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The Anglican church is to be congratulated for being enlightened enough to condemn our population growth rate - and to question the rationale that it brings prosperity. Such a politically sensitive topic like this takes courage and wisdom to be contrary mainstream political thought. There should be some limits to the baby bonus so that big families are not encouraged, and the costs passed onto the public purse.

However, the real source of our growth, and the same proportion of our "natural" growth rate, is from economic immigration. Thus, this is the easiest source of growth to limit. It's all about misanthropic greed and selfish take-what-we-can now mentality, leaving little for future generations.

With the wind-down of our natural resources, to grow our population now is simply foolish and reckless. We have so many challenges this century, and without being sure of our food security, energy crisis, climate change impacts and impending global disasters, with a stable population we would be in a better position to handle and survive them.

Church agencies often are forced to deal with the poverty and social issues caused by population growth. There are many dimensions of human communities, and the implication of limitless growth are enormous. A one-dimensional justification, based on the specious and groundless theory that it promotes "prosperity" while ignoring the other multiple impacts - mainly negative - cannot and should not be enough to have it forced onto us.

The Salvation Army estimates that there are 2.5 million Australians living in poverty, which is approximately 12% of the population. This is an increase of 400,000 people in the last three years, or an additional 0.5% of Australians living in poverty since 2002.

The Anglican Church asks how did we learn to live with the idea of 30 per cent of the population living below the poverty line, when wealth and prosperity abound at the top of the economic heap? Wealth is being re-distributed to a few, while the rest are becoming poorer.

There is not virtue in denial!

See also: Both parties reject Anglican Church plan to cut baby bonus in aim to curb birth rate, Anglican think tank targets baby bonus, Gillard Government vows to keep baby bonus despite church calls, Babies are an economic bonus in Rupert Murdoch's Australian, Baby bonus here to stay: Macklin, World's future is a crowded place of 30 Apr 11 by Nicky Nicklin in the Sydney Morning Herald. The corporate newsmedia, on the whole, and their Government glove-puppets have united to shout down the Australian Anglican Church's sensible proposal for Australia to become sustainable.

Despite 8 years of strong campaigning and great opposition by residents, this development was approved.
Their impressive efforts included:
• 2410 signatures presented at the Legislative Assembly of Victoria,
• 670 submissions to Council
• 2 public meetings with hundreds of residents present
• Public Rally "Walk for Serendip"..over 400 residents present.
• Facebook site. Save Serendip..No Rezone over 1100 members.

To rezone this land sets a dangerous precedent for open slather development that places the very SURVIVAL of our wildlife at risk. Consequently, Serendip will become "an urban park in an urban matrix" instead of the sanctuary which is internationally recognised for successfully breeding captive species such as Brolga ,Musk and Freckled Duck and now the EASTERN BARRED BANDICOOT which is on the brink of EXTINCTION.

Numerous free ranging wildlife like the Cape Barren ,Magpie Geese and Eastern Grey kangaroos breed here and spill over on to the rural land surrounding the Sanctuary that is also only 2 km from You Yangs Regional Park. This is an important wildlife corridor. High density housing opposite the Sanctuary also brings increased numbers of cats and dogs and an increase in fox population due to urbanization.

The Wood Report, (an independent report organized by Parks Vic and not referenced to at either of the Independent Panel hearings by D.S.E) forecast this outlook if high density housing was approved
on the land opposite Serendip Sanctuary. How is this to impact on endangered species and regenerated ecosystems?

It is very clear that the City of Greater Geelong Council will develop land ANYWHERE irrespective of natural assets such as Serendip Sanctuary and You Yangs Regional Park not to mention the Ramsar listed Limeburners Bay and Avalon that directly link these wildlife corridors.

We must "accept our share of developments" said one councillor! Our population growth problem will not be solved while growth continues, and we keep accommodating it! It's not inevitable but a politically-driven decision done in consultation with business groups.

The City of Greater Geelong Council will also allow development regardless of MAJOR flood and fire threat as experienced in the past and present. Already population growth has outstripped infrastructure, but this does not seem to faze this Council.

Why is Council neglecting their Duty of Care and placing Lara residents at further risk from floods and fire?

To the west of Lara close to 30 years lot supply is available for Lara’s future development needs. Lara residents say appropriate development is needed in appropriate regions. It's politically correct to not be "against appropriate developments", but population growth is grinding us into more poverty, environmental stresses, higher costs at a time of declining manufacturing in the West, and Victoria wide. Population growth is outstripping welfare too. It's driving land clearing, loss of farming land, climate change and our native species further into extinctions.

