(We) can do better

Who was David R. Brower? He was the dean of the American environmental movement, to be ranked among John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt in importance. Nominated for the Nobel Prize three times, he founded the Sierra Club Foundation, the John Muir Institute for Environmental Studies, Friends of the Earth, the League of Conservation Voters, Earth Island Institute, North Cascades Conservation Council and Fate of the Earth Conferences. But it was with America’s flagship environmental organization that he was most associated with. He joined the Sierra Club in 1933, was elected to its board of directors in 1941 and was made its executive director in 1952. Under his leadership club membership grew ten-fold (7,000 to 70,000) from a group of affluent apolitical hikers to an aggressive player on the national environmental scene. David Brower was the catalyst in this transformation. He was the Sierra Club. Yet after 67 years this great crusader felt compelled to resign, “with no regret and a bit of desperation.” Brower, you see, had a problem. He had a problem with corruption, bribery, political correctness and myopia. He knew that demography drives not only human destiny but the destinies of the species we impact, and that unchanged immigration policies would double America’s population by 2100, or if liberalized, add as many as another 700 million by that time. He also knew that post-1970 immigrants and their descendants would be the decisive force fuelling American population growth. If unchecked, it surely meant ecological Armageddon for the country. In resigning Brower stated that “Overpopulation is perhaps the biggest problem facing us, and immigration is part of the problem. It has to be addressed.” Brower, of course, was not alone in advancing those beliefs. Earth Day co-founder and former Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, Earth First co-founder Dave Forman and Harvard professor and socio-biologist E. O. Wilson all warned of the environmental effects of current immigration policies. Just after the first Earth Day in 1970, the President’s Commission on Population Growth and America’s Future urged Congress to stabilize the population at 200 million expeditiously. Paul Ehrlich was among several ecologists who identified 150 million people, half the country’s present population level, as a number that would ensure sustainable habitat survival. The Sierra Club used to agree with them. It used to believe that population growth was a crucial variable in environmental degradation. After all the Ehrlich –Commoner equation (environmental Impact=Population x Affluence x Technology) was conventional wisdom and common sense. Population stabilization, a function of lower fertility rates and lower immigration quotas, were long a part of its program. According to its Population Report of 1989, “Immigration to the U.S. should be no greater than that which will permit achievement of population stabilization in the U.S.” And then suddenly in 1996 that policy was dropped. It became politically correct to ignore the “P” in the IPAT equation and focus on “A”, affluence or reducing per capita consumption, and “T”, more efficient technologies. Greener lifestyles and renewable technologies would save the day and with the oxymoronic fraud of “smart growth”, we could pretend that we could shoe-horn half the world into this continent merely by channeling, or “managing” growth. But when a group of Sierrans, including Brower, saw the folly of this approach and attempted to restore traditional immigration policy, in stepped a billionaire, David Gelbaum, who threatened that if it was restored the Sierra Club would “never see a dollar of his money”. The ruling clique complied and was dutifully rewarded with in excess of $100 million in bribes, tendered in 2000-1 alone. Elizabeth May, for her part, threatened to change the name of the Sierra Club of Canada if the dissidents succeeded in returning the US Club to its original course. She has obviously carried her globalist convictions into the leadership of the Green Party of Canada with a pledge to chase immigration targets into the stratosphere, even beyond that of other parties. American Presidential Green candidate Ralph Nader, by contrast, denounced open borders and liberal immigration as “absurd” in his 2000 campaign, and for that reason enjoyed Brower’s support. Mass immigration can be understood as a right wing project that benefits from left wing collusion, with progressives essentially lining up behind Bill Gates and 40 major technology companies and agribusiness to drive down wages so that conservatives obtain their cheap labour and socialists obtain their cheap cause. Donations to conservation groups to look the other way while the invasion continues is an excellent return on corporate investment. No wonder Canadian members are kept ignorant about who gives money to environmental NGOs, how much is given and what directors are paid. No wonder sleazy arrangements are made between big corporations like the Royal Bank and Nature Conservancy of Canada, the Audubon Society of America and Toyota (a $20 million deal) and the Sierra Club’s deal to endorse the cleaning products of the Clorox corporation. Now you understand why this pioneer of the Sierra Club had to finally leave it just before his death. He could no longer stomach being a member of a corrupt, money-grubbing, corporate lackey that accepted a massive annual bribe to leave immigration, a vital ingredient of environmental degradation, out of the policy book. He realized that a clique purchased by David Gelbaum’s millions and intent on chasing after potential Hispanic members at the expense of defending the environment against the illegal invasion across the southern border could not be overthrown. And the organization was too irredeemably corrupt to be reformed. It had to be abandoned and by-passed. David Brower. An authentic environmentalist, a man of integrity and principle. A rare commodity in the movement. http://www.susps.org/index.html (The whole story on the Sierra Club) http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/1631 (The Royal Bank and Nature Conservancy) Tim Murray April 22/08

Dear Claire, Shane, and John: As the following letter published in a local paper points out, you are asking entirely the wrong question for your April 24th session. The real question is "People and Environment: Can the two co-exist?" Dear Sir: According to Statistics Canada, Canada has a very rapid rate of population growth when compared to other countries. “Between 2001 and 2006, Canada's population increased 5.4%, the first time since 1991 that the census-to-census growth rate has accelerated. This acceleration during the past five years was due to higher levels of immigration. Canada had a faster rate of growth than any other member of the G8 group of industrialized nations between 2001 and 2006.” That high rate continues, and there are calls by politicians and the business community to increase it even further. In contrast, there are calls by citizens’ groups to halt population growth and immigration across the spectrum, making it clear that this is not a racist perspective, but rather an environmental one. Recent polls in the United States and other countries show that the majority of people in general support population control, but that the people in control do not. From July 1 to October 1, 2007, Canada’s population increased by 115,200 people, or about 46,000 households at an average of 2.5 persons per household. British Columbia is growing more rapidly than most other provinces, and takes a large share of that growth. At the current annual growth rate of 1.4%, British Columbia’s population stands to double within 50 years. In one year, the increase will be about 60,000 people, or about 24,000 households. In that light, it’s indeed sad that BC Hydro tries to make us feel good about the recent Earth Hour, where people are urged to turn off their lights for an hour. According to an article in the Lakeshore News (April 4, 2008, p. 10), BC Hydro claims that, if all British Columbians turned off their lights for one hour every evening, “the combined savings would be enough to power more than 4,000 homes for an entire year.” Putting the two numbers together, British Columbians would apparently have to turn off their lights for about 6 hours each day in order to accommodate the provincial population growth in just one year. After four years of this, we will apparently have to leave our lights off permanently, 24 hours a day, in order to accommodate the growth. This is just another example of the futility of conservation efforts in the face of population growth, and economic growth I might add. And worse, further population growth only makes other problems much worse. Loss of biodiversity, loss of farmland, further depletion of fish stocks and resources, and a host of other serious problems lead us even closer to the brink of ecological collapse, and to the other grim predictions from a large and increasing number of voices on this planet. At some point, we will shed our arrogant assumption that we and our economy are somehow immune from the limits of the natural world. Whether that comes before or after the collapse of our civilization is the question. Exactly like a cancer, we are rapidly killing our host with unchecked growth. Sincerely, Rick Shea, 1375 Salmon River Road, Salmon Arm, B.C. 833-4053 Postscript On Wednesday, January 24, 2007, Environment Critic Shane Simpson shouted in the Campbell River Museum, “I will not tell people not to come to British Columbia!” Why not? If he was a motel owner, would he never tell passing motorists that there were no more vacancies? If he was a fire marshal, would he never say there was a limit to the number of people who could sit in a given restaurant or movie theatre? When told that Qualicum Beach had capped its population, at first he expressed disbelief. He was unaware of such a pivotal move having taken place in his own province. Then he haughtily dismissed its legality, “It won’t last, it is illegal”. But it is completely in keeping with the Charter, as is the simple device of refusing to issue more building permits. The province now tells people they just can’t visit the West Coast Trail or Bowron Lakes on whim. The principle is already established. As the environment falls under siege, more and more people will be excluded from popular destinations be they Provincial Parks, seaside towns or the province itself. And of course, the easiest measure of all would be to restore immigration levels to sane pre-Mulroney era levels. But oh no, “I am not going to tell people they can’t come to Canada.” Very well then, suffer energy growth. Since 1970 US population grew by 43%, GHG emissions grew by 43%. Since 1990, Australia’s population grew by 30%, and its GHG emissions grew by 30%. The correlation is clear. Face it. Tim Murray Quadra Island, BC

