 171,000 in 2007-08 to a forecast 203,000 in 2008-09 is required to support the economy. The benefits to the country have been modelled and mount into the billions of dollars over 20 years. [Note: these "benefits" are dubious as they do not factor in infrastructure and environmental costs incurred by immigration. Even if one ignores these costs, the "benefits" of immigration are trivial in per capita terms.]

Imagine my surprise when listening to an interview by Fran Kelly (FK) with Shane Oliver [chief economist at AMP Capital Investors] the other day, discussing the economy and in particular the impact of the latest interest rate cut by the Reserve Bank and the expected slowdown in the ABS GDP figures for the April-June quarter on employment. Here we have Shane Oliver telling us that now we have to maintain a high level of economic growth (3.5%) to enable the country to provide jobs to employ the large number of immigrants we have coming into the country. Its the ‘smartest’ about face I think I have ever seen.

FK: If growth has slowed further, if we find that out in the National Accounts today, what will that mean for unemployment?

SO: Well, the bottom line is that Australia needs to have (GDP) growth of between 3 to 31/2% each year to absorb the new entrants to the labour force and those new entrants are coming from natural growth in the population and pretty high immigration levels. So if we’ve got (GDP) growth running way below that and through the first half of this year average growth will be something of the order of about 2% if you average the March and June quarters, then that suggests that unemployment will start to rise and in a year’s time I think we’ll see unemployment well above 5%, maybe 51/2% and even though the labour force figures don’t yet show that, all the labour force figures show is a slowdown in employment growth. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence out there with a whole range of companies over the last couple of months announcing layoffs including Holden, Ford, IAG, Qantas, National Australia Bank, and the list goes on, so I think we will see rising unemployment.

(ABC Radio National “Breakfast” with Fran Kelly (FK), 3rd September 2008)

Read full interview

This blind commitment to maintaining high immigration levels irrespective of labour market conditions simply demonstrates how Australia's immigration program has become divorced from serving the needs of Australia and its existing population. It is an example of immigration for immigration's sake.

As Geoffrey Blainey put it, "an immigration system set up originally to serve the nation has been undermined. Now it is the nation that exists to serve the immigrant."

Put quality of life first

2008-12-20T00:21:00.000-08:00

Barry Cohen, former Federal Labor MP, asks some tough questions about the Rudd Government's massive immigration program.

From The Spectator:

Balance population with quality of life

Barry Cohen
Wednesday, 10th December 2008

Unless I’ve been grievously misled, global warming/climate change is caused by the excessive amount of carbon emissions poured into the atmosphere. The major offenders are the developed countries, and the more affluent members of them in particular. Near the top of the list is our good selves with a footprint Ian Thorpe would envy.

And what, I hear you ask, has been Australia’s response? Well for starters, the government has ratified Kyoto; it is developing a carbon trading emissions scheme and is investing in a range of alternative energy proposals, including hybrid cars, solar energy, clean coal, wind and much more. Australia is taking global warming seriously. There are no sceptics or deniers in the Rudd government.

There is one problem. An increasing number of people are finding it difficult to equate our climate change initiatives with our immigration policy. Carbon emissions, we are told, are caused by people and affluent people in particular. Ergo, the more affluent nations are the more carbon emitted. You don’t have to be a climatologist, an economist or a demographer to work that out, you just need an IQ above room temperature.

Part of the solution therefore, and I stress the word ‘part’, would be to reduce or at least stabilise our population. As reduction is nigh on impossible, that leaves stabilisation as the only alternative. And what are we doing to achieve that? Increasing the annual migrant intake to 190,000, which is double the number during the first year of the Howard government. That doesn’t include 100,000 temporary skilled workers allowed in on 457 visas.

One has to be very careful here, for anyone questioning immigration numbers runs the risk of being branded a racist. Nevertheless, I believe it behoves me to ask politely, ‘What the hell is going on?’ If there was a public debate about the level of immigration in the run-up to the last election, I must have missed it. Now, however, we find both government and Coalition united in favour of a dramatic increase in our annual migrant intake.

For 2008-9, the projected figure is 203,800 plus 100,000 on 457 visas. When the Chifley government initiated the post-war immigration programme, the slogan was ‘Populate or Perish’. One justification was that having just fought a ferocious war with Japan, we needed to build up our population to defend Australia against ‘the yellow peril’. The White Australia policy was alive and well. Our population of six and a half million could not justify our occupation of such a vast empty continent. Economies of scale would enable us to produce goods at a lower price and increase our ability to export.

Only the last of these three reasons has any validity today, and even that is questionable. Our export income is no longer dependant on the mass production of consumer goods. Specialised quality production, agriculture, mining, tourism and educational services earn most of our foreign currency.

