I think that Natural Sequence Farming is about closed systems where you do not export what you produce. That is probably why Richard Pratt and other investment predators lost interest in it. It repairs the land, but then stops depleting the land by maintaining it, i.e. returning what was there to it in ecological stasis. I will check up on my statement at the Natural Sequence Bulletin Board.
Relocalisation, using such methods for rehabilitating the land, would support more people where none were supported before, but it would not reproduce the kind of population that broad acre farming with highly mechanised systems and using fossil-fuel based fertilisers as well as phosphates from rapidly disappearing guano deposits, is able to sustain - albeit for limited periods before ruining the soil and making land uninhabitable.
You could say that over time a sustainable local system using natural sequences and permaculture would be able to support more people, by sustaining small populations indefinitely. There are two big problems with industrial agriculture: it destroys soil and waterways - i.e. the very systems it relies on augmenting, and it affects political rights by removing choice and autonomy from most of the population, allowing only a very few people to be in control of the food and fiber supply, which is the basis of modern economies, even though most people live in cities in them.
Australians in cities where there are still big gardens could still supplement a lot of their food and fiber if they used these gardens to produce food, like the food gardens of the Pacific Islanders - in the permaculture manner. That would also change the political economy by taking importance away from the wage system, the banking system, the food transport and mass-production system. That is why we are encouraged to believe that producing our own food would be harder than it is. The people who dominate our current system get a lot of profits from all our hard work, where we dedicate most of our time to producing stuff for resale where the profits go to owners and investors. If we ran our own lives and 'traded'/bartered locally, the Wayne Swan and Kevin Rudd types would be entirely out of the picture. People would take on real roles in the community and wake from their political sleep and realise that they have the same capacity for thought and action as the people they currently sit down and shut up to listen to.
Sheila Newman, population sociologist
home page
Copyright to the author. Please contact sheila [AT] candobetter org or the editor if you wish to make substantial reproduction or republish.
Comments
Population growth as a necessity and not a virtue
I don't actually dismiss out of hand what John Hogan writes.
In future, we may face no political choice but to acceppt yet further population growth.
(As I have written elsewhere -- will find the link some other time) I think may just be possible, but by no means guaranteed, for this country to support more people if we began to repair the environment systematically using such techniques as Natural Sequence Farming advocated by Peter Andrews.
This could only conceivably occur if the economy move back to much more of a localised agricultural based system. We could not hope to be able to have access to the vast range of consumable items that we have today.
We would also have to preserve the maximum amout of biodivestiy and not permit any further loss of endangered fauna and flora.
In those cirumstances a larger population just may be sustainable, although, I don't consider desirable.
The irony of the situation is that those who are, today, pushing for breakneck rates of population growth, and without any serious effort to repair our current environment, are, in fact, destroying what real capacity this country has to support our current population, let alone a larger population in future.
One last point, I think there are already more than enough people here today to begin repairing the Australian environment, I dispute that more would be necessary to accomplish that.
Favours a different kind of managed population growth
Subject was: "Issues raised by Kelvin Thomson" - JS
Hi there,
I heard Mr Thomson's comments via the ABC yesterday and would like to respond to them briefly.
I share his concerns about the accelerated environmental degradation that could occur were our population to reach 35 or 50 million. I have noted in the past the public comments of Prof Ian Lowe on this issue. I think however that it is critical that we find a way to properly manage growth in a way that has not occurred previously because I think it essential that we do grow. I am in my 30s and I may well live another 50 years. I can see a crowded world in 50 years that looks at a wealthy and essentially empty continent with hunger and in many cases, desperation.
Now I know that seeing Australia as empty would be wrong - given our climate and resulting geography. But I don't think that the truth of the matter will come into it in 50 years. Desperate people do desperate things - think drowning men and straw. I won't go into the forms I suspect that this desperation could take but they can be imagined.
I think that a perverse truth exists here - that the best way to preserve and rehabilitate our country in the long term will be to develop quite quickly but correctly. I think we must quarantine in the most strict of ways the majority of the country from development while developing larger, sustainable population centres interspersed among it and concurrently using some of the least important land and some of the surrounding ocean to both feed us and our neighbours and to actually begin to reverse climate change. I think we will unfortunately need a much larger population in order to do this and to ensure that we remain the masters of our destiny. Our current means of increasing population is clearly poor and I see no signs that it will improve. What I am talking about requires a major rethink.
While it is obviously important that groups such as this one champion population and ecological issues, I am sorry to say that I believe that to achieve the ultimate aim, a different means to the end must be pursued. When there are more than 10 billion people on the planet and we are running a reasonably habitable continent but with only a few million people on it, issues of ecology and biodiversity will seem trifling to desperate hoards of people. I don't think that this is being considered properly.
thanks, John
Environmentally & economically stupid
Rudd should have a read of the UK House of Lords select committee report on the economic impacts of large scale immigration. The net benefits are marginal at best & that overcrowding/infrastructure costs can be a major problem.
Not to mention environmental costs, social cohesion problems (see social capital research by Harvard's Robert Putman) and crime.
The report is The ecomnomic impact of Immigration - Voulme I ; Report (pdf, 1.2MB).
We need an independent and scientific assessment on population
Does Lindsay Tanner really judge the validity of a country by how many people can be squeezed in per square kilometer? We are not livestock!
How can Australia be compared to Bangladesh? They are are developing nation that straddles the fertile Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta and is subject to annual monsoon floods and cyclones. It has the largest mangrove forest in the world. Very different from Australia's dry and expansive landscape!
Bangladesh's population growth was among the highest in the world in the 1960s and 1970s, when the country grew from 50 to 90 million, but with the promotion of birth control in the 1980s, the growth rate slowed! If a developing nation can some restraint, surely we in Australia can too. Bangladesh remains a poor, overpopulated, and inefficiently-governed nation.
Perhaps Lindsay Tanner would prefer to live in one of the world's overcrowded and sprawling cities than Australia?
His speech to the Property Council of Australia is evidence that Australia has no optimum population plan, or no policies on growth rates. Population growth is being allowed randomly, in an ad hoc manner, and thus we get these ridiculous statements derived from conflicts of interests.
We need a clear and independent assessment of what our carrying capacity really is.
Our carrying capacity should be assessed by independent ecologists, agriculturalists, climate change analysts and demographers. Such as important issue should not be addressed on desire, or idealism or economics alone. This "vast continent" is deceptive. We are actually a small nation on a large chunk of land, and much of it is not suitable for high density populations due to heat and lack of resources.
The most naive and suicidal thing our governments could do is to assume that our population can be continually grown! Australia's security will be compromised internally, and being dominant species, our ecosystems would be swamped by people wanting "jobs" and "economic benefits" from our environment until there is nothing left to consume!
Noise warfare between neighbours
Trading noise for noise sometimes works well, but it can also backfire.
Some inconsiderate dog owners are so dense that trying to reason with them proves futile. In these instances something else is required, but unfortunately that "something else" (such as reciprocal noise) can be in breach of other laws.
The mindset of many unintelligent dog owners is so illogical that if a distressed person retaliates with a noise rebuke (such as trading one noise for another as a free and unsolicited aid to learning) they become incensed and call the police.
I recall over twenty years ago being tormented by the loud barking of two large black dogs next door. Of course I politely told the owner about the noise but his riposte was the common "All dogs bark!" so I knew another method of getting through to him was required. I chose Noise for Noise.
Just on my side of the paling fence between us was a gum tree. I climbed it half way to a point where I could nail a car horn ($5 from the wrecker's yard) and aimed it downwards towards his barking dogs. Then I connected it to my car battery with heavy-duty automotive cable running down the side of the tree and secured to it.
When I became too distressed with the din invading all parts of my home I'd go outside, lift the car's bonnet and tap the wire onto the positive terminal of the battery. I'd make the circuit intermittently so that if a dog went "WOOF!" my horn went "HONK!" Similarly if the dogs went "WOOF! WOOF! WOOF! my horn went "HONK! HONK! HONK!" This is what I call trading noise for noise.
The owner was outraged. He called the police. Two police constables came out and said to me "You can't do that!" whereupon I quietly convinced them that I actually could. They repeated "You can't do that! It's Disturbing the Peace!" whereupon I asked them politely "What peace?"
They then threatened to arrest me if I did it again but as they did so, Mr Next-door's two big dogs started their engines up and the terrible din was startling. I said "There! Now you've heard for yourself what we have to put up with!" The two officers, now somewhat freaked out at having heard the alleged offence with their own ears, immediately left my front porch and entered my neighbour's premises. Maybe 20 minutes passed. When they came back they said "We have spoken to the owner and you'll be pleased to know he's getting rid of the dogs in two days!"
Quite surprisingly, he actually did, and peace reigned for several months. Then the oaf obtained two more large black dogs and the procedure repeated - but this time the police did NOT come out. You see, I had delivered a four-page letter to the town's police station outlining the problem and the distress it was causing, and informing them that if the owner repeated his offences I would double my responses to TWO honks per woof - and that's exactly what I did.
It seems the police eventually felt that they'd better just leave the matter to my neighbour and I to sort out between ourselves. He fumed that his phone calls to the police were clearly futile.
At some point I realised that aiming my very loud horn at the dogs was not fair to the dogs - themselves victims (as is so often the case) of owner stupidity. I recognised that their extreme barking was not their fault but their owner's, so I climbed the tree again and this time aimed the horn directly at my neighbour's bedroom.
This now proved altogether too much for him, particularly when, after one long din-for-din session, his wife told me that she'd just spent two hours trying to get their baby off to sleep - and then HORN! I did not know about the baby. She was a reasonable person, and fair. Her husband was neither.
This neighbour became resentful because he could not induce the police into condoning his lawbreaking - or to defend his self-perceived right to practice it at will.
He came down my driveway to remonstrate with me. I forget what he said, but I recall his parting curse: "I hope your house burns down!" Tough luck mate - it was never my house, and over twenty years later it's still there.
He and his family moved out, and the dogs with them.
The above story, all true, shows what can happen when an aggrieved person trades noise for noise. There can be trouble but there can also be success. In this unique instance, very satisfying relief had been achieved by putting my horn up a forking gum tree.
But there's more. Before this donkey moved out he had a visitor. It later became apparent that this visitor had been regaled with stories of my outrageous behaviour.
There was a loud knock on my front door. A somewhat inebriated man stood there. He had my horn in one hand and in the other hand was the horn's connecting cable trailing across my front yard and along my drive and into next-door's driveway.
He demanded to know, while standing beside his car parked in his friend's driveway and minding his own business, how suddenly, from out of the sky, came this object.
It had landed on his windscreen and cracked it. He pretended to great shock and affront. At first I did not know what to make of all this, then the truth of the matter dawned upon me.
What this moron had done, on behalf of his gutless dog-owning friend, was to put his arms across the top of the paling fence to grab hold of the power cable, and then jerked it with such strength that the horn and its mountings were wrenched from the tree trunk. This was evident from the damaged horn terminals, too.
I appraised him of my conclusion and he denied he'd done anything of the sort. Before departing, this liar declared "I don't care who did it, but I'm going to get a new windscreen out of it!"
My poor horn. It had given such sterling service for peace - but there it was, terminally wounded.
It never worked again. Even in death it represented the best $5 investment for peace that I'd ever made.
Peter Bright
www.pebri.net
A decision FOR the environment was timely
With the shame of the massive 10 week oil leak off the Kimberleys, and other pressures no doubt, a decision actually FOR the environment will well and truly due! With the exposure of the threat to koala populations, and the endangered species threatened by the dam, there was really no "science" that could be twisted and distorted enough to endorse this project. A decision FOR the environment had to be made - eventually.
Landsakes! Garrett makes an environmental decision!
Thanks for the news, tigerquoll. Thanks for the reprieve, Garrett. Didn't think you had it in you.
Sheila Newman, population sociologist
home page
Copyright to the author. Please contact sheila [AT] candobetter org or the editor if you wish to make substantial reproduction or republish.
Garrett's decision to reject QLD Premier Bligh's dam is cogent!
I heard on the news this evening that Federal Environment Minister Garrett has rejected QLD Premier Bligh’s Traveston Dam proposal.
A JUST TIMELY DECISION WITH CONVICTION!
I support Mr Garrett on his decision, on his timing and moreso on this public delivery and explanation.
This is strong and frankly the best communicated decision Peter Garrett has delivered since entering politics. Conviction is what Australians respect, listen to and right now crave while political indecision wafts in the tropical heat to our north. When a Federal minister conveys a steadfast decision supported with a ratio decidendi at a prompt media conference, the public listens.
Good stuff! Leadership requires decisions that are not always popular. But popularism is a trait of submissiveness or manipulativeness, but not of leadership and more one of diplomacy or administrative convenience. No leader is remembered for a record of compromises, but for standing fast to one's conviction. No one can be fairly criticised for standing by one's conviction.
The Traveston issue is one well beyond Brisbane’s grey water thinking. It is one of overpopulation pressure – like an elephant in the room. Bligh landed Beattie's job from his timely departure, yet brought to Queenslanders no Bligh plan or hope. So what does Anna want to be remembered for in her time at the Queensland helm?
Our carrying capacity should be determined, not ad hoc
While our leaders are wrangling their political futures on climate change and ETS, population growth, easily as important and directly related to climate change, is being brushed aside as detached (de-linked) from the issue. Population growth is ad hoc, and determined with consultation from business leaders and economists, together with politicians who decide what they want! These groups all have conflicts of interests, and left to them we will have continual population growth!
Polls are not reliable either. What people "want" be be totally skewed and based on social issues and other subjective areas.
Our carrying capacity should be determined by ecologists, agriculturalists, climate change analysts, demographers and based on empirical science. The science is clear that Australia will suffer from loss of agricultural land, and will have problems producing food exports. Why add more people? As for national security, does Kevin Rudd want more cannon fodder?
Kevin Rudd should be making policies for the benefit of the people of Australia, not on his personal and egotistical desire of a "big Australia"!
Our government puts population growth above wildlife
Humans are feathering and propagating their own nests, their own numbers, and destroying other species. The policies that are being imposed on native species are totally selfish and anthropocentric. While our wildlife are diminishing and ecosystems are being destroyed for water, roads and housing, our biological systems are under more stress. Koalas are a flagship species and are easily recognisable icons of Australia. SE Queensland has Australia's highest population growth rate in Australia, and developers and mortgage industries are accumulating wealth while other species are being denied a livelihood and being butchered! We cannot continue with such lethal policies from our greedy development-driven governments. Our government prefers population growth and developments at the cost of the environment and the animals that make Australia unique.
ABC local demand ignored in favour of Rudd's global message
The programme certainly tackles the important issues affecting Australia. The popularity of the programme and its broadcast reach (being the national coverage and perceived credibility of the ABC) means demand to be heard invariably exceeds time available.
To address the shortage of public airtime, Talk Back programme listeners should publicly question ABC Radio management's allocation of available airtime to issues of popular interest and talk back.
Perhaps listeners shoud be more concerned about ABC's current corporate-wide strategy to focus to take on an unprecedented expansion into multiple overseas news bureaus. This includes a service in Arabic, which has been flagged as a Rudd/Obama propaganda tool soft pitching Rudd-US policy.
Ethics, democracy and ABC budget to the wind!
Again Rudd, with his statesman head in the stratosphere of global politics, is aloof to home issues beneath him, while salivating on his new 'world leader' status to play the ABC on the world stage.
Issues of national significance should be Rudds focus such as personaly following up his hollow 'sorry' statement to indigenous Australians with financial compensation and pragmatic follow through on delivering policies to reduce the disadvantages between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians.
Instead, Rudd's head space is anywhere but in Australia. What national priority warrants our national broadcaster investing millions of public money on an unjustified juggernaut into overseas expansion competing with the BBC, CNN and Al Jazera?
"Scott argues that only the ABC can deliver the benefits." [Source: Crikey]
His boss is Kevin Rudd of course! Clearly this move is a furtherance of Rudd's unchecked addiction to foreign affairs at the expense of Australian domestic affairs.
Like talking to kindergartners - Australia talks
I just spent 45 minutes hanging on the Australia talks talkback phone, without ever getting to say this - even though I was one of the very first callers.
This is what I never got a chance to say, but it is of enormous importance:
"Kevin Rudd does not have a mandate to set Australia on the path of the population level that he is talking about -35 million - and that is an underestimate anyway.
Anyone with primary school arithmetic would know that a growth rate of 2% per annum our present population of 22 million will double in 35 years to 44 million in 2044.
Australia is not living sustainably right now with 22 million people.