Article below is based on a report by Australia’s Olympic Poet, Mark O'Connor :

Demographer, Peter McDonald, is famous for presenting extreme projections of population implosion. His contributions to a debate at ANU on April 1 were predictable and are now on line. (The PPT versions are the easier ones to read). Peter's ideas suit big business and corporatised government and have thus become very influential. The criticisms and analysis below are therefore very important, since the Murdoch and Fairfax media, and sadly, even the ABC, market these attitudes uncritically and approvingly. Sheila Newman

Peter McDonald's piece, "Australia’s future population: planning for reality," is unlikely to impress environmentalists, according to Mark O'Connor.

In case you haven't time to scan it on line, here are some exerpts, organised and analysed by Mark O'Connor around 5 keywords that McDonald uses:

McDonald's Five Keywords:

Environment
Growth
Labour
Fatalism
"Realism"
"Social cohesion"

Those last two concepts probably really do need to be in inverted commas. The first 3 concepts are mixed together as follows:

The first sheet of his presentation summarises his line on environment:

"Environment and economy

• Australia will achieve a better result in relation to its own
environment and its contribution to the reduction of global
greenhouse gas emissions if it has a strong economy.
• A strong economy will provide the capital that is necessary
to invest in improvement of environmental infrastructure,
repair of degraded environments, and a shift to alternative
sources of energy that are not fossil-fuel based."

The next sheet proclaims:

"Capacity constraints are Australia’s biggest economic problem

• Much of the infrastructure required to support a strong and
productive economy is in short supply in Australia at
present.
• This includes water, transport for people, transport for
goods, ports, energy supply, housing and office space, and
state-of-the-art communications.
• These shortages may be artificially reduced in the short
term by increasing interest rates to slow demand.
• However, we do not want to live in a continued forced
recession. So, higher interest rates are not a long-term
solution. In the long term, the capacity constraints must be."

Notice that this, like most of PMD's talk, is not demography, but growth economics.

Next sheet:

"The requirements for new infrastructure

• New infrastructure involves technology, capital, good
planning and commitment, and labour.
• The technology is available now in most instances and
more will come on line.
• Capital also is in relatively good supply.
• Planning is improving, commitment is stronger.
• Shortage of labour is the problem."

"Why we need labour

• Conservation is highly desirable as far as it goes, but we
shall only solve our water, energy and environmental
problems in the long run through construction of new
infrastructure.
• If we want solar or wind energy, then the solar panels and
windmills have to be made and constructed.
• If we want secure urban water supplies then whatever
policy mix we use to do this involves construction.
• If we want to ease the housing crisis, we need more
houses.
• If we want the economy to run productively and
competitively, we need better transportation of goods and
people, better ports, and better communications
infrastructure."

Which leads, as you've guessed to:

"Why we need labour (continued)

• Conservation is highly desirable as far as it goes, but we
shall only solve our water, energy and environmental
problems in the long run through construction of new
infrastructure.
• If we want solar or wind energy, then the solar panels and
windmills have to be made and constructed.
• If we want secure urban water supplies then whatever
policy mix we use to do this involves construction."

In short, according to Peter McDonald, we need vast population growth in order to provide more labor, so we can have more energy efficiency. Oh, and more mining (presumably solar powered mining).

Well it was April Fool's Day, but Peter didn't seem to be joking:

"Labour demand

• Almost right across the Australian economy, workers are
short supply.
• This is especially the case in the construction industries
(15,000 builders from the USA?).
• The mining industry is desperately seeking workers to
commence new projects (Chinese work gangs?). Note,
revenue from mining is the source of much of our public
capital for environmental and social development."

Next we get a dubious graph showing labor falling:

"NOM = Net Overseas Migration
Note: Assumes fertility constant at 1.8 births per woman and labour force"

participation constant at July 2007 levels

Except that labor, in McDonald's own projection, is actually rising. It is only the rate of increase of labor ("Labour force annual growth rate") that is falling. (If you can't say a figure is falling, you can always go to its first or even its second differential to find a function that is falling.)

What about automation, computerisation, machines? Why do we need so very much labor?

Well, you see, there is a multiplier effect:

• If we had all of these [mining and construction] workers, they will demand more
services and hence more workers in retail, hospitality and
personal services. There is a multiplier effect (foreign
students and working holiday makers?).

The nations of the world will soon be competing fiercely for labor, and hence for immigrants.

Hence we must be fatalistic:

"Inevitable population growth for Australia

• We can improve our productivity and we can raise labour
force participation rates somewhat, but it is inevitable that
overseas migration to Australia will remain high and the
population will grow by 2050 to something in excess of 30
million people.
• In comparative terms, this will be much lower than the
population of California and the population of the USA will
be around 440 million. Canada’s population will be over 50
million."

Apart from economic growthism and a strong streak of fatalism, Peter McDonald now shows a new emphasis on "realism", cf. his paper's subtitle:

"Australia’s future population: planning for reality"

The subtitle seems borrowed from business lobbies like APOP, The Australian Property Council, and the Scanlon Foundation (the latter which funded his recent paper with Glenn Withers). Such groups emphasise "realistic" (= fatalistic) planning on population. i.e. accept that huge growth is coming, and plan for it. (In debate Mark O'Connor called this a bully's argument: "Since we're going to put you in the stocks anyway, why don't you co-operate and then we'll do it more nicely.")

Hence Peter's line: what we have to fear is not population growth but our failure to plan for it.

Hence Peter McDonald's concluding "overhead" runs:

"Conclusion

• Australia will be a better country in its economic,
environmental and social dimensions if we accept the
inevitable and plan for it.

• Not planning properly for future population growth is part
the Australian way of mucking things up."

• The present Australian Government seems to have accepted this message. It has set up an infrastructure council and my educated bet is that it will increase the official migrant intake in the May budget."

cf. APOP's "opinions" page: http://www.apop.com.au/opinions.html

• A recent expert study concluded that there are no insurmountable engineering, scientific or environmental barriers to reaching an Australian population of 30 million in 2050, assuming that thorough analysis and planning occur and that leadership is exercised, especially by governments.
• Long-term planning is imperative to ensure timely and orderly provision of needed infrastructure, and leadership from governments is essential in setting clear policy directions.

