A new report confirms beyond doubt that rapid population growth is the main cause of Australia’s housing affordability crisis, notes Sustainable Population Australia (SPA). While interest rates and government policies influence short-term trends in house prices, it is population growth that has driven house price inflation long-term.

Attempts by a Queensland coal mining company to import foreign labour has been condemned by the Mining & Energy Union.Sojitz Blue has applied to import coal mineworkers from overseas whilst simultaneously offering current workers substandard work contracts and delaying negotiations for an enterprise agreement.The company operates the Gregory Crinum and Meteor Down South (MDS) coal mines near Emerald in Queensland and employs 350 workers.

Any new inquiry into Australia’s migration program needs to assess the full costs and benefits of population growth, especially the costs to our environment and the risks of collapse. I wish I had a dollar for every pro-population-increase article I have read that begins by telling the reader that Australia is a nation of immigrants, with some 25% born overseas and about 50% with at least one parent born overseas.

3CR's Anarchist world does not appear to have been censored yet.

Listen to Dr Joe Toscano's Anarchist World This Week - 9 March 2022

There is not much comparison between the situation of the multi-millionaire tennis player Novak Djokovic and his fellow detainees in the Park Hotel, Carlton (in Victoria, Australia.)  Petitioners for the release of the long term detainees and those for Djokovic have coincided over the last day but probably have little in common. 

India is in a terrible state due to the pandemic, a situation largely the result of gross mismanagement by the government. The spread of the virus was difficult to control because of high-density cities that made lock-downs extremely difficult for residents, and safe separation impossible. A highly infectious new variant may also be a driver, but there are other factors, including an underfunded health service, and a severe shortage of doctors. India needs about 600,000 more doctors, just to meet the WHO recommendations for doctor to patient ratio. Unfortunately, the situation is getting worse. A study by the Indian Journal of public health found that, because of population growth, India will need another 2 million doctors by 2030.

Yet training more doctors is but part of the solution, as it is becoming increasingly clear that India is in a highly competitive battle with developed countries to retain the services of their newly minted doctors.

“Out of the total number of graduates, 10% are opting for pastures abroad. The basic fact is that India needs them, and India is not in a position to retain them,” says Dr. Vedprakash Mishra, vice chancellor of DMIMS University, a medical college in Nagpur.

In 2007, the WHO estimated that over 100,000 Indian-trained doctors were employed overseas. About half these expatriate Indian doctors were in the US, followed by the numbers in Canada and Australia. About a third of doctors practicing in Australia and Canada had done their initial training overseas, many being from developing nations. In 2017, there were 4771 Indian doctors working in Australia, as well as 2287 from Africa, and even 116 from Oceania. Not all overseas-qualified doctors in Australia are working as doctors because of professional qualifying hurdles, meaning that many skilled migrants may find it impossible to find employment in their chosen career.

From an economics point of view skilled migration is a bargain. It’s also immoral, but morality isn’t part of economics.

Maybe we could adapt our foreign aid to subsidize the employment of doctors in poor countries?

Some References:
Australian Government Report: "Medical practitioners workforce 2015, Who are medical Practitioners?"

Farz Edraki and Cathy Pryor, "Doctors and engineers end up driving taxis': The uphill battle facing migrants to Australia," ABC, 31 October 2019.

Navin J Antony, Health care: India needs more doctors," The Week, August 17, 2019.

Table 1: Employed medical practitioners: country of initial medical qualification, 2015

Source: https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/workforce/medical-practitioners-workforce-2015/contents/who-are-medical-practitioners

On Australian ABC's Q & A, 28 July 2020, "Fight of our lives," Bill Bowtell[1] alone seemed able to conceptualise the biological restructuring of our economic environment, although Gigi Foster, economist, NSW, seemed to know instinctively what she needed to combat in order to keep the global, privatised economy going. She advocated allowing people to die from COVID-19, Swedish-style, in order to maintain business more or less as usual. However, when it was put to her that this would make everything less predictable and also incapacitate our health-care system, with no end in sight for the virus, she could draw a logical conclusion, which was, "[...] If we keep our borders closed, until there is a vaccine, we have to restructure the industrial mix in Australia." But this conclusion, anathema to her ideology, seemed ridiculous to her.

Not so to Bill Bowtell, Adjunct Professor, UNSW and Strategic Health Policy Adviser, who has a history of success in policy-making and promotion in the HIV-AIDS pandemic. He said, "The greatest enemy here is nostalgia and looking backwards. The Australian economy, the 30 years of the boom, have gone. They have disappeared. They were the product of a plan that came in in the 1980s, the Hawke-Keating government and the subsequent reforms. That's gone. The assumptions that underlie that plan have evaporated. The globalisation, the international economy functioning as we used to know it. So now we need Plan 3. The third plan since the war. And that will take all of the intellectual capacity that we have in Australia, the committment of the Australian people - they've got to buy into it - and the economy that will be born now will be very different than the economy that we have been used to. We can do it. We can make a better economy. The question of borders - Look, in the world, the Coronavirus caseload is going up like a rocket. There will be no opening up of international borders, as people seem to think there will be. We saw, in the last few days in Europe, where they opened up the southern borders in Spain, and then they had to shut them down again, because, guess what, the virus kept going up. Now, we have problems also with the Australian borders. I cannot see the outlying states opening up to a situation where we have Coronavirus cases at the level we have in Victoria and New South Wales. I don't see Western Australia doing that. The Federal Government is in court at the moment trying to force the West Australian Government [to open (?) interruption by compere, saying time running out and gives opportunity to another panelist to make final comment.]"

Karen Soo, Executive Officer at the Haymarket Chamber of Commerce, said, "I think this is a time for universal pause enables us as a society to really review what's important, and I think, as all people, I think it's really created a lot of equity and parity. So, everybody's now looking at the homeless, it's looking at multicultural societies, it's looking at everybody to say, 'How do we work together? How do we move forward? And how do we ensure that everyone can have a future together? And I think, it's going to hopefully be - I am quite optimistic - I think it's an opportunity that businesses will review and innovate and work together - local communities will be very market-driven until the borders are open once we are safe enough to function in a new way. Like, there's going to be a new way to operate in business."

NOTES

"Bio:
Mr Bill Bowtell AO, Executive Director, Pacific Friends of the Global Fund. Bill is a strategic policy adviser, with particular interest in national and international health policy structures and reform. He trained as a diplomat, with postings in Portugal, Papua New Guinea and Zimbabwe. As senior adviser to the Australian health minister, Bill Bowtell played a significant role in the introduction of the Medicare health insurance system in 1984. He was an architect of Australia’s successful and well-regarded response to HIV/AIDS. Between 1994 and 1996, Bill Bowtell was senior political adviser to the Prime Minister of Australia. He maintains a close interest in the potential impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and the other communicable diseases, on the social, economic and political development of the Asia-Pacific region. Since 2005, Bill was Director of the HIV/AIDS Project at the Lowy Institute for International Policy and, since 2009, the Executive Director of Pacific Friends of the Global Fund. Pacific Friends is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In these positions, he has sought to increase knowledge and awareness of the challenges posed globally, and to the Pacific region, by the three diseases. He has written and broadcast extensively on these subjects and participated in many international and Australian conferences and seminars especially in relation to HIV/AIDS." Source: https://kirby.unsw.edu.au/event/kirby-seminar-mr-bill-bowtell-international-and-australian-perspectives-three-decades-hivaids.

Previous research has shown a wide split between elite and non-elite opinion on topics such as cultural diversity, globalisation and immigration. Media professionals and most politicians share these elite views, but large swathes of the electorate do not. The current findings of the survey conducted late in 2018 by The Australian Population Research Institute (TAPRI) on attitudes to immigration and population growth confirm this. They show that the split between elite and non-elite opinion is mirrored in the divisions between voters who are university graduates and voters who are not. This is logical as most elites are now recruited from the graduate class. The gap is wide. Overall 50% of voters want a reduction in immigration. But this proportion rises to 60% of non-graduates while only 33% of graduates agree. (The October/November 2018 TAPRI survey Katharine Betts and Bob Birrell.)

Overall 72% of voters say Australia does not need more people, a proportion that rises to 80% of non-graduates and falls to only 59% of graduates (Figures 1 and 2).

But these findings nonetheless present a puzzle. Given elite domination of cultural and political institutions, why haven’t the non-graduate majority fallen into line on population growth and immigration?

To answer this question we need to look more deeply into the second major finding of the TAPRI survey: the central relationship between attitudes to the cultural consequences of high immigration and a desire for the rate of growth to be slowed right down. (See pp. 19-34.)

We now know that most Australian voters are unhappy with the heavy growth that immigration policies impose upon them. Survey data and numerous complaints about congestion and unaffordable housing attest to this. The TAPRI survey asks whether there is anything more to their disquiet than practical and economic problems.

In 2016 commentators were taken aback by two unexpected and, seemingly, unrelated events: the Brexit vote in the UK and the election of Donald Trump in the US. Analysts scrambled for explanations and initially settled on the idea of voters who had been ‘left behind’, people economically pinched by the evaporation of manufacturing jobs in the heat of globalisation. These ‘left behinds’ had sought relief from their common misfortune by choosing the populist side in each of these two elections.