Peter McDonald said we would be wealthy with a larger population. What does 'wealthier' mean, when we are living in a degraded environment with far fewer 'choices'?
Rob Adams said that in his sustainable city of the future we would harvest sunlight from rooftops, when in highrise buildings, only the top floor has the privilege of doing this (and only if it rises above the neighboring buildings). What are the ramifications?"
You know what, it's like arguing with kindergarteners or being at the mad hatter's tea party.
Our environment is deteriorating. All environmental indicators are nose-diving - waterways, biodiversity, soils...
I would also like to have said: Peter McDonald said we 'are not talking about a doubling'. But of course we are. When you have a growth rate of 2.1 you must be talking about a doubling.
Ed. Radio Australia or radio growth lobby?
Geothermal ... but there was much more to say
I have just posted this comment to The Australia Talks Website.
"I rang this program and was 'permitted' to criticise planner Rob Adams's reckless promotion of Geothermal energy as a solution for the additional energy needs of a big population. I was talking about deep geothermal. Rob had not specified that he might be referring to subsurface geothermal - which is not going to provide the vast quantities of energy for millions more people; it can merely off-set some heating and cooling needs, and I have written about this as well in the Final Energy Crisis, Pluto Press, UK., 2008. It isn't as if most houses are even using this kind of technology. Many are not even insulated. That is another reason for the insulation rebate. It is not responsible to have planners talk 'as if' when the problem is already really grave.
The presenter did not introduce me with my qualifications, which are Energy and Population Sociologist, and cut me off before I could give my sources or my qualifications, which are very germane to this debate. I was also cut before I could talk about other matters, which no-one else writes about, such as the role of the Scanlon Foundation and government in pushing population growth, unfortunately. When I rang to speak a second time, I was told that I had taken a long time to 'make my point' about geothermal energy and that I could make my comment on the website. I suspect, however, that I will not be allowed to give people a reference to my research on the Scanlon Foundation. http://candobetter.org/taxonomy/term/1179 (If you cannot include a web address for research articles, could you please ask people to google the Scanlon Foundation and candobetter.org?)
As for Peter McDonald's comment about "Human rights" and one child policies, it is the big population policy that is abrogating human rights in Australia, notably the right to self-government. We are losing democracy to commercial planning projects and policy."
Sure sign Brisbane's population has exceeded regional saturation
It's a sure sign Brisbane's population has reached saturation when new dams are proposed.
If a city cannot sustain its population on the existing resources it has, then it has reached population saturation.
Brisbane's metropolis now sprawls from NSW to Noosa Heads and west of Ipswich. It's population demand for water has exceeded its water supply.
Queensland Premier Bligh says "the Queensland Government will have to come up with alternative sources of drinking water if the Traveston Crossing dam in the state's south-east is not approved." [ABC 10-Nov-09]
Water is just one public utility, then there is electricity, gas, public transport, education, housing, aged care, etc. All Queensland public services are overstretched from Rudds flood gate policy on immigration with spill over effects from interstate as many thousands flee saturated Sydney and Melbourne to a bulemic Brisbane. Australia's urban population problem is snowballing, yet Rudd blindly cannot see the elephant in the room or has a hidden agenda. It has nothing to do with race and nothing to do with the refugee issue - which are being mischieviously played as political red herrings.
Traveston dam on the Mary River near Gympie will be another travesty of justice on the existing rural community way of life and ecology to feed an insatiable sprawl policy.
Garrett stands to be remembered for his watering down of Australia's environmental legislation and for species extinctions on his watch.
Pop Stats need to be relative to have meaning to mainstream
The population statistics have little meaning to the mainstream population when expressed as a national aggregate. A figure of 35 million or 50 million for the whole of Australia may sound small or large. This is reflected in the contradictory results of The Age/Nielson poll.
It is important to first appreciate the inherent weaknesses of statistics and of survey sampling of quantitative data.
Australia’s population size has a comparable meaning as world population being about 6.7 Billion. The mainstream will ask, so how does that impact on me? How do people evaluate whether a figure is acceptable or too large?
Well, when that figure is expressed as a relative change or is translated to the scale of the person being surveyed. For instance, If Australia’s population in November 2009 is about 22 million, then 50 million represents a doubling of the current figure. In order to objectively guage public opinion about projected population growth and immigration, the Age/Nielson poll ought to ask is: Is the doubling of Australia’s population from what it is now to what it may be in forty years time an acceptable level of population growth? This allows the respondent to a survey assess the figure relative to what they know now. It is important to be aware that population growth and immigration, while related, are different statistics.
Further, the national figure should be translated into a likely proportion on a State basis (which in Australia would in the main be the same as the Capital City of that State. For instance, NSW (or Sydney) may typically have a third the population of Australia (see ABS statistics below). So another survey question could ask: Is an increase of Sydney’s population by 13 million (1/3 of 40 million) an acceptable level of population growth?
MARCH KEY FIGURES
Population at end Mar qtr 2009
PRELIMINARY DATA '000
________________________________________
New South Wales 7 076.5
Victoria 5 402.6
Queensland 4 380.4
South Australia 1 618.2
Western Australia 2 224.3
Tasmania 501.8
Northern Territory 223.1
Australian Capital Territory 349.9
Australia(a) 21 779.1
________________________________________
(a) Includes Other Territories comprising Jervis Bay Territory, Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands.
SOURCE: Australian Bureau of Statistics
Yes, we must question the validity of the poll – the collection, analysis and interpretation of the population data. The statistical method used by Age/Neilson should be independently peer scrutinised, to ensure best practice is followed and so the public and federal policy makers alike are not mislead with inappropriate findings. “Statistics is the science of making effective use of numerical data relating to groups of individuals or experiments. It deals with all aspects of this, including not only the collection, analysis and interpretation of such data, but also the planning of the collection of data, in terms of the design of surveys and experiments.”
[SOURCE: Wikipedia citing Dodge, Y. (2003) The Oxford Dictionary of Statistical Terms, OUP]
I question whether in this poll whether indeed effective use has been made of the numerical data.
we should like totally like
we should like totally like stop killing secy turtles
Population poll today in The Age
There is a poll today in The Age
Already the results are overwhelming that 35 million for Australia is too high!
This is an interesting contrast to the nation wide Age/Nielson poll:
43% say that immigration is "too high" and the same number say it is "about right". 9% say "too low".
Population projection of 35 million by 2049: (another deception - at our present growth rate it will be closer to 50 million).
40% said "too many", 30% "about right", the rest "too few" or "no opinion".
We must question the validity of the poll. How neutral is The Age?
How relevant is a public opinion poll when our human numbers may be the real issue that defines our future, and maybe our very survival?
There are many people in cities who are basically environmentally illiterate. They buy their food in supermarkets, turn on taps for water, and air conditioners for cooling but have little awareness of what is happening in rural Australia, or the devastation of climate change and drought on natural resources and our biological systems.
Our leaders should consult ecologists, agriculturalists, demographers and climate change scientists to assess our carrying capacity and form a population policy for Australia. Such a basic issue, and so impertinent for climate change and our food-producing ability, but left to economists, incompetent leaders and corporations to decide!
EPBC's future?
The Traveston Dam project to provide water for the growing population does not align with the objectives of the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act that Mr Garrett administers. Thousands of people wait for Peter Garret to invoke a decision that may in fact save their homes, their communities, their lifestyles. They don’t want a song or a live performance, they simply want one word. NO. The decision rests firmly in the hands of Garrett and according to some, so does the future of the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC) which the federal minister must consider when assessing the proposed dam.
The state government said that if approved the dam would be completed by 2016-17 and create 770 jobs. Anna Bligh said she had always said south-east Queensland needed the project to deliver reliable water supply for the future. Queensland lungfish, the Mary River turtle, Mary River cod and the giant barred frog and further koala habitat will be all possibly gone! What is the chance that Peter Garrett will make a decision FOR the environment on this one? What is the future of the power of the Environmental Protection Biodiversity Conservation Act if the dam goes ahead?
QIC boss: $15billion Qld fire sale to pay for population growth
I just heard Brisbane local ABC radio's Madonna King interview Doug McTaggart the Chief Executive of the Government owned Queensland Investment Corporation (QIC).
He talked of 20,000 (I think) people moving up to Queensland each quarter.
I am not sure how this topic came into it, but Madonna King asked if that would cause property prices to go up and he unsurprisingly confirmed that it would. Then Madonna King suggested that property would be a good investment.
In other words, Madonna King apparently sees profiting from others' needs for such a basic necessity as shelter being a good thing and, presumably, allowing (or deliberately causing) population growth to drive up property values is also a good thing, although se didn't state that explicitly.
A regular feature of her program is a discussion of property values with a real estate investment adviser. In those sessions she talks as if its inherently good if property prices go up and bad if they remain the same or go down
Then, on other occasions, Madonna King rails with seeming passion against housing unaffordability and the plight of the homeless. At least one of her Saturday Courier-Mail columns in the previous month was devoted to this issue, However, she seems inexplicably incapable of understanding the obvious irecconciliable conflict of interest between property speculators on the one hand and ordinary Australians needing secure adn affordable shelter on the other. As I put in a media release as Lord Mayoral candidate on 4 March 2008 in response to one of Prime Minister Rudd's similar expressed concerns about housing unaffordability:
Mr Rudd needs to decide whether he will continue to serve the interests of the property sector or whether he will provide ordinary Australians with affordable housing, but he cannot do both.Naturally my media release was not published. Doug McTaggart also went on to explain how population growth necessitated the Queensland Government's fire sale. The argument he put was, the Queensland faced 3 choices: 1. Not build the infrastructure necessary to provide jobs for and meet the needs of the new arrivals; 2. Raise taxes; or 3. Sell off assets ("Rearrange the balance sheet" as he put it at one point. Interestingly, both Kevin Rudd and Rupert Murdoch's Australian newspaper neglected to tell the Australian public that selling off public assets was part of the price they would have to pay for the population growth that they insist is so much in our interests. (See, for example "Population is destiny" in the Australian of 19 September.) Somehow, it apparently occurred to neither King nor McTaggart that another choice should be offered to the Australian public: 4. Reduce immigration and stablise our population. McTaggart's 'argument' in favour of privitasation was reported almost immediately afterwards on the ABC's 10AM news bulletin. For those who may be interested, I have written more of Madonna King's method of journalism, which many of her listeners mistake for properly holding to account our political and business leaders here on John Quiggin's web site as well as in the article "Brisbane ABC suppresses alternative candidates in state elections despite listener dismay with major parties” of 30 Apr 09 on this web site.
Need for poacher culling industry
So long as cowboy poachers in utes hoon around the scrub shooting wildlife for a pittance and seek to legitimise it by calling it a 'kangaroo industry', there ought to be calls to set up a Poacher Culling Industry.
Roo mis-information
What a load of C R A P, with an obvious bias to scare.
I am an active roo shooter, and all those killed are treated the same. A quick clean kill, with attention to any young, if nec.
Editorial comment: The personal attack in this post, which does not address the substance of the issue, has been removed. - JS
Growth lines the pockets of investors
Paul Braddick, head of property and financial systems analysis at ANZ, said the housing industry and policy authorities have a lot of work ahead to ensure supply issues don't further skew house prices. Housing prices have become impossibly high for many Australians by an artificial high demand. That means that more houses must be build to keep up to demand.
Migration added 439,000 people to Australia's population in the year to March 2009, the strongest increase on record. But dwelling completions are forecast to fall below 130,000 in the year ahead, he said. Instead of dealing with the root source of the problem, explosive and unnatural population growth, the pro-growth investors want to take advantage of it and line their own pockets.
It is ironic that Kevin Rudd is blasting the climate change deniers while he himself orchestrated our historically high immigration numbers, supports economic growth at all costs and unsustainable coal industries.
Adams and Palestine, Israel, 9/11, population, etc.
Thanks for your sharing your observations about Phillip Adams with us.
I personally don't understand why so many people if we are rightly critical of US military aggression, we should necessarily feel bound to view this through the prism of the Palestine vs. Israel conflict.
To me, it seems that the US rulers are engaged in these wars not to suit Israel or 'Zionism', but rather to suit their own ends. Obviously, there is a lot of confluence of interest between Israel on the one hand and the US rulers on the other and I agree that the US is highly partisan in favour of Israel in that conflict, but I still find it hard to accept the view that the US rulers are somehow dancing to the tune of Israel and 'Zionism'. My mind is not closed on this one way or the other, by the way.
I think Adams displays an irritating fetish for just about everything Jewish in the world on his program, but in regard to the Palestine-Israel conflict he strikes me as more pro-Palestinian than pro-Israel. Of course, so is, supposedy, fellow 'left' Gatekeeper Noam Chomsky. As far as I am concerned, they are both effectively in the service of both Israel and the US rulers.
Certainly Addams strikes me as often gullible and impressionable. He seems to have a capacity to be wholly agreeable with everyone who comes on his program.
Once, years ago, even war criminal Henry Kissinger appeared on his program. He never breathed a word about his carpet bombing of Cambodia or his role in orchestrating the 1973 coup in Chile and his many other cirmes against humanity.
The a few years later, he interviewed Christopher Hitchens, who, is spite of being an apologist for US wars, today, was then commendably trying to get Kissinger tried for his war crimes.
I didn't hear Adams make any reference to the way he, himself had been so accomodating to that very same war criminal.
He will accept uncritically the views of people who argue that China's attempt to control it's population numbers placed it at a competietive disadvanatge with with India as he did early in 2008 and then a fe months later will just as uncritically accept the (in this case correct) views of population stability campaigners such as Mark O'Connor.
Phillip Adams
Like you, I have noted Adams' dismissal of all but the official conspiracy theory about the Twin Towers collapse. I think it is because he knows that any real investigation of that and other atrocities would lead straight to the activities of Israeli secret agents in the US and of Zionist loyalists in high positions in the US Government. Adams makes no secret of his fervent attachment to Jewish causes. You may call him a left gatekeeper; I would call him at best a sentimental, egotistical soft-liberal who loves above all the sound of his own voice.
The fellow is also profoundly ignorant scientifically, to the point of imbecility. I refer you to the campaign he mounted about 2 years ago in support of Dr James Whisson and his so-called water machine, which he claimed could extract huge quantities of water from the atmosphere using wind power alone. Of course it was pure quackery, as anyone familiar with high-school physics could see straight away, but Adams encouraged the gullible masses through all possible media outlets (including the Inventors program on ABCTV) to invest their money in it. I emailed him to protest about this; all I got in reply from Adams was a list of all the clever things he claims to have done over the years, and a statement of his faith in Dr Whisson. In the light of that, I suggest to you that there is no point in trying to persuade Adams of the scientific and physical impossibility of the official 9/11 story. It is all way above his head.
No need for holographic planes on September 11
The planes did not enter the buildings the way ordinary planes would enter ordinary buildings. Not because there were no planes, but because both the planes and the buildings had been prepared in a special way. The buildings were full of various sets of explosives. With both planes the contact was preceded by a bright flash. Most probably a missile. There is no excuse for someone into 9/11 truth not knowing about this. It was extensively analyzed in the first serious 9/11 documentary, In Plane Sight, still easily available. The mechanism for the planes having left a Roadrunner-silhouette sort of gash can be easily explained as the result of explosives in the leading parts of the plane set off by the missile's detonation. This and the resulting fireball were straight out of Hollywood -- probably literally, as Christopher Bollyn has pointed out. As professional show business -- albeit in the service of evil -- it was top class. Oscar material.
A defence of 9/11 holographic plane theory
Subject was "Real planes?" - JS
Good to see more criticism of Chomsky around the issue of 9/11. Chomsky was a big influence on my gradual political awakening, but I am very distrustful of him at this point.
"From that distance at that instant Flight 175 appears to be flying through South Tower as if either the South Tower was not real, Flight 175 was not real real or both were not real."
The Hezarkhani/"ghost plane" footage (which is what I currently see a still from on the blog you've linked to) is clear enough and shows an impossibility. This has been gone over elsewhere, but if you freeze frame through the footage, you will see, for instance, a point at which the plane is half-in and half-out, yes there is no evidence of debris, the planes are not deformed (despite having hit heavy steel columns), and there is no explosion.
And how about the Fairbanks footage? Is that not taken from a close enough vantage point for you? Again, it shows an absurdity.
"In fact, it is hardly surprising that it should appear thus given that passenger airlines such as the Boeing 767-222 which was used for the doomed Flight 175 are constructed of light weight aluminum and that the much of the material comprising the outer walls of the Twin Towers were not of great strength, unlike the inner core of the buildings."