--

One other element in Peter McDonald's thinking is worth noting.

Both APOP and Scanlon may be worried that lack of social cohesion might force a halt to such rapid immigration, because they are promoting the need for certain kinds of social cohesion. (Hence the conference that Scanlon Foundation funded recently, with Jupp, Nieuwenhysen, and frequent flyers at such immigration-growth-promoting events.)

As APOP puts it:

"The future prosperity of Australia, underpinned by population growth, will depend on our ability to maintain Social Cohesion in a society with even more cultural diversity than we have successfully accommodated historically."

"Since overpopulation tends to destroy social cohesion (e.g. food riots, water riots, road rage) this line is probably what is known in marketing circles as "advertising against the perceived weakness of the product" --i.e. trying to present your weakness as your strength."

Mark O'Connor

Peter McDonald now styles himself:
"Peter McDonald, Director, Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute, ANU"

and remarked at one point "Mark presents me as an economist, but I think of myself more as a sociologist." Wishful thinking, perhaps. Peter seems like someone who would offer little resistance to the APOP line on social "reality".

Murdoch's Queensland Courier Mail has long been in the business of marketing unacceptable development, but the April 9 2008 editorial read more like a medieval sermon on the benefits of floggings.

“Full story needed on big projects” began with some newspeak and then descended into arguments so crude that one suspected that lack of internal conviction was snarling up logical expression.

The editorialist started off by conflating ‘growth’ with ‘progress’, thus giving the concrete entombment of Brisbane a positive spin. Towards the end, in a kind of third-word medical metaphor for torture, s/he crudely compared undemocratic development with medicine and going to the doctor for an abdominal operation. We were not expected to like what we are told is going to happen, but it is clear that we must accept it. To object to being slashed open in order to …what?... would be unreasonable, apparently.

“Progress will sometimes hurt, but like an unpleasant visit to the doctor, it will hurt less if you are warned in advance of what to expect, rather than having a line drawn through your torso and told this is where the operation will happen.”

Shock treatment without a muscle relaxant would seem a little more congruent to the situation than abdominal surgery. Unless this is some kind of medieval operation to remove our persistent ‘bile’.

The writer (or the mad doctor) tells us that ‘We’ all want progress. It isn’t too clear what progress is, from the editorial, and the doctor seems to be hedging about the outcome of the operation, or its reason. Nonetheless, we must suffer for this abstract thing.

If, like most of us, you don’t want to suffer, and you aren’t sure what progress is anymore, you might feel that you are the only person in Brisbane who feels this way and you probably won’t dare raise your voice to protest.

The journalist-social psychiatrist hits potential protesters against the operation for progress with, not just NIMBYism, which isolates with the charge of selfish the person fighting to defend their territory, but with the dreaded “BANANA” acronym. (See 'Damn 'em all', 23 May Courier Mail, Brisbane, Australia.)

BANANA is even worse than ‘selfish’; it means Totally Unreasonable, maybe even certifyably insane; certainly indefensible. BANANA stands for, “Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.”

The charge is that Queenslanders are objecting to nearly every development that goes up.

Well, Mr Editor-doctor, the fact is that Queensland is very densely populated and developed, so it is pretty difficult to find a place to develop which isn’t close to something else. And, with all this development, why should ‘we’ need, let alone ‘want’ more? We don’t like it, so we are protesting.

Brisbane has far less green space left than Sydney and Melbourne. It is obviously overdeveloped and overpopulated:

“ o•ver•pop•u•la•tion (vr-ppy-lshn) n.
Excessive population of an area to the point of overcrowding, depletion of natural resources, or environmental deterioration.”

We are suffering all three of these symptoms in Brisbane. Why can't we admit we have a problem and stop the cause rather than just trying to manage the effects! (Jennie Epstein in Victoria, slightly paraphrased.)

The editorialist-doctor sympathetically admits: “No one wants a freeway, chemical plant or a new power station at their back door …“but,” (s/he concludes harshly informing us that we cannot escape the symptoms of the progressive disease, or curse) “… these things are a fact of life if we are to cater for the needs of a rapidly growing state.”

The dishonest implication, from the main newspaper, the Murdoch voice of authority in Brisbane, is that Queensland’s extreme population growth is some kind of irresistible Brisbanite fate, like Sysiphus’s was to push a stone up a hill every day, except that, in Queensland, that stone gets bigger every day, and so does the propaganda we have to swallow.

What must Queenslanders have done to the Gods to provoke such punishment as

“freeways, chemical plants and new powerstations at their back door; transport corridors and dams which endanger the environment and destroy local communities ...”

... which the editorialist identifies as our inescapable fate?

The editorialist tells us moreover that many of us may be economically inconvenienced or have airports expanded on our “comfortable backyards.” (This was only to be expected, apparently, and we should have moved somewhere else if we didn’t want our surroundings to degenerate into overpopulated slums. Quite a few of us should perhaps have enquired more carefully before being born here.)

Incredibly, the editorialist equates these sufferings with “our very comfortable 21st century lifestyle.”

And that is not the end of our sufferings: No, we must endure dispossession if we are to avoid dying of thirst in the short term. Nevermind the long term.

Our water security is threatened by population growth, which for some reason we cannot question. That population growth was brought upon us by the developer-serving Queensland Government, which advertised far and wide for it, interstate and overseas. Now we have to put up with the ‘solutions’ for water security which the government that made our water insecure tells us it must foist on us.

For stealing fire from the Gods and giving it to men, Prometheus was chained to a rock. Every day an eagle came and tore his liver out and ate it. During the night it would grow back, only to be torn out again.

Was that the operation?

How bad must it get? It could get a lot worse if our progress takes on the shape of India’s or Africa’s or Chile’s. But, as that dear old man, Augustus Pinochet once said, “Sometimes democracy must be bathed in blood.”

We can be sure that we will be told that it is good for us when that happens.

People are going to start worrying about food right here in Australia. They already look worried in the supermarkets. Now is the time to point out to them that the government is responsible for this and that population growth must be restrained, through downsizing our huge immigration program and cutting off this supply of ready customers to our incredibly greedy property development and finance industry.

On the subject of 'mortgage delinquencies': Rate of Mortgage delinquencies rises, by Ruth Simon, Market Watch, http://www.marketwatch.com/, 4/10/2008 12:01:00 AM

"The latest increases in delinquencies are being driven in part by falling home prices and rising unemployment. The U.S. economy lost 80,000 jobs last month, according to the Labor Department, the biggest drop in five years. Meanwhile, some
8.8 million borrowers had mortgages that exceeded the value of their homes in the first quarter, with the number expected to increase to 10.6 million in the second quarter, according to Moody's Economy.com."

On the subject of food riots:
Global Food Crisis, In some countries, food inflation is turning violent, with Divya Reddy, Eurasia Group; Victor Lespinasse, GrainAnalyst.com; and CNBC's Erin Burnett., http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=707473516&play=1

Note the contrast between the ads that precede this program and the program's contents.

"High food prices, a nuisance in America ... It may amaze Americans who are upset at high food prices to see the pictures... peoples' lives at stake ...As food prices, rice prices have increased dramatically over the last month ... 40% of the population in Egypt lives at or below the poverty line ... governments saying they won't export wheat or rice because they are worried about shortages at home ... This is increasing the prices of those commodities globally and making it worse for importing countries..."

