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"More and more of the pages of the Australian Financial Review these days are taken up with real-estate, property development, land-marketing, land-use planning arguments, and industries associated with immigration".

One group, vocal against the tide of high rates of population growth, are the vilified "NIMBYs"! While they may not mention the dreaded "p" word of population growth, or the "i" word for excessive immigration, they generally safely stick to "planning" schemes for their cities and suburbs.

A study by University of South Australia and University of New England researchers compared the approval rates for new housing developments across all Adelaide councils to find out how the city would cope with increases in population. It found that council approvals showed that for every 1 per cent increase in the average weekly earnings of a council's residents, there was a corresponding 2 per cent reduction in that council's new housing approval rate. In other words, the more affluent the residential areas, the more vocal the "NIMBYs" were! The more articulate no doubt are the long term residents who have the wisdom and perspective of years, and the community support to be vocal.

Academics are meant to be indifferent and objective, not endorse any lobby group. However, University of New England co-author, Mr Sorenson said that "There is a need for Adelaide to get over the hurdle of NIMBYism, or the maintenance of existing lifestyle at the expense of housing the population.''

The "hurdle" of NIMBYISM is stopping population growth, and housing growth! The residents actually want to maintain their lifestyles and housing quality, not go down the path of Victoria's deprivations, congestion and high costs of "solution" to excessive population growth!

Adelaide inner-city growth stifled by NIMBYs - report of 4 Jan 2014 at http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/adelaide-innercity-growth-stifled-by-nimbys-report/story-e6frg6n6-1226794577026

What's insidious is the assumption that our population growth is natural and organic, in response to the number of families, economic health and an abundance of affordable natural resources. Our "projected" population growth is engineered by at least 60% of our growth from immigration, and is a government policy that needs to be questioned and challenged - democratically like any other!

Below is my unpublished letter to The Age, 29th December, in response to a letter published by Victorian Premier Napthine. It's in reference to the East West Link.

The cost and the great demands of population growth are skirted around by The Age. It's the elephant in the room of our need for more roads, despite upgraded public transport. Anything with the dreaded "p" word is censored.

Melbourne's circulatory system is under pressure from more and more cars, and the massively invasive and expensive by-pass "surgery" of the East West Link is to relieve the traffic pressure building up on our roads, due to population growth. The gridlock is causing our arteries to be seriously clogged.

However, my letter was unpublished! (not only this time, but repeatedly). They continue to skirt around the massive boulders of logic, the impediments to smooth traffic flows, and the reason for Melbourne's serious short-fall in infrastructure - and productivity. The dreaded "p" word is avoided, like a plague!

My unpublished letter:

Premier Napthine (letters 29/12, What about the wins) claims that the government has increased the number of weekly metro rail services by 1078, and weekly bus services by 3400. The government has also purchased 15 new Metro trains, 50 new trams and 40 new V-Line carriages.

So, despite the increase in rail and bus services, our roads are still congested and productivity is being impeded by traffic growth. Access to the western suburbs is already available via the West Gate Bridge and the Western Ring road, but they are clogged up.

Hon Terry Mulder, Minister for Roads, justifies the massive expense and disturbance of the East West Link by the fact that Melbourne is currently growing faster than almost any time in its history, and demand for mobility is also growing, meaning they need to invest in both public transport and roads.

Any planning or professional design that must incorporate perpetual growth will find the constraints prohibitive, and limit best practices and outcomes.

Melbourne's population, at current rates of projected growth, will swell to 8 million by 2050. Any solution to traffic gridlocks will become outdated with time until the parameters of Melbourne's needs are known - and stable.

Margit Alm
Eltham

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Premier Napthine's Letter published by The Age:

What about the wins?

It is disappointing that The Sunday Age continues to fail to fairly and fully inform its readers with respect to the commitment to, and significant achievements in, improving public transport across Melbourne and Victoria by the state government.

Nowhere in the article by Farrah Tomazin (Opinion, 22/12) did she mention that we are currently undertaking the largest public transport infrastructure project in our state's history - the $4.8 billion Regional Rail Project.

Tomazin also failed to mention that since coming to office, the government has increased the number of weekly metro rail services by 1078 and weekly bus services by 3400. The government has also purchased 15 new Metro trains, 50 new trams and 40 new V-Line carriages.