I'm not sure I follow all of this, but as for the second part, the outer walls of the Twin Towers were built of heavy steel. Go look at how the Twin Towers were constructed.
I'm sorry we are stuck with a "weird" theory that this was faked somehow (I go with cgi rather than holographs, incidentally), but I think it's the best one.
There's no question that the no planer wing (as it were) of the 9/11 truth movement(s) is full of dubious characters, but some of the core arguments are quite solid. One simply has to focus on the arguments and the information presented and try not to accept anyone as a guru. I admit I have made the mistake of giving some people the benefit of the doubt on some of their arguments I didn't quite follow, because other things they said made sense. Don't give anyone in the 9/11 truth movement the benefit of the doubt!
I will add that in my opinion (Australia's own) "Genghis6199" has been the most reliable in presenting serious evidence-based arguments and in trying to encourage group self-criticism and self-regulation rather than simply embracing any new theory anyone within the no-planer group happens to propose. (That's not to say he is a "nice," even-tempered fellow!)
One solution to nuisance dog barking
My wife puts a loud radio at our property edge when the neighbor's dogs are barking. After the neighbor takes the dogs inside, she turns the radio off. The wife is trying to 'train the trainer' or lack thereof.
Appreciation of article exposing Chomsky
The following was sent to me through the feedback form. - JS
Dear Sir,
Thank you for an excellent piece. More please, Much appreciate your
insight and work.
Your assessment that Chomsky and his fellow travelers -- like Naomi Klein[1], Howard Zinn, Amy Goodman -- all sayanim[2] for the NWO. Close research reveals that Chomsky was Director of the Institute for Policy Studies back in the 1960's when it was at the top of its influence molding the SDS etc. IPS was a covert MI6 sponsee of the Tavistock Institute and very hooked up with its brethen groups to further the cultural/intellectual side of the
NWO. Chomsky is as fake as they come. And he is NOT "brilliant"- his
stuff is muddled, inconsistent and anything but original. Just another of
the stooges, like Obama, who has been branded and stuffed down our throats via the overwhelming media propaganda. Chomsky is a "designated
opposition" of the NWO and has been from the very start. Research what Dr
John Coleman (former MI6 agent) has to say on Chomsky... Hard to believe,
but the Left is even more conformist than the right. Just my opinion as
strictly a Party of One, neither left, right or center.
Footnotes
1. I still have a lot of time for Naomi Klein. Her book "The Shock Doctrine" of 2007 is towering and indispensable and represents a massive propaganda blow against the disaster capitalist elite who have guided much of the world's destiny since at least 1973, in spite of its failure to point out the obvious truth about 9/11 (and, also, less 'politically correct' on our part, its effective stance in favour of high immigration.) If it were not for the fact that she produced this book, I would consider Klein a left gatekeeper. I can only offer as a possible explanation that some people around her in whom she has placed her trust have counselled her to steer clear of the 9/11 Truth Movement in order to be able to better sell the message contained in the pages of "The Shock Doctrine." Of course, my mind is open to being swayed in either direction depending upon what further evidence is forthcoming.
Other people I have grave doubts about, who are not usually included in lists of left gatekeepers include John Pilger and Gore Vidal. I would be most interested to read further comments to any of the three forums to which I have linked, either in defence of or critical of these two.
2. I'm not sure whether or not the word ''sayanim' was the result of mis-typing, so, for now, I have left it as it was. - JS.
We humans are cruel bastards aren't we?
I remember nursing a lady in her final days. We were talking together one night and she said to me that, although she would miss some of the things about the world she would soon be leaving, she would not miss the cruelty. She told me the story of gratuitous cruelty and neglect by her own daughter of some dogs. We also talked about the situation of wildlife in Victoria, which was not so dire then. She gave me an angry smile and said, "We humans are really cruel bastards, aren't we?" I could see in her eyes that she was remembering things she had observed over her long life, and there were tears in her eyes.
I agreed.
That is the last thing she ever said to me and I have never forgotten it.
If there is anything that humans should try to change about themselves it is this trait of cruelty towards other creatures and the land that nourishes all things.
Kevin Rudd is leading a march of depravity towards nature in this land by intending to overwhelm it with people and if we continue on this course we will all be so much poorer, morally as well as economically.
A Gore has finally conceded to methane as a greenhouse gas
Al Gore has finally conceded that CO2 is not the only atmospheric warmer. Gore now blames soot and methane for the majority of global warming, leaving the door open for a tax on livestock, a tax on meat and milk.
There are 1.4 billion cows and pigs on the planet emitting methane, which is 25 times more effective than carbon dioxide at containing the planet's heat. Calculated by Food and Agricultural Organisation of the UN (FAO), livestock farming generates more greenhouse gas emissions worldwide than all cars, lorries, trains, boats and planes added together.
Lord Stern, a British expert on global warming, says that if we really want to pull the planet back from the brink of utter destruction, we all need to stop eating meat. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources.
With a burgeoning world population, and rising middle classes in Asia, the demand for meat and dairy will continue to grow.
A Gore's crusades remain shallow until he includes the "inconvenient" truth of the need to reduce our livestock production and consumption, something that is much simpler to address than the technology and costs of alternative energy.
PS on Sweden
Sheila,
I forgot to mention the poor forest practices and importing of timber from baltic regions.
The high concentrations of immigrants are not intergrating and crime is rising.
They import more oil per capita than any other country.
Currently the engineering industry and the car manufacturing account for over 40% of the Swedish industry. The wood, pulp and paper industry accounts for over 20% the chemical industry about 12%. not very eco, me thinks.
Current population is just over 9.31 million.
Sweden's problems with immigration and nuclear power
Guess what,
Sweden has ten nuclear power plants that supply 46% of the power they use so they can deal with a few taxes. What you fail to state in your nordic footprint is that Sweden also own 12 coal fired powerplants in other regions. Greenpeace dumped tons of coal on parliment's doorstep in protest. You paint a rosy picture of nordic standards but have a look at the reactor incidents and problems developing in regard to immigrants, the stats you show are only up to 2003. They are currently taking more refugees from Iraq than any other country. They are headed for a big hangover soon.
Disputes claims about Kangaroo killing industry
Subject was "Menkit Prince joke". - JS
I had to check if it was April 1st after reading Menkit Prince's article. Do you really expect people to swallow that much mis-information in one go? This is the same tired old patchwork of rot, sticky taped together for another fear campaign by animal rights folk.
If your a vegetarian good for you, but dont dictate to others about what they should and shouln't eat, it makes you sound like a loonie.
The green on the carcass photo is fresh paunch material which when removed renders the meat quite safe to eat as I have done many times. Im sure your intention was to present a rotting carcass.
As for quantity of roos stop reading the crap that gets dished out as scientific fact and spend some time out bush.
Im truly amazed that you could glue together so many small bits of information and tar/feather the whole kangaroo industry. No cred for you.
By kilo, most kangaroo meat sold by Coles & Woolies, is pet food
By kilo most kangaroo meat sold by Coles & Woolies is pet food selling retail under $4 a kilo. So it is a low margin product for the cheapest meat market around - domestic cats and dogs "not for human consumption". These are the "huge quantities of this meat to their customers". So are roo shooters proud of their work? Shooting wildlife for pet meat for pittance? Get a real job!
Check out a leading brand of roo pet meat at Coles:
Paws Fresh Pet Foods
PO Box 10562, Southport BC Qld 4215
http://www.pawsfresh.com.au/pet-food/default.asp
It is in these PAWS 1 kg plastic bags of mince that thousands of Australia's kangaroos end up. With Coles and Woolies having dominant market buying power with dominant market share of the shameful 'roo trade', they control and almost set kangaroo meat prices paid to wildlife poachers.
If PH had an argument with any merit, PH would supply referenced facts, rather than resort to argument ad hominem (shooting the messenger 'do gooder' while avoiding the 'do gooders' argument). How lame!
Consumers buy roo cat food because its cheap - simple as that! It's even cheaper than old mutton. It's like ripping out precious native forests in East Gippsland and WA so it can be woodchipped it on the cheap and flogged to Japanese pulp companies like Itochu for just $2.50 a tonne!
Just last month [21-Oct-09], Japan's Itochu Corporation announced that "it is expected to push for lower woodchip prices after terminating its purchase agreement with failed agribusiness group Great Southern."
Source: WA Business News
Go to Japan and see how the Japanese revere and protect their own forests like the famous Beech Tree Forest in Shirakami Sanchi.
"The hills and mountains of Japan cover 70 % of the land. Forests cover a total area of 62 million acres that is equal to 67 % of the land. But "even though two thirds of its land is covered by forests, Japan is one of the world largest timber importers. Foreign imported timber is cheaper than Japan's domestically grown timber, even after considering freight costs for importing timber."
SOURCE: http://www.saveamericasforests.org/JapansForests/Japansforests.htm
Australian immigrants and their descendants since their colonial exploitation culture are mugs for raping Australia's natural heritage and wildlife and flogging it for a song to foreign profiteers who make the real profit.
Perhaps PH can quote facts about the percentage gourmet roo meat that actually makes it to expensive restaurants and retail for $100+ a kilo at the table. If the roo 'industry' was smart and treated kangaroo as gourmet like abalone, despite still being immoral poaching of Australian wildlife, it would have a stronger case for itself as a viable and sustainable practice.
But pet food?
It's hell for leather out there in western Queensland with thousands shot and no controls on humane treatment or hygiene. Any hobo can register as a roo shooter and make a quick quid, but bugger all profit. The so-called 'industry' is basically a knackery supplier and has literally gone to the dogs.
Perhaps road kill ends up on the shelves as well - wombat, echidna, Tasy Devil, whatever, who'll notice? The cat?
Bark-counting collars.
No James, the collars are fraught with potential legal dangers. Any vexatious dog-owner can readily modify his/her dog's barking behaviour for the duration of the monitoring period. In order to avoid rebuke, or a fine, the owner of a dog wearing the bark-counting device can choose to keep the suspect dog inside, or leave it with a friend where possibly less populated environmental conditions ensure it will not bark.
Then what do we have? Documentation that provides the dog-owner with legal evidence that the dog was not barking, and that the person who complained likely made a false statement! Once again, the person who has been unwillingly drawn into this unhealthy situation is subjected to even more complications.
The emotional, legal and environmental position of the person on the wrong end of the barking is further degraded.
Fitting such a collar to a dog is a clear signal to any uncooperative dog-owner that habitual barking will be recorded. What better way to warn someone that he/she should keep the dog quiet --- at least for the time it takes to prove the dog was not barking as reported?
Not only that, but as yet there are no professional human health studies that recommend how much barking disturbs sleep, interferes with family communications and constitutes psychological deficit. Dr Craig Mixon (Californian psychologist) has written extensively on The Harm Done, but no-one has yet announced how many barks per hour will cause sleep arousals (with consequent drowsy driving).
I wouldn't want my pilot, ambulance officer or school bus driver to be a victim of bark-induced sleep deprivation. Yet this is occurring everywhere, it is not restricted to poorer socio-economic areas. I live in Toorak, Melbourne, and also spent years in Ascot, Queensland, both areas where one would not expect irresponsible dog ownership. But right across Australia, in every nook and cranny, at every level, the statistics are showing rising complaint numbers on an environmental pollution that you would more likely associate with socially under-privileged, under-informed groups.
It must be just another sign that the Australia we once had is not the Australia that our valiant Diggers honoured with their lives. The title of this website is "We Can Do Better". And a good part of doing better is to do the right thing for neighbours. Just be nice. That's all.
People are capable of eating anything
People are capable of eating anything that is available. Most people eat for flavour and customs, and ignore the pain ethics. About 95% of pigs are raised in intensive conditions, and sows can be in sow stalls pinned for up to 16 weeks in the one tight metal stall. Piglets get little maternal care, and it is quite legal to de-tail them, castrate and extract their eye teeth without pain relief. They are "processed" at about 6 months without normal lives.
Factory farmed hens are de-beaked, and suffer in cramped cages. This is to stop the cannibalism caused by stress. There are no ethics, and all these abuses are "legal"! It is all sanitised by supermarkets and left to consumers to decide what is moral and ethical. If it produces money, it is saleable and people don't see, and often don't care, about the cruelty involved.
this is awesome
this website is awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Electronic bark-counting collars an investment easily justified
Thanks for that news, Peter.
I think the money invested in such devices by councils would be well worth the investment.
Would retailers risk law suits over Kangaroo meat anaphylaxis?
Extremely biased article from a do-gooder who does not understand the food chain. If what you say is true, why are all the major food retailers (Woolworths, Coles etc.), selling huge quantities of this meat to their customers. I do not think that the legal department of "Woolies" would open themselves up to a huge lawsuit from someone with an anaphylaxis reaction to their product. It is so rare that it makes your article laughable. The grocery stores still sell peanuts, do they not? It is up to the consumer to decide whether or not to buy kangaroo, and many of them have made their choice with their wallets. Some of the best chefs and restaurants in the world serve kangaroo, and I know many people who have consumed it to their utmost satisfaction. Maybe your article should be a bit more "balanced", and not based on pure emotion from what you may have seen on television.
Electronic Bark-counting Collar
Councils everywhere are hamstrung by their state's barking control legislation's use of imprecise terminology.
Here's part of Tasmania's Dog Control Act 2000 ...
Dogs creating nuisance
Section 46:
(2) The occupier of any premises must not permit a dog to be, become or create a nuisance on those premises.
Penalty: Fine not exceeding 5 penalty units. (A "penalty unit" is currently $120.)
(3) A dog is a nuisance if –
(a) it behaves in a manner that is injurious or dangerous to the health of any person; or
(b) it creates a noise, by barking or otherwise, that persistently occurs or continues to such an extent that it unreasonably interferes with the peace, comfort or convenience of any person in any premises or public place.
At first glance this all looks very reasonable, however if you are an Animal Management Officer (AMO) or anyone else lumbered with enforcement tasks, then it's so unreasonable as to be virtually unworkable. For example, where's the definition of "injurious" and where's that for "health"? Similarly, where are the definitions of "continues" and "to such an extent" and "unreasonably" and "peace" and "comfort" and "convenience"?
These subjective terms impose such legal minefields on councils that it's no wonder many of them have entered denial mode and won't come out. This leaves innumerable barking victims with no legal recourse for relief so it's no wonder that some tormented persons prefer to kill the dog rather than move out.
Some states have attempted to resolve the above dilemmas by time-slotting - that is, a dog may bark for six daytime minutes per hour or three night-time minutes per hour before its owner commits an offence. There are several serious problems that render this concept impractical. For one thing, dog's can't tell the time. For another, who is going to stand outside the premises alleged to contain a barking dog and record the woofing with a stopwatch? For another, who's going to believe his tally anyway?
In the last few years a new device, developed in Australia, has been trialled by some councils. This electronic device logs each bark as a function of time - the time being perhaps 7-10 days. At the end of this period the collar, which can't be removed by the dog's owner, is taken off by the council which fitted it and its data is downloaded for examination.
The Onkaparinga council in South Australia was one of the first councils to trial this device and its management expresses some satisfaction with the results obtained - when owners consented to its use. The Knox City Council in Victoria is currently proposing to not only fit the collar, but to do so whether the dog's owner likes it or not.
Interested persons are invited to visit http://www.pebri.net/index_32.htm and assess the matter for themselves.
There are currently provisions for commenting both on the Quiet Tasmania News website and that of the Knox Leader.
Peter Bright
Tasmania
www.quietas.net
www.pebri.net
Pro-growth parasite investors are benefiting from housing demand
Housing - a roof over our heads - is a basic social need, and a right. The growth lobby have milked this need to create wealth for a few elites. By manipulating the demand for housing through population growth, the price of land and housing has skyrocketed and globalised. This "improvement" ("recovery") has made investors happy, and boosted the mortgage industries, stamp duty collection, real estate, land developers and the building industries. Building applications, land subdivisions and new growth corridors boost the coffers of local councils, and as more people flood into our cities, demand outstrips supply.
Every night in Geelong at least 70 families are sleeping rough on the city's streets.
Budget-priced rooms above pubs are booked out months in advance and caravan parks are full. Rental inspections for houses under $300 attract dozens of families and waiting lists for public housing have blown out. (Geelong Advertiser 10th Oct)
Australia used to be a land of high home ownership. With the median price of housing, in Melbourne, recently reaching nearly $500,000, it means that many wage earners, and professionals too, are finding home-ownership not a dream but a nightmare! Home ownership is increasingly out of reach for normal Australians.