This is exactly what Malthus warned about in his second essay on the Corn Laws, on the danger of importing staples. He said that if cheap food were imported, farmers would lose the incentive to produce food. (Of course no-one was trying to grow ethanol in England at the time he wrote.) He also pointed out that if a country were at war, or its currency was low-value, it would not be able to purchase food on the world market. All these situations are prevailing around the world right now.

The comments from some of the market commentators are pitifully naive.

"I think for the time being prices are likely still headed higher .. [but] if we have normal weather ... I think that a year from now they could be considerably lower... Farmers will respond the way they always do to high prices... they will increase production sharply..."

Note the faith an economic commentator on the show places in higher prices causing more food to be grown - if we have normal weather!

"There is some speculative interest in the market because they are just going where the market is trending higher... not just grains but energy... all the commodities are doing well... and finally they've got ... biofuel, which is using a lot of grain which in the past would have been for food..."

High prices are causing major exporters like the US to grow corn for ethanol! And the poor don't have any money to buy from farmers who have to make huge profits.

You can see here how Marie-Antoinette was able from her cocoon of comfort to suggest that starving Parisiens eat cake if they did not have bread.

The religious faith these traders have in the stock market is pitiful. And the complacency of some commentators on discomfort in the US (and France, and Australia ...) about high food prices. They really don't get it; that quite a lot of the 'richworld' populations are not very far from the breadline - and therefore from rioting - either.

State Premiers and the Prime Minister must cut the property lobby (mainstream media and finance are part of it) loose from the public purse. Their grip on the press is threatening democracy. Their industry is causing huge inflation of vital resources - food, water, land, shelter - in our own and other exporting countries, like Canada, Brazil, and the USA. Affecting us at home and those we export to abroad. People cannot be expected to starve in order to keep the property and finance marketeers rich.

In Australia the property, finance and mainstream media, who are made up of related corporate institutions, is becoming like some monstrous bloated leech, draining our society of resources in order to provide for the customers it insists we import in greater and greater numbers to an economy riding on a massive, fragile, high-tension housing and engineering development bubble. And it gets worse every day. Right at this moment, at extraordinary expense, Port Phillip Bay is being dredged in anticipation of an economy four times as large! Four times as many houses! Four times as many widgets! Four times as many mouths to feed! Yet we are running out of water, food, and oil!

One way to end the real-estate parasite economy would be to simply give people the houses they cannot pay for and put the marketeers on the dole. Does anyone have a better suggestion?

Time to take back democracy. Time to make our votes mean something. Time to make our voices heard by our economically deluded 'leaders', including Rudd with his description of Australia as a 'robust democracy'. Yeah, where we can say anything, but we won't get heard unless we are rich. Time to contact your local member of parliament, and take a few neighbours with you.

“It seems to me we gotta solve it individually…” from the 1968 hit song by the Young Rascals

Somebody hand me a barf bag. Quick. I was in the supermarket yesterday and came upon one of those innumerable escapist books on how we can ignore the big picture and the root cause of the coming apocalypse by retreating into private solutions. It was a book by cheery CBC talk show personality Gill Deacon called “Green for Life”, a compendium of some 200 “eco-ideas” (ego-ideas?) on how to pack school lunches, plan picnics, birthday parties and weddings, decorate and do what Sir Richard Branson called, in his endorsement, “the simple things in your everyday lives that will positively impact our future.” It is Deacon’s hope that just living sustainably in this fashion will become normal. Branson’s “normal” of course is burning up the stratosphere with jet trails all over the globe and investing in biofuels that entail the destruction of rainforests in Brazil, Indonesia and Malaysia. But those are just one or two simple things.

Deacon established her credentials for lecturing me about sustainable living by giving birth to three sons, who collectively will emit 69 metric tonnes of GHG this year. She must be a bona fide environmentalist, however, because she was a director of the World Wildlife Fund of Canada in 2002 and demonstrates her love of wildlife by living in Toronto. You are familiar with the WWF. They suction money from dupes who think you can defend wildlife from population and economic growth by creating sanctuaries for it, while refusing to take positions on population growth and immigration in whatever country they operate. In their defence though, they at least divert donor money away from Nature Conservancy, who make similar fraudulent claims.

The WWF deserves notoriety for providing ammunition to pro-immigrationists by producing eco-footprinting data that purports to show Canada as capable of accommodating more people than it should. The 2000 Living Planet Report, for example, identified Canada as having a carrying capacity of 38 million, an estimate that Optimum Population Trust UK declared took no account of the unsustainability of Canadian agriculture due to serious soil erosion.

It is rather telling that Deacon would devote a section of her “Eco-ideas” to selecting the environmentally correct kind of lubricant to, as she puts it, “grease the wheels of your lovemaking machine.” Yet it is apparently acceptable to conceive three sons in Toronto, or six for that matter, so long as you don’t fuck up the planet with petroleum jelly. I suppose inflicting a large brood on the world is a matter of “personal choice” but tossing a plastic container in the landfill is not.

One Green eco-idea Gill left out, I notice, was for consumers to send a letter to Ottawa or launch a petition against an immigration policy that makes all of her 200 “little things” a joke. Deacon might also send an eco-idea to her employer, the CBC, to drop their euphoric coverage of Canadian foreign aid missions, like Harper’s trip to Haiti, so that Canadians busy with their “Green” lifestyle might learn that their tax money is encouraging people in Haiti, Afghanistan and Africa to have four and five children each and ravage local environments for survival.

But one must not be too harsh with Gill Deacon of course. Cutting down her hypocrisy is like cutting off the head of a many headed hydra. There is a plague of these Green lifestyle books on the market. There is Adria Vasil’s “Ecoholic:Your Guide to the Most Environmentally Friendly Information, Products and Services in Canada.”. Kim McKay’s “True Green: 100 Everyday Ways You Can Contribute to a Healthier Planet”. Greg Horn’s “Living Green: A Practical Guide to Simple Sustainability.” Elizabeth Rogers’ “The Green Book: The Everyday Guide to Saving the Planet One Step at a Time”. And Ellen Sandbeck’s “Organic Housekeeping”, to name but a few.

The impetus for this myopic preoccupation with our personal lives can be traced to the famous entreaty by Al Gore in his documentary “The Inconvenient Truth”. There he states, absurdly, that “each of us is a cause of global warming, but each one of us can make choices to change that with the things we buy, with the electricity we use, the cars we drive. We can make choices to bring our individual carbon emissions to zero. The solutions are in our hands. We just have to have the determination to make them happen.” Gore does not appreciate that green consumers can never reduce their consumption to zero, and that an increase in the number of even green consumers is going to increase total consumption. The solution does not lie in the hands of individual consumers, but in the collective hands of citizens to effect political change.

The limits of green lifestyle habits can be illustrated clearly by a study conducted by Optimum Population Trust UK that found that one new citizen either born or admitted as an immigrant to Britain, wiped out 80 lifetimes of responsible recycling. Put differently, a lifetime of responsible recycling would only make up for one and one-quarter per cent of the damage done by a new citizen. Even if all of domestic waste was recycled, only 10% of the waste contributed by an additional citizen would be counter-acted.

It must be remembered that it is consumption that generates waste. While reducing our profligate per capita consumption is laudable and necessary, one must be aware that it is the number of “per capitas” which is relevant. Thus reducing our per capita C02 emissions from 23 metric tonnes to something reasonably obtainable will prove to have little effect if population growth is permitted to continue at 1.08% per annum.