From this perspective the two events were related after all: economic pressures could explain them both. But now there has been time for more research and opinions have become more nuanced.

A number of analysts have found that it is not always the most destitute who have swung to the populist side. On the contrary, in both countries they are often people of middling means who are not as distressed by low wages and job losses as much as they are by the high immigration of ethnically diverse people and the cultural changes that they bring with them.

The divide is not so much between the well-to-do and the poor and unemployed. Rather it is between the graduate class, immersed in a cosmopolitan world view, and non-graduates attached to the ethos of their national home. Immigrants can share this attachment. Indeed it may have been the pull of the national culture which encouraged them to migrate in the first place. Because of this some of the new populists may be immigrants themselves.

That was the Executive Summary. You can download the entire report (88 pages) here: https://tapri.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Tapri-survey-2018-final-report-April.pdf.

Amazing isn’t it? The federal government sets immigration policy. And yet the immigration minister can’t even answer the most simple of questions.

In Part Two, Liam Bartlett again takes Alan Tudge to the Woolshed:

Liam Bartlett: “So, when are we going to hit 30 million”?

Alan Tudge: “We outline a 10-year, for example, infrastructure pipeline”.

Liam Bartlett: “Great, so where are we in 10-years?”

Alan Tudge: “In part we’re going through a process”.

Liam Bartlett: “30 million? 35 million? 40 million? Stop me when I am getting close”

Amazing isn’t it? The federal government sets immigration policy. And yet the immigration minister can’t even answer the most simple of questions.

Well done 60 Minutes.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has released visitor arrivals and departures data for the month of January, which posted record annual permanent and long-term arrivals.

In the year to January 2019, there were 835,310 permanent and long-term arrivals into Australia – up 6% from January 2018 and an all-time high. This was partly offset by 546,310 permanent and long-term departures from Australia:

Put together, there were 289,000 net permanent and long-term arrivals into Australia in the year to January 2019, way above the 42-year average of 154,249:

While the ABS is at pains to state that “permanent and long-term movements… are not an appropriate source of migration statistics”, since they relate to the intention of passengers arriving, not actual outcomes (measured using the 12/16 rule), there is a strong correlation between this series and the ABS’ official quarterly net overseas migration (NOM) estimates:

Given the strong rise in net permanent and long-term arrivals over the second half of 2018, there’s a strong likelihood that ABS’ NOM estimate for September 2018 will jump when it is released on Thursday.

In November 2018 The Australian Population Research Institute (TAPRI) published an analysis of the higher education overseas student industry. It was framed around the remarkable growth in the share of commencing overseas university students to all commencing students over the years 2012 to 2016. This share increased from 21.8 per cent in 2012 to 26.7 per cent in 2016.

Bob Birrell and Katharine Betts

(This post is republished from John Menadue’s site, Pearls and Irritations, 27 December 2018.)

In November 2018 we published an analysis of the higher education overseas student industry. It was framed around the remarkable growth in the share of commencing overseas university students to all commencing students over the years 2012 to 2016. This share increased from 21.8 per cent in 2012 to 26.7 per cent in 2016.

Since publication, higher education statistics for 2017 have been released. They show  that the share of commencing overseas students to all commencing students have increased to 28.9 per cent. In the case of the Group of 8 (Go8) universities, by 2017 this share had reached well over 40 per cent in the University of Sydney, ANU, and the University of NSW (Table 1).

The following brief summary indicates why such extreme reliance on overseas students should be of concern. We then explore another issue, not canvassed in the November report. This is the implications of the rapid growth in overseas student commencements for access to higher education on the part of domestic students.

This a highly topical matter because in December 2017 the Coalition government announced that it would henceforth cap the level of domestic higher education enrolments. Since that time, Australia’s universities, including the Go8, have mounted an offensive against this decision on the grounds that it limits opportunities for domestic students. Yet the enrolment data examined below indicates that, at least since 2012, the Go8 have effectively enforced just such a cap on domestic enrolments.

A summary of the November report’s findings

The November report argued that the overseas student industry was in a precarious state because of its increased reliance on overseas student enrolments. The share of overseas commencing students to all commencing students at Australia’s universities increased from 21.8 per cent in 2012 to 26.7 per cent in 2016.

We concluded that the tail was wagging the dog. That is, such was our universities’ reliance on overseas students, that most were prioritising the health of the overseas student industry over the educational needs of domestic students. In the case of research, the universities’ focus was primarily on basic research. This is because it is this that is relevant to their aspiration to achieve a place in the top 100 institutions in the global university ratings systems. As documented in the November report, research of this kind is the most likely to be accepted by the top international journals that drive the ratings system. Research focused on local priorities wouldn’t make the cut.

Australia’s overseas student industry is split into two distinctive markets. The first includes most of the Go8 universities, where overseas students were charged some $40,000 a year, mainly for courses at the undergraduate and post-graduate-by-coursework level in business and commerce. Most of the students are Chinese. Indeed, between 2012 and 2016, the total increase in overseas student commencers at Go8 universities was 13,738 . Of these 12,198 were Chinese.

Students’ (or parents’) willingness to pay for such high priced courses can be attributed to the fact that they deliver credentials from a university rated in the international top 100. (This includes almost all of the Go8.) Qualifications from these universities appear to be highly regarded in the Chinese labour market. Relatively few of these Chinese students stay on in Australia after completing their studies.

This enrolment pattern helps explain the universities’ focus on basic research. In order to maintain enrolments from China, they have to promote such research because it scores best on the metrics used by the international ratings systems.

The second market is composed of almost all the other universities. The number of overseas students enrolling in these universities also increased significantly between 2012 and 2016 (though at a slower rate than occurred in the Go8). However the countries of origin were primarily located in the Indian subcontinent. Most of these students were attracted to Australian universities because of the access their enrolment gave them to the Australian labour market and thus to the potential of a permanent residence visa.

We concluded that the overseas student industry was in a precarious state. In the case of the Go8, overseas enrolments were vulnerable on three points.

First is the risk of reputational damage on account of the poor quality of the education overseas students are receiving. In the business and commerce faculties at the Go8, where Chinese students often constitute the majority, such courses have had to be made less demanding so that the many Chinese students with relatively limited English language skills can cope with their requirements. Then there is the risk from geopolitical tensions that threatened Chinese enrolments. And finally there is the risk of competition from other countries.

For the other universities the main issue is current changes in the rules governing overseas-student access to the Australian labour market and to long-term employment contracts. This means that their chances of obtaining a permanent residence visa are contracting. As a consequence we argued that these changes would diminish the attraction of enrolling for higher education at a non-Go8 Australian university.

Table 1: Per cent share of commencing onshore* overseas students to all onshore commencing students, Go8 universities and all Australian higher education institutions, 2012, 2016 and 2017

Source: Department of Education and Training, Higher Education Statistics, Table 1.10, Commencing Students by State, Higher Education Provider, Citizenship and Residence Status.

* The term onshore is used to distinguish overseas students being educated in Australia from those in Australian campuses set up overseas. The latter are not included in these figures.

Higher education opportunities

Australia’s universities repeatedly assure the Australian public that increased enrolments of overseas students are not damaging the prospects of domestic students aspiring to a university education. Rather, they state that the two sets of enrolments are independent of each other; opportunities for locals are not being crowded out.

How could this be? Well, according to a 2014 policy document from the Go8, international students actually ‘directly facilitate domestic participation in higher education’. This is achieved, the document claims, because revenue from overseas student fees contributes to the costs of domestic education. It asserts that international student fees ‘subside each domestic student by around $1,600’.

This might seem plausible given that domestic enrolments have increased since the removal of enrolment caps for domestic students in 2009. Over the years 2012 to 2017 (years in which overseas enrolments expanded rapidly) the number of commencing domestic students at Australia’s universities increased from 370,314 to 416,371.

The result is that a very high share of the cohort of university age are currently enrolled as higher education students. In fact, university competition for potential domestic students is such that some universities have seen a drop in their domestic enrolments over the past couple of years. Concern that this enrolment scramble had gone too far (and was costing the Commonwealth government too much in funding) prompted the Coalition government in December 2017 to announce that it would re-impose enrolment caps in 2018 (caps which Labor promises to withdraw should it win government in 2019).

The universities have responded to these caps by insisting throughout 2018 that they amount to a reduction in opportunities for domestic students. According to Margaret Gardiner, Vice Chancellor at Monash University, the cap acts as a funding freeze which ‘will limit the share of highly-skilled well-paid jobs in our economy that can be done by qualified Australians in the decades ahead’. Or, in the words of the newly appointed (in June 2018) Chief Executive  of Universities Australia, the reinstating of caps puts an end to the ‘unearthing and unleashing’ of talent that has occurred since the caps were removed, starting in 2009.

If expansion of overseas student enrolment was helping to create opportunities to increase domestic enrolments you would expect that more domestic students would be gaining places in Go8 universities. Over the period 2012 to 2017, when there were no caps on the number of domestic students that any university could enrol, domestic student commencements at Go8 universities barely moved. They were 87,939 in 2012 and 87,930 in 2017. By contrast, over these same years the number of overseas student commencements at the Go8 increased from 30,320 to 56,363. (The data are drawn from Higher Education Statistics releases, various years.)