In addition, the Coalition is currently spending more than $400 million removing dangerous level crossings at Springvale Road, Springvale; Rooks Road and Mitcham Road, Mitcham; and two on Anderson Road, Sunshine. The government has also outlined and funded plans to remove a further seven dangerous and congestion-causing level crossings. This real action to actually remove these crossings stands in stark contrast to 11 years of inaction under the previous Labor government.

The Coalition also provided $125 million in recent budgets to upgrade the Dandenong and Bayside-Frankston railway lines to improve punctuality and reliability of services as well as passenger comfort.

However, the clearest demonstration of the effectiveness of the Coalition government's efforts to improve public transport is the fact that both punctuality and reliability of our metro train services have improved significantly.

For example, on the Frankston line, which was a disaster under Labor, punctuality has improved from 65.6 per cent in June 2010 to 90.8 per cent in November 2013.

DENIS NAPTHINE, Victorian Premier

Letters to The Age: Premier Napthine's letter

There's no proof or evidence that the use of renewable energies can be ramped up and scaled to meet the needs of "big Australia". All the Greens platitudes about renewable energy, ignoring population growth, make them nothing but a whistle in the wind.

Population growth has a multiplying effect on pollution, land clearing, GHG emissions, demands for fossil fuels, and living standards. Living in apartments and towers, as we are being forced to more and more, is a higher energy consuming lifestyle. There's no recycling, gardening, water harvesting, composting or evaporative cooling of trees and vegetation.

They have become a social justice party, more interested in an open door to asylum seekers and gay marriage.

If you scratch a little under the green facade, you find they are simply a mainstream party with little to contribute to politics except as an alternative to the duopoly of Libs and Labs.

Without a meaningful population policy, one devoid of political correctness and oxymorons, then the Greens have little to offer.

Antonio Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, said Prime Minister David Cameron's proposals to toughen rules on entry could stigmatise foreigners and create a "climate of ethnic profiling". (The Australian, 28th Dec - behind a Paywall - Ed)
Mr Cameron has used a new bill to set out provisions making it harder for illegal entrants to remain undetected. Landlords, NHS workers and banks will have to check the immigration status of tenants, patients and customers.

A UNHCR briefing note sent to MPs that Mr Guterres feared that legal asylum seekers and refugees would be penalised by the proposed restrictions as public sector employees and landlords struggle to work out their status.
The UN also called on the international community to offer not only humanitarian aid for refugees, but also resettlement opportunities outside the country, and Labour is urging the Government to accept 400-500 Syrians, including torture victims (the clams are almost certainly fabricated, see sana.sy/index_eng.html, syrianews.cc - Ed), women and girls at high risk and people with family links to the UK.

Economic overshoot and scarcity of jobs is a population problem, along with conflicts for limited resources. Spreading the displaced in developed countries is an open-border concept, one that means migrants will take advantage of welfare and economic developments paid for by residents. Genuine refugees should be the priority, not migrants wanting a "better life".

The English are already living in one of the most densely populated nations on Earth. Prime Minister David Cameron wants to get UK net migration below 100,000 before the 2015 election.

United Nations should focus on key issues such as Syrian refugees rather than "interfering" in British policy, senior MPs warn.

A Bill has been brought in following concerns about a surge in economic migrants from Romania and Bulgaria when transitional controls over their movement are lifted on January 1.

The UN says 10 days of violent fighting in the area has left thousands of people dead and forced another 80,000 to leave their homes. The Australian military is to send two aircraft to help the UN respond to the crisis.

Recent fighting in the world's newest nation erupted after president Salva Kiir accused his former deputy Riek Machar, who was fired from the government in July, of attempting a coup. The latter denied the claim and accused Kiir of carrying out a vicious purge of his rivals.

Thousands of South Sudanese have been killed in over a week of violence with reports of bodies piled in mass graves, the UN says, due to the civil war.

The United Nations estimates the population of South Sudan to be over 11 million, saying that over 1.9 million people have returned to the country since the 2008 census that put the population at 8.3 million.
And there are over 4.4 million Internally Displaced Persons in Sudan / South Sudan.

Population growth rate is about 2.5%, and despite oil wealth, it's one of the most underdeveloped countries in the world. Annual food consumption in South Sudan is between 1.1 million and 1.3 million tonnes. In the past five years, there has been an increase in production but it has been outpaced by an increase in population driven by natural growth, returnees and displaced people.