Similarly our lifetime per capita consumption of 3.7 million pounds of minerals, metals and fuels, if reduced, will still be problematic if more people consume them even at a lesser rate. And turning off the lights for one hour, as we recently did in solidarity with other conservers globally, is a futile gesture if we allow population and economic growth to continue. Case in point. British Columbia Hydro encouraged customers with the thought that if they did that every night it would save enough energy to power an additional four thousand homes for an entire year. But as analyst Rick Shea of Salmon Arm, BC observed, “ British Columbians would apparently have to turn off their lights for about 6 hours each day in order to accommodate the provincial population growth in just one year. After four years of this, we will apparently have to leave our lights off permanently, 24 hours a day, to accommodate that growth.”

In summary then, the movement toward “sustainable living”, as represented by books like Gill Deacon’s “Green for Life”, is largely an exercise in ineffectual do-goodism and feel-goodism. If “every little bit counts”, it counts for little. If “it all adds up”, it doesn’t add up to much buried in a demographic avalanche. The call to “reduce, re-cycle and conserve” in the face of runaway population growth can only be likened to a cheerful cleaning lady tidying up a cabin in the Titanic as the ship is listing, making sure everything in the room is bio-degradable. She could never be relied upon to tell you the truth about the ship’s prospects, or yours, but she was hired by Captain CBC for her pleasant disposition and you will find her trivial advice entertaining.

Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC
April 4/08

Can it really be forty years to the day? I remember exactly where I was that terrible day when Dr. King was shot in Memphis. It is hard to believe that one man could accomplish so much in 39 years of life, and could combine so much intellect with so much moral authority and courage.

Much is known and celebrated about his civil rights campaigning. What does not seem to be known however is that this foremost champion of human rights was also one who spoke of the importance of setting limits to our population both domestically and globally as a necessary precondition for those rights. Human rights in a nation whose water supply, housing, infrastructure or farmland is exhausted by overpopulation was to Dr. King largely meaningless And civil rights for a black family overburdened with more children than it could support was less advantageous as well.

In some respects, the career of Dr. Martin Luther King can be compared to that of Cesar Chavez. In death their legacy has been claimed by those who have not entirely been aware of their holistic approach. Chavez for example has been invoked by Hispanic leaders opposed to tighter border controls and immigration restrictions. In fact, Cesar Chavez stood at the border several times on patrol in an attempt to prevent illegal immigrants from entering the United States from Mexico. He realized that illegal immigration undercut the wages, working conditions and job security of established Mexican-Americans.

The following quote by Dr. King two years before his death should unequivocally place him alongside neo-Malthusians. To be a progressive, a leftist, a trade union leader or an environmentalist before the mid 1970s was to be someone who intuitively acknowledged limits. Since then, the zeitgeist changed. Why?

Recently, the press has been filled with reports of sightings of flying saucers. While we need not give credence to these stories, they allow our imagination to speculate on how visitors from outer space would judge us. I am afraid they would be stupefied at our conduct. They would observe that for death planning we spend billions to create engines and strategies for war. They would also observe that we spend millions to prevent death by disease and other causes. Finally they would observe that we spend paltry sums for population planning, even though its spontaneous growth is an urgent threat to life on our planet. Our visitors from outer space could be forgiven if they reported home that our planet is inhabited by a race of insane men whose future is bleak and uncertain. There is no human circumstance more tragic than the persisting existence of a harmful condition for which a remedy is readily available. Family planning, to relate population to world resources, is possible, practical and necessary. Unlike plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases we do not yet understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we possess. What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the solution but universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and education of the billions who are its victims₁.

- Rev. Martin Luther King, May 5, 1966

Footnotes

1. From www.plannedparenthood.org/about-us/who-we-are/the-reverend-martin-luther-king-jr.htm, www.experiencefestival.com/a/Martin_Luther_King_Jr_-_Overpopulation/id/5279280

Tim Murray,
Quadra Island, BC
March 29/08

On 31 March Brisbane's Courier Mail Newspaper reported that the proponents of the proposal to build a high residential development on a concrete slab above the Northern half of the Brisbane River adjoining the Central Business District had declined to put their case at a public debate to be organised by the Brisbane Institute.

Peter Skinner a lecture in Architecture at the University of Queensland and an an outspoken critic of the proposal had issued the invitation to Queensland Premier Anna Bligh ,a principle backer of the proposal. When she refused claiming that it clashed with another commitment, an invitation was made to Deputy Premier Paul Lucas who also declined. Multiplex, the developer who is hoping to build the residential complex also declined an invitation.

As I wrote in a letter published in the Courier Mail of 1 April 2008:

... Given that at least the Premier and Deputy Premier must surely have satisfied themselves beyond any reasonable doubt that their plans to entomb much of the Brisbane River adjoining the CBD beneath a giant slab of concrete is in the best interests of the public they serve, what could they possibly have to fear from an open public debate?

Philippe Legrain's puerile veneration of globalization and free market economics is, for its outrageous simplicity, alluring to some in the same way that Ayn Rand's uncompromising fantasies drew a cult following. His call for open borders is so boldly brazen that it disarms many of his incredulous audience in the manner that Milton Friedman or Julian Simon did theirs. But a glance at any best sellers' list will reveal that is typically those who stake out extreme and provocative positions without solid empirical foundation who attract readers and the favour of publishers. While those authors and commentators who are better informed of a broader and deeper knowledge, on the other hand, often lose their market edge because a more balanced account is inherently less exciting.

In fact, in his book review of Immigrants:Your Country Needs Them, Australian critic Mark O'Connor characterized Philippe Legrain as essentially "ill-read", "a rhetorician, not a thinker", who in his euphoric assessment of a world where mobility was unimpeded "ignores inconvenient issues of resources, spaces, greenhouse emissions and environmental degradation."

Like a tireless door-to-door salesman of a quack remedy that subsequent lab analysis would show to be lethal and fraudulent in its claims, the infamous open-borders advocate, economist and journalist Philippe Legrain knocked on French Canada's door recently to speak to the biweekly magazine L'actualitie. The message was practically the same one he has given to the Economist, the Guardian, the Financial Times, The Times, Prospect Magazine, to the BBC and many foreign publications.

The pitch is: "Hey Canada (or America, or Australia etc.). Not enough water? Here's the medicine. Open your borders to limitless millions! Housing costs too high? Open your borders to limitless millions! Almost out of agricultural land? Open your borders to limitless millions! Educational institutions and medical system over-burdened? You guessed it. Open your borders to limitless millions! It's good for them and good for you too."

Actually Legrain did not say that verbatim, but in so many words. For one thing he has no evident concern or awareness of any ecological consequences from his miracle cure. It is enough for him that bringing down national borders would allegedly double the size of the world economy. The effect of this on greenhouse emissions or biodiversity is simply not on his radar screen. But it is on the radar screen of the Royal Academy of Sciences who according to Monbiot has virtually stated that economic growth will have to be halted if we are to escape that critical two degree rise in global temperatures. Clearly Legrain's economic utopia would be an environmental dystopia.