Given that there were no caps in place, the Go8 could have taken more domestic students over these years. Many more thousands of these students would have jumped at the opportunity to attend a Go8 university. They were precluded from entry by the high ATAR  entry thresholds imposed by Go8 universities. Such is the Go8 universities’ prestige that they attract the best domestic performers in secondary school exams. Like the overseas students, domestic students know that a credential from a Go8 university gives them a competitive advantage in the labour market (in this case within Australia).

The stabilisation of domestic enrolments was not because the Go8 lacked the capacity to increase their student load. They did have the capacity, but all of it has been taken up by increased enrolments from overseas students.

Clearly, the Go8 universities preferred to enrol overseas students. In effect, the benefits of the allegedly superior education that these universities offer went to overseas students rather than to local students. This was not because overseas students had superior potential to take advantage of what the Go8 offers. The contrary is the case. The Go8 do not preference high performing overseas students. There are minimal entry barriers to their enrolment other than the ability to pay the huge fees required.

Conclusion

Australia’s universities, especially the Go8, are caught in a vicious circle as their reliance on overseas student revenue deepens. This reliance means that they cannot prioritise teaching which benefits the vocational needs of their domestic students, to expand enrolment opportunities for domestic students or to focus on research activities relevant to Australian industry or the well being of Australian citizens.

Report authors

Bob Birrell (mobile 0413 021 126) is the Head of the Australian Population Research Institute (TAPRI), an independent, non-profit research organisation. Katharine Betts is deputy head.

This paper is based on two TAPRI research reports:

Australia’s higher education overseas student industry revisited, December 2018  and Australia’s higher education overseas student industry: in a precarious state, November 2018.

Pauline Hanson, the leader of One Nation, an Australian political party, says the Sentinel Island tribe that killed US missionary John Allen Chau with bows and arrows, should be praised for their immigration policies. Good to see one politician in Australia has respect for non-agricultural peoples. Inside find most of an article reporting this from https://www.rt.com/news/444962-australia-hanson-tribe-missionary/

Scott Morrison appeared on ABC Lateline denouncing the government’s plan to tag and release migrants to the bush as a policy brain fart:

TONY JONES: Can you have a debate on population without a debate on immigration numbers?

SCOTT MORRISON: Well of course you can’t… Two thirds of the increase in population is coming through immigration and so if that’s not part of the debate then I don’t know what these guys are going on about. You’ve gotta focus on the things that you can address. Now they can talk about all these other issues, they’re all really important, but those things are not going to solve themselves in the next term of government.

What you can do in the next term of government is ease the pressure on those problems by throttling back, and if this Government’s not prepared to throttle back then they are trying to put one over the Australian people…

We’ve also made it clear that we’re not comfortable with the 36 million [population] projection…

The Government says it is not about immigration and they want to put out this false hope that they can move all these people around the country differently. Well those who are coming into the country, less than 10 per cent of them currently go out and settle in regional areas and rural areas.

So to hold out some false hope that this problem’s going to be solved because a Population Minister is going to fantastically move people around like has never been done before in our history, is I think unfair to the Australian people to suggest that that is realistic option, certainly in the short or medium term. Long term I think there are still real doubts.

The history of settlement over centuries means that people will come and gravitate to areas where there is population…

Scott Morrison also appeared on ABC’s PM program, where he once again rubbished the ‘migrants to the bush’ policy:

It holds out unrealistic promises that all of this can be turned around by everybody moving to regional areas.

We simply know, through centuries of migration experience, that that simply isn’t how it happens.

Are you confused? Well you should be, because these interviews were done in 2010/2011 when the former Gillard Labor Government was also spruiking a ‘migrants to the bush’ policy to relieve population pressures in the major cities.

Fast forward to 2018 and Australia’s permanent migrant program is just as big as then, but even more concentrated than ever into Sydney and Melbourne, which received 86% of migrants last financial year.

History doesn’t repeat but it sure does rhyme. Don’t fall for the Coalition’s latest immigration smokescreen, especially when it has been cutting regional visas while in office:

Department of Home Affairs figures… show non-regional skilled migration visas have risen every year under the Coalition, while those dedicated to the regions dropped from a high of 20,510 in 2012-13 to 10,198 under the Turnbull government in 2016-17.

The five consecutive years of cuts to permanent regional migrant visas coincided with a rise in the total immigration level to record highs of 180,000 a year, meaning proportionally more migrants were arriving on non-regional skilled visas under the Coalition.

QED.

[email protected]
[Article first published on Macrobusiness, October 10, 2018 at https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2018/10/scott-morrison-slams-scott-morrisons-migrants-to-the-bush-policy/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20MacroBusiness&utm_content=Daily%20MacroBusiness+CID_a2e8fef423e19939f632e11a3fdeb4df&utm_source=Email%20marketing%20software&utm_term=Scott%20Morrison%20slams%20Scott%20Morrisons%20migrants%20to%20the%20bush%20policy]

Australia’s annual permanent migrant intake has fallen to its lowest level in more than a decade after a Federal Government crackdown on dodgy claims. Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton said the government had restored integrity to the migration program to make sure the “best possible” migrants were brought into the country through tougher vetting. William Burke from the Sustainable Australia Party spoke to Tim McMillan about the new figures.

Should Australia’s migrant intake increase or decrease?

Australia’s annual permanent migrant intake has fallen to its lowest level in more than a decade after a Federal Government crackdown on dodgy claims.

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton said the government had restored integrity to the migration program to make sure the “best possible” migrants were brought into the country through tougher vetting.

William Burke from Sustainable Australia spoke to Tim McMillan about the new figures.

Download this podcast here

Oksana Boyko (pictured right) in US vs UN? Ft. Antonio Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations her Worlds Apart interview of Sunday 24 June, generally discussed how the United Nations should handle conflicts between the United States and Russia its two most powerful members . The discussion included at least two issues which are of concern to this site, candobetter.net : 1. Border control in the United States and Europe, and 2. Syria.

Antonio Guterres attempted to put all the arguments by proponents of open borders and they were all effectively rebutted by Oksana Boyko. At one point in the discussion, after she stated that the United States as well as European countries, have the right to control their borders Oksana was accused of listening to Fox News, that is the station which features Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and other outspoken advocates for the effective control of the United States border with Mexico. The video, embedded below, is easily worth the 28 minutes of your time required to watch it.

Later in the program Oksana Boyko put to Antonio Guterres that the United Nations should oppose the United Sates' schemes to partition Syria and preserve Syria's territorial integrity. [1]

Footnote[s]

[1] The partitioning of Syria is also supported by the group Australians for Kurdistan. The group absurdly maintains that, with up to 20 U.S. military bases in Syria's Kurdistan (acccording to RT on 1 Mar 2018 and other sources) the YPG (an acronym for "People's Protection Units") is building a communist or anarchist society which is also a beacon of women's liberation. The convenor of "Australians for Kurdistan" is John Tully. In Hitler of the Middle East (6/2/18) | Tasmanian Times, ostensibly an attack on Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Tully smears the popularly elected President of Syria, as "the Syrian dictator". Nowhere in his writings does Tully show any concern for the fate of Syria, including the 80,000 soldiers of the Syrian Arab Army, amongst the 400,000 citizens of Syria, who have been killed in the war against Syria since March 2011 in which which Erdogan has been complicit. That would come far closer to justifying Tully's emotive likening of Erdogan to Hitler than any of his actions against Kurdish secessionists in recent years.

This is the report that Bob Carr referred to in the Q&A "A Big Australia" program on Monday 12 March, 2018. "The survey found that 74 per cent of voters thought that Australia does not need more people, with big majorities believing that that population growth was putting ‘a lot of pressure’ on hospitals, roads, affordable housing and jobs (Figure 4). Most voters were also worried about the consequences of growing ethnic diversity. Forty-eight per cent supported a partial ban on Muslim immigration to Australia, with only 25 per cent in opposition (Figure 3). Despite these demographic pressures and discontents, Australia’s political and economic elites are disdainful of them and have ignored them. They see high immigration as part of their commitment to the globalisation of Australia’s economy and society and thus it is not to be questioned. Elites elsewhere in the developed world hold similar values, but have had to retreat because of public opposition. Across Europe 15 to 20 per cent of voters currently support anti-immigration political parties. Our review of elite opinion in Australia shows that here they think they can ignore public concerns. This is because their main source of information about public opinion on the issue, the Scanlon Foundation, has consistently reported that most Australians support their immigration and cultural diversity policies." [Extract from Executive Summary, The Australian Population Research Institute (TAPRIS)]

Download Full Report: TAPRI-survey-19-Oct-2017-final-3.pdf

Executive Summary: Australian voters’ views on immigration policy Katharine Betts and Bob Birrell

The Australian Population Research Institute Executive Summary Australia’s population grew by a massive 384,000 in the year to March 2017, some 231,900, or 60 per cent, of which was due to net overseas migration. Immigration is the dynamic factor in this population surge, reflecting a record high permanent migration program and generous settings for temporary-entry visas. The consequences are becoming obvious and are being reflected in increased public concern about quality of life and questions concerning ethnic diversity. The Australian Population Research Institute (TAPRI) commissioned a national survey of Australian voters in August 2017 to assess the extent of this concern and its causes. The survey found that 74 per cent of voters thought that Australia does not need more people, with big majorities believing that that population growth was putting ‘a lot of pressure’ on hospitals, roads, affordable housing and jobs (Figure 4). Most voters were also worried about the consequences of growing ethnic diversity. Forty-eight per cent supported a partial ban on Muslim immigration to Australia, with only 25 per cent in opposition (Figure 3). Despite these demographic pressures and discontents, Australia’s political and economic elites are disdainful of them and have ignored them. They see high immigration as part of their commitment to the globalisation of Australia’s economy and society and thus it is not to be questioned. Elites elsewhere in the developed world hold similar values, but have had to retreat because of public opposition. Across Europe 15 to 20 per cent of voters currently support anti-immigration political parties. Our review of elite opinion in Australia shows that here they think they can ignore public concerns. This is because their main source of information about public opinion on the issue, the Scanlon Foundation, has consistently reported that most Australians support their immigration and cultural diversity policies.