The latest excuse for increased population is a shortage of skilled labour. Those arguing the case may be right, but in doing so they should answer the following questions: how many of our current unemployed can be trained to fill these jobs? What effort is being made to train unemployed Aborigines in northern Australia where the mining boom is creating demand for the many skilled and highly paid jobs available, or do we believe they are incapable of being trained? If more skilled labour is required, why can’t we cut, at least, temporarily, the numbers brought in under family reunion and humanitarian categories? Halving both categories would reduce the annual intake by 35,000. What impact will the current increase have on our population level? When will we achieve those levels? What then? Where will new migrants live? Where will the water come from to service them?

I could continue, but I’m sure you get my drift. Which brings me to my life-long obsession, that governments never connect the dots between increasing population numbers and the ‘crises’ that daily beset our citizens — congested roads, air and water pollution, prohibitive land prices, housing shortages, overcrowded hospitals and schools and so on. And that’s before the impact of climate change.

Why am I so obsessed? I was born in 1935 when Australia’s population was around five and a half million. When I became an MP in 1969 it was 12 million. It is now 21 million. In my lifetime the population has almost quadrupled.

On 10 June 1970 I asked PM John Gorton for a cost benefit analysis of immigration, and in a speech that followed asked, ‘We all know that if we follow unthinkingly the present immigration programme we will reach any figure we care to name: 25, 50, 100, 200…. The question is, when? Will it be by the year 2000, 2050, 2100, 2200 or 2300?’

The above led to the then minister for immigration, Phillip Lynch, appointing Professor Borrie to lead an inquiry into population. Unfortunately, the Borrie Report, when tabled, avoided the question of numbers. In fact, no federal government has been prepared to answer the following question: How many people can Australia contain and ensure that each and every citizen has a genuine quality of life?

If our population doubles in the next 40 years, as it has done in the past 40, what will life be like in Melbourne with seven million people and Sydney with eight million? The mind boggles.

All these questions must be asked and publicly debated before any attempt is made to substantially increase our population, and certainly before we take the Garnaut Review seriously.

Original article

Many still in denial about Australia's population explosion

2008-12-19T01:56:00.000-08:00

From the Brisbane Times:

Many in denial over rising population

Mark O'Connor
December 19, 2008

The United Nation's Population Fund is concerned population growth in Asia averages 1.1 per cent a year. Australia, as a First World country, should have a much lower growth rate. It does not. By the end of the Howard era, our annual population growth had risen to a stunning 1.5 per cent: almost off the First World scale and high even for Third World countries. (Indonesia's, by contrast, was then 1.3 per cent, but has recently come down, with much effort, to 1.2 per cent.)

Under the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, our rate has increased. According to Bureau of Statistics figures, it is now 1.7 per cent. Both natural increase and net migration continue to rise. At this rate, one which many are determined to maintain or increase, our population will reach 42 million by 2051. By the end of the century, it will pass 100 million.

This is far above any credible estimate of the population Australia could hope to feed.

Troubles will come sooner. This week's government white paper proposes a 5 per cent cut in emissions, but this, like Ross Garnaut's report, assumes large per capita cuts can outpace population growth, like a swimmer prevailing against the tide. But this planning is based on the dubious assumption we are heading for 28 million people living in Australia by 2051, rather than 42 million. If the Rudd Government does not change course, even painful per capita cuts will deliver no overall cuts, but an increase.

Much the same goes for water consumption. El Nino droughts come two or three times a decade, yet state and federal governments are, in effect. gambling it won't happen on their watch. Several of Rudd's ministers, most notably Penny Wong and Peter Garrett, are "population deniers". Even Rudd has been heard repeating the nonsensical claim that "numbers are not the issue". They are.

Some claim Australia is a big country, "boundless plains to share", etc. Yet the geographer George Seddon has remarked Australia is more truly "a small country with big distances". Even our agricultural areas are not so large, or fertile, as population boosters pretend. Wheat is our main crop, yet France, for instance, grows twice as much wheat (and far more of most other crops).

The human as well as the natural environment deteriorates as population grows. Two years ago, the NSW Government instructed Sydney's councils to accommodate an extra 1.1 million people within 25 years. Bankstown, for instance, was told to build 26,000 extra homes. Most councils protested it was impossible to reconcile this with conserving the amenity of the suburbs. Even these draconian plans will be overwhelmed by additional people.

In the Hawke-Keating days, the knee-jerk reaction to any suggestion that population growth, and therefore perhaps immigration, should be reduced was to accuse the critic of "racism". Yet polls show most immigrants think immigration is too high.

But the Government seems asleep at the wheel. The Minister for Immigration, Chris Evans, claims to foresee only "a continuing modest increase in our population levels over coming years".

Others continue to claim that births are not keeping up with deaths. Bureau of Statistics figures show that births each year in Australia are twice the number of deaths, have been so for decades and look like being so for several years more. Baby bonuses are the last thing we need.