When asked by L'Actualitie why we should abolish all borders and open all countries to freedom of movement, Legrain responded with the same line that he had given the New York Times six months before in October. "It is first of all a moral question. We should end this global apartheid by which we set the door wide open for rich and well-educated foreigners but close them for poor ones thereby forcing them to stay in their poverty. It is also a humanitarian question", in that according to the IMF immigrants send $300 billion in remittances to their home countries, "which go straight to the pockets of local people." But unfortunately he doesn't appreciate that from the pockets of local people it goes straight back into the pockets of corrupt policemen and officials as bribes. Remittances take the edge off the worst of third world poverty and emigration allows incompetent regimes to export their poor, providing a safety valve so that corruption and overpopulation never gets solved. How many potential Nelson Mandelas and Lech Walesas would be lost to emigration under a global free movement protocol?

I must confess that I find it somewhat galling when an economist of any stripe should protest like Legrain that "it is abhorrent that the rich and the educated are allowed to circulate around the world more or less freely, while the poor are not." Mr. Legrain should know that there are lots of things that the rich can do with their money that the poor can't in the marvelous free-market economy that he champions. They all can drive hummers if they want to, for example. Does that mean that, as a matter of equity, every one in Bangladesh should be afforded a hummer? Migration has vast ecological consequence too. If Mr. Legrain wants to vent his closet socialist conscience, why doesn't express abhorrence over the low wages that his unskilled immigrants are making everywhere in the developed world?

Legrain would argue that it should be a matter of consistency that governments devoted to the free movement of money and goods should also be committed to the unfettered movement of people. But Harvard economist George J. Borjas would reply that "a conservative position that encourages free trade and restricted immigration is not contradictory. Simply put, importing tomatoes is not the same thing as importing people."

Thomas Sowell also stated that people are not commodities, as commodities are consumed, while people generate more people, and immigrants impose a cost on the country. In his Canadian interview, Legrain argued that immigrants consume goods and services and generate economic activity, making the U.S. an economic powerhouse. What he did not mention, however, was the 2004 report by the Centre for Immigration Studies that showed that illegal immigrants consumed $10.6 billion more in services than they paid in taxes. Nor did he comment on the 1997 metastudy by the National Research Council that concluded that while immigration raises over-all output, the aggregrate additional net benefit to the U.S. native-born is nugatory--wiped out by taxpayer funded transfer payments to immigrants.

As for Britain, a House of Lords committee reported on April 1st of 2008 that ten years of record immigration has produced virtually no benefits to the country. The report argues that the 6 billion pounds that foreign workers supposedly add to the nation's wealth each year must be balanced against their use of services like health and education and the growth of the population. The error of conventional government assessments of migrant benefits to economic growth (15-20%), according to Professor David Coleman of Oxford University, is that it has excluded costs from crime, security, race relations and imported ailments like TB. And, according to visiting Professor Richard Pearson of the University of Sussex Centre for Migration Research, "these migrants are likely to be displacing, and reducing the incentive on employers to recruit and train low-skilled, indigenous workers."

If these are the results of a Labour government that critics say has lost control of the nation's borders, issued too many work permits and should not have exposed the labour market to Eastern Europe, what would have been the result if they had followed Philippe Legrain's formula for success and thrown open the borders entirely? One pill makes you sick so you take three or four more?

Legrain of course, can no doubt conjure up a study to show wage improvement in the wake of mass immigration, but other studies by more eminent economists like Borjas can counter them. But can't Philippe Legrain be honest here? Does he really believe that big employers lobby governments for more immigration so that they can raise wage levels? Is that why Bill Gates went to Congress to ask to loosen H-1B visa regulations and raise caps, as a philanthropic measure to improve the wages of IT workers in America? Give us a break, Mr. Legrain. It is as Garrett Hardin said, "immigrant labour pauperizes local labour." What is most sickening about Legrain's argument is that he presents it mostly as a cause of social justice for the global poor while it is in fact, really a cause to bring cheap labour to the developed world and improverish its indigenous working class. As socialist Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont observed, five million middle income workers in America have been caught in a vice between out-sourcing and cheap immigrant labour and have dropped into the ranks of poverty during the Bush era. Even more sickening than Legrain's hypocrisy though has been the collusion of leftists and liberals in it. Imagine if Charles Dickens had teamed up with the Manchester school. Contemporary leftists are not internationalists. They are globalists, unwitting collaborators in the pyramid scam of runaway population growth that cloaks the naked profit motive under the attractive guise of cultural diversity and human rights.

Now for the old chestnut. The one Legrain repeats ad nauseum in countless interviews and essays in reference to several countries. The famous "they do work that locals won't do" routine. For example, he recently stated in his blog that "with France's growth slowing, its sclerotic labour market could do with an infusion of foreign blood—of hard-working , enterprising people who are willing to do the jobs that French people can't or won't." There is always an inference that native workers aren't hard-working, or "enterprising", and as far as a "sclerotic" labour market in a slow growing France is concerning, there is an alternative translation for that. The workers of France are benefiting from a "tight" labour market in a "stable" economy. As one should know, but many including Legrain apparently don't, there is no such thing as jobs that Frenchmen, Americans, Canadians or Australians "won't do". Merely jobs they are unwillingly to do at the wages offered. The phrase "they do work that locals won't do" evidences equivalent ignorance to other phrases that have consigned to the lexicographical museum like "I drive better when I'm drunk" or "my wife had it coming."

Legrain's open borders recipe, aside from presenting monstrous adjustment problems for recipient countries, would also pose problems for poor countries, one would think. When asked by L'Actualitie if they would not be crippled by an exodus of doctors and engineers, Legrain was cavalier and dismissive. Émigré doctors would only meet 12% of current needs if they were forced to return now, so therefore it was better just to assist developing countries in training more doctors. And then what? So they in turn could leave for the First World? Is that Legrain's vision? India and Africa as a big medical school for the West?

Philippe Legrain is not very re-assuring about terrorism either. Since "99.99% of immigrants aren't terrorists" then border controls don't make sense as a deterrent to terrorists. OK, Mr. Legrain, since 99.99% of all air-line passengers aren't bombers, on any plane that you are boarding, we won't bother to do any security screening or luggage checks.

It would seem reasonable, would it not, that when toying with the fate of 6.7 billion people and 194 plus countries that before unleashing a sweeping change of Philippe Legrain's prescription we first test the waters by leaving one or two nations defenceless against incoming hordes. Actually the experiment has already been conducted. Does anybody know how things have working out for Tibet the last little while? How have the ethnic Serbians made out in Kosovo? How did the Poles like their open borders in September of 1939? Must admit, those hard-working enterprising Germans did work that the Poles would not do.

But Legrain doesn't favour a kind of incremental, phased relaxation of borders, but rather the shock therapy of an immediate global village. His only assurance is, not to worry, when the floodgates are opened, not many folks will actually move. "Since the EU opened its borders to certain East European countries, there has been little emigration." But surely Mr. Legrain can't compare the economic disparity between Poland and England with the disparity that exists between England and Bangladesh or Africa. The Mariel flotilla from Cuba presents a more plausible portrait of third world eagerness to seek greener pastures. And if even 5% of the world's population could move to the United States, it would double their population and bring about an ecological holocaust.

I think it prudent then, despite Legrain's assurances, to first test the market as it were by granting an unlimited number of visas to all third word economists who wish live and work alongside Mr. Legrain in the UK. With an economist coming out of every manhole cover to bid for jobs as columnists with the Guardian and the Times and so forth, and as commentators on the BBC, Philippe Legrain could test his hypothesis that immigrants raise the wages of local labour.