How could Australia be so different from other Western countries? It has long been argued, including by the Scanlon Foundation, that Australians were insulated from the economic shocks of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008-2009. This means that we have a lower share of angry ‘left behinds’ than in Europe and the US, that is, people suffering from economic stress who can be mobilised around an anti-immigration banner. This is why Labor’s shadow Deputy Treasurer, Andrew Leigh, can assert that Australian attitudes to migrants are warm and ‘becoming warmer over time’ and that ‘there is solid support for the principle of non-discrimination’ (pages 1-2). It is also why, according to prominent writer David Marr, ‘more than almost any people on earth, we are happy for migrants to come in big numbers’ (pages 2-3). The TAPRI survey refutes these findings. It shows that 74 per cent of voters believe that Australia does not need more people and that, at the time of the survey, 54 per cent wanted a reduction in the migrant intake. This includes 57 per cent of Liberal voters and 46 per cent of Labor voters (Figure 1). This result is far higher than the 34 per cent of respondents wanting a lower migrant intake reported in the last Scanlon survey (in July-August 2016). Australian voters’ concern about immigration levels and ethnic diversity does not derive from economic adversity. Rather it stems from the increasingly obvious impact of population growth on their quality of life and the rapid change in Australia’s ethnic and religious make-up. Such is the extent of these concerns that they could readily be mobilised in an electoral context by One Nation or any other party with a similar agenda, should such a party be able to mount a national campaign. If this occurs, the Liberal Party is likely to be the main loser.

The page I am writing about is on the Australian ABC website, entitled, "You decide Australia’s population, we’ll show you how it looks," by journalist Inga Ting, Mark Doman, Ri Liu and Nathan Hoad. The arguments presented are a kind of demographer's fantasy. Demography is not population science; it is maths and statistics. Maths and statistics are not themselves science. They can be used as much for population science, to test theories, as they can be used for advertising and propaganda. Demographers are often also economists and they usually try to establish trends in population numbers in isolation from the environment, social values, or deep history. What they call population science is usually only economics, which many people think is now practised as a dogma. They do not tend to challenge propaganda and, for this reason, they are very useful for governments and corporate media that want to push peoples' thinking in a certain direction about population.[1] This interactive article on the ABC gets the reader to make certain decisions, comes up with biased feedback, and then invites the reader to change their minds. To be unbiased, this interactive would need to list the positives of lowering population growth. It fails to. It does mention some as opinions, but it does not employ related arguments in its presentation of demographic trends in Australia.

The message of "You decide Australia’s population, we’ll show you how it looks," is that if we choose low immigration, the size of the population over 64 will be greater than the size of the population under 15 yrs old. It compares the size of the post WW2 baby-boomer population, as if this were a norm, with the projected elderly population.

"In 2101, one in eight Australians will be children, compared to nearly one in three in 1960. At the same time, one in three will be 65 or older, compared to one in 10 in 1960."

There are a number of flaws in this.

1. The baby boomer population was the first of its kind, and should not be used as a norm.

2. There is an insistence on maintaining and increasing our current population in Australia and, by implication, everywhere else, but our current populations are the largest by an order of magnitude that have ever existed. They are not 'normal'. They are out of proportion to all human history and other species. They are an exception that is very hard to maintain materially, has many political, energy and biological-ecological problems, and few positives, except in terms of profits made by a few through inflation of resource prices.

3. Comparing numbers of children 15 and under to people over 64 is comparing one arbitrarily selected cohort over a limited number of years - 15 - to another of a larger number of years - 64 to, say, 100 - amounting to 36 years. If we were to compare a similar number of years in the older cohort, we might compare older people in 15 year cohorts, such as people aged 85-100, or people aged 70-85, or people aged 65-80.

4. The dependency ratio of children to adults 64 and over is not cut and dried, not predictable. Elderly people are much less dependent than babies, toddlers, school children, who almost never earn their living. These days children's dependency may last far longer than 15 years. Some people will never find any reliable legal work in our future society, due to the declining affordability and standard of Australia's education system, the effects of industry automation, and competition from immigrants selected for their education and skills.

5. The greatest cost in all cohorts - dependent and independent; children, adults and older adults - is the cost of land for housing and business. These costs are hugely inflated by population growth. If we allowed population growth to slow naturally, then no-one would have to work so hard to have housing, businesses would have much bigger profit margins, wages could fall and people would still have enough money to live well, and the few elderly people who finish up in high dependency care units for long periods of time, would not have to pay nearly so much for their care, because the land and therefore wage costs of those old-age care facilities would be greatly reduced.

This manipulative article talks about 'demographic problems' associated with Japan's population decline, but there were more problems associated with the overpopulation that Japan suffered from, including reliance on nuclear power plants in earthquake and tsunami-prone areas:

Perhaps most alarming, however, is the threat of a shrinking population. In South Korea and Japan, for example, very low birth rates combined with few immigrants and high life expectancy have led to a dwindling workforce and rapidly-growing elderly population. "Demographically these countries are in quite serious trouble," Dr Wilson said.

These 'problems' solve themselves. Expatriots are returning to Japan from Australia because the housing has become affordable again and it is a pleasant place to live. An older population does not need the frantic productivity that a young industrialising one does. The population will presumably return to much lower levels, perhaps those of the Edo period, which was a Japanese social pinnacle, when the country was self-sufficient.[2]

It is the property development lobby that wants population growth and which has lobbied for it since the 1904 Royal Commission into the Decline in the Birth Rate in New South Wales (which was actually caused by men leaving the state to goldmine in Queensland and then in West Australia, but don't tell anyone).[3] If the population growth rate fell now in Australia, then the growth lobby would just shrivel up and die, industry-wise, and we could get on with our actual lives. You can imagine the fuss and bother that the death throws of our malignant growth lobby would cause as they thrashed around in our parliaments and councils, our banks and insurance industries, our mining and road-building industries - but after the dust settled, most of us would be so much wealthier because our cost of living would have plummeted. Necessary industries would continue - as they did in Australia before the two wars, when we built most of the things we now import: cars, aeroplanes, scientific instruments, pharmaceuticals ...

Evolutionary population theory argues that the long-lived elderly people in tribal societies were the repository for knowledge and judgement. If everyone had only lived to thirty years old (as is often supposed) a society would have little capacity to develop culture or complex language. Consider what it may mean to our societies to have people living to one hundred years old and more. It might make the difference between a society that is wrecked by capitalist demands and a society with people who have many years of experience and can identify snake oil because they have heard it before.

Actual dependency: Are treatable illnesses that cause dependency and death in the elderly being systematically overlooked?

With regard to actual dependency in the elderly, as a person with a background in nursing, as well as sociology, I would suggest that we restart Vitamin B12 therapy for people over 60 [and for vegetarians and vegans and new mothers and their children. There is now a higher risk for everyone due to the addition of Folic Acid to our foods.] Diagnosing Alzheimers is not an exact science and I know from experience that much treatable Vitamin B12 deficiency goes under the radar, even while it is resulting in dementia and loss of the ability to walk. [See /node/4463.] There are so many more people in walkers and on electric carts these days. Question them and you will find that almost none have any idea of their Vit B12 status. I would also suggest that we revise our therapeutic levels for these upwards, to at least the Japanese norms. (Note that you can buy high-dose sublingual Vit B12 now which in many cases does the job the injections do.)

I will also just raise here the idea that we should question the use of Thyroid Stimulating Hormone (TSH) as the ultimate measure of thyroid health as many thyroid sufferers do on various forums growing round the world. We need also to be measuring T4, but especially T3, and taking note that quite a substantial number of people with hypothyroidism do not really improve on T4 replacement alone. Australia used to add iodine to salt, but this was discontinued and tests for iodine are not even rebated, yet our country and our diets are still low in iodine. Few doctors even test for this. Iodine is not the only cause of hypothyroidism, but it is a common cause. Several books have been written by doctors about the need to increase the use of specific hormone testing for suspected thyroid disorders.

NOTES

[1]
I think that ANU Demography Crawford School Unit's professor Peter McDonald's 'coffin-shaped populations' is a case in point. Here is one of many examples: "This is a projection for Australia that leads to the 25 million population in 50 years time and close to zero growth subsequently. The essential difference between the two is that the Sydney population is younger. The Sydney population is beehive-shaped and the rest of Australia is somewhat coffin-shaped. As we shift Melbourne, Brisbane etc from the right side to the left side, this impression would become very pronounced. That is, a projection that provides a reasonable outlook for Australia is the sum of high population growth in the existing cities with considerable ageing and labour supply decline in the non-metropolitan regions. We need more work on this and we shall be doing this as a component of the AHURI study of future housing needs."