Our natural assets must always be protected for us all and for our children's future and the very existence of our wildlife. Serendip is an internationally recognised sanctuary and so it their success in protecting and breeding endangered species. This hardly gets a mention in Geelong city planning!

This case sets a democratic precedent. If this inappropriate and toxic development goes ahead despite the wrong location and impacts on wildlife, then anything goes in Victoria!

TLC Lara Group

Mobile: 0418 327 403

I transcribed the following dialogue from the movie Reds made in 1981 starring Warren Beattie as Jack Reed, a founder of the modern American Communist Movement and author of Ten Days that Shook the World, the bestselling work that popularised the 1917 Russian Revolution amongst English readers.

This dialogue only deals with how Reed believed that having leaders of the American Communist movement, who were not being integrated into the culture of the United States, would prove to be an insurmountable barrier to winning the American workers across to communism. It does not address the kind of mass immigration that is being faced today by workers in the United States, Canada, Australia and The United Kingdom. However, it seems unlikely that Reed and his followers back in 1918 would have excused or defended similar levels of high immigration into the United States in the same way that supposed socialists, bleeding heart liberals as well as those claiming to have drawn their political inspiration from the likes of John Reed, have excused or defended high immigration into anglophone countries in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Footnote: 1. In spite of being highly critical of Louis Frayna in this scene, John Reed found more common cause with Rayna later on in the film.

Another article from Murdoch's misnamed The Australian, which has disappeared, is of 2 July 2008 by Bernard Salt. Some of it has been extracted and posted here and below.

Extract from Check out Jackson's death becomes celebrity thriller in the Australian of from http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/story/0,28124,25719720-25658,00.html

"THERE are still questions to be answered about the untimely death of pop singer Michael Jackson and I suspect these questions will continue to be asked long after he has been laid to rest.

The reason is that all the ingredients are gelling for a grand conspiracy theory.

To bake a delicious conspiracy theory, here's what you need: Take a celebrity with global fan appeal but make sure your candidate is aged between 33 and 50 (any younger and they haven't amassed the fan base necessary to incite hysteria after death; any older there's a diminution of the feeling of being robbed by their death). There's no "injustice" in an 80-year-old dropping dead.

(Blah, blah, blah, rhubarb, blah, blah - Princess Diana conspiracy theory - blah, blah, - Harold Hot's defection to the Chinese - blah, rhubarb )

But if you really want to create the perfect conspiracy theory, then have a celebrity power figure, say a 46-year-old US president, assassinated in public. And then have the whole thing captured on a single movie camera operated by a middle-aged man with an exotic name such as, oh I don't know, say Abraham Zapruder.

(Blah, blah, blah, rhubarb, blah, blah - fake moon landing conspiracy theory - blah, blah, rhubarb )

Other conspiracy theories question the motives behind global events: the bigger the event the greater the market for an elaborate theory.

Did you know that 9/11 was orchestrated by the CIA so a pretext could be established for George W. Bush to invade Iraq via Afghanistan? [1] The And this is because Bush wanted to please his father, who regretted not taking Saddam Hussein out after Desert Storm."

Footnotes.

1. The 2010 Movie Fair Game starring Naomi Watts as former CIA agent Valerie Plame (which ends with live footage of Plame testifying before US Congress) shows incontrovertible evidence that George Bush's Government faked evidence to construct a pretext for the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 by Australia, the US, the UK and other allies. (As Iraqi deaths are estimated by a number of authoritative sources to be at least 100,000 with The Lancet estimating 700,000 deaths (pdf) in 2006 and other sources higher and given that the invasion has wrecked the economy and inflicted poverty and unemployment on many formerly prosperous Iraqis, how Iraq could have been worse off if Hussein's dictatorship had endured has not been explained.) Don't hold your breath waiting for Salt and other journalists, particularly Murdoch journalists, to debunk the movie Fair Game.