Tim Flannery has suggested that, granted the rate at which we are losing soil, Australia's safe carrying capacity in the long term may be as low as 8 to 12 million people. As he points out, humans are extremely long-lived mammals. Population growth, like herpes, is easily acquired but very hard to lose.

In 1994, the Australian Academy of Science held a conference to publicise its findings on population: 23 million people should be our limit. Today, with peak oil and climate change now realities rather than theories, that might have to come down.

Over the years, Australians have been promised a series of points at which population growth would supposedly be capped: Bob Hawke spoke of 25 million, which the Fitzgerald report had suggested might be the limit set by water resources. Within the last decade, Philip Ruddock, as minister for immigration, spoke soothingly of our population naturally peaking at some 23 million (later he said 25 million). Peter Costello's Intergenerational Report claimed that population would be only 28 million in 2051. Our current trajectory is to break 100 million by 2100.

Just as every fat person was once a normal child, so every bloated behemoth nation of 100 million-plus was once a nation of 5 or 10 million, with intact ecosystems and abundant water. Even Java, as late as the early 19th century, had fewer than 5 million people.

Population increase suits governments wanting to please the business community now, by doing something the full cost of which will only emerge over the next 20, 30, 40 or 50 years - far beyond the attention span of three-year governments. There is still a way out and it is not economically naive to think population growth can be slowed.

Much of politics is repetitive and unproductive, but sometimes a logjam breaks. In the past two years, most politicians have ceased being in denial about climate change, greenhouse emissions, limits to water, and peak oil.

All these crises reflect the deeper underlying problem: our population growth is out of control. Waiting for the population debate to begin is like waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Mark O'Connor is co-author of Overloading Australia : How Governments And Media Dither And Deny On Population, published by Envirobook.

Original article

Rudd puts immigration over carbon cuts

2008-12-17T05:00:00.000-08:00

From Candobetter.org

Surprise, surprise! The Federal Government has welched on its emissions-cut targets to mitigate climate change.

The Herald Sun reported today that the reason given is that the Rudd Government doesn't believe "the world will get its act together on climate change soon."

The global emergency is being treated like some kind of board game. Why don't they simply cut population growth?

You might just as well ask a bunch of lemmings not to take a running jump.

This is from Monday's ABC radio national PM programme. Kevin Rudd comments on the emissions targets that have just been set: http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2008/s2446990.htm

The Prime Minister defends his 2020 target with the option of going higher if the rest of the world moves, saying it's comparable to Europe's response.

KEVIN RUDD: The EU's 20 per cent target announced over the weekend is equal to a 24 per cent reduction in emissions for each European from 1990 to 2020. Our five per cent unconditional target is equal to a 27 per cent reduction in carbon pollution for each Australian from 2000 to 2020 and a 34 per cent reduction for each Australian from 1990.

That is because Europe's population is not projected to grow between 1990 and 2020. By contrast Australia's population is projected to grow by 45 per cent over the same period.

Note that Rudd totally misrepresents what is happening: The growth is 'projected' ... as if it happened all by itself. Europe has cut back on its growth since the first oil shock. Rudd is setting out purposefully to grow Australia's population enormously. It would not grow much at all by itself and, without his interference (despite the interference of Howard), would stabilise and hopefully decline within a couple of generations. People should understand that Rudd is forcing a population growth policy on Australians and is selling it to them by pretending he has no control over it; allowing them to infer that this is a natural phenomenon. It is not. It is a conscious, coercive political policy carried out by the Federal government with the complicity of the States.

Comment on Rudd's speech from a disgusted correspondent on roeoz@yahoogroups.com: "This means that the Labor Party is fully aware that population growth makes it more difficult to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but have decided to grow anyway. Australians will be faced with making larger cuts in living standards than people in Europe in order to feed the growth monster. We will be sacrificed on the altar of the housing industry by a government that represents business before the people."

Original article

A poster writes:

When are we having a public debate on immigration and population growth?

Our Government is factoring in a population growth of 48 per cent between 1990 and 2020 to meet the 5% reduction of emissions by 2020. As one of the planet's highest per capita carbon emitters, surely our obligation to cut back means we should not be deliberately increasing our numbers? Businesses and land developers benefit from a continual demand for goods are services but most of the population is disadvantaged and have their liveability reduced. More people means additional environmental impacts as more people demand and compete for natural resources. While people are encouraged to live sustainably, and become more conservative in their water and power usage, our government boasts of our high population growth rate! Surely these efforts are contradictory?

Isn’t time we realised that our high and artificial population growth rate is prohibiting our ability to reduce carbon emissions? Just because we have always had a heavy immigration program it doesn’t mean it has to continue! We are not a colony any more, or living in the 1950s. Our high population growth rate could easily be avoided by halting our skilled immigration program. When is the debate starting?