Pro-growth parasitic investors are benefiting while living standard are being eroded and people are falling between the cracks.
More like Hitler than Napoleon
I think what you say about Rudd's Napoleon complex is a little disrespectful to Napoleon, Tigerquoll. If Napoleon hadn't had every dynasty in Europe against him in the anti-revolutionary coalitions that gave rise to the Vienna treaties (which subsequently shaped our distorted world) he wouldn't have gone to all those wars. Napoleon was a very smart person who left the French with an extraordinary code that has helped them to preserve democracy. Napoleon may have censored the newspapers and run a country obsessed with economic growth for a while, but France was under attack. The monarchy came back twice as it was and did even worse censorship AND brought back religion and it was not until 1846, some time after Napoleon died, that the French obtained a lasting republic and freedom from state religions. Of course you don't hear any of this from the anglophone histories because they were written for the dynasties, which took over the religions.
Rudd strikes me as a lot closer to Hitler in his nationalistic policies: there is the obsession with growing the population, with industrial expansion, and he doesn't like innovatory art. Both of them thought that oil would last forever, too, I think. There are differences, of course, Rudd doesn't wear a moustach.
Unless of course you meant Napoleon, the Pig, in Animal Farm. I agree that the resemblances there are quite striking. And not just with Rudd, with the whole Labor Government. And Mr Jones in the pub that the pigs began to fraternise with, that would be the property developer and banking coalitions, where you can no longer tell the difference between the government and big business. And all of them trying to work the people harder and fill Australia with more people than it can comfortable support, just to make money for themselves. All the while telling the animals that they just don't understand and need to be educated - for instance with regional forums about population growth where demographers induce a state of helplessness by telling them all that no-one can stop population growth.
That is not to let the Libs off either. It's just that they don't add insult to injury with the same McDonald's grin, "And would you some fries to go with your burning haystack, sir?"
Sheila Newman, population sociologist
home page
Copyright to the author. Please contact sheila [AT] candobetter org or the editor if you wish to make substantial reproduction or republish.
Rudd's Napoleon complex
Rudd's role as international diplomat has been inculcated over years before he became PM from his diplomatic roles in Stockholm, Beijing and Taipei, then as Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs. Now as PM, Rudd, comfortable in this arena has left Foreign Minister Smith to the lesser tasks and has self-elevated himself from diplomat to international statesman. Rudd enjoys mixing it with the big players and must surely feel in his element.
But the statesman thing has him punching above his weight, which may sound patriotic, except that desire seems to have morphed into an envy of the big players. Why can't Australia become one of the big players too he feels? But how? Rudd's rationale seems to have played out in a form of catch up strategy by building a big population and by big spending.
It is as if Rudd at one of his formative diplomatic functions was on occasion unfairly criticised by a big bully player making condescending remarks about Australia not being a significant player on the world stage. Rudd like most Aussies would be rightly offended. But this may have impressed upon Rudd an inferiority complex.
Now that Rudd has usurped power and position, personal complexes can be played out. But played out as national policy by mere privilage of position is undemocratic. Rudd may desire bigness but why force feed Australia into bigness? It is as if Rudd has a Napoleon complex in national representative terms.
Bigger is not better. It drives complexities and problems that Rudd hasn't even started fixing out of his 2020 Summit, let alone fueling the problem further with flood gate immigration. Look at the burden Obama is faced with! Why invite bigger problems?
Yes, small IS beautiful indeed!
Rudd does a lot of reading. He would be well advised to read British economist E. F. Schumacher's book 'Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered' and consider the merits and application of the 'appropriate technologies' (AT) that require fewer resources, causes less impact on the environment and factors in consideration of the environmental, ethical, cultural, social and economical aspects of the community.
Rudd could learn from political scientist, Leopold Kohr [1909-94]:
"... there seems to be only one cause behind all forms of social misery: bigness. Oversimplified as this may seem, we shall find the idea more easily acceptable if we consider that bigness, or oversize, is really much more than just a social problem. It appears to be the one and only problem permeating all creation. Whenever something is wrong, something is too big." [The Breakdown of Nations, 1957]
Next there will be land developers selling sea-side real estate!
Fears for the health of the Coorong have been compounded because of falling water levels and increased salinity, the result of drought and overextraction of water in the Murray-Darling Basin.
A three-year study of the Coorong by the CSIRO found that it was, in effect, dead as an ecological community , but could be revived if new environmental flows of fresh water were flushed into the struggling wetlands. As salt levels rise and the river dries, tube worms have travelled upstream, building their homes on the native turtles – and just about anything else they can find.
Before white settlement the water flow had kept the Murray mouth open for about 7500 years – even in times of drought. The lakes were rarely salty, and the environment allowed turtles, brolgas, magpie geese and fish such as Murray cod and pygmy perch to flourish.
The Environment Minister, Peter Garrett, will have to decide whether to allow the flooding of the Coorong with seawater under national environmental laws next year. Environmentalists say the seawater plan would contravene principles of the Ramsar Convention, of which Australia was a founding signatory, because member countries are required to maintain the ecological values of a listed wetland. The sudden influx of salt water would be beyond the adaptive capacity of any species. This is an abysmal record of environmental destruction for an internationally recognised site!
The Murray Darling Basin remains the food basket of the nation, and a big earner of export dollars. Engineering is the dreaming story of so much of white settlement in Australia. Yet downstream, the narrative of gardens in the desert is, basically, over. In South Australia and western Victoria, fruit trees are dying, grape vines are being ploughed up and a whole constellation of towns are facing the fact that there may be no future for the industries that have supported them since before the First World War. Waters that were once clear that are now dangerous to the touch, fish that were once a staple food source that are now dangerous to eat, and a Coorong that is now saltier than the sea.
According to Water Minister Penny Wong: "We've made clear on many occasions that we believe the best thing for water reform is to ensure water can go to where it's most highly valued."
Australia's commercial asset - it's food Murray Darling Food Bowl - clearly cannot sustain the commercialism that we since Colonialism have imposed on it. We need to provide for our own people, not exports that suck our ecological systems dry!
Next there will be land developers selling sea-side real estate where the waterbirds and turtles used to wade!
Immigration up - house prices up - interest rates up
Immigration up - house prices up - interest rates up
It follows ...
House price surge lifts rate rise odds at http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26293557-601,00.html
James Glynn | November 02, 2009 The Australian
Article from: Dow Jones Newswires
AUSTRALIAN house prices surged to record highs in the third quarter, likely stoking the case for interest rates to be raised sharply over coming months.
Rudd the Dudd
Boy, Rudd sure is a dud - in every respect. And a cruel and despotic one as well. It's like he is looking for opportunities to make himself mean and small, whilst always talking 'Big!'
Rudd wants to drop humane slaughter laws to please halal lobby
Please take a moment to read this as we must not let Rudd change this law about stunning the poor animals before they are slaughtered! They give up their lives so you can eat them and, with the Christmas season fast approaching, there is more slaughter of all animals - especially pigs, turkeys and chickens ... so please write to the websites below and also to Rudd and make your opinion count!
For the animals, please...
Please see article below regarding the non-stun slaughter of animals in Australia. Feel free to make a comment at the Farm Weekly website as below
http://fw.farmonline.com.au/news/nationalrural/livestock/news/mideast-princess-in-plea-to-rudd-on-halal-slaughter/1665104.aspx
or (or both)
http://www.watoday.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/inhumane-slaughter-puts-australias-reputation-at-risk-20091101-hrjw.html
Vicki
Editor: See also: Very significant gains made against live sheep-trade cruelty in Middle East
From hunter-gatherers to emerging pathogens
Clearly industrialisation has been the nutrient fertilising the human weed plume. Not only is the insatiable appetite to grow fat from the land, top order humans of the 'first' world have extended that insatiable urge to a growing dependence on materialism, credit, sugar, fat, babies and drugs as if addicted to the principle that more is good. It is beyond the norm. It is cultural extremism. Boom and bust is set to perpetuate with this greed mindset as if last recession was last generation's failure, the current generation knows best.
Big societies insatiably want exponentially more - taller, larger, faster! It's as if humans have become engorged ticks sucking blood from the Earth. Humans have exceeded ecological competence and top order predator status. With billions swarming across the globe humans have become the most invasive pathogen on the planet, invading and multiplying rapidly in not just suitable but unsuitable new habitats which they then convert to suitable, then want more.
To any non-human organism able to comprehend the scourge, this is a scary phenomenon. But the urge to breed is instinctive and encouraged.
Where's the mirror?
I remember
kangaroos ~ I remember when I was about 6 ~ now 57 ~ my dad and another left me in a slab hut whilst they mustered stock for the day ~ Shorthorns half way between Moree and Boggabilla ~ I remember the Roos they drove back for me to see during the mid afternoon ~ one mob, hundred's of them ~ mostly blues and reds ~ I remember the horizon mirage illusion amongst the dust ~ like heat waves over the plains ~ as they approached only a few willga and other sparce scrub scattered around ~ Roos flat out ~ I mean as fast as they go, a few emus too. Do any of you know the panic state a distressed Roo shows and the on guard hop mode they get in? Dad and Neville ~ Neville with his stock whip ~ up and down, I know now, the climax, the smile on my Dads face was getting the Roos together for me only ~ I was in the slab hut by myself, they did it for me. There's more ~ about the shearers stretcher I was left alone to sleep in ~ Well I remember them drinking out side with only the light of a fire ~ I knew gidgie ~ how do you spell it ~ sandle wood, oak, willga and I once new their smell ~ that is what I remember ~ and much much more. I remember. Years later I remember shooting Roos ~ many ~ today I am so sorry for them ~ where are they now ~ and mostly only little ones ~ flighty the shooters say ~ I feel sorry for them. I say. I do not believe the ABS ~ I do not believe the Cull is sustainable ~ I do believe we ~ you and me and our families need to let the law makers know ~ we want our wild life to survive the next ~ say 50 years ~ because I am sure if we are not silly enough to let our beautiful creatures die during say the next 50 years then our off spring ~ our children will be smart enough to look after the mob forever ~ Kangaroos like all creatures are unique and beautiful ~ trevor thompson ~I remember much much more than this.
foraging and industrial societies
I agree that gathering probably contributed the largest part of human diets, but that included crustaceans, molluscs - land and marine - arachnids and insects and birds' eggs. I have read that women's gathering contributed around 70% of hunter-gatherer diets.
Humans have only been engaged in agriculture for about 10,000 years since the last big ice age. During that time the most unequal societies evolved, with large populations and with the majority of people poorly fed. I don't think that we have adapted to this and it is likely to kill many of us off early in the 21st century.
We have entered, with the industrialisation of agriculture, a new era of high fat and simplified carbohydrate consumption. It is probably that diet that signals to some populations that there is plenty to spare, when in reality the fat and sugar is just about all there is to spare and it is not good stuff to store (all of it) as fat.
Food seems to be being used like a narcotic, and their high fat and sugar diet may be one of the things that keeps North Americans from revolting against their long working hours (especially compared to Europe) and poor returns on the personal energy they invest in their society, with so few having any real power or choice in important things.
The gardening societies of the polynesians and micronesians - and indeed all peoples living in clans and tribes after the ice-age - were probably ideal, with a variety of food sources divided up among families sharing the same territory. One of the most notable foods, of which the vast array of species was eradicated in the 20th century in the service of the false god of 'progress' and 'efficiency' was the giant taro. This plant was a staple of polynesia and micronesia. It grew in swamps and provided medications, fibre, and high-energy foods. Large and beautiful specimens would be kept for special occasions. The Japanese still grow taro. There have been attempts to grow and harvest taro on an industrial, massive basis, with the usual results of destroying the delicate societies they nourished and symbolised, reducing taros to a few species, and stuffing up the soils and water tables. Those societies typically also ate lots of fish and trapped or kept small terrestrial animals.
Naturally there were big variations between islander diets, according to what grew and survived on different islands, but there was a typical majority of islands.
For sure, big societies are not beautiful societies.
Sheila Newman, population sociologist
home page
Copyright to the author. Please contact sheila [AT] candobetter org or the editor if you wish to make substantial reproduction or republish.
We are more like foraging herbivores
Tigerquoll, you are correct about top order predators is a key to preserving biodiversity and forest ecosystems. Too many have been eradicated to protect livestock industries and people. However, "top order predators" cannot include humans as the rate of our expansion is far to heavy to support. Our "hunting and gathering" for bearers have been much more celebrated for their hunting, but the reality is that the gathering part was probably much more part of their diet. We are actually physiologically more foraging herbivores than carnivores, despite the hype and what our culture and conditioning tells us.
Economies developed from a culture of breeding, herding and eating animals. Civilisations meant captive domestic animals instead of a subsistence level of hunting. Livestock ownership became a currency.
Our nearest "cousins", Chimpanzees, are omnivores, but the amount of meat they eat is minimal compared to what most human societies eat. Chimps may eat up to 3% meat, but mostly fruits and nuts. Most people accept Darwin's theories, yet throw them out when it is convenient! The food pyramid should be turned upside down.
Custodial approach is most respectful
Vivienne,
I appreciate your insight. I support practices that strive for a humble ecological footprint and the feedback suggests traditional farming of cattle and sheep is an extravagant use of natural resources, so seeking ideas about less impacting alternatives has merit.
I prefer the custodial approach to the stewardship approach in how humans interact with the natural environment. Stewardship presupposes human domination over nature and prescribes responsible caretaker use of that power to treat nature responsibly. But since when have humans been held accountable?
Humans are top dog in nature and watchdog to the extent of ecological dictatorship. Carnivors have their place in nature, like tigerquolls, but human dominance of nature is far more that what quolls take to survive. Humans play god. Playing god is when humans step outside nature. Perhaps celebrating nature has a higher morality than celebrating a human fabricated deity.
The variant species of the quoll are a traditional top order natural predator across Australia's forests in perhaps an equivalent way as the gorilla or lion is a traditional top order predator in Africa. A predator's diet of meat should not shape the degree of respect to preserve their habitat - vegan or carnivore - let's not discriminate on nature's evolution.
Respect for the health and integrity of top order predators is key to preserving biodiversity and forest ecosystems. Much forest management is about trees and ignores the dependent fauna - including the current human myth of prescribed burning.
It is custodial responsibility that humans would be morally correct in pursuing as a philosophy to re-engaged with nature. "Custodial responsibility, sometimes called the principle of inter-generational equity, underpins both the intrinsic value and utlitarian cases for conservation."
I recommend reading: 'Practical Conservation Biology' by David Lindenmayer and Mark Burgman.'
Gorilla the mascot of World Vegan Day
Getting woodchipping Neanderthals to accept deep ecology is not like Christians accepting Muslims as they are, in some ways, on the par. It is more like trying to convince red-neck gun-slinging shooting carnivores to go vegan!
The idea of human dominance has been misconstrued. With the honour of responsibility and stewardship of Earth comes the onerous duty of caretaking and ultimate accountability. Nowhere does God, in any Creation story, give humans the right to destroy, kill and overpopulate or basically trash the planet. Neither is the right to conquer and destroy the natural world and other species. This is what is happening now.
The gorilla has been chosen to be the mascot for this year's World Vegan Day, 1st November These herbivores can weigh between 75 - 180 kilograms but are known to have upper body strength at least six times greater than that of humans. Event organisers were impressed by their strength and ability to live harmoniously with the natural world. Gorillas look fierce, but they are actually shy, friendly animals
In the 2007 Red List of Threatened Species, Western Lowland gorillas are now classified as Critically Endangered. Mountain gorillas are Endangered. Gorillas' main threat is people. They are hunted as food, are susceptible to human diseases and ironically their loss of habitat due to human conflict and habitat destruction.
Going vegan is about celebrating life, health, creative cooking and ethical choices. It is also about caring for Earth's creatures and encouraging a humble footprint on our planet. Deep Ecology and veganism are about harmony and peace, not dominance!
Preaching to the converted
Yep, read Arne Næss' eight principles of Deep Ecology. So how to persuade an eldest son of a champion woodchopper to appreciate and respect the existence values of a forest?
Answer that effectively and you are half way towards appreciating deep rooted 19th Century logging cultures like that still breeding strong in NW Tasmania with a one eyed view of the dollar value of old growth forests. Check these popular sites and appreciate the embedded culture you come up against:
Tasmanian Woodchopping Carnivals
Axeman's Complex (Tas)
Tasmania's Legendary Axeman David Foster
Deloraine Axemens Club Inc. (Tas)
..just back from Tasmania's north west, where one must have passed a few dozen B-double log trucks loaded with big native tree logs, plus three busy saw mills.