If this pilot project was pronounced a success and British sovereignty subsequently dissolved, then I could look forward to moving into Legrain's London flat, with a host of my relatives, who have always fancied living in the great city. Even if it contained only the 76 square metres of space that the average British dwelling does, I am sure Mr. Legrain, as a matter of logical consistency, could have no objection to moving over and making room for us. After all, a man who favours open borders can hardly oppose open houses.

Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC
28 March 2008

The editorial writers of newspapers from Rupert Murdoch's News Limited, including the Courier Mail and The Australian, are not shy in showing their contempt for public opinion whenever it runs counter to the powerful vested interests they represent. Examples from recent years include their support for:

• The privatisation of Telstra
• The privatisation of NSW's electricity generation
• 'Work Choices'
• The Iraq war
• The Mary River Dam₁
• Queensland forced local government amalgamations

Naturally, in 2007, with local governments such as the Douglas Shire Council and the Noosa Shire Council receptive to the wishes of their constituents to stand up to developers, the News Limited editorial writers gave their full support to the Queensland government's forced local government amalgamations inspired by the Property Council of Australia₂.

However, the hopes The Australian held out for in these amalgamations came unstuck when, on Saturday 15 March, anti-development candidates standing in the amalgamated shires were able to overcome the additional difficulties posed by their having to campaign in larger shires and were able to defeat candidates backed by developers. These included the Cairns City Council into which the Douglas Shire had been forcibly amalgamated and the Greater Sunshine Coast Council into which the Noosa shire had been forcibly amalgamated. In at least two other large local government regions, the Gold Coast City Council and Redland City Council, anti-development tickets won control in spite of extravagant developer-funded advertising campaigns against them.

In response, on 18 March an editorial entitled "Queensland faces a tougher job on regional development"₃ was published. It commenced:

Queensland's local government elections demonstrate the difficulty that beset public administrators trying to manage the competing demands of population growth.

The 'difficulty' being that electors in those council areas were not prepared to put up with the further degradations to their quality of life necessitated by continuous population growth. As has become the established practice with the Murdoch Press, the question as to whether population growth is an issue over which affected communities should have any say, is not even posed, rather population growth is treated implicitly as a given over which no power in Heaven or on Earth can have any control:

... the Queensland (state government) must grapple with an influx of thousands of new residents each week and deliver, health, education and other public services.

In fact, the choice is being made, but instead of it being made by the affected communities, it is being made by politicians, like Queensland Premier Anna Bligh, who serve the same vested interests as does the Murdoch media. They include principally the aforementioned Property Council of Australia, whose members gain from population growth, through land speculation and property development, at the expense of the rest of the community, the environment and future generations.

To be sure, there is a moral ambivalence to this issue as many who oppose today's population growth were part of yesterday's additions to the population to those areas and the editorial writer seeks to gain from this the high moral ground:

... much of the growth comprises city refugees making a sea change to what they consider their own piece of paradise. From Cairns to Coolangatta, it was easy to detect a determined anti-development flavour to much of the voting on the weekend's election.

A 'flavour' that the editorial writer makes clear he/she wishes to be ignored by the state and federal governments. It is interesting that The Australian is silent on what the sea changers were seeking 'refuge' from, namely the over-crowding of Australia's capital cities, which has been greatly encouraged by the Murdoch media through its past promotion of population growth.

Of the triumph of Val Schier over the long-serving pro-developer Cairns Mayor Kevin Byrne, the editorialist opined, this "will test the state Government's willingness to use independent panels to make decisions on development applications". Supposedly 'independent' panels are made up of people who, unlike popularly elected councillors, are not accountable to the residents who will be affected by their decisions. In this way it is hoped that the opposition to over-development can be swept aside.

The editorial acknowledges that the "new batch of local leaders can legitimately argue that they have a mandate to resist change." It, nevertheless, concludes:

Amalgamation has happened, but given the weekend results, the reform push is clearly unfinished business.

Can we come to any other conclusion from this editorial except that the 'reform push' is expected to be 'finished' by the use of dictatorial state government powers to over-ride the democratic wishes of Queensland communities?

Footnotes

1. See The Australian newspaper backs environmental vandalism in the Mary Valley of 5 Jan 08.

2. See story Cate Molloy : Forced council amalgamations planned by Property Council of Australia of 7 Sep 07

3. Unable to obtain URL for this editorial.

The following article was printed in the free community newspaper Gympie Life on 20 March 2008. The Integrity Gympie Team were unsuccessful in either the Mayoral elections or the Councillor elections₁.

This is no joke!

The multinational daily went into a late frenzy of fear and deception on Friday and Saturday to avert voters from thinking clearly and constructively on polling day (Saturday 15 March).

Friday's election eve cover story sought to discredit Ron Owen as having purposefully connected his campaign web-site to community group web-sites and identities so as to improperly claim their support for his campaign.

The facts prove the story to be a vicious beat-up. The most obvious and shocking of these facts is the fraudulently constructed front-page picture used to launch the attack.

This cover image (reprinted to the right) was a photographed web page containing a google search. The typed search terms shown in the picture, and stated in the article, are 'little haven gympie'. The top 'hit', supposedly returned from this search, is the 'Ron Owen for Mayor' website.

From this image is spun the story that Ron Owen coded his web site to appear whenever a range of Gympie community groups are sought on the web.

However a close look at the image shows that the actual search made to deliver the search result was not 'little haven gympie' but 'little haven ron'. This is proven beyond all doubt by the words that appear embedded on the page title bar, the search tittle bar, the search results bar, and the bolded type in the search result (all circled in red on the picture).

The words in bold in these four circled locations are generated by google coding and are the exact search terms used to deliver the page results. They are locked within the page structure. They cannot be changed without making a new search.

However the typed search field can be changed whilst the existing search results remain in place. Which is exactly what the multinational muck-rakers did. The search field term 'ron' has been deleted after the search was complete and replaced with 'gympie'. The altered page has then been photographed and printed as 'evidence' to shock and convince readers. The evidence is fraud. The whole story is error, exaggeration and defamatory vapour-ware.

Deft Dealings in Dirt and Denigration

According to Alan Caulfield, the developer of the web-page in question, the actual issue is nothing more than a simple and explainable misunderstanding. Mr Caulfield said that the paper could have easily checked and included the facts behind the published assertions prior to printing them. He says he did get an enquiry from the Times journalist, but it was looking for dirt not daylight. None of what he correctly explained to the journalist was included in the printed story.

"After reading Friday's printed article", says Mr. Caulfield, "I immediately sent them an outline of the technical facts that prove their assertions to be wrong. I requested they print this letter on the next day as some fair response to this concocted damage. It wasn't printed".

Checking both sides of the story before printing accusations, and giving timely right of reply after making accusations, are both basic journalistic standards. Neither was done. Both omissions were purposeful.

Mr Caulfield says we now have a much bigger issue, in fact a huge one: how and why has this paper purposefully manipulated a non-event to deliver personal damage, rather than acting to fairly and responsibly inform the public interest?

The Saturday edition of the daily then let fly with both barrels (the editor and the general manager) in an explicit and vitriolic attack upon the standards of the Gympie Life and all that is associated with it.

Considering the photo fraud, and its clear intent to derail the fair composure of the election, this is gross and despicable hypocrisy. Worse, it follows a criminal breach of the Electoral Act.

So then, to respond to Saturday's huff and puff editorial, who really is the gutter press?