Professor McDonald seems to me to truly to believe that Australia must have a continuously growing population to fulfill a continuously industrialising economy based on youthful manpower. The growth lobby and its corporate press reward such theories and present their proponents in a very favourable light. That is why we hear so much from them and so little from the rest. How would a student in Professor McDonald's unit fare if he argued for a small population to keep essential resource costs low and wildlife corridors for native fauna? Would you even enroll in the Canberra Demography unit if you had those views?

This man also advises our ministers and people overseas, including Europe.

"Peter McDonald is Professor of Demography in the Crawford School. He is President of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population for the years, 2010-2013 and is a Member of the Council of Advisers of Population Europe.

He is frequently consulted on the issue of population futures (causes, consequences and policies) by governments around the world, especially in Australia, Europe and East Asia. In 2008, he was appointed as a Member in the Order of Australia. He is Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research. In 2012, he was appointed as an inaugural ANU Public Policy Fellow. He is a member of the Australian Ministerial Advisory Council on Skilled Migration. He has worked previously at the Australian Institute of Family Studies, the World Fertility Survey and the University of Indonesia." https://crawford.anu.edu.au/people/visitors/peter-mcdonald

[2] See Tony Boys, "How will Japan feed itself without fossil energy?" in Sheila Newman (Ed.) The Final Energy Crisis, 2nd Ed. 2018.

[3] See, Sheila Newman, The Growth Lobby in Australia and its Absence in France, Chapter 6, Thesis minus 6 appendices.

When listing high-immigration bias at ABC and SBS, we tend to forget the many ABC shows now aimed at the younger demographic (where the ABC had been losing audience dramatically). The ABC have hired a lot of youngish talented comedians out of the vast pool of stand-up comedy talent among young Australians. It’s mostly smart-arse stuff without much pretence to news value, but there are some shows like The Chaser and Planet America that hybridise comedic style with serious debate on current affairs. These are in effect part of the ABC News stable, and their biases matter more.

The problem is that the ABC seems to have selected its comedians for having the right political and social views. One reason these comic shows seem a bit dull, especially to anyone over 30, is that there seems to be almost no difference of opinion or political stance among these comedians. Think how much more interesting it would be if the comedians on these panels actually had different points of view, instead of merely having different comedic styles!

When listing high-immigration bias at ABC and SBS, we tend to forget the many ABC shows now aimed at the younger demographic (where the ABC had been losing audience dramatically). The ABC have hired a lot of youngish talented comedians out of the vast pool of stand-up comedy talent among young Australians. It’s mostly smart-arse stuff without much pretence to news value, but there are some shows like The Chaser and Planet America that hybridise comedic style with serious debate on current affairs. These are in effect part of the ABC News stable, and their biases matter more.

The problem is that the ABC seems to have selected its comedians for having the right political and social views. One reason these comic shows seem a bit dull, especially to anyone over 30, is that there seems to be almost no difference of opinion or political stance among these comedians. Think how much more interesting it would be if the comedians on these panels actually had different points of view, instead of merely having different comedic styles!

Yesterday (Friday 2 February 2018) on Planet America the presenter, Chas Licciardello, produced an absolute rant in favour of high immigration, primarily in the USA, but by implication in Australia too. He had clearly got hold of a stack of dubious statistics from high-immigration sources, including our old favourite myth, the “ageing population” scare.

It is far from the first time this program has done tendentious stuff like this, but this time I have taken the trouble to transcribe it.

I’ll leave it to the experts to pick apart Chas’s errors, but they clearly include some well-known tricks of our own Australian high-immigration spruikers. e.g.

1. Selective assumptions: Chas assumes that we (i.e. the US and by implication Australia too) are heading for a terrible lack of workers, though there are many indications (such as stagnant wages) that both countries have the reverse problem.
2. Selective alarmism. The rather high US birthrate of nearly 2 children per woman, which in fact ensures a surplus of births over deaths, at least until the population is considerably older, is represented as a disaster. Why? Similarly, the staggering rise of the USA’s working population from 45 million in 1950 to around 150 million in 2015 rings no alarm bells, yet a possible decline of just 7 million by 2035 is represented as a disaster. In fact this may be too small a drop, if automation and robots mean that only a much smaller workforce can be kept in work.
3. Misunderstanding of the “dependency rate”. Traditionally this term means the ratio between the number of people of “working age” (traditionally 15-65 years, but today that might have to be raised to at least 20-70 years) to those either too old or too young to work. The trick is to get the naive hearer to imagine that only old people are “dependants”, and that everyone over 65 is on the pension. In fact the dependency rate was often worse in the past, when people had large families and the population was more full of “unproductive” children than it is now.
4. Forgetting that to have a high percentage of the population within “working age” is only good if there is work for them. If not, the extra “workers” just add to the number of persons on social security. And a working age breadwinner without work often means a whole family on social security, whereas a retired person has very likely already paid for their retirement, and may be financially supporting younger dependants.
5. Caricature and moral grandstanding: e.g. assuming that people who dislike high immigration must “hate” immigrants.
6. Ill-defined and contentious statistics: How rigorously was “innovator” defined, for instance? Do we really know how many US patent applicants are by immigrants?
7. Forgetting that the brain-drain of doctors and surgeons and of top graduates into rich countries, which certainly occurs, has cruel effects on poor countries. “All our doctors are in America.”
8. GDP worship, and belief that growth can go on forever. E.g. Chas: “ . . . to slow annual GDP growth by 1.2% this decade! That is a lot.”

No doubt demographers and economists will find further and probably larger holes in Chas’s rant. What a great target its complacent self-righteousness would make for an astute ABC comedian—if only the ABC employed comedians with diverse views!

Below is my transcription of it:

Planet America program, “Episode 1” 2018
ABC TV channel 24. Screened on 2 and 3 February 2018
c. 38 minutes into program as stored online at http://iview.abc.net.au/programs/planet-america/NC1814H001S00

Chas Licciardello’s “Deep Dive into US Immigration”

NOTE ON TRANSCRIPTION by Mark O’Connor:
This is a monologue, with pre-prepared slides, spoken by presenter Chas Licciardello in his trademark emphatic manner with dramatic gestures. Latter part is sub-titled by the program itself, with emphasised words in capitals. Earlier, my under-linings indicate heavy emphasis.

Chas Licciardello: “We spoke earlier about Trump’s immigration framework, which tries to tilt the balance of legal immigration more towards those with particular skills rather than family connections or pure diversity. But the truth is the immigration pool is skilling up anyway. Let’s go deep!

Logo appears: THE DEEP DIVE (sound effects))

Chas Licciardello: “Immigrants are becoming more educated. 38% of native born Americans over the age of 25 have a college degree. But immigrants over the age of 25 who arrived in the last 5 years, 48% of them have a college degree. What about African immigrants? 41% of them have a college degree, even though they most of them arrived on diversity visas. Finally, what about Asian Immigrants? A whopping 75% of 25-34 year old Asian immigrants have college degrees.

Logo appears: Source: Census Bureau, Migration Policy Institute, Pew Research.
Logo: 25-34 y Asian Immigrants 75%

Chas (continuing emphatically): Immigrants are innovators. 35% of US innovators are immigrants, with European or Asian immigrants

Logo: Europeans/Asians = 5x native-born innovators

Chas (continuing): . . . being 5 times more likely to have created innovations than a native-born American. Between 2000 and 2010, immigrants filed about 200 thousand American patents

Logo: 194,600 patents (2000-10)

Chas: Immigrants were twice as likely to be entrepreneurs as native-born Americans.

Logo: 28% of entrepreneurs (= 2x native-borns)
Logo: Source: Information Technology and Information, 2015 Kauffman Index, National Foundation for American Policy.

And immigrants founded over half of America’s 87 $billion start-up companies.

Logo: Skilled Immigrants: founded 44 of 87 $billion start-ups

Chas: In fact 50% of Silicon Valley workers aged 25-44 are immigrants.

Logo: 50% of Silicon Valley workers (25-44)

Chas: And so are 28% of America’s doctors and surgeons. So they are bringing the skills already!
But I don’t want to debate who immigrants should be or where they should come from, because those are questions of opinion. I’d like to focus more on the numbers of immigrants, because that (dramatic hand gesture) is a question of economics. You see, America is AGING! (dramatic fast-paced music)

Logo: Graph labelled Projected US population over 65: (Source: UN World Population Prospects 2008). Graph shows the percentage over 65 rising from about 7% in 1950 to about 12% in 2010, kinking up to about 21%by 2040, and then largely flattening off at around 22%.
Chas (dramatically): This is the percentage of the population that is over 65 today. [Graph shows about 14%]. And this is the percentage of the population that will be over 65 in 15 years time. [Graph shows about 20%.] And the aging of the workforce [sic] [dramatic gesture] is projected by Rand Corp . . .

Logo: The effect of population aging on Economic Growth, the Labour Force, and Productivity
NBER July 2016 “Our results imply annual GDP growth will slow by 1.2 percentage points this decade.”