It's almost like getting Christians to accept Muslims.
Deep Ecology
Deep Ecology is the belief that the world does not exist purely as a resource for man's benefit. The world exists for its own sake. We are a part of this wonderful and diverse creation but we do not own it. Our culture tells us that the way we are living is the best that human beings have ever had. It is the best that we could hope for. The world was made for man and our destiny is to conquer and rule it.
Our cultural ecology sees human beings as separate from and superior to the rest of nature. We believe that all of creation exists for man's benefit.
Deep Ecology advocates a change in culture to one where we see human beings as equal partners in the community of life but not the owners.
Our culture with its sneering sense of superiority thinks that is the best way of life humans have ever lived. Our culture detests the way of life of so called "savages." We patronise developing nations and impose our values onto them, then urbanisation and industrialisation is promoted as an ideal, a way to emulate.
Tribal cultures were sustainable because their vision meant they did not devour the world. They did not see the world as theirs so they did not turn the world all into human food. www.deep-ecology-hub.com
Colonialism destroyed tribal societies, and imposed the evils "civilization" onto them.
Rudd has no mandate to exceed Australia's carrying capacity
The Rudd government has no mandate to exceed Australia's carrying capacity.
* Labor had no electoral platform on population growth going into the 2007 federal election
* There is no Labor policy on immigration or population growth
* There have been no federal bills passed to perpetuate/accelerate immigration numbers - have there?
* There has been no national debate on immigration and population growth
* The ALP National Platform and Constitution 2009 [http://www.alp.org.au/platform/index.php] makes no mention of population policy or immigration, as listed in chapter headings below.
•Chapter 1 - Governing for Australia's long-term future
•Chapter 2 - Securing our future with responsible economic management
•Chapter 3 - Building a 21st century economy
•Chapter 4 - Delivering fairness for working families
•Chapter 5 - An Education Revolution for Australia's future
•Chapter 6 - Preparing Australia for the health needs of the future
•Chapter 7 - Securing an inclusive future for all Australians
•Chapter 8 - Strengthening regional and local communities
•Chapter 9 - Tackling climate change and our environmental challenges
•Chapter 10 - Strengthening Australia in a changing world
•Chapter 11 - New ways of governing for a stronger democracy
...population ? immigration? ... no mention
So the logical conclusion is that Kevin Rudd himself must have a personal agenda driving the immigration explosion out of some personal pet desire and in doing so is abusing his powerful privileged position as Prime Minister of Australia. May be Rudd has convinced himself that since Australia has a history of immigration and has done arguably well from it, so more must be better.
The problem with this approach is that Rudd has no measurement in place to assess the economic, social and environmental impacts of each additional 100,000 immigrants walking through airline international arrival gates. Thee impacts are being felt not at federal level but at state level in NSW, VIC, QLD, WA and even Tasmania. State budgets are not coping and can't fund vital infrastructure - housing, transport, health, education, public services.
Public services are being diluted and quality of life is being downgraded. Australians' fundamental right to preserve Australian values and way of life is being squandered on one man's personal fettish. Australia's way of life is not that of congested countries like Hong Kong, yet Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane are increasingly adopting a Hong Kong look and feel.
Rudd has no clear sense of what population size is optimal. What is the carrying capaity of Australia? When is enough enough? Well when cities run out of water this is a natural sign that capacity has been reached. Cities that have or have started planning for high energy sucking desalination plants are surely exceeding their capacity. On this basis Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth are at capacity. They need stomach stapling so to speak.
May be Rudd has convinced himself that Australia should be a big boy like those of the countries he is mixing with on his international travels. This is the 'bigger must be better' philosophy. Since when? Rudd's head space must be in the clouds, blissfully ignorant of how his simple ignorant policy of encouraging mass immigration is having on ordinary Australians.
Immigration and climate change
Dear Vivienne,
Thanks for taking the time to speak out on this issue of ever increasing importance. It's well past time we had a full, intelligent and informed public debate about this issue. Australians have been too long been disenfranchised about this issue - we need to speak out now clearly and intelligently and make our leaders listen! After an election where he carefully avoided mentioning immigration Rudd has imposed record immigration levels upon us without our consent. He suddenly came out the other night and said he believes in a big Australia - well why didn't he tell us before the election instead of treating us like children. Of course the debate is about numbers and not about 'types' of people - the word 'racism' has no proper place here- regards Peter
US double standards on Iranian nulcear program
Subject was: "politically incorrect" - JS
SMH ignores US double standard
The following letter is in response to a Sydney Morning Herald editorial. It was sent to that paper but not published. -
Your editorial, "Iran's radioactive reasoning" (September 29) failed- to mention the exposed double standard the US is using about to nuclear weapons in the Middle East.
While the US is turning a blind eye on the grave danger Israel's nuclear weapons represent to world peace and security, it applies harsh pressure on Iran and other countries to prevent it from possessing nuclear technology.
The only country that is defying international law, hundreds of UN resolutions, launching wars and oppressing and occupying other people's territories in the Middle East is Israel and not Iran.
Why does the US not also demand that Israel allow, within weeks, unlimited access to the secret plants and sign the Non Proliferation Treaty as Iran and all Arab countries have done?
The danger of Israel's nuclear weapons and the double standards is that it will push Iran and other countries in the future to possess deterrent nuclear weapons.
Ali Kazak, former ambassador of Palestine
Our numbers will double in 36 years!
The "parasitic elites" are trying to make us accept a 35 million figure for 2050. However, this will inevitably blow out, just like Melbourne's growth zone has done already, and Australia's population growth has surpassed projections. Unless our immigration rate is drastically slowed down, our numbers will double in 36 years! In this case, we will be much closer to 50 million by 2050. We humans have an evolutionary flaw in our failure to comprehend exponential growth. Water allocated to the red gum wetlands along the Murray had to be cut due to the needs of consumers. Additional population growth will eat away at our remaining forests and waterways in the quest for "jobs" and "economic benefits", and our land will be a dry, hot and sterile desert. Of course as long as our GDP is growing, the wealthy elites will be able to find sanctuary in their private acreages and ivory towers while the rest struggle against the tide global tides of shortages and poverty.
Australia won't be able to help feed the hungry world!
Former World Bank economist and Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture executive director Marco Ferroni told the Rural Press Club of Victoria it was sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia that needed to increase production to feed the world. Australia, the US and Argentina won't be able to feed the world. Mr Ferroni said the developed world had become complacent about food security in the past 30 years.
Also, Department of Primary Industries chief scientist Graham Mitchell told guests at Grains Innovation Park's 40th birthday celebrations in Horsham Victoria last week that the arithmetic of to feed a growing population with less land and less water is one of the biggest issues facing scientists around the world "causes sleepless nights".
"We need to double the amount of food by 2050 with a quarter less land - and the gorilla in the room is overpopulation, " Dr Mitchell said.
Dr Mitchell said the past 50 years of Australian agriculture had been relatively stable, but a tsunami of instability and change was predicted.
We have governments and economist aiming to increase our population to stimulate the economy, but all the signs point to the reality that with environmental threats and food shortage looming, we are likely to have problems feeding the population we have, and export overseas.
Why don't governments and economists listen to scientists? Our safe future depends on it. It is not one gorilla in the room, but a jungle full of them (despite the fact that they are being pushed off the planet) but still they don't hear the warnings of impending perils to our survival.
Incessant mass immigration a variant of the Shock Doctrine
A very necessary and timely article.
I think we should regard mass immigration as a variant of the of other tools of disaster capitalism, referred to in Naomi Klein's towering "The Shock Doctrine" of 2007 (even though Klein, unfortunately, adopts an implicit politically correct pro-immigration stance, as discussed in Sheila's article here.
How to overcome the disorganisation caused by the incessant waves of immigration that Howard imposed on us and Rudd continues to impose upon us, will prove to be a difficult, but not altogether insurmountable challenge. This article will be a very good start to a discussion on how to meet that challenge.
Union takes stand against shooters party & NSW Gov
"Union orders rangers to defy hunting in parks
LOUISE HALL
26/10/2009 6:28:00 AM
UNION bosses have pledged to fight any deal the Rees Government negotiates with the Shooters' Party that would allow the hunting of feral animals in national parks.
The Public Service Association, which represents park rangers, has ordered its members not to assist in establishing recreational hunting in national parks in NSW.
The association's general secretary, John Cahill, says without the support of park rangers, a plan to introduce regulated hunting under the supervision of NSW National Parks would likely fail.
He called on uniformed rangers and other union members to attend a rally organised by the Greens tomorrow outside Parliament House.
The Shooters' Party, which holds the balance of power in the Legislative Council, says the bill will allow licensed gun owners the opportunity to play a more active role in conservation hunting programs in public lands. (...)"
More here:http://theland.farmonline.com.au/news/state/agribusiness-and-general/general/union-orders-rangers-to-defy-hunting-in-parks/1658804.aspx?src=enews
'Growth' pushers well understand the harm they cause
Some good points have been made here and above, but I think they fall into the trap of crediting the growth pushers with far less nefarious motives than they deserve to be.
That population growth could possibly be good is self-evidently ridiculous.
Once, decades ago, before Australia reached its population size, maybe.
And just maybe, theoretically, in the future, if we can somehow fix up the land, our forests and our waterways, take proper care of all our endangered fauna and flora and all agree to live in a far less materially profligate fashion, we may be able to squeeze a few more millions into our now largely barren and dry continent.
But, today, amidst the ecological crises and crises of resource scarctiy, on top of the chaos and waste caused by extreme laissez faire free market capitalism, it is insane from the point of view of our society as a whole, and these economists who pretend otherwise are lying through their teeth.
They are lying on behalf of a cynical parasitic elite amongst us, who have calculated that by trashing our environment with more people and making us all, on average, necessarily poorer and by wasting enormous resources coping with the diseconomies of scale you refer to, they can profit at an even further cost to the rest of us.
All the economic activity of the population-growth-pushing sector adds nothing to the overall wealth of this nation[1] but takes a good deal away.
The people pushing population growth are the moral equivalent of those who would burn a house to the ground in order to destroy any possible evidence linking them to the burglary of that house.
The only thing more stupid than 'growing' an economy through population growth is 'growing' and economy through war.
For further information, please read "How the growth lobby threatens Australia's future" of 24 Jan 09.
Footnotes
1. Arguably, wealth brought in by immigrating overseas elites, and to a smaller degree, some of those with skills trained by other, often poorer societies, could be considered in some sensed as exceptions to this as it would add to the overall wealth of this nation, but at the expense of the overall wealth of the nation from which they come. Of course almost none of this wealth would end up in the hands of ordinary Australians.
Economystic population growth delusions
Economists who think that exponential population growth is "good" is because it improves the economy by increasing the number of consumers.
To quote American anti-immigration writer Lawrence Auster:
"The prevailing view of immigration among mainstream elites is that it represents a great boon to the economy. That immigration is only to be considered from the standpoint of its economic effects has become such an accepted notion over the past 25 years that it has not occurred to many people what a bizarre idea it really is. The implication is that our well-being as a society is solely a function of economic output. Matters of quality of life, social cohesion and continuity, aesthetic enjoyment, political liberty, national identity, and all the other intangibles that make up the life of a society—since these cannot be stated statistically, they don’t count. Or so the economists seem to believe. The late Julian Simon, with his crack-pated idea that every immigrant, regardless of his cultural origin, level of education, or legal status, represents a net economic gain for this country, was perhaps the most extreme of these “economystics.”
Notwithstanding the veneer of scientific expertise with which its claims are advanced, the economystic faith boils down to an almost vacuous proposition: immigration is good because it increases population, and thus (assuming more economic output from more people) proportionately increases gross product. A doubling or tripling of the U.S. population will lead to a doubling or tripling of economic output. Voilà—immigration makes us a “wealthier” nation! One of the problems with this logic is that individual wealth does not necessarily increase, only the aggregate wealth. Meanwhile, our congested coastal and metropolitan areas have become two or three times more crowded. Pressure on open spaces and parks, stress on resources (increasing the need for burdensome regulations), crippling traffic congestion, displacement of older residents, as well as ethnic conflict, all become worse. Even as economic output goes up, overall quality of life can decline. But the economystic cannot see these things because for him the only reality is that which can be stated in economic terms.
For the economystic, the swelling of Los Angeles due to immigration has been a wonderful thing. According to the Los Angeles Times, “Development policies over the last decade have sought to make the Los Angeles area the magnet of the burgeoning Pacific Rim economy. The region’s growth has been phenomenal, as measured by trade revenues, number of building permits issued and aggregate income.” Sounds great, right? But the article continued: “The success of Los Angeles’ integration into the international economy, however, is not matched by success in integrating its immigrant and ethnic minority populations.” The article then discussed the uncontrolled ethnic rivalry and violence in this new “world-class” city of Los Angeles.(5)
In other words, the great economic growth of Los Angeles has not necessarily been a boon for the people living there. By most standards, Los Angeles over the last 30 years has become an immeasurably worse place to live in as a direct result of the very things that have led to the growth of its aggregate wealth. The economystic cannot see this. He looks at a table of statistics, notices the upward trend in population and aggregate income, and rushes into print telling us how immigration is turning America into an earthly paradise."
Source
Australia the "lucky country" is fading into history!
THE OECD and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation have just released their combined annual agricultural outlook. It suggests that with one billion undernourished people in the world already, food availability must increase by 60 per cent in the next 20 years to overcome this shortage. Food prices will continue to rise, and the growing demand for biofuel is another factor that will impact on food production.
With less arable land and global population continuing to grow, increasing food production by 60 per cent in 20 years is going to be a phenomenal challenge and maybe impossible!
We can't just keep destroying oceans, rivers, forests and biodiversity and expect resources to just keep expanding!
Australia, as a leading developed country, needs to show some initiative in dealing with humanity’s challenges. However, both our political parties are committed to growth and greed!
Rarely do politicians listen to climate scientists, nor will the atmosphere cooperate with governments trying to obtain a balance between addressing climate change, the demand for jobs, threats to food production, water shortages and securing votes! Climate change is caused by over-population of people and their unrealistic demands on natural resources and energy.
Before being elected, Kevin Rudd stated that climate change was the greatest moral challenge of all time. Continuing to add people to Australia is his way of boosting his political power and with more impoverished, desperate and dis- empowered people their business sponsors will have an endless resource of unemployed and underemployed to exploit. State leaders willingly cooperate as they receive more taxes and revenues. We will find more people living in third-world conditions while the power monopolies accumulate wealth. Australia as the "lucky country" is fading into history!
Economists and mad men!
Economists who think that exponential population growth is "good" is because it improves the economy by increasing the number of consumers. Australia is a land of immigrants and this policy of welcoming people as residents has helped bring us prosperity and cultural diversity. However, more of a good thing is not necessarily better! Medicine is good, but taking more than prescribed is NOT better. Economist and demographers who apply rules without basic biological understandings of ecological communities are living in a vacuum. Growth cannot continue forever, and if we tip over sustainability the benefits will turn to detriments and destroy the building blocks that sustain life. All economists should have a basic understandings of biology and ecology, the "web of life" without which we could not live on planet Earth!
Kenneth Boulder's Dismal Theorems
Kenneth Ewart Boulding (January 18, 1910 – March 18, 1993) was an economist, educator, peace activist, poet, religious mystic, devoted Quaker, systems scientist, and interdisciplinary philosopher.
He said: "Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist."
First Theorem: "The Dismal Theorem"
If the only ultimate check on the growth of population is misery, then the population will grow until it is miserable enough to stop its growth.
Second Theorem: "The Utterly Dismal Theorem"
Any technical improvement can only relieve misery for a while, for so long as misery is the only check on population, the improvement will enable population to grow, and will soon enable more people to live in misery than before.
Third Theorem: "The moderately cheerful form of the Dismal Theorem"
Fortunately, it is not too difficult to restate the Dismal Theorem in a moderately cheerful form: if something else, other then misery and starvation, can be found which will keep a prosperous population in check, the population does not have to grow until it is miserable and starves, and it can be stably prosperous.
At least kangaroos are able to regulate their own reproduction and control their own fertility.
Politicians like Kevin Rudd lack the will to view population growth as something to be avoided due to the monetary benefits of taxes and mass markets. Population growth doesn't solve problems, but rather invites even more growth. We are selfishly creating larger impacts for future generations to cope with. As relatively new-comers to Australia, we haven't learnt much from the original inhabitants!