The following is my comment to Ellen Bown's article Why Japan Can Easily Afford to Rebuild. Perhaps, the title should have been Why Japan Can More Easily Afford to Rebuild. Even a country, such as Japan, which has, fortunately, not been burdened with the private banking scam that has burdened nearly all other industrialised economies as Ellen Brown has shown, will surely still find the cost of rebuilding from its largely avoidable man-made nuclear disaster a huge burden. The article is also published on Global Research as Japan: Financing Reconstruction. The Monetary Implications of the Nuclear Catastrophe and The Huffington Post as Why the Japanese Government Can Afford to Rebuild: It Owns the Largest Depository Bank in the World

Whilst not having the dead weight of a private banking system monopoly gives Japan an enormous advantage in rebuilding from the devastation caused by earthquakes, tsunamis and nuclear accidents, I think we still have to bear in mind that even countries with good financial systems can still suffer horribly from natural and avoidable man-made disasters. Some authoritative figures, including the French nuclear reactor construction company, AREVA, are calling this the worst peace time disaster ever (see speech by Arnie Gunderson at http://www.fairewinds.com/content/closing-ranks-nrc-nuclear-industry-and-tepco-are-limiting-flow-information).

So, whilst Japan has a vastly better banking system than most of the rest of the world, this may still not come anywhere near to countering the terrible losses that Japan has suffered and will suffer, because it has adopted such a dangerous means of generating domestic electric power and allowed its privately owned power companies including TEPCO to skimp on proper safety.

We can't completely exclude the possibility that even if Japan retains what is of merit in its banking finance system as Ellen Brown has rightly and cogently argued -- and let's hope that it does -- it still may end up an impoverished wasteland if the worst fears of critics of Japanese nuclear power are realised.

Articles, which may be of interest about the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster, written by Tony Boys, an English-speaking resident of Japan, and Sheila Newman, can be found at candobetter.net/node/2428 candobetter.net/node/2408 (in French) candobetter.net/node/2419 candobetter.net/node/2413 candobetter.net/node/2412 candobetter.net/node/2410 candobetter.net/node/2409.

VLook for "Tokyo Newspaper, p.20" in Tony's rolling update no. 2, here: but I am citing it below anyway: "An article on p.20 mentions that a) tsunami in the Tokai region in 1498 reached a height of 15 m and killed 50,000 people at a time when Japan's population totalled only about 12 million, and that b) this is far larger than current assumptions concerning possible tsunami disasters. A second article on p.20 mentions that after the Showa Sanriku earthquake in 1933, Miyagi Prefecture issued regulations including fines or imprisonment clauses prohibiting construction (of homes and so on) in coastal areas likely to be affected by tsunamis. The regulations appear to have been rescinded in the 1950s, when the national Building Standards Law was introduced. Over three thousand people lost their lives in the 1933 earthquake and tsunami. An article I missed in the yesterday's (April 6) Akahata (p.14) describes a book published in 1995 by former public school teacher Mr Yugi Iinuma on the history of the dangers of living in the flat coastal area of Sendai City, Miyagi Prefecture. A picture in the article shows the former teacher, now 80, holding the book at an evacuation center in Miyagino Ward, Sendai City. The Mr Iinuma's house was destroyed in the tsunami, but he managed to escape in the time between the earthquake and the arrival of the tsunami. It would seem that people forget about the dangers of tsunamis over time. It's sad to see how a large part of the destruction, and the nuclear disaster, could have been avoided if the collective memory had remained intact."

The following comment was posted to ABC Radio National's National Interest web site in respose to their story NSW electorate hands out electoral drubbing to ALPof 27 Mar 11. It was also one of the listeners' comments read out (mpeg, 2.6 MB) at the end of their program of Friday, 1 April.

Two other readers' comments about the Greens were read out. My comment above was a response to the following:

The Greens were formed 19 years ago in 1992. I would have thought that nineteen years would have been plenty of time for any party with the following of Greens to have made a noticible and positive impact on Australian politics. However, since that date, very little has been has been achieved, considering the huge amount of time, money and energy that large numbers of Australians have poured into it, particularly at election time.

It is hard to know how a lot more could not have been achieved if those energies had been applied elsewhere since 1992. The Greens, like most other alternative, 'soft left', 'hard left' and 'pro-environmental' parties in Australia, only seem to divert energy away from where it could be put to truly effective use.

But, as I wrote in my above comment, published on the ABC National Interest web site, we may still hold out hope that the Greens recently elected to the NSW and Tasmanian Parliaments may, for a change, help bring about a worthwhile change for the better.

Appendix: Comment apparently in response to mine

The following comment was formatted on the message board as if it were in response to mine, although it doesn't address the issue I raised. It was also read out on the program.