Overpopulation drives hunger, hunger drives conflicts, and conflicts are caused when limited resources are being sourced in a time of ecological overshoot.

A study by scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln argues that there have been abrupt declines or plateaus in the rate of production of major crops. This is despite optimistic projections of constantly increasing crop yields. As much as "31% of total global rice, wheat and maize production" has experienced "yield plateaus or abrupt decreases in yield gain, including rice in eastern Asia and wheat in northwest Europe."

They are challenging the cornucopian myth of endless goodness and benefits of Nature.

"... we found widespread deceleration in the relative rate of increase of average yields of the major cereal crops during the 1990–2010 period in countries with greatest production of these crops, and strong evidence of yield plateaus or an abrupt drop in rate of yield gain in 44% of the cases, which, together, account for 31% of total global rice, wheat and maize production."

We have Thomas Malthus, Dr Norman Borlaug and Dr Paul Erlich already warning of limits to food production and that human populations can exceed the rate of food increases - despite human manipulations of crops and landscapes.

Factors contributing to the declines or plateaus in food production rates include land and soil degradation, climate change and cyclical weather patterns, use of fertilisers and pesticides, and inadequate or inappropriate investment.

70% of US grain production is fed to livestock. As much as 85% of rangeland in the western US is being degraded by overgrazing. Between 19 and 22% of all threatened and endangered species are harmed by livestock grazing. Cattle ranching has destroyed more Central American rainforest than any other activity. 70% of cleared forests in Panama and Costa Rica are now in pasture.

It makes sense that a combination of a lowering humanity's diet further down the food chain, and incentives for small family sizes, avoid a "Malthusian crisis" of human overshoot and starvation.

Dramatic decline in industrial agriculture could herald 'peak food' at http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/dec/19/industrial-agriculture-limits-peak-food .

A visitor tells us she/he is building a web-site with the free open-source WordPress Content Management System (CMS). She/he asked if we were also using WordPress. In fact, candobetter.net is built using the free open-source drupal CMS. Other open-source CMSs are listed here (Search terms used: open source content-management systems).

Drupal is written with the open-source php programming language. Most of the components which make up any web page served from a Drupal web-site are stored in tables of the free open-source Mysql Database Management System (DBMS). (Drupal can also be built on another open-source DBMS PostgreSQL.

Other open-source software necessary to run a Drupal web-site include the Apache web-server and the Linux operating system. (The Free BSD operating system can also be used.)

Clearly Internet users have gained immensely from free open-source software. The World-wide Web (www) could not possibly have become nearly as ubiquitous as it has if we had been forced to rely upon proprietary copyright software such as the Microsoft operating system and the Microsoft Word word processing package.

However, one problem with open source software is that there is no business model which allows a large proportion of the many who create open source Intellectual Property (IP) (of which open-source software forms only one component) to be adequately remunerated. Whilst subscriptions and various on-line payment mechanisms such as Mastercard or Visa theoretically could go some way towards solving this problem they are not flexible enough to allow visitors to easily pay an amount which is affordable and which matches what he/she considers the value obtained by him/her of the information obtained from a given article or from the use of a given piece of software.

To illustrate I will give examples of articles I have read on candobetter recently and the estimated values of the knowledge I have obtained by reading them. The values given are only rough guesses. If on a given day I were to have read, say 20 articles, then I would more likely want to pay less per article than for each of 5 articles I had read on another day:

Fox vs Owl in possum predation, tree dieoff - Victorian Studies of 20 Dec 2013 by Hans Brunner — 40 cents; Animal Justice Party: Less hooves = more food of 20 Dec 2013 by Vivienne Ortega — 35 cents; Urban Taskforce pretends surprise at Australia's explosive population growth of 20 Dec 2013 by PostGrowthEra — 40 cents; Support your local activists if you don't want Australia to be girt by concrete! of 20 Dec 2013 by admin — 20 cents; Two winners for Antarctic environmental competition of 20 Dec 2013 by admin — 35 cents; Deep Sea Mining is not the answer to poverty alleviation for the Pacific of 17 Dec 2013 by Sheila Newman — 30 cents; If Environment Victoria continues to duck its population charter, then it should step down as a 'peak' body of 20 Dec 2013 by — 20 cents;

One Social micropayments system designed to enable this is flattr.com. Steve Keen, the creator of Steve Keen's Debtwatch, wrote an article which enthusiastically promoted flattr back on 22 March 2011. He then placed a number of flattr buttons on his web-site in an effort to kick start this busies model. Over two and a half year later, it seems that his initiative, unfortunately hasn't caught on.