Kevin Rudd: the greatest social threat to Australia for our time
If one was to analyse the on ground impacts to Australia since Rudd came to power, and ignore the puffery like the 2020 talkfest or public Sorry statement, Rudd's personal secret agenda for Australia is disturbing and irreversibly changing Australia's social make up and undermining our core values. The Rudd Record to date is:
* Record immigration
* Record overseas flights playing foreign minister and Obama patsy
* No action on climate change or environment
* Massive spending on carbon accelerating militarisation
* No action improving indigenous rights, self-determination and health - instead of saying sorry, Rudd should have been frank with his intent and said 'stuff ya'
* No action on long term infrastructure investment
* Billions on bailing out greedy banks and dodgy investments
* No action on anything from Rudd's 2020 summit circus
Rudd's undisclosed personal agenda is driving federal Labor without question because they are turning a blind eye based on Rudd's electoral mandate and popular polling. Rudd is pursuing a personal mission of power abuse to hget his way. Rudd has outstepped his democratic mandate. Local and state governments are reeling and yet to intimidated to challenge Rudd.
Rudd has become Australia's greatest sovereignty threat equivalent to the historically proven misguided level of Britain's Neville Chamberlain. As Chamberlain naively pronounced to the British people on 30 September 1938 from his false reading of the Munich Agreement:
"My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time... Go home and get a nice quiet sleep."
Copenhagen for Rudd looks set to become the Australian electorate's awakening of Rudd's concept of 'peace for our time'.
Robert Burns: How Scotland's elites betrayed their people
The following is from an article, "'A Parcel of Rogues' Musical Interlude" on the blog Mild Colonial Boy, which includes an excerpt from this article.
The Corries — Such a Parcel Of Rogues in the Nation
The Corries sing a poem of Robert Burns written in 1791 to protest the Acts of Union 1707. Some Scots, such as Robert Burns, saw it as an act of betrayal by a traitorous Political Elite handing over Scotland to alien masters.
Some Readers may see parallels to the Australia of today with it’s Political Elites’ handing Australia over to the whims of foreigners through the bipartisan policies of high Immigration and Multiculturalism at the expense of traditional Australia.
Such a Parcel Of Rogues in the Nation
by Robert Burns
Fareweel to a’ our Scottish fame,
Fareweel our ancient glory!
Fareweel ev’n to the Scottish name.
Sae famed in martial story!
Now Sark rins over Salway sands,
An’ Tweed rins to the ocean,
To mark where England’s province stands --
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!
What force or guile could not subdue
Thro’ many warlike ages
Is wrought now by a coward few
For hireling traitor’s wages.
The English steel we could disdain,
Secure in valour’s station;
But English gold has been our bane --
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!
O, would, or I had seen the day
That Treason thus could sell us,
My auld grey head had lien in clay
Wi’ Bruce and loyal Wallace!
But pith and power, till my last hour
I’ll mak this declaration :-
‘We’re bought and sold for English gold’--
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!
Boat voyage $3000 cheaper than Immigration agents
In Bill Hoffman's article, "Boat people not the issue", he mentions the $15,000 per head paid by the Tamils to get on the boat for Australia, I think this is the same number that has been quoted widely in the media.
In the article from The Australian, it says immigration agents have been asking for up to $18,000 to create a fictitious loan as evidence that student visa applicants from the subcontinent had the means to study in Australia. Looks like there is a an easier and quiter way of making it to our shores than a rickety boat. There is no mention in the article of how many student visa applicants slipped through the net using this fraud.
Bogus loans used in student visa scam
Guy Healy, Higher education writer | October 24, 2009
Article from: The Australian
FALSIFIED Indian bank and loan statements are being used to underwrite a people-smuggling operation centred on student visas, forcing the cancellation of at least 500 applications from Indian nationals....
Kevin Rudd needs a "big" nation for his ego?
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd last week defended his belief in a "big Australia" - ''I think it's good for us, it's good for national security long term, it's good in terms of what we can sustain as a nation".
At our present rate of population growth, we will have closer to 50 million by 2050, not 35 million!
Further cramming more people into our already congested cities, and further demands on our already natural resources, is not "good for us" or for the "working families" we often hear concern for. The only thing "good" about an overpopulated Australia will be for the benefit of Kevin Rudd and his elite business supporters!
As for national security, more people means more cannon fodder for defense like the Bush regime lured Latinos to USA with promises of financial security and citizenship.
What "sustains" our nation is our biodiversity and the web of life, Australia's ecological systems. Already we have lack of water, pollution, overfishing, loss of indigenous species, ruin of Ramsar wetlands , threats to the Great Barrier Reef, and a massive oil spill in the Timor Sea etc. The demands for jobs and economic benefits will eat away and pollute existing natural life-supporting features and Australia will be a hot and sterile dust bowl.
This megalomaniac wants to be a ruler over a "big" nation - and its all about a little man with ego needs! This seemingly mind-mannered, bookish, spiritual man has some serious personality/self-esteem issues and if he needs a "big"nation he should see a psychiatrist!
Rees supporting Mad Max 4 - says it all!
Petrol head Nathan Rees was behind the Repco Rally and sorted political legislation to make it happen, same with V8 Supercars ripping through Homebush. So somehow I expected to see him supporting the forth Mad Max film being announced today for New South Wales. The original Mad Max was screened back in 1979.
As Rees sees it - simple - more jobs for mechanics, spray painters nd tourism - jobs, jobs, jobs. But film making is a one off. So like mining companies than come and go sacking workers as hey move on so will this film. Boom and bust mentality perpetuates like the 19th Century gold rush.
Now there digging up the 1970s for a remake. It's like Bowie's Life on Mars remastered. But I wish "Fury Road" every success for Australia's struggling film industry, although can't we find a new subject? How about a file called 'Franklin' with Australia's best actors and emerging actors retelling the iconic environmental and social battle of Australia's recent history? It would be new, fresh and topical.
Anyway, may be Mel s Max 4 may wish to do a Silvester Stalone come back. The NSW Film & Television Office is now part of Rees mega department Industry & Investment NSW. It all sounds energetic, but can someone name just one project out of it that is fully funded, approved and underway with a 5 year life or longer let alone beyond the NSW election cycle.
Nathan relishes any business announcement especially one that involves cars. Pity Bridgestone has suddenly announced closing up shop in South Australia with no thought to redeploying its 600 Australian employees.
Executive director of the Australian Institute for Social Research, Associate Professor John Spoehr, says ""We know from the past that around about one-third of manufacturing workers that lose their jobs during downturns go on to be long-term unemployed."
[SOURCE: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/10/24/2723176.htm]
The writing is on the wall for the automotive industry in Australia, but some petrol heads just can't give up the addiction and keep tuning into Top Gear 'to keep the dream alive'.
Rees says 'keep it simple stupid'! Well simple ideas for simple minds as other say. NSW has become the meat head state! May be I should change my number plate.
Rudd Gates - a pet project of Kevin Rudd without mandate
I agree with quarkasylum's article above.
The less than 1% of total immigrants to Australia from the desperate refugees fleeing persecution from Sri Lanka pales in terms of the real immigration pressures impacting at airports at Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
Sydney's international arrivals terminal has become the start and driver of most social and public infrastructure pressures imposed on Australia. Yet Rudd blissfully ignores this direct immigration pressure on society and in his high minded state, self-justifies population increase as performing some out of touch noble international missionary duty.
Any criticism is branded with propagandic racism slur.
It is blantant exploitation of a politician's pet project fettih once handed too much power. Rudd is guilty.
Currently the most moral international duty for Australia should be to stand up for the oppressed minorities in our region (not the US instigated mess of Iraq and Afghanistan) but Australia's immediate dependent neighbours of East Timor, West Papuans, Soloman Islanders, indigenous Fijians, indigenous Vanuatans and the persecuted Tamils of Sri Lanka.
Where is the Rudd government's public criticism of the Sinhalese Sri Lankan genocide of its ethic Tamils?
The Rudd government's undisclosed accelerating record of legal immigration through our key international airport hubs has no electoral mandate - but yet our naive media feed on the oppressed and desperate 1% and are almost incitng racism in their fettish for scandal.
Rudd accepted government with no mandate to promise to immigrant lobby groups to ramp up immigration when he got to power. Remember Maxine McKew displaced Howard in his own electorate back in the 2007 federal election largely because she appealed to the Chinese vote of that electorate.
Perhaps a 4 Corners investigation is warranted into Labor deals done to rid PM Howard of a long held safe Liberal seat?
The Australian federal government website has no information on the Rudd Government's immigration policy. Seems Rudd's Mein Kamf has being withheld - another ambitious politician who once tastes power is too tempted to live out personal pet programmes like the kings of old who could order wishes at whim.
Check http://www.australia.gov.au/topics/immigration
The logical conclusion with this state of affairs is that Rudd is using and abusing his grasp of power and influence to pursue his personal pet desire to massively increase Australia's population with overseas immigrants.
Problem is that he hasn't presented a policy and allowed for public discussion and approval. His government has let the resultant presures of hsi mass influx burden and stress Australia's major capital cities Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane with flow on effects on the smaller major cities. Darwin and Tasmania have ever before experiences such pressures on rent and housing affordability. This is a litmus test showing that Australia isn’t coping with Rudd's undisclosed personal fettish to maximise immigration.
Rudd's pompous fluff about making "no apology" for illegal immigration is a bit rich. Illegals make up less that 1% of immigration, so Rudd' tough stance is on the periphery. Clearly this is to distract from his real fettish - maximising legal immigration.
Rudd is the key driver of the demise of Australia's way of life as we had it before these mass population pressures. Housing is in short supply, transport infrastructure is inadequate, hospitals can't cope - all public infrastructure in Victora, NSW and Queensland are not coping with the federal population explosion policy. But these three Labor state governments remain compliant, complicit and silent about the demand side of the public service and infrastructure problem as if Rudd has them by the short and curlies.
Rees, Brumby and Bligh lack leadership to stand up to Rudd for the economic, social and environmental degradation he inflicting on their constituents
Rudd seems to have a Chinese embracing vision for Australia. But his already mass immigration legacy will burden and culturally change Australia for generations. Question is has Rudd's pet projects been thought through and put to demographic experts or does Rudd consider himself judge, jury and executioner in the same vane as Henry VIII? Rudd's electoral promises, his 2020 Summit promises and his sorry statement to Aborigines have now proven hollow rhetoric. Rudd is capitalising on the lack of alternative political leadership in Australia on the other sideof the chamber.
Rudd's political winfall of power has gone to his head. Rudd has become dangerous for Australia to the extent that his pet projects will blind him to real on ground issues. But on ground pressures are only going to get a whole lot worse, yet no-one in Australian politics seems able to come within a bull's roar of seriously challenging Rudd's arrogance for his pet projects.
Murdoch, Privatisation and the Wheat Board scandal
Hi James,
Well, what you say about the Wheatboard scandal reminds me of another thing that the Murdoch press favour - privatisation - and its role in placing the Wheatboard beyond the control of government and the courts. (I am not sure what role this may or may not have played in the AWB scandal - do you know?)
Here is the article:
Justice Michael Kirby on
Why Privatisation is wrong (reproduced below)
The Hon Justice Michael Kirby AC CMG*, went to the trouble in 2006 to warn1 Australians about the dangers of privatization removing important government functions to a position beyond the laws made to administer them fairly.
He said “The ‘commercialisation’ of the public sector means that isolating the activities and decisions of government from those of the private sector is becoming a more complicated, and sometimes, seemingly, an impossible exercise.”(p.3)
“The exercise of public power is fundamentally different in character to the making of a decision in a purely private context. Decisions are then being made on behalf of the people, typically involving the use of money raised from, and power derived from, the people. Higher standards of accountability and responsibility are therefore attached to the decisionmaker. Public power imports public accountability, including before the courts.” (p.4)
“This reduction in accountability is a result of removing control over day-to-day actions and decisions from the relevant Minister and government departments to private sector bodies whose ultimate legal responsibility is to their shareholders, rather than to the public interest more generally.” (p.6)
He goes on to describe the outcome of a series of cases involving the High Court where the law encountered problems in getting public accountability. This problem arose in NEAT Domestic Trading Pty Ltd v AWB Ltd (2003) 216 CLR 277. It involved officials of the Wheat Board who had refused six applications from another trader(NEAT) to export bulk wheat. The AWB had acquired through its creation by government, the power to prevent by veto bulk wheat exports from Australia. It could do this by withholding approval. The power to approve or veto exports normally belongs to a government body because it is a legal power. As such it is normally reviewable and controllable through the courts. That is, the judicial representatives of “we the public” can ensure that Australian trade is conducted fairly.
The outcome of this case was that Australians had lost the power to control the nation’s wheat exports by giving that power to this private body.
Because of this case, and others, it seems very wrong for Mr Carr, Mr Keating, the Murdoch Press and the many others we hear of to be urging Mr Iemma to privatize electricity against the will of the bulk of the NSW electorate and the NSW Labor Party.
The government has given up a great deal of control to corporations in the area of banking (through deregulation) and the banks have become too strong to effectively control. There seems every reason for Australians to disbelieve reassurances that all will be well with the corporatisation and privatization of electricity, water, ports and municipal government functions and assets.
Privatisation means transferring the powers conferred by ownership of an influential or vital asset or trade from elected government to private individuals. The only reason government gained control of them in the first place was because communities gave them that control. The communities did not ever give them the power to transfer those assets and resources. This power has been achieved without real consent. In the case of our electricity, water and savings, this means that we are (involuntarily) giving up control over resources and assets upon which our comfort and ultimately our lives depend.
Peoples form governments to protect them from this kind of situation yet our State and Federal governments are gradually removing the protections they were created to provide.
This is a bad thing and Australians have reason for grave concern.
Justice Kirby concluded, “It is no good Australia preaching good governance of other lands if it neglects the issue at home.
“I commend a reflection upon these aspects of governance to all participants in this conference concerned with the basic parameters of accountability in the deployment of public power. Public power and the use of public funds beget the need for public accountability. We should never forget or neglect this basic rule.” (p.14)
But most Australians have either forgotten or given up on this simple rule.
The speech referred to was by Justice Kirby, in the University of Canberra, Corporate Governnace ARC Research Project, Corporate Governance in the Public Sector Dinner, High Court of Australia, Canberra, 9 March 2006. The speech is downloadable from here as 53K pdf file.
Sheila Newman, population sociologist
home page
Why Murdoch still prefers the Liberal Party
Great article, Sheila.
You wrote:
Clearly the Murdoch Press is pleased with Kevin Rudd's performance to date and they don't regret the departure of Howard, although they know that some of their readers still do.
My own view is that the Murdoch press would have preferred that Howard win the 2007 election. Of course, they make much of their editiorials immediately prior to the election (Thursday in the Courier Mail as I recollect), after much ostensible weighing up of the relative merits of the two supposedly 'worthy candidates', calling for a vote for Mr. Rudd
Clearly, to maintain their value as propaganda organs, the Australian the Courier-Mail and other Murdoch papers have to, on occasions, tell the truth and appear to take the side of the people.
They did the latter prior to the 2007 elections.
If they had not, and had overtly supported, yet again, the lying, incompetent, and malevolent Howard Government, their ability to subsequenlty fool public opinion and to corral the Rudd Government into accepting its agenda would have been far more limited.
It seems more than likely than not that they judged that they could not save Howard's miserable hide, yet again, in 2007. In fact, to me, it seems more likely that overt support for Howard by the Murdoch Press in the 2007 elections may actually have worked against him.
So, instead they hedged their bets.
In fact, given the mountain of scandals against the Howard Government, the Murdoch press was indeed heavily biased in favour of Howard Government. As one of many examples I could give: remember the AWB scandal, in which the Howard Governmnt allowed AU$296 of bribe money to be paid to the same regime of Saddam Hussein that, in 2003, it insisted was such a mortal threat to world peace, that we were left with no choice but to immediately invade Iraq then and there? Like most Australians, I believe that Howard and Downer knew precisely what was going on all along and, therefore, belong behind bars. However the Australian, feigning astonishing gullibility, insisted that it was all the fault of the AWB bosses and that Howard and Downer had truly been kept in the dark.
Even if the Australian could possibly have accepted such a tall story, at the very least it owed to its readers to remind them, and repeatedly remind them, until election day that it was unfit to hold office. Given its role in bringing about the early election that resulted in the removal of the Whitlam Government in 1975 for alleged incompetence of a far smaller magnitude, why didn't it demand new elections then and there?