Chas (continuing): to slow annual GDP growth by 1.2% this decade! That is a lot. Of course as the population ages, there’s going to be less workers, unless you have immigration. For instance, current rates of immigration . . .

Logo: US Working-Age Population (Pew Research Center)
Graph showing US working-age population moving steadily up from around 45 million in 1950 to c. 150 million in 2015.

Chas: ... the working-age population will grow 10 million by 2035, but without immigration it will shrink by 7 million. And by the way, the places that would die[sic] the fastest without immigration, are rural cities [dramatic finger-point at viewers]—Trump country! [double-eyelid wink]

But why does it matter if the working population shrinks? Well, according to the Labor Secretary in 1917 . . .

Logo: Medicare’s hospital trust fund will run out of money in 2029
The Washington Post, 13 July 2017 “Labor Secretary Alexander Accosta pointed out that in 1960 there were 5 workers for every Social Security recipient. By 2035 there will be only two workers for every beneficiary.”

Chas [reads this text, varying the ending to]: for every social security recipient, but by 2035 there will be only TWO workers for every beneficiary, so that each worker has to carry a bigger load. And Medicare is gonna be even more expensive, which is how you end up with headlines like this, about Medicare running out of money.

Logo: Dramatic red flashing arrow point to the Post headline: Medicare’s hospital trust fund will run out of money in 2029

Chas: Well what about America just having more kids, then? [dramatic eye-widening] Too late! America’s fertility rates haven’t been high for decades! And they are just getting worse[sic].

Logo: American Fertility Rate: Source National Center for Health Statistics: Graph showing births per woman falling from nearly 4 to around 2.

Chas: So, bottom-line: whether restrictionists like immigrants or not, America needs to take a heap of them.

Logo: [A visual clip showing an abusive British celebrity chef.]

Chas: Well, probably not THAT one.
[Program Wrap-up]

The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) has unleashed on the revised Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement (dubbed “TPP11”), which will reportedly allow employers unfettered access to ‘skilled’ migrant workers from member nations. From The Guardian:

The revived Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal will allow at least six countries to access temporary skills shortage work visas without first testing the Australian market, unions have said.

According to the unions’ peak body, the Australian government has confirmed in consultations that employers will be able to hire workers from Canada, Mexico, Chile, Japan, Malaysia and Vietnam in 435 occupations without first advertising jobs to Australians.

The consultation from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade appears to confirm for the first time that the text of the new TPP11, negotiated after Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement, will lower Australian barriers to skilled migrants…

The ACTU president, Ged Kearney, said the deal would mean that migrant workers could be brought in as nurses, engineers, electricians, plumbers, carpenters, bricklayers, tilers, mechanics and chefs.

“Clearly the only allegiance the Turnbull government values is to employers,” she said, accusing it of putting big business ahead of “the rights of workers and the national interest of Australia”.

“There has been no analysis of how this will affect local employment, nor have there been any safeguards proposed to protect these vulnerable workers.

“This agreement would be a disaster for Australia and we call on the Turnbull government to immediately cease negotiations until they have proved that the deal will not come at the cost of massively increased exploitation and unemployment”…

This is pathetic by the Turnbull Government. The recent Senate Report, entitled A National Disgrace: The Exploitation of Temporary Work Visa Holders, explicitly recommended stringent labour market testing of all temporary ‘skilled’ workers to ensure that employers employ locals first wherever possible:

Recommendation 7: The committee recommends that the replacement of local workers by 457 visa workers be specifically prohibited.

Recommendation 8: The committee recommends that the current exemptions on labour market testing for ANZSCO skill levels 1 and 2 be removed.

Recommendation 9: The committee recommends that the Migration Regulations be amended to specify that labour market testing applies to all positions nominated by approved sponsors under labour agreements and Designated Area Migration Agreements.

Immigration should never be included in trade agreements. Immigration is covered in Australia’s ‘Migration Programme’, and there is little sense in negotiating away control of our sovereign borders other nations – and in the process diluting Australian wages and working conditions – for slightly improved market access.

Trade agreements should be for trade and nothing else.

[email protected] Article first published at https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2017/12/tpp-2-0-open-immigration-floodgates/

Leading real estate rent-seeker, the Property Council of Australia (PCA), is pushing for another idiotic policy “solution” to fix Australia’s housing affordability woes: offering a government-backed low deposit home loan scheme.

From The Australian:

"A government-backed low-­deposit home loan scheme could help address housing affordability by getting more buyers into the market and adding to the housing stock, according to the Property Council of Australia…

The PCA highlighted the Keystart program in Western Australia, where buyers can purchase a home with a 2 per cent deposit in Perth and up to 7 per cent in regional areas without paying lender’s mortgage insurance…

PCA chief of policy Glenn Byres said the program had been “useful in helping to drive supply” and had helped buyers who would otherwise be locked out.

“The big challenge right now is the deposit gap and people having to save sufficiently to meet the deposit requirements of ­lenders,” Mr Byres told The Australian…

BIS Oxford Economics senior manager for residential property Angie Zigomanis said any rollout of such a scheme might encourage some borrowers to buy better properties than they could otherwise afford, which could drive up prices for more affordable homes…

Digital Finance Analytics principal Martin North… echoed concerns about pressure on pricing, saying that when similar programs had been introduced around the world “it tends to lift property prices higher”.

Earth to PCA: you don’t “fix” housing affordability by sucking sub-prime buyers into the market and raising demand. You fix it by implementing policies that lower demand and boost supply. You know, things like:

• Normalising Australia’s immigration program by returning the permanent intake back to the level that existed before John Howard ramped-up it up in the early-2000s – i.e. below 100,000 from over 200,000 currently [reduces demand];
• Undertaking tax reforms like unwinding negative gearing and the CGT discount [reduces speculative demand];
• Tightening rules and enforcement on foreign ownership [reduces foreign demand];
• Extending anti-money laundering rules to real estate gatekeepers [reduces foreign demand]; and
• Providing the states with incentive payments to:
• undertake land-use and planning reforms, as well as provide housing-related infrastructure [boosts supply];
• swap stamp duties for land taxes [boosts effective supply]; and
• reform rental tenancy laws to give greater security of tenure [reduces demand for home ownership and reduces rental turnover].

As usual, the PCA is using the fig leaf of “housing affordability” to lobby for government subsidies to the housing sector. This shameless self-interest should be resisted on all fronts.

[email protected]

Article first published by Unconventional Economist in Australian Property at 8:33 am on January 12, 2018 by Leith van Onselen at https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2018/01/another-idiotic-housing-affordability-solution-emerges/

Chief of Staff to former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, Peta Credlin, is the latest to question Australia’s mass immigration program, which flooded NSW (read Sydney) and VIC (read Melbourne) with a record 185,500 net overseas migrants (combined) in the year to June, further crush-loading our two biggest cities. This article was first published on Macrobusiness at https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2017/12/peta-credlin-give-us-national-debate-vote-australias-population/ on December 15 2017.

By Leith van Onselen

Chief of Staff to former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, Peta Credlin, is the latest to question Australia’s mass immigration program, which flooded NSW (read Sydney) and VIC (read Melbourne) with a record 185,500 net overseas migrants (combined) in the year to June, further crush-loading our two biggest cities:

Last night, Ms Credlin delivered a detailed monologue on Sky News calling for immigration levels to be normalised back to their historical average, as well as demanding that our federal politicians give Australians a national debate and vote on Australia’s future population size.

While the whole video is well worth watching, here’s a few key quotes:

Overcrowded streets, busy roads, nowhere to park, over development, unaffordable housing, cramped schools, and in the words of many locals, far too many highrises. These were the concerns raised today [in Bennelong], and they are all code for population growth…

What I can say with absolute certainty is that we didn’t come along any ‘Big Australia’ advocates in Bennelong today…

Having spent 16 years on campaign trails, like today, I wasn’t surprised. Population is often raised because the majority of Australians live in the capital cities, and the congestion and development issues that come with population growth are a big concern…

Should we keep taking immigrants?’ is not the question.

Instead it’s ‘how many immigrants should we take?

What’s the optimum population size for Australia?

I know I speak for many people when I say this is the conversation they want to see their leaders having, the nation having, rather than being shouted down as racists or worse…

Isn’t it about time we had a national conversation about how big we want our population in the future and put in place immigration levels to deliver it, rather than pretending this issue doesn’t exist?..

We need to take a pause in Australia’s immigration intake so that we can settle those here now into affordable housing and secure jobs, and let the infrastructure that is being built catch-up.

Well said. It’s important to note at this time that net overseas migration (NOM) into Australia was 245,500 in the year to June 2017, which is more than triple the historical average of 73,000 NOM since Federation:

Clearly, immigration levels need to be drastically reduced, starting with Australia’s permanent migrant program, which is running at 2.5 times turn-of-the century levels and is even higher than at the peak of the mining boom:

There is no economic or social rationale for such high immigration levels, especially given the overwhelming majority of migrants are flooding our two biggest and most crowded cities, and more than 90% are non-humanitarian (hence we are stripping developing nations of their ‘skilled’ human resources).

[email protected]

With NSW’s (read Sydney’s) population growing at a break-neck pace (see below chart), last month it was revealed that there was a revolt underway from within the NSW Liberal Party against the federal government’s mass immigration program and over-development across Sydney (watch video).

