Posts to 1 August, 2017

Sustainable Population Australia
MEDIA RELEASE for Earth Overshoot Day
1 August 2017

This year, 2 August is Earth Overshoot Day, the day we have spent 100 per cent of this year’s ecological income.  It marks the 46th year that we are using more ecological services than the Earth can provide, according to Sustainable Population Australia (SPA).
SPA National President, Dr James Ward, says every year the day gets earlier and earlier.
“This year, it is 2 August. Last year it was 8 August; in 2015 13 August and in 2014, 19 August.  From 1997 to 2004 it was in September,” says Dr Ward. “We lived within our ecological means up until 1971 and have been on a downhill spiral ever since.”
Dr Ward says there are too many people in the world using too many resources and creating too many wastes which are beyond the Earth’s absorptive capacity.
“While we are morally obliged to lift people out of poverty, it comes at further ecological cost,” says Dr Ward. “To counteract this, we in the wealthier countries have to reduce resource consumption and shift technologies to emit far less carbon.
“We are eating into our capital which means that the assets future generations will inherit will be smaller than we ourselves inherited,” says Dr Ward.
“This shrinking asset base is currently spread amongst an ever-increasing number of people, which makes the situation much worse.
“Thus, to stop this downward spiral, we have to do whatever we can to end population growth as soon as possible. It must be voluntary but it can be achieved through greater environmental awareness, universal access to modern contraception, as well as equal rights for and the education of women and girls.”
Further information: Dr James Ward: 0408 819 175  [email protected]
www.population.org.au

Today Mathis Wackernagel, Co-founder and CEO of the Global Footprint Network we are thrilled to announce the launch of a newly designed mobile-friendly Footprint Calculator just in time for Earth Overshoot Day, which lands August 2. Calculate your own Overshoot Day and Footprint now at www.footprintcalculator.org!

Our new calculator, still a beta version, features improvements in data, graphics, and calculations. As an added bonus, this brand-new version allows you to calculate your very own personal Earth Overshoot Day. In other words, if everyone on Earth led your personal lifestyle, how many planets would humanity need?

The GFN invite you to pledge and take a step to #movethedate by using the new calculator to assess your individual Earth Overshoot Day!

Our Footprint Calculator is used by some 2 million users every year around the world, including students and teachers. The new calculator allows you to play with options, learn about solutions, and connect to brief facts about sustainability. And of course, you can calculate your personal Ecological Footprint.

If the only justification for sky-high immigration is it’s “good for the economy”, it is a policy fundamentally flawed. Judged through the prism of existing citizens’ interests, there is no economic case that can justify the transformative changes  current policies are inflicting.  (E.R. Drabik, From Quadrant Online, July 26th 2017)

By Unconventional Economist in Australian Economy, Featured Article
at 11:24 am on July 19, 2017 |
By Leith van Onselen
Last October, The Age ran a detailed report on how Melbourne’s hospitals are being overrun by the ongoing population influx caused by Australia’s mass immigration program:
…leaked data indicates there has been no improvement in ambulance “ramping” and that this month hundreds of patients waited longer than an hour to get into an emergency department while under the care of paramedics.
The queues are tying up paramedics when they should be free to respond to urgent cases. Doctors say the problem persists because hospitals are too full…
​(A short but illuminating and insightful article on the current sad state where infrastructure is failing the Governments push for a bigger Australia. ..from MacroBusiness)

Leith Van Olselen presents very cogent argument supporting the notion that the Greens in Australia, have failed to protect the environment but rather support rapid and environmentally damaging population growth.  He goes on to show that this doesn’t need to be the way forward and there are solutions where they could achieve their social goals while still supporting the environment and low population futures for Australia.

The Conversation has indulged in a full series on Australian Population issues over the last few weeks, called ‘Is Australia Full’.  Without doubt, the series is a masterful attempt to raise the profile of population and the level of debate on this issue in Australia. Unfortunately, most of our politicians aren’t listening, instead, adopting the ‘growth in population as the saviour of the economy’ line pushed by many in the Retail and Property Markets.  I suspect they don’t want a debate in the media as they realise there is concern among the population of voters ‘out there’ about this issue and that they will likely turn on them if they try to tackle population growth as an issue to ‘manage’.  This series is worth a visit to at least see where the discussion is leading us.

Editor’s (To ‘The Conversation’) note. ..
Australia doesn’t have an overall population policy, but the issue touches on almost every aspect of life in Australia. And those impacts aren’t always as obvious as people imagine.
In the last piece in our series Is Australia Full?, Shanthi Robertson and Kristine Aquino test the perception that new migrants are to blame for the pressures on services in Western Sydney.
Clearly, judging by Conversation readers’ response to our series of the past two weeks, population is an issue that many Australians care about deeply. So here’s the rundown of the series in full, allowing you to explore some of the many aspects of population and consider the sometimes sharply divergent views on these issues.

John Watson
Editor (The Conversation)

Listen to Ben Fordham at 2GB interview the Unconventional Economist on Sydney’s Population Growth.

“Population growth has profound impacts on Australian life, and sorting myths from facts can be difficult. This article is part of (“The Conversation”) series, Is Australia Full?, which aims to help inform a wide-ranging and often emotive debate.”
Neither of Australia’s two main political parties believes population is an issue worth discussion, and neither currently has a policy about it. The Greens think population is an issue, but can’t come at actually suggesting a target. ..