The fact that the Howard Government ever stood a chance of being re-elected after the essential truth of the AWB scandal became known is an indication of the media's, and in particular, the Murdoch media's, blatant bias in favour of John Howard that continued right up to election day in 2007. (Some may be interested in a post I wrote arguing essentially the same on an Online Opinion disscussion forum in response to the article "Judging Howard" by Chris Lewis of 7 Sep 09.)
The fact that the Australian's strategy of hedging its bets now seems to have paid off shouldn't therefore be taken as proof that they prefer Labor over the Coalition. However rotten Federal Labor in Government may be, it still appears to be subject to more constraints from their grass roots membership and trade union base, from behaving like the tyrannical feudal despots that the Coalition in Government has shown itself to be.
So, even though a Federal Labor Government may not be ideal for Murdoch, it's a damn good consolation prize.
Given a few more months of Federal Labor incompetence and trampling on its own support base, having them thrown out and replaced by the more trusty Coalition Federal Government should not pose an inordinately difficult challenge to the Murdoch Press, that is unless, we remain vigilant against it.
It's important that we do what we can to prevent the Murdoch Press orchestrating political events to suit its own agenda as it has many times in the past. However much we rightly feel revulsion at the Rudd Government we should not allow ourselves to automatically fall into line behind any future demands by the Mrudoch press for its removal.
Of course, what has to be done is to build a viable political alternative to both the Coalition and Labor. The Greens still appear, in spite of havinn almost countless opportunities handed to them on platters in recent decades, incapable of becoming that alternative. So it seems that that alternative will have to come from elsewhere.
Foreign Aid fallacies
The Aid Agencies all function on two fallacious beliefs:
1. That industrialisation is progress and will cure all ills
2. That overpopulation is normal for the third world and can be cured by industrialisation in an ideology known as 'the demographic transition', which has so often been shown to be fallacious that you wonder that the AID people and the politicians who so often quote it, continue
AID agencies, and particularly the UN, avoid looking at the theft of land by colonials and big business and justify the failure to return land with the 'industrialisation cures all ills' ideology, thus allowing corporations to buy it all up, and allowing new colonisation by China and India, for instance, in Africa.
There are a number of amazing books about Foreign Aid Agencies which would put you off giving them chewing-gum off your shoe. So many are busy in there providing cover (whether they know it or not) for foreign warmongers who want to make trouble in adjacent countries with various minerals or oil.
Somalia is a very good example of all of these things. A book now out of print is Michael Marin, The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity,
The book is all about Western intervention in Somalia, plus Marin's investigation of a number of well-known aid organisations, notably some of the ones that get people to sponsor a child - CARE and Save the Children, notably.
He shows how Somalia, once self-sufficient due to herding and nomadic lifestyles on marginal lands, overpopulated and destroyed those previously well-maintained lands, due to the provision of wells for permanent populations and other really arrogant and stupid 'progressive' agricultural innovations - none of them necessary at all - merely dictated by the ideology of 'progress'.
(See also the "Kalahari fires" article on this site which is a study of traditional nomadic lifestyles on marginal land.)
Somalian politicians (the modern variety) - not the ordinary people - abused the aid system by setting up pseudo refugee camps among other things, but the aid system had done the damage and set in train the overpopulation.
Maren argues that the aid business is driven by the grain merchants, to guarantee income for grain that might otherwise not find buyers in any year. The objective is to sell the grain, not to help people, some of who do not need or want that help in any particular year.
Maren says that journalists are uncritical of the aid agencies because they rely on them, presumably for stories and safe passage.
Maren's is not the only book I have read on the subject, but it is the one I most recently read, albeit now out of print.
If you go to internet sites about Africa, Somalia etc you will be able to put together the same stories, especially from independent local writers.
All in all it would be better if we all grew and manufactured what we needed locally. The third world does not benefit from trade; the rich in the first and the third world benefit from trade in the third world.
Australia is increasingly subject to the same treatment as third world countries, with foreign purchases of land, especially agricultural land, dispossessing the local farmers and local people forced by inflation to live in accomodation with no possibility of any self-sufficiency.
Colonialism produces poverty and there is a constant drive to keep that system going.
Sheila Newman, population sociologist
home page
Sandra Kanck should look at Canada's refugee debacle
So Sandra Kanck thinks cutting the intake of skilled migrants in favour of more refugees is the humanitarian course. She should take a look at research done on the impact of the immigration selection process for Canada and the United States. Professor Herbert Grubel in his seminal study of immigrants who came to Canada between 1990 and 2002 came to the very same conclusion that Ed Rubenstein and Robert Rector did concerning the United States. Unskilled immigrants, who comprise 80% of all those who come to Canada, including the relatives of "professionals", impose a fiscal burden that was $18.3 billion a year by 2002, but now is probably close to $30 billion. They simply cannot earn enough income to reimburse the state for the services they consume. In fact, to break even, the government needs to have a taxpayer earn $25,000 annually. McJobs will not pay for our health care system, our children's education or our pension outlays.
This deficit represents a huge opportunity cost, not only to Canadians who need those dollars for social services but to the investment needed to boost productivity. A Canada with higher productivity and a sustainable population would be better able to assist the world's poor, and poverty and overshoot are the root causes of the conflicts that drive people to flee their homelands. The Australian Conservation Foundation took the same position regarding Australia in recent years. The money deployed in providing services to unskilled immigrants is money that could also be spent in dispensing foreign aid made conditional on family planning. This money could reduce the 'push' factors that encourage migration in the first place, and would benefit the great majority of people who do not win the lottery of landing in North America. It is more cost effective to provide relief to people where they live rather than import their poverty to countries of high consumption and crippling welfare commitments. The money thrown at unskilled migrants in Canada could match the total sum spent by foreign governments in third world family planning programs, and benefit far more people than the 4 million foreign born Canadians who lack marketable skills.
None of this, however, is an argument for recruiting skilled migrants. There is no reason that native born citizens could not satisfy the demands of the job market. In Canada, young Aboriginals are crying out for vocational training and are not getting it, while multinationals are able to hire foreign workers a mere stone's throw from native reservations that suffer an unemployment rate of 75-80%. Without the needed education, and a Canadians-First hiring policy, they are a generation without hope and most end their days as refugees in the cities. Ironic that. So many bleeding hearts worrying about global refugees when we are making refugees out of our own citizens. And still, so many environmentalists are willing to open the flood gates even further. Don't refugees have an ecological footprint? Funny how Dr. William Rees never mentioned that in his book. I suppose that he is so interested in reducing personal footprints that he is oblivious to the number of "feet'.
We have no moral obligation to capsize our own lifeboat by taking on more passengers, skilled, unskilled, white, brown, English or non-English speaking. Closing our borders would be the best gift we could give to both ourselves and the world.
Tim
Surrender Australia
I recall Geoffrey Blainey, Australia's most eminent historian, claiming back in the 1980s that the Federal Government had effectively adopted a "Surrender Australia" policy. Blainey observed, ".. we jump as a nation from extreme to extreme. The old White Australia policy said rudely to half the world: Keep out. The new Surrender Australia policy says to that half of the world: Come in."
Fast forward to the present day and we have the likes of Bernard Salt arguing that we need to accept China's surplus millions or otherwise they will force them upon us - a view seemingly shared by Australia's political elites. For even if our elites don't accept the view that Australia has no choice but to become Lebensraum for Asia's masses, their immigration policies are nevertheless turning Australia into precisely that.
Kevin Rudd and the 'god' of materialism!
It is incredible that Kevin Rudd, a professing church-attending Christian, totally lacks any sense of social justice or compassion. Our government head-hunts the well-off professionals and educated from often developing countries and lures them to Australia at a time of high unemployment, housing stress and prohibitive education fees. Foreign students who have paid for their own education are invited to apply for PR. The great majority of asylum seekers are found to be genuine. However, the poor and persecuted are turned away from Australian shores! He is happy to pass them onto a basically Muslim country to be the Good Samaritan.
Kevin Rudd is totally focused on monetary values and on worshiping the Economy! According to what he said on 7.30 Report - ''I actually believe in a big Australia. I make no apology for that. I actually think it's good news that our population is growing,'' Mr Rudd said.
Rudd is totally ignoring costs of infrastructure that will be paid for by the public, the environmental damage to our already fragile ecological life-supporting systems, the social, cultural impacts we are seeing from excessive immigration, and the erosion of our lifestyles that used to be part of the "lucky country". His interest in the welfare of the Australian public is so blatantly lacking he is prepared to make this sacrifice for The Economy!
We in Australia are already world leaders in wildlife extinctions, with 40% of mammal disappearing in the last 200 years originating from Australia. Is their demise of no significance?
Christianity is about sharing compassion, the importance of individuals, and caring for God's Creation. However, Kevin Rudd seems to have missed the point and has sold out to the 'god' of materialism, and he is quite happy to be subservient to the monetary masters of mass markets and globalized powers.
Ken Henry adds rare moment of sanity to population 'debate'
Of all people, the Secretary of Treasury has finally added some sanity to the debate. This morning's news reported that the Government is under pressure to explain itself following Ken Henry's challenging the Government to explain exactly how the country can hope to support 35 million people by 2050. Rudd's response was (I will correct this when I get the precise wording):
That will pose some challenges we will have to meet.If he was paying any attention whatsoever to the news in his own state of Queensland, as well as the other major Eastern seaboard states and Western Australia, he would be left in no doubt that this country has already abysmally failed to meet the 'challenges' that have already been needlessly 'posed' by previous massive population growth. As this site has tirelessly pointed out, the principle driver of every major social, economic and ecological problem that this country is facing --- road congestion, threatened native species extinction, water shortages, increases in council rates and charges for electricity, gas, water, road usage, registration, etc. To cap it all off, Queenslanders are having to face the selling-off of $15 billion of assets paid for them by past taxes, because, according to Premier Anna Bligh, they must be flogged off to build the infrastructure necessary for the new arrivals. As Noosa Mayor Bob Abbot so pertinently pointed out recently, you can't go on doing the same thing as you have in the past and expect a different result. Perhaps it is time that the debate over immigration, long promised, began, and that Prime Minister Rudd also explain exactly why this country even needed to create these 'challenges' in the first place. He and his immigration Minister Chris Evans need to explain to the Australian public, whether Rudd and Evans are completely insane, or, whether, out of the sheer unnecessary stupidity of massive population growth, some powerful vested interests bankrolling the Labor Party somehow stand to gain from what intuition, common sense, as well as the evidence, tells all of us, necessarily makes all of us on average, poorer. [Ed. Article about speech now here.]
What would forefathers, who fought in New Guinea, have thought?
Think about how things would be today if, in the 1930s and 1940s in Australia, our political leaders had been prepared to make peace with the Japanese at any price, instead of preparing this country to defeat the threat from the North. How differently things would have turned out then.
Today, not only are houses in which native Australians previously could expect to live, been flogged off to cashed up foreigners, but our mineral wealth is being bought up and publicly owned assets are being sold.
What would our fathers and grandfathers who fought in the jungles of South East Asia to defeat a threatened Japanese military invasion make of our circumstances now?
Rudd talks up the invasion on 7.30 Report
Kerry O'Brien was interviewing Kevin Rudd tonight (22 October) and asked him a question regarding increased population. Rudd said that we want population growth, that we want a "big Australia" and that we did to want to suffer from population decline as they are in Europe.
How do they find such ignorant people to be prime ministers. Why should we have to put up with it?
Australia has never agreed to be invaded by nearly a million people a year (counting the temporaries) and what is wrong with Europe - they are not suffering. WE ARE!
Japanese whalers in Australian waters should be arrested!
Japan has indicated their intention and audacity of "hunting" whales in Australian waters this summer.
Japan's whale slaughter is internationally illegal, unlawful in Australian waters and their presence without permission is a potentially dangerous precedent for Australian citizens and the pristine marine environment.
The Federal Court in 2008 declared Japanese whaling in Australia’s Antarctic waters as unlawful under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999. Enforcement of the prohibition against whaling in the Australian Whale Sanctuary (AWS) under the EPBC Act rests on the shoulders of the Australian Government.
Any illegal vessels in the The Australian Whale Sanctuary, adjacent to the Australian Antarctic Territory, should find the perpetrators arrested by Australian customs for breaching Australian law.
Before being elected into government, Kevin Rudd promised "tough" action against Japan's whalers. However, his only "tough" action as Prime Minister so far has been against the crew of the Sea Shepherd when the Federal Police raided their ship, and recently when some of the crew had their visas delayed and shortened.
His real motive is to protect our "friendly" trade relations with Japan, at the cost of national security and the lives of hundreds of whales in protected waters. Already blue fin tuna have been almost hunted out of existence, and Japan's blatant disregard for quotas could also apply to whales!
Red Dog
A dog that looks like the illustration could be forgiven anything.
Barking and hyperacusis are unrelated
There is no connection between barking and hyperacusis.
From the article above ..
"1. HYPERACUSIS: These individuals have a collapsed tolerance to normal environmental sound .. "
Barking is NOT a "normal environmental sound." It is in fact, hideously and distressingly UNNATURAL.
Neighbourhood barking is usually the distress cry of a trapped animal.
Peter Bright
www.quietas.net
Hyperacusis.
There is no doubt that deflection of the adverse health effects of neighbourhood noise pollution through the promotion of hyperacusis as causal within the complainant population constitutes an implied excuse for uncontrolled barking dogs. Or at least an excuse for those who think its just fine to impose their acoustic preferences on the environment around them.
Hyperacusis is an organic dysfunction, while invasive neighbourhood noise is a disruptive psychological imposition.
When quiet enjoyment of the family home is denied through what is known as "impulse" sound, or any other high or low frequency disturbance, and when the World Health Organisation authoritatively and strongly warns governments at all levels to act to protect their populations NOW, then attributing distress to a well-researched condition such as hyperacusis shows yet another level of irresponsibility.
(How long will the average person tolerate his own dripping tap, the one that disrupts his concentration and prevents sleep? Not very long!)
I undertook a survey to establish the incidence of noise complaints within a targeted community. The survey was in some part devised to determine whether or not hyperacusis, or over-sensitivity to noise, or organic hearing dysfunction could be attributed to the hundreds of thousands of complaints about noise lodged each year with Australian authorities.
One of the questions contained in the survey:
"Is any other individual living in your household disturbed/distressed by the noise?"
98% of respondents replied "Yes".
So the propensity to focus on the receptors of this noise pollution as contributing to their own problem, seems medically unwise, and statistically unsupportable.
Hyperacusis - a condition of extreme sensitivity to sounds
I have also published this comment, with some variations here "Hyperacusis, a condition of extreme sensitivity to sounds"
Those who find particular sounds unbearable, where other people don't seem to understand, should find out about the condition of hyperacusis at this hyperacusis site. The website was created through the contributions of clinicians and patients from all over the world, who joined together to establish an extensive source of information to help patients recover from hyperacusis. It was by fully reading this site that I came to some understanding and tolerance of the level of complaint about dogs barking on this forum. The following site has a massive amount of helpful information, including case histories, a self-help treatment option, and specialist referral services. The self-help treatment option (using a cd with 'pink noise') is very low cost (instead of USD $3-4,000) and there are several accounts on-line of how it helped people to easily accomodate common sounds which they previously found intolerable. Even if you are not a sufferer, the syndrome is a very interesting one to read about. In fact all of us, as we grow older, may be at risk of symptoms of the 'recruitment' syndrome described below, although most people will not experience it in a devastating way.
Of particular interest was the page, which gives information about four kinds of hyperacusis, which I reproduce below.