Nonetheless, a social micropayments system with the characteristics of flattr is still badly needed on the web, so the flattr and other similar initiatives should not be dismissed, yet.

There was a Landcare conference in Noosa on how to protect koala habitats and the animals from disappearing.

Australian Koala Foundation CEO Deborah Tabart said that the idea that we could replace koala habitat with offsets was idiotic. "We should not be cutting down koala-preferred trees in the first place," she said.

Counting trees, koalas and more surveys were being used to give the assurance that something was being done, but in reality it does nothing! It's like counting the horses bolting after the gate has been left open!

Koalas in the south east of the state are fighting what seems to be a losing battle with the three major dangers - disease, dog attacks, and being hit by vehicles. These three increasing threats are directly related to unrelenting population growth!

There are about 80 koalas at a time in care at Australia Zoo at any one time. The laws say they must be released within 5 km of where they were found. It means they are put back into the same danger zone!

Land clearing for urban development, reduced habitat is placing stress on koalas. This leads to increased disease problems such as chlamydia.

What conservation groups need to be doing is to campaign is a rethink and not avoid the obvious! It should be to limit our overseas immigration rates, and not be blinded by political correctness - that our fragile and stress-prone endemic wildlife are no match for the economic power of property developers and the pro-growth lobby.

The 1500-hectare former Australian Defence Industries site is now partially owned by Lend Lease, which is building three suburbs there, including Ropes Crossing. They say the emus must go because vandals are breaking fences, and the emus are a threat to themselves (?!) and the public, on the roads. There haven't been any incidents of the emus being hurt or of any people being attacked by emus in the local area.

There are 27 emus and several hundred kangaroos living on the site.
There will be three new suburbs built on the land, by the property developer. The destruction caused by this industry of course is overlooked!

Human population growth, engineered by heavy immigration levels, is the underlying threat to wildlife, and habitat destruction in Australia. Emus and kangaroo are being pushed further out to more remote areas, outside their normal safety zones. No wonder, with money and urban development underlying our economy, we are the world's greatest species extinguishers.

The O'Farrell government is undertaking a version of "conservation triage" where limited funding will target 1000 threatened species with the best chance of survival. This means using a formula to rank spending priorities, based on a cost-effective analysis. Some species will be evaluated as being worthy of saving, and others allowed to die off.

The government says 59 per cent of all native mammal species in the state are threatened, as are 28 per cent of bird species, 18 per cent of reptiles and 13 per cent of plants. It's a death-row toll.

We have Tony Abbott signing a MOU for the Government's 'One Stop Shop' Policy for streamlining environmental assessment and approvals. NSW and Victoria are also in the processes of winding back native vegetation protection laws, and planning laws are also being "streamlined."

In a country famous for extinctions, recovery plans for threatened species need to outpace the threatening processes of habitat destruction, and loosening environmental laws.

I was declared schizophrenic because I refused to use a bicycle helmet. I looked at the Queensland child protection act s326:

CRIMINAL CODE - SECT 326 Endangering life of children by exposure

... and found out that a bicycle helmet with no adequate sun protection would expose a child to the likelihood of serious harm, serious because the death rate from melanoma has gone up more than 50% over the past decade.

Then I discovered that due to what was uncovered by the IPA:

Australia's helmet law disaster

The behavior of the minister for child protection could be seen as serious, outside the confines of acceptable behavior and criminal in nature.
The bicycle helmet per se, may be good, but the compulsory wearing law is unenforceable. See also http://www.cyclehelmets.org/1193.html

The whole "planning" of Melbourne is corrupt, and ruled by vested interests and distorted priorities. Melbourne's vital arteries are clogged, and already our city is crawling almost to a stand-still in many areas due to traffic congestion.