On the eve of World Population Day (July 11), Sustainable Population Australia (SPA) has called for a significant increase in funding for contraception to meet the unmet need of over 200 million women worldwide.

First published on 6 Mar 2017.
Love him or hate him there is no doubt that the Philipines President Rodrigo Duterte is tackling the problem of unwanted pregnancies and large families among his country’s population.  His recent Executive Order mandating access to reproductive healthcare and sexual education, opposed by the Church and other conservatives has challenged their teachings!
VICE News reported the extent of the problem, – “Family planning is very important here in the Philippines because mothers here have five babies, six babies, sometimes 13 babies,” said John Paul Domingo, a registered nurse at a Manila maternity ward, one of the busiest in the world.
Subscribe to VICE News here: http://bit.ly/Subscribe-to-VICE-News

Anyone living in Western Australia will surely have a ‘chip on their shoulder’ after reading this (if they didn’t have one already living with the GST confusion). WA has no rail or shipping of any kind from north to south, just road and air transport at huge cost to business and the public.  Yet here we go again with High Speed Rail being pushed, linking the three east coast ‘mega’ population centres of Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane along with the fast growing Canberra.  I sometimes wonder whether population growth is pushing the need for HSR or whether the desire for new technology is pushing for population growth to justify it. And with costs pushing the $120 billion in 2013 dollars, ‘The Unconventional Economist’ makes good sense, I hope someone is listening!

A couple of comments here have suggested (as governments and developers currently do) that ‘decentralisation’ is the cure for all that ails us from overpopulation, in evident disregard of water, agriculture and natural and resource environmental costs. And there is currently a plan to ‘create’ (mostly via massive immigration) eight new cities between Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney, to be financed entirely by speculating on the increase in land-costs to be made by rezoning from rural to urban in that area (our major food basin). (See https://candobetter.net/node/5217). (This is a foretaste of the desire of many in the growth lobby to have a population of 200m in Australia and 50 major cities here.)

The privatisation of land-production since Menzies has evolved into a system whereby the act of packing more and more people into smaller and smaller areas actually multiplies the dollar-value of the land, whilst massively diminishing the land per person. So most of us pay more and more for less and less, whilst a minority profit obscenely from the growing misery of their fellow citizens and residents. That is essentially what drives the dictation of policies for mass immigration in this country. The costs to business are horrendous (unless they are corporations that invest in land and mortgages). For instance, manufacturers have to pay for their own accommodation, for their business premises, and for salaries which will permit their employees to afford rent or mortgages. These costs ruin many businesses and make us globally uncompetitive since our land, housing, rent costs are among the highest in the world.

At the same time, the abolition of state industrial award systems, the redefinition of most state CBDs as ‘regions in need of immigration’ and Howard’s use of the Corporations clause in the Constitution meant that it became possible, for the first time since Federation in Australia, to import cheap labour to undermine Australian wages. (See https://candobetter.net/node/4612). This situation where employers can exploit cheap imported labour, but labour must pay very high rent and mortgages has pitted employers against workers, citizens against citizens.

These unreasonable, anti-social land costs (and the population-growth-associated inflation of water and power costs) make the pension and welfare system unaffordable, but the problem is then blamed on ‘dependency ratios’, as in ‘too many old people’ etc. However, if we greatly reduced invited economic immigration (which all the states advertise for as in https://www.liveinvictoria.vic.gov.au/ which is Victoria’s), pensions would be adequate to live on and could possibly be reduced and working people would not have to enslave themselves to life-long mortgages. (See https://candobetter.net/node/1967). Furthermore, it would be relatively low cost to start manufacturing businesses and employ people.
25 years ago, when I became worried about population growth in Australia, we still cared about the plight of wildlife and the loss of green spaces and wild spaces as major Australian values. This has changed: it is as if wildlife are completely off the radar; the extremes to which we are now pushed socio-economically, the urbanisation of our values, have reinforced our anthropocentricity and I find this very depressing.

The counter-growth lobby probably needs to stop reacting and instead become proactive. A good place to start could be in the Residents’ Bill of Rights see https://candobetter.net/node/5217

Sheila Newman

The WA State Government has scrapped the previous State supported skilled migration list and replaced it with just 18 eligible occupations.  WA Newspapers reports the the old list, made up of “178 occupations including bricklayers, engineers and nurses” now has just 18 occupations listed, principally in the health sector where the State has a genuine need.  The WA Newspaper report cites the Premier Mark McGowan as stating that we should be maximising job opportunities for local workers first rather than “fast-track workers from overseas when there are unemployed Western Australians who are capable of doing the work”.
Perth has also been removed as a region from the Federal Governments Regional sponsored migration scheme. (see the 2017 ​WA Skilled Migration Occupation List page and the Dylan Caporn report in the Yahoo7/The Western Australian page) ​(Wednesday 21st June 2017)

The world’s population is set to increase by one billion by 2030. In this Nature Video, we take a look at where on Earth they are all going to live.

Read more here: http://www.nature.com/news/where-to-p…

An amazing and insightful review of Australia’s ‘excessive and messy’ immigration situation by a long time supporter

“The plot: a largely arid and water-deprived country of 22 million with a manufacturing base on its knees is ordered to more than double its population in just a few decades on a flimsy back-of-the-envelope premise that more people equals more prosperity.”
Garry Linnell Sydney Morning Herald, 3 September 2016