By Leith van Onselen

With NSW’s (read Sydney’s) population growing at a break-neck pace (see below chart), last month it was revealed that there was a revolt underway from within the NSW Liberal Party against the federal government’s mass immigration program and over-development across Sydney (watch video above).

The most important quote from the video was the following:

“Government MPs have all told me the same thing: Sydney is full. They believe the federal government needs to have a difficult conversation about curbing immigration or it simply will not be possible to keep up”.

Now the revolt has spread to Sydney’s long suffering residents, with more than two-thirds of those surveyed declaring “Sydney is full” and off limits to further mass development. From The SMH:

With plans for hundreds of thousands of apartments in the city’s “priority precincts” over the next 20 years, the ReachTel poll conducted for Fairfax Media shows 66.4 per cent of NSW residents oppose more development in existing areas to accommodate a bigger population…

Significantly for the Coalition government, 61.7 per cent of Liberal supporters believe Sydney is full… Of Labor voters, 68 per cent are opposed to more development in existing areas…

The results will fuel tensions over the Greater Sydney Commission’s plans, spilling into the upper echelons of the NSW government…

The Greater Sydney Commission, established last year to lead on planning and development issues and chaired by former Sydney lord mayor Lucy Turnbull, says the city will need about 725,000 extra homes over the next 20 years to accommodate a growing and ageing population.

Sydney’s population is expected to grow by about 1.74 million people by 2036…

On Sunday, a spokesman for [Planning Minister Anthony] Roberts said… the population was increasing because people were living longer, more children were being born and more people were moving to NSW due to it having an economy that was “the best in Australia”.

The last paragraph is the funniest. It pins Sydney’s break-neck population growth on everything but the actual driver: the federal government’s mass immigration ‘Big Australia’ program, which massively ramped-up Australia’s immigration intake from the early-2000s to around 200,000 people annually:

The NSW Government’s own population projections show that Sydney’s population will increase by 1.74 million people (1,650 people per week) to 6.4 million over the next 20-years, with 1.53 million of this growth (1,473 people per week) coming from net overseas migration:

Sydneysiders are not stupid. They know that extreme immigration-fueled population growth is destroying their living standards, with roads, public transport, schools and hospitals all crush-loaded and housing becoming hideously expensive.

The NSW Liberal ministers are right to revolt, as is the electorate. But they need to take the fight to the federal government, which is driving the mass immigration ‘Big Australia’ agenda, and demand that it immediately halve Australia’s immigration intake back to sustainable historical levels.

[email protected]

Article first published on Macrobusiness at https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2017/10/residents-declare-sydney-full-curb-immigration-now/

Dick Smith commissioned a Galaxy poll to assess both the impact of his $1 million TV ad campaign based on the Grim Reaper AIDS ad of the 1980s, and community attitudes towards Australia’s developed-world-leading immigration-fueled rapid population growth. The sample comprised 1,005 respondents, distributed throughout Australia including both capital city and non-capital city areas – the report is attached. The main findings of the poll were:

 The majority of Australians (83%) believe that population growth is of such significant consequence that every major political party should have a population plan.
 There is an overwhelming belief that politicians should be doing something about population growth (82%).
 Population growth is an issue of concern for the majority of supporters of both the Coalition (62%) and the Labor Party (62%).
 Among those that have seen the TV ad 91% are convinced that every major political party should have a population plan.

Poll confirms that Smith understands what ordinary Australians want

Dicks Smith said “This just confirms that what I’ve found from the conversations I’ve had with ordinary Australians: 8/10 are concerned that the major political parties have no population plan.” Dick Smith said “Aussie families can have up to 20 kids during their lifetime, but none do. This is because parents have a population plan for the number of children they can give a decent life to. Yet our politicians have no similar plan for our country. It’s time for a population plan that involves stabilising Australia’s population below 30 million by reducing the net overseas migration program down from the current 200,000 back to the long-term average of 70,000 per annum.”

Is Dick Smith the last good rich man in Australia?

Or will some other wealthy people come out in support of democracy too? It is admirable that Dick Smith really seems to be on a truth-seeking mission. He has refused to be put down by the ABC propaganda dogs at The Drum and Media Watch and he has financed a proper survey which has shown his support base is very high. His detractors have greatly underestimated him. Is Dick Smith the last good rich man in Australia, a country run by wealthy men and women politicians, CEOs, property developers, transnational corporations and media owners, entirely for their own enrichment, at great cost to the rest of us.

I have just come back from 2 weeks in my old home Jakarta. When we went there to live there were 3 million people and it was easy to get around and very manageable. Those were the good days. The Governor, Ali Sadikin, closed the city to more incomers on advice from UN city planning experts as they said the bigger a city gets the harder it is to manage and the mega cities are beyond human management. Immigration was reduced down to those who had work permits. (Immigrants in this case refers to people coming to the city from the countryside). The Governor himself told me the story that the President eventually forced him to open the city to immigration. Population is now maybe 10 million and growing. The city is a total polluted gridlocked nightmare.

There is not enough infrastructure. The city is packed with millions of cars and motor bikes and it takes hours to inch along through this solid pack of vehicles, on every street, everywhere, at all times. If your taxi is immobile in traffic you can jump out and hop on the back of a motor bike. This will be a bit quicker. One has a choice of UBER bikes, GRAB bikes or GO JEK bikes all with their own distinctive helmets with the name in large letters across the back - great business. It is a good idea to cover your nose and mouth against the pollution - you should see what the police wear to protect themselves.

I knew I was seeing Melbourne as it will be in the future if our population keeps growing as it has been and we do not have the money for the infrastructure. Infrastructure is currently estimated to be $200 billion behind right now and remember that Infrastructure Vic said they would be spending $100 billion over the next 30 years. Think how far behind we will be then. What we are seeing in Melbourne right now is what I have seen happening in Jakarta over the years, It will end up like Jakarta now - a nightmare. We are insane to let this happen to Melbourne. We have got to tell the government loud and clear to reduce immigration right now before it is too late.

There are better ways to keep the economy going. The small rich European countries seem to manage by going in for super high tech whereas all we do is build more and more houses. We are being conned by a lazy stupid government with a ponzi scheme. So what happens when we double the population of Melbourne, does it stop there or does it keep growing? If the government still insists on high immigration it should allow migrants to come only if they live in country towns, It should provide jobs for them there and put in fast trains across Victoria connecting the towns. But no, all they do is pack them into Melbourne, in your back yard. Go to Jakarta if you want to see the future of Melbourne or Sydney.

Article by Jay Syrmopoulos January 25, 2017. First published on the Free Thought Project Macedonia – Only a week after Hungary announced plans to purge all NGO groups funded by globalist progressive mega-donor George Soros, a new global initiative – Stop Operation Soros (SOS) – dedicated to the countering the influential political/social engineering the billionaire activist is now engaged in across the globe through his Open Society Foundations, was announced in Macedonia.

During a press conference last week, SOS founders called on all “free-minded citizens,” regardless of race, ethnicity or religion, to “fight against one-mindedness in the civil sector, which is devised and led by George Soros,” the Vecer newspaper reported.

This move comes on the heels of the Hungarian government announcing that it will use “all the tools at its disposal” to target and “sweep out” all non-governmental organizations funded by Soros, a Hungarian-born financier who has become one of the U.S. Democratic Party’s major sources of funding, according to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s ruling party.

Co-founder of the movement, Nikola Srbov, called out Soros for hijacking civil society, in an effort force his own personal ideology upon others by monopolizing civil discourse through strategically funding certain organizations via his group Open Society Foundations.

At the press conference, the group announced that their first step would be to work at uncovering ‘subversive’ activities by Soros-funded NGOs.

“We’ve witnessed the takeover of the entire civil sector and its abuse and instrumentalization to meet the goals of one political party. That is unacceptable and goes beyond the principles of civic organizing,” Srbov said at the press conference.

“The Open Society Foundation, operating under the Soros umbrella, used its funding and personnel to support violent processes in Macedonia. It has monopolized the civil society sector, pushing outside any organization which disagrees with the Soros ideology,” he stated.

Read more at http://thefreethoughtproject.com/stop-operations-soros-initiative/#CHZRDlRR9Bmxjc19.99

Video of conference inside: Speeches verbally translated in English, live. Leaders of several European nationalist parties gathered for the ‘Freedom for Europe’ congress, in Koblenz, on Saturday, January 21. The meeting was the first official appearance of Frauke Petry, chair of the AfD (Alternative for Germany), alongside Front National leader Marine Le Pen. Both were joined by Geert Wilders, founder and leader of the Dutch PVV (Party for Freedom), and Liga Nord leader Matteo Salvini. Dubbed a “European counter-summit”, this first-of-its-kind gathering was organised by the Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF) group from the European Parliament.

Jeff Dorset has begun a campaign addressed to the Prime Minister to reduce Australia`s economic, non refugee immigration intake to economically.environmentally and socially responsible level of 50,000 net pa and significantly reduce 457 Visa and other foreign worker import program. Please consider signing it.