Planning should be holistic, not just allowing property developers access our suburbs for their profits. Planning should be about building hospitals, schools, ambulances, public transport, not just about cramming more people into our city, up to 8 million by 2050!
How are the public meant to agree and accept 70% of housing growth be confined to existing areas? Once a city is mature, adding more people and housing will simply clog up our city even more, exacerbating our city's problems. Already our infrastructure is heavily overloaded, and the $8 billion EW Link will absorb and suck out essential funding.
The East West link is not for the people, the commuters of Melbourne, but for the business lobby. Ironically, it's assumed that people living in the high density and high rise apartments will not need private transport, but the EW Link assumes private car use!

The EW Link is primarily to create Melbourne as the biggest transport hub in Australia. It's to support the supply chains of all the increasing imported goods we will be importing from overseas, thanks to the decline of even iconic national brands such as Qantas and Holden! With more and more shipping containers arriving with goods, they will need the EW Link to deliver them around the country. The empty shipping containers will continue to accumulate, symbolic of our empty economy, and empty policies coming from our State government.

No wonder Melbourne's planning committee is in disarray! It's a rort, full of contradictions and oxymorons.

Title was: Four kangaroos deliberately mowed down in mudgee. - Ed

Today I witnessed the aftermath of deliberate cruelty. I was called out to two injured adult roos and a Joey. It was in fact three adults and an at foot Joey that had been mowed down and left to die. All three adults and Joey had to be euthanised by the police.

When I got there two adult females had been euthanised but the Joey was still alive with blood seeping through the ear, lying on his side unable to move. Soon after we discovered another adult female on her side unable to get up and clearly in a lot of pain.

All four were in the tyre tracks of a car that had deliberately left the road to run them down.

What upset me most is knowing no one is going to be held accountable for this abhorrent cruelty.

The disassociation by the general public about the pain and grief native animals suffer sickens me. Can you imagine if it were someone's pets lying by the side of the road still alive? The whole street and the emergency services there would be there with demands to catch the perpetrators.

I managed to get a photographer from the local paper, the police and the council to come out to the scene of carnage of a 100 metre stretch of a quiet suburban, residential road. But why an earth were the residents who live on that road more eager to get to work on time than help these poor innocent kangaroos?

Sorry to off load with yet another case of cruelty. When I talk about this to non wildlife carers I get the look of 'it isn't a big deal'. But it is a big deal and until these sickos are hunted down and made to pay, nothing is going to change. Just a slap on the wrist with a wet lettuce leaf.

Holly x (Mudgee Wildlife Carers Network)

Thanks to $200 million of taxpayers' money, and farmers efforts, the amount of dredge to be taken from the Great Barrier Reef has been reduced by 340,000 tonnes.

That's the good news!

The bad news is that 140 million tonnes of marine sediment are proposed to be dredged during port development in the Great Barrier Reef over the next decade, according to my calculations from port development plans.

That enormous amount of material in the water will have tremendous effect on marine creatures, such as dogongs, turtles, fish and seagrass. More developments are up for approval, including a decision by Environment Minister Tony Hunt, due by 13 December on whether Abbot Point can be expanded to become one of the world’s biggest coal ports, which would involve dumping 3 million cubic metres of dredged spoil into the reef.

This could do great damage to Australia too. Due to UNESCO listing, it could hurt Australia economically if it hit reef tourism, which brings in $6.4 billion a year in direct spending and employs more than 64,000 people.

Australia obviously can't look after the environment, either our unique biodiversity richness or our world class natural heritage. The Colonial mentality of slash, burn, cut, kill and dig still exists today, but with even bigger equipment! Despite all our understanding of environmental impacts and climate change, the destruction continues. It's profits and corporations against conservation and coal exports.

The problem of aiming for perpetual economic growth means continually loosening environmental controls, and losing control of what really values. We have such a rich natural heritage, being wrecked by incompetent governments and their slavery to corporate mega-dollars.

Brisbane Times: Dredging set to swamp decades of Great Barrier Reef protection

“Australia continues to give the go-ahead for the development of several new coal and natural gas ports within the Great Barrier Reef.” According to the presage of Blue Ocean Institute Founder, PBS’ Saving Oceans host, and award-winning author Carl Safina in National Geographic: “The continued destruction of the reef seems inevitable.”

ForceChange: Petition President Obama to save our Great Barrier Reef, seeing the Australian government is blinded by $$$$