"4 Types of Sound Sensitivity" "1. HYPERACUSIS: These individuals have a collapsed tolerance to normal environmental sound. The term commonly used to describe this condition is 'hyperacusis'. Hyperacusis can come on gradually or occur suddenly where the patient finds themself in a state of crisis. Patients who have a collapsed tolerance to sound need to have their Loudness Discomfort Levels (LDL's) established by a hearing healthcare professional. Normal LDL's are in the 85-90+ decibel range. Patients with hyperacusis would have LDL's well below that level. The common treatment for hyperacusis is listening to broadband pink noise though sound generators (special hearing aids) which must be ordered through a specially trained doctor or audiologist who administers Hyperacusis (Tinnitus) Retraining Therapy. The therapy often costs $3000-$4000 (depending on the clinician) and typically is not covered by insurance. There are two basic ways to deliver broadband pink noise to your ears. The best way starts with a clinician who is trained to diagnose the seriousness of your condition, explain to you the dynamics of hyperacusis, test your ears in gentle ways to determine your loudness discomfort levels (LDL), fit you with special hearing aids called noise (sound) generators that deliver broadband pink noise to your ears, monitor your progress and provide directive counseling until you recover. Treatment usually lasts 6 months. Clinicians who administer this kind of treatment were trained by Dr. Pawel Jastreboff (Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia). They are experts in treating hyperacusis and tinnitus patients. Their protocol is called Tinnitus Retraining Therapy (also know as TRT) and it has significantly helped tinnitus and hyperacusis patients recover. To learn more about TRT you might consider reading Dr. Jastreboff's book "Tinnitus Retraining Therapy." A list of TRT clinicians can be seen by visiting this website: http://www.tinnitus-pjj.com/referral.html The second way one can deliver broadband pink noise to their ears would be to purchase the broadband pink noise CD from the network. Instead of listening to broadband pink noise through special noise generators (TRT), a similar sound can be delivered to the ear by listening to a pink noise CD. With this method pink noise is delivered to the ears through a compact CD player (i.e. walkman). If you use a compact CD player it is very important that you use open air headphones. More detail is explained in the guideline that comes with this networks pink noise CD. Pink noise can also be downloaded from the pink noise CD to an ipod. The only caution here would be that the pink noise be converted to a WAV or AIFF format. 2. RECRUITMENT: There are many more individuals who have recruitment. Recruitment is the a rapid growth of perceived loudness for sounds in the pitch region of a person who has hearing loss. This phenomenon occurs because at some decibel level, the normal hair cells adjacent to the damaged hair cells (corresponding to the frequency of a hearing loss) are "recruited." At the decibel level at which these normal hair cells "kick in," perceived loudness shoots up rapidly, causing discomfort. In other words, at one point the person cannot hear the sound because they have hearing loss (in that frequency), then when the sound reaches a certain loudness and/or frequency the person is blown away. Once they finally hear the sound, it is perceived as far too loud. Recruitment is a common phenomenon in cultures where the majority of their lives have been saturated with too much noise – like our Western culture. Common treatment is the same as it is for hyperacusis unless the persons hearing loss is so pronounced that listening to broadband pink noise would be of no benefit to them. 3. HYPERACUTE HEARING: Then there are individuals who are sound sensitive at birth but it is only specific to certain frequencies heard at loud levels (typically above 70 decibels). It may seem like we are splitting hairs here but remember – the key words with hyperacute hearing are – sound sensitive to specific frequencies heard at loud levels. These frequencies are typically labeled 'problem' frequencies. Autistic children are good examples of this. They can tolerate some sound at normal or even loud volumes but some frequencies are intolerable. Commonly autistic children, children who are marginally autistic, or non-autistic individuals who have hyperacute hearing are treated with auditory integration therapy (AIT). AIT takes regular music and filters out the problem frequencies through a special machine called an audiokinetron. Somehow this therapy seems to 'retune' their ears and normalizes their hearing tolerances. The music is listened to at decibel levels which can peak up to 90 decibels. This creates a problem for the hyperacusis patient. The therapy is too loud and only worsens the condition of the hyperacusis patient whose Loudness Discomfort Levels have been compromised. Hyperacusis and recruitment share part of a common pathway but in some ways we are very different and our retraining therapies run very much a different path. Phonophobia often develops with an individual who has a significant collapsed tolerance to sound. They not only fear the sound of the environment they are experiencing in real time (right now) they worry about the sound that future events of the day or in the near future will produce. Phonophobia can take over ones life and make one feel they need to isolate themselves to survive. This is a recipe for disaster. It is critical that we keep our ears active to rebuild our tolerances to sound. That is why broadband pink noise is so crucial to bringing us back to the mainstream of life. 4. MISOPHONIA: (dislike of sound) has often been thought to be hyperacusis. This is not true. Let us be clear here. A hyperacusis patient can have a strong fear of sound (phonophobia) or a specific dislike of specific soft sounds (misophonia) but neither one of these symptoms stand alone as hyperacusis. Hyperacusis is a collapsed tolerance to normal environmental sounds. They hyperacusis patient may or may not have phonophobia and/or misophonia. If the hyperacusis patient IS also dealing with phonophonia and/or misophonia then their clinician needs to address these issues is addition to treating the patient for hyperacusis. It is also important to note that a person can have phonophobia and/or misophonia and not have hyperacusis at all. Sound confusing. Let's talk... We will discuss forms of misophonia. They are not a separate catagory of sound sensitivity because the issues we are about to talk do not involve loud sounds. Some individuals are not sensitive to loud sounds (in other words they have normal loudness discomfort levels - LDL's) but they are unable to tolerate the sound of people eating or chewing. Oddly enough they have no problem tolerating the sound of their own eating. These individuals have a difficult time eating with their family and friends and some insist on eating all by themselves. They become irritated or enraged at meals and sometimes. This is not hyperacusis. The patients primary goal would be to neutralize or refocus the dislike they have of these specific sounds. Most of these individuals live very normal lives with the only exception of being unable to tolerate all the dynamics of other people eating. Often these individuals have been unsuccessful finding any information about this condition. To the best of our knowledge no articles have been written in any qualified medical journal and no studies or research has been done about this. Patients seeking treatment from their clinician may have to copy the information from this website to help their doctor understand what is taking place here. Treatment for these patients comes from clinicians who have a specific protocol for misophonia. Search the network message board using the word 'misophonia' to learn more about this problem and protocols suggested. Usually these individuals are sensitive to particular sounds which are not loud in volume. For example, some individuals have a hearing sensitivity to certain consonants (i.e. s, t, p, c). Once again, although this is a sound sensitivity issue, this is not hyperacusis. It is misophonia. Misophonia is a symptom which is misunderstood. The word 'misophonia' was invented by Dr. Pawel Jastreboff to help clear some of the misunderstanding. Aside from a misophonia protocol it is not clear whether broadband pink noise helps the patient improve their dislike of sound. Some individuals with misophonia have been diagnosed with an obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and have sought treatment from a psychotherapist."home page Copyright to the author. Please contact sheila [AT] candobetter org or the editor if you wish to make substantial reproduction or republish.
I share your concerns about barking dogs, however ...
I share most of the feelings expressed above, having also been the victim of accoustic assault by barking dogs on a number of occasions throughout my life.
However, whilst, of course, my overwhelming sympathy lies with those who wish to end the destruction of the quality of life caused by barking dogs and their often selfish, inconsiderate owners, we still need to bear, at the very back of our minds, the fact that our demands upon dog owners of good will, may cause them problems too.
Appropriate solutions may involve the victim of accoustic assault helping in some way. Personally if my yard was fenced, I would choose to allow a neighbours dog to roam in it when I am home and the neighbour is away, although I can understand why some might not be so willing on health grounds.
I also see no reason why an owner of an offending dog should not be willing to allow a neighbour he/she trusts to come into his/her yard in order to appropriately discipline an offending dog in order to stop the dog barking.
If we are going to assert our rights against accoustic assault, as well as assertively standing up for ourselves, we also need to demonstrate some capacity to accomodate the reasonable needs or well-meaning dog owners.
"Social housing" is the new solution to a housing shortage.
Land developers, builders, the finance industry and our State governments are all part of the great growth lobby - to increase our population by using land and housing as a source of profits. Housing should be a basic right, and we used to be a land of high home-owners. Now, with our massive immigration numbers, the demand is outstripping supply. The prices have been globalised and are way above what they should be, and Australian families are losing out while big businesses are amassing wealth. "Social housing" is what is being pushed for now - high density living not for new arrivals like the Housing commission in the 1960s, but to cope with Australians who can't afford a house with a back yard.
Barking dogs.
I truly understand that logic and reason should be safely invoked on the matter of externally generated noise when that noise is forced inside neighbouring premises. Logic and reason should ideally be based on the premise that where there are laws against something, the laws are usually for a good reason and that the person responsible will react well to any polite request for domestic quiet.
But does it really matter how hard I am punched on the arm, or whether or not the force, time, location and reason for the punch could or should be my responsibility to negotiate ? The punch on the arm, however slight, is a physical and psychological assault. The same standard, under law, has to apply for acoustic assault that is delivered into the sanctity of someone else's living and sleeping quarters.
I doubt if there is going to be any safe way that those who want to live inside their homes minus acoustic assault can (nervously) negotiate with offenders who didn't demonstrate sufficient social conscience to disallow their own trans-boundary noise in the first instance.
If they know that their dog is barking, then a law abiding and considerate citizen would ensure that they attended to it immediately, or at the very least, from the moment they are notified. Too often offenders when notified, become haughtily resistant, making all manner of excuses. There seems to be some kind of nasty human personality traits developed in recent decades that make it almost impossible to approach the owners of dogs.
We we are seeing more and more that innocent people who think they are doing the right thing in courageously and personally asking for quiet, are being rewarded with physical or verbal assault. There are increasing numbers of complaintants who are rewarded for their courtesy in taking the direct approach --- they are further assaulted, or murdered. Just recently a lethal stabbing happend in Australia when someone asked for a dog to be quiet.
On the suggestion of allowing other people's dogs to play in our backyards: I think this idea is fraught with danger. Even if my opinion is not agreeable to others, I invoke the natural right to express it, and though I strongly disagree with the writer of this opinion, I also strongly defend his/her right to provide it.
In no way, given the immense grief that barking dog owners have given me and my family, would I feel sufficiently magnanimous to take responsibility for the socialising of anyone else's dog in our backyard.
As well, the potential damages/financial liabilities on owners who let their dogs play on someone else's premises could be horrendous. The owner of a dog that delivers a dose of roundworm to an unspecting or visiting infant, causing major vital organ damage,or bites, or just pushes over a tiny tot who is then further harmed, could likely find him/herself the subject of a costly legal claim.
Anyone who would like to keep a dog has every right to do so. There are many lonely people whose only conversation is with a dog, and some might even enjoy the sound of their dog barking. But they must be warned, and they must understand and conform with the legal requirement from the outset, that every aspect of their dog's behaviour belongs inside their own premises.
For us, we only want to choose whether or not we have a dog barking inside our homes. Nothing more, nothing less.
The land mafia
The cost of land drives the cost of every other thing up. We have to get rid of the land mafia. It is because of them that we work so hard, produce too much, consume too much, are too many, and are facing ecological peril.
Sheila Newman, population sociologist
home page
Copyright to the author. Please contact sheila [AT] candobetter org or the editor if you wish to make substantial reproduction or republish.
New national park in Victoria to be debated next week.
Four new national parks are set to be created in northern Victoria within weeks to protect river red gum forests.
The National Parks Bill was introduced to State Parliament last week and it will be debated early next month.
Under the plan 150,000 hectares of forest along the Murray, Goulburn and Ovens rivers will be protected and stock grazing and logging will be banned.
What is needed is NSW to do the same.
The National Parks Association alleges that Forests New South Wales engaged in bullying and intimidation by claiming that a reduction in logging operations would cause massive rural job losses.
NPA told Forests New South Wales the logging had to stop in the Murray-Mildura area, and all logging had to stop in the Ramsar-listed wetlands by May 31.
The same arguments of "job losses"! How will our environment survive the need for jobs when our population doubles (or more) by 2050?
Please fill in the form (link above) to send a supportive message to Premier Rees.
Working hours
A few decades ago journalists and social commentators in Australia used to write and talk about the challenge of the future being how we would spend our copious leisure because working hours and the working week would be shorter in the future. They said it was expected that a 3 or 4 day week may be the norm. They were not talking about under employment, but a society where this amount of work was sufficient to support a reasonable standard of living -a standard of living equal to the prevailing one.
The reason this was expected was with improvements in technology which would deliver us this almost nirvana.
How differently things have worked out. Of course people are now working longer hours than they did a few decades ago! Now 2 people have to work to pay off a mortgage on a house which is not as good - (may be bigger)- but not as good in terms of all that matters - its position, amenity and proximity to services compared with that available to their parents' generation.
This did not have to happen.
There must be a very clear unequivocal way of measuring material well being without confusing the measurement with inter generational comparisons of home electronics technology (TV , Hi fi computers etc)
I think the measure would have to be associated with the hours worked to pay off or secure the family home
Sick-leave Australia talks lightweight but could be worse
A few interesting calls in to the program, including one from a Belgian currently working in West Australia. He pointed out that in Europe, workers have 7 or 8 weeks annual leave and are paid up to 80% of their wages for as long as they are ill with a medical certificate - with no limit. Others rang in and reminded people of the problem that you cannot take your sick leave with you when you change jobs - with rare exceptions. This is the reason that a lot of people stay in jobs. (I was reminded of Michael Moore's film about the U.S. hospital and medical insurance system, Sicko, where workers with health problems are chained to their jobs by their employee sick-leave plans, fearing that they will be uninsurable if they go to another job.)
Another reason raised, was that the amount of sick leave often depended on the relationship people had with their direct manager, which certainly rings true. If you feel that your manager doesn't even know or care who you are, then why should you care about the impact of taking a day off might have on the workplace.
Nothing fundamental was raised, however, such as the fact that employees are locked into the wage-system by the rising price of land. In the first place, high land costs are a big obstacle to becoming partly or fully self-sufficient, as in growing your own food. Secondly, starting a business requires you to pay land costs or rental before you even hire people or manufacture a product, leaving very little margin, if any for profit. Thirdly, the cost of mortgages makes it necessary for people to get high incomes one way or another, and the banks keep raising the bar, so the pursuit of 'wealth' is endless wage-slavery or round the clock work in your own business.
PAYE tax was not touched on. PAYE tax came out in the early 1940s and has never gone away. Most of us accept it without thinking. An indication of this is the lack of blogs on the subject. Why is it important. Well, governments have gradually become dependent on a large swathe of employees continually forking out one third or more of their earnings so that the governments can pass these on to their friends in big business, who are insatiable, as we have learned from the global financial crash and beyond if we had not already worked it out.
The theory was that we paid taxes to get things done for the community, but now we are told that we must pay charges for all the things that taxes once paid for - water, roads, justice - etc.
The dependence on PAYE tax locks societies into keeping a lot of people in the wage-earning force, with few alternatives. This is one of the big reasons that increased leisure is always put off for some time into the future. This is the reason that our societies are not allowed to slow down by governments, who require the turnover from endless growth just in order to pay the interest on the debts they have accumulated in various grandiose schemes they have subsidised their corporate friends in.
So, these are some of the reasons why most people in society are treated like little children who must ask a doctor politely for a certificate for a day off if they are sick and who must toil in environmentally and socially damaging jobs in a growth economy instead of contributing as adults to the real, not-for-profit community.
Sheila Newman, population sociologist
home page
Sick of the media propaganda
I'm sick of their bloody propaganda to work, work work!
I want to buy land to provide for myself and my family and go and have some kind of life before I die, but I can't even afford a mortgage. I'm 55 and I don't call this progress.
Australia is the melting pot!
What is the insidious agenda of our Australian government? Our population will be at least 50 million by 2050, and all the problems we have now will blow-out into absolute tragedy by then! Free trade with China will, and has already, destroyed most of Australia's manufacturing industries. We have Indian students sourcing entry level and casual jobs while our own youth are struggling to find positions. Clearly internationals are more compliant and docile then Australians who probably know their rights! We are part of a global melting pot.
Are just being homogenized into a conglomerate of "Asia" rather than having a distinct environment, history, culture, national identity and economy? "Racism" is a great silencer.
HIgher profile if it impacted on Australia's fishing industry!
The disaster has now entered its ninth week after the failure at the weekend to plug the spill, which has seen oil spew into the Timor Sea at an estimated rate of up to 400 barrels a day. The operator of the well that has leaked tens of millions of litres of oil and will try again to stop the spill this week.
While the damage caused to wildlife in Australian waters is reportedly "small", Indonesian fisherman are saying the spill has killed thousands of fish.
Amhad Junaidi, the editor of an Indonesian publication with reporters in West Timor, says dead fish are turning up in large numbers.
This disaster would have a bigger impact in Australia's media if our fishing industry was suffering! The oceans are becoming sewers in the quest for economic benefits, power and jobs!
A new film may interest you...about the Gamo Highlands, Ethiopia
Greetings Helga,
I was pleased to just read yours and Antony's exchange about Another Green Revolution. And, I'm thinking you may enjoy watching our new short film, A Thousand Suns, about the Gamo people in Ethiopia and how they've been living sustainably for 10,000 years, until now, when their way of life is being threatened by the introduction of 'new' Green Revolution technologies and initiatives from the West. Please go to http://www.globalonenessproject.org if you are interested in viewing the film online or ordering the DVD (free of charge).
Best regards,
Alan Zulch
Global Oneness Project
Email: [email protected]
Why is it essential that we continue to grow?