To:

AUSTRALIAN PRIME MINISTER

REDUCE AUSTRALIA`S (non refugee) EXCESSIVE IMMIGRATION and FOREIGN WORKER INTAKE

"[Raising immigration and open borders] would make everybody in America poorer. You're doing away with the concept of a nation state and I don't think there's any country in the world which believes in that. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people. What right wing people in this country would love is an open border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for 2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don't believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create the millions of jobs." (Bernie Sanders)

Ezra Klein: Something that’s in what you said being a democratic socialist, is a more international view. I think if you take global poverty that seriously it leads you to conclusions that in the US are considered out of political bounds. Things like sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders. About sharply increasing
...

Bernie Sanders: Open borders? No, that's a Koch brothers proposal.

Ezra Klein: Really?

Bernie Sanders: Of course. That's a right wing proposal which says essentially there is no United States ...

Ezra Klein: But it would make ...

Bernie Sanders: Excuse me ...

Ezra Klein: It would make a lot of global poor richer, wouldn't it?

Bernie Sanders: It would make everybody in America poorer, you're doing away with the concept of a nation state and I don't think there's any country in the world which believes in that. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people. What right wing people in this country would love is an open border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for 2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don't believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create the millions of jobs. You know what youth unemployment in the United States of America today? If you're white high school graduate, it’s 33%, Hispanic 36%, African American 51%. Do you think we should open the borders and bring in a lot of low-wage workers or do you think maybe we should try to get jobs for those kids?

I think from a moral responsibility we've got to work with the rest of the industrialized world to address the problems of international poverty but you don't do that by making people in this country even poorer.

Ezra Klein: Then what are the responsibilities that we have? Someone who is poor by US standards is quite well off by say, Malaysian standards, so of the calculation goes so easily to the benefit of the person in the US, how do we think about that responsibility? I guess I'm asking for – I agree. You have a nation-state structure. You always are going to, the politics don’t allow anything else.

But I guess philosophically, the question is how do you weight it? How do you think about what the foreign aid budget should be? How do you think about poverty abroad?

Bernie Sanders: I do weigh it. Well first of all, again, as a United States senator in Vermont, my first obligation is to make certain kids in my state and kids all over this country have the ability to go to college, which is why I am supporting tuition-free public colleges and universities. I believe we should create millions of jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and ask the wealthiest people in this country to start paying their fair share of taxes. I believe we should raise the minimum wage to at least 15 bucks an hour so people in this county are not living in poverty. I think we end the disgrace of some % of our kids living in poverty in America. Now how do you do that? What you do is understand there's been a huge redistribution of wealth in the last 30 years from the middle class to the top 1/10 to 1%. The other thing that you understand globally is a horrendous imbalance in terms of wealth in the world. As I mentioned earlier, the top 1% will own more than the bottom 99% in a year or so. That's absurd. That takes you to programs like the IMF and so forth and so on. I think what we need to be doing as a global economy is making sure that people in poor countries have decent paying jobs, have education, have healthcare, have nutrition for their people. That is a moral responsibility, but you don't do that as some would suggest, by lowering the standard of American workers which has already gone down very significantly.

When your party is going off the rails, don't you have the right to shout out the windows for help? Geoff Dowsett is a member of the Hornsby Kur-in-gai Greens' Population and Sustainability Reference Group. He has been growing increasingly concerned about the failure of the Greens to take the issue of environmental sustainability seriously and make positive changes to their population policy. Geoff’s resulting activism on the issue of population numbers in Australia has been received by some Greens members with hostility. He is not the first and will not be the last Green to suffer for his convictions at the hands of party members. A threat of expulsion relayed by Greens candidate for Eden-Monaro, Tamara Ryan, is now in train, scheduled for the August Ordinary General Meeting to be held on Monday 12 th September 2016 at 6:30pm at Hornsby Central Library, 28-44 George St Hornsby NSW 2077. (Entrance in Hunter Lane). We publish the motion about this that was sent to Geoff and we report on Geoff’s reaction in this article.

The motion

"The Motion is:

That, Mr. Geoff Dowsett’s membership of the Hornsby Ku-ring-gai Greens should be cancelled on the grounds that the member has, as outlined clause section 6.5.3 of our constitution, "placed herself or himself outside of the Group" acted in contravention of clause 6.5.3.2 of our constitution, in that he demonstrated repeated disruptive behaviour within the Group and behaved in a manner that brought the group into disrepute.

Due to the confidential and personal nature of specific incidents underlying this motion, the details of these events will only be discussed at the meeting."

Geoff says that he rarely attends meetings, so he doesn't think that his alleged 'disruptiveness' could be about disrupting meetings. He says that he thinks that the objections are probably about his energetic, persistent lobbying, using emails and Facebook posts, addressed to Greens members and MPs. He has sometimes received responses indicating that some Greens see his population policy activities as insulting and counter to their ‘safe speech’ rules.

The motion above cites Section 6.7 of the Greens NSW constitution. Geoff believes this has to do with sharing information to people such as Jane O`Sullivan and Sheila Newman who are not Greens members. At this stage he thinks this concerns sharing Mercurius Goldstein's response to a question he circularised to candidates and encouraged others to send similar questions about candidates’ attitudes on Australian population policy.

Other Greens candidates who responded to Geoff’s question did so on Facebook so their comments were in the public domain, but Mercurius responded to the NSW Greens Population Working Group. Geoff told Mercurius that he was forwarding Mercurius' response to Sheila Newman (candobetter.net) and Mercurious wrote,

“It's nice of you to share my responses with Sheila Newman and I appreciate her interest in the NSW preselection -- is she a Greens NSW member? As an author I'm sure Sheila can speak for herself without your assistance and I'd urge her to contact me directly if she's interested in following up on any matters.”

It is hard to believe that there is a valid case against Geoff, but three members have apparently asked the secretary to arrange for Geoff's dismissal.

Geoff says that he has frequently been abused by some Greens members who don’t like his views on population numbers. (We published Tamara Ryan’s response to Geoff here:http://candobetter.net/node/4935.) A few Greens members have persistently described him as a racist, xenophobe and, more recently, as sexist, publicly breeching Greens safe speech protocols but without reprimand within the party, he says.

Greens candidates lack qualifications to make decisions on environment and population

Geoff has distributed an email to hundreds of NSW Greens MPs and members suggesting that none of the candidates for John Kay's now vacant Upper House seat are sufficiently qualified to represent the environment, quality of life, fauna and flora, or habitat of NSW. He came to this conclusion from their poor responses or failure to respond to a relevant question he sent to candidates [see below]. He said that the responses to this email 'displayed no knowledge, interest or inclination to admit that the Turnbull Government's record, high, excessive, unsustainable 457 Visa and middle class immigration intake should be returned to the long term average of about 50,000 net per annum from the current excessive 500,000 net per annum.’ With regard to the move to expel him, he has said that the Greens should read his message rather than shoot the messenger.

Text sent to candidates

This is the text he sent to the candidates:

As a candidate for John Kaye's Upper House seat how about a strong statement and policy improvement suggestion from you to address the desperate need to stabilise Australia`s population growth? The current "economic" middle class so called skilled (non refugee) immigration rate of 500,000 per year including 457 Visa (a world record high intake) is not sustainable. Sydney's population is growing by 83,000 net per a under the Liberal Govt's Immigration scam. It is causing excessive impact on inadequate infrastructure, impact on natural eco-systems through urban growth and consumer demand. Increased traffic congestion in our major cities - sky rocketing housing prices. Of course the immigration rate is just what big business wants, particularly the housing industry, while our quality of life, natural environment and urban environment goes down the gurgler. The immigration rate is also closely linked with the insane growth economy which is addicted to continuing growth in consumption. It is HYPOCRISY of the Greens to have a policy of sustainable economy without a policy for a substantial reduction in immigration. Priority should be humanitarian i.e. for political and environmental refugees NOT wealthy middle class business migrants. When will the Greens members such as yourself bite the bullet on population ? I won't vote for you unless you make a statement indicating a clear commitment to reducing Turnbull's excessive Immigration and 457 Visa intake."(Geoff Dowsett. Member. Hornsby Kuringai Greens. Population/Sustainability Working Group Member. Statement above does not represent the views of all of the working group.)

Shooting the messenger

We will be watching with interest and concern to see whether Mr Dowsett suffers injustice for his environmental activism. As noted in other articles on this site, e.g. ”Greens members harassed for expressing valid views on environment and population”, he is not the first Green to be pushed around for sounding the alarm on how rapid population growth and the intensification and expansion of human activity is threatening native animal habitat and quality of life in Australia. Geoff runs eco-bushland tours around Sydney national parks which are threatened by encroaching population density and its associated infrastructure and footprint. His blog on candobetter.net is at http://candobetter.net/blog/324.

Geoff Dowsett and the Greens, why and when he joined

Geoff says that he thinks he actually joined Hornsby Kuringai Greens about 10 years ago, but it could be more. He had been a supporter – letter-boxing – for instance and doing polling booth work for about 20 years.

He was friendly with an old Greens stalwart, Mervine Murchie, a Scotsman with trade union background--- who convinced him to join.

He finds that the Greens have changed a lot since then. They are very different. There were many more conservationists in the early days.

Geoff says that he has attended many community meetings organised by Greens and only one State Delegates Conference. He has placed Greens candidate placards in his front garden during elections and he has two Greens placards permanently in his front garden. One is high up in a tree and the other in ground. Have letter boxed----and handed out at polling booths. Meeting is 12th Sept 6.30 pm.