Usually, and repeatedly, the Times cons its readers by what it doesn't print. It accuses and insinuates without giving right of reply. It beats the drum of developers and their tame politicians whilst avoiding printing any of the facts and the injury that exist on the other side of the story.

This works because it is deft. People naturally have trouble noticing what isn't visible. It works because it is relentless, drumming its skewed messages of favor and attack into our brains like clockwork. People may pick up on some anomalies, but the sheer torrent of it seeps in regardless. The only certain cure is don't read it.

To actually construct and commit a fraud as material and obvious as Friday's front page is remarkable. Quite obviously the stakes within Saturday's election were high enough for that paper, and whomever it is that really runs it, to risk this very extreme action.

The Life prints the facts and, as much as it can, the full facts. These can be confronting, and can sometimes be confounding given they appear nowhere else. Nonetheless they are the facts. If they weren't the Life would be sued. The paper does often opinionate upon those facts. However, given the facts, everyone can make and share their own opinion.

What the Life does not do is manipulate public opinion by censorship and distortion of fact. Neither does it fabricate untruths. It acts to shine light on things that need to be visible. Sometimes these can be shocking, even frightening. But do we want to live in the dark?

Gympie Life thinks not. We will continue to print the truth, as we know it, and all of it, for those who do not want to live in the dark.

Greg Wood, 19 March 2008

Footnotes

1. Neither Ron Owen nor any of the eight Integrity Gympie councillor candidates won office. Undoubtedly, dirty tricks at the hands of the Gympie Times played their part in this outcome. This would have been compounded by former Mayor Mick Vernados' peculiar choice of using the undemocratic first-past-the-post system for both Mayoral and Councillor elections. Mick Vernados also failed to win office. For the Councillor elections, the 8 divisions were abolished and single combined electorate, in which 42 candidates contested all the positions, was created. This turned the councilor elections, in particular, more into a lottery than in an exercise in popular will, with 5 of the 8 the successful candidates not achieving the 4% of the vote required to get their deposits back from the Queensland Electoral Commission. Their votes ranged from 3.41% up to 5.94%.

The original article can be found on sinkinglifeboat.blogspot.com.

It was a different world in the 1940s. Nearly half of Canadians and 40% of Americans lived outside urban areas. People grew much of their own food. During the war many had "victory" gardens and my parents had a farm in the Fraser Valley. As a boy my memories were that some things just were not available "out of season". No one expected that the full range of fruits and vegetables now exported from California and beyond should be provided as a matter of right. One other memory, when you ate a tomato or orange, you almost had to eat it over the sink. They were rich and obviously dense with nutrients.

That was a Canada of 10 million people (18 by 1960). Could a Canada of three times that number be fed that way? What happens to agriculture when it must serve an artificially high population base? When 18% of Class 1 farmland is covered with subdivisions to house more people, two-thirds of whom are imported? When to increase the productivity of that farmed land the soils are stripped of nutrients and filled with chemicals? What happens to our food? Thomas Pawlik answers that question in his book The End of Food.

Pawlik notes that since 1950 supermarket potatoes in Canada haven’t contained Vitamin A and their iron content has been reduced by 57%, along with their Vitamin C. Tomatoes have lost 61.5% of their calcium, 35.5% of their iron and 50% of their Vitamin A while gaining 200% more sodium. Of course, what’s got into livestock is an entirely new chapter. Bottom line: I have to eat five times as much of what I did in the 50s to get the equivalent amount of vitamins and minerals. We’re over-weight and yet under-fed.

We must ask some serious questions about agriculture in the face of runaway population growth and the collapse of the oil economy. We expect to feed a country like Canada which has only 5-7% of its land base as legitimately arable, with comparatively poor quality soil in relation to America, Britain and France and a population of 33 million that is currently growing faster than any G8 country. When the oil runs out, Canada and the United States might expect between one half to one third of its population to starve. (cf. Eating Fossil Fuels, Dale Pfeiffer).

According to an analysis by J.R. Wakefield of Komoka, Ontario, a typical Canadian city like London, population 400,000, in the heart of farm country, could not feed itself, despite conscripting all of its labour to replace petroleum dependent farm machinery. 200,000 draught animals would be needed, but even then, productivity per acre would drop dramatically, and of course, food could not be frozen for storage. "Relocalization" for the population we have is, as Wakefield has shown, a joke and a pipedream.

If that scenario is not to your liking, try climate change. James Lovelock says that the United Kingdom, to survive global warming, will have to confine human habitation to one-third the island’s land surface, devote one-third entirely to wilderness, and the last third to intensive agriculture. Here’s the trade-off. One can deliver low-nutrient food to a high volume of people, or high-nutrient food to a low volume of people. It is unlikely that 61 million British people, or more if current immigration rates persist, are going to fed by mechanized, oil-based, soil-depleting methods, so strike off the first option.

Whenever one warns of global warming, of course, Mary Poppins chimes in that this is good news for northern countries who could use a longer growing season. Yeah, but could we use the tropical pests and droughts? Australia is an object lesson on the dangers of letting land developers and politicians determine your population level without bothering to notice how climate change and water shortages will affect agricultural productivity.

In Canada post-carbon agriculture should give us a better product, but not for the market that has been built up the last 50 years. Agribusiness and its criminal mistreatment of the land is but the inevitable creature of the population explosion, not simply an extension of wicked capitalism. Its welcome demise with the death of oil and the re-emergence of small farming and backyard gardens will, like renewable energy sources, not even begin to save the day for the masses. Instead more labour-intensive farming that relies on manure and crop-rotation will provide nutrient-dense food for far fewer people.

We have been living on borrowed time. And some of us will survive to eat the way we were meant to----eating local produce, and eating it in season. Others, like myself, will likely succumb to disease, malnutrition or illness untreatable by a medical system that has collapsed under the weight of too many foreign passengers that developers, cheap labour employers and human rights activists have lobbied to bring to our shores.

Tim Murray

Like so many other days when I walked my food-obsessed lab retriever “Barney” through the forest trails, he made a quick and sudden foray into the woods alone. No doubt he had picked up the scent of another deer kill, the cougar and wolves having littered the whole island with them now. Barney was gone but one minute and I decided to look back over my shoulder to see if I could catch a glance of his yellow coat disappearing into the depths of the forest. It would be futile to call him but at least I might get a bearing on his whereabouts so that I could go looking for him if he gone was too long. This time though, I was startled to see Barney just one hundred yards away. And as he approached the “kill”, he flinched as the “kill” fought back. I ran up and chased Barney away and came upon his intended victim, at very close quarters. It was a magnificent bald-headed eagle, lying in a very prone position on its back amongst the ferns and the brush. It was huge. Its talons were too impressive for description. The beak of this bird as it looked at me would have inflicted enough damage alone. The concept of Labrador retriever thrusting his muzzle at this lethal specimen is just too absurd to contemplate. I rushed home as soon as I could to contact Wildlife Rescue. Their over-worked volunteer staff did not return my call for three hours, and could not spare the staff time to send anyone out until I could confirm the bird was still there. When I returned it was with the assistance of the woodlot owner, who spotted the eagle two hundred yards on the ground from where it had been when I found it. Alarmed by the two of us, it rose up and flew about five feet off the ground a couple hundred feet into the woods. Obviously it was injured. We searched for it, and finally found it. This time, it was perched about twenty feet off the ground in a tree. There was nothing more we could do. While injured it could not be captured for recuperation. When I reported the incident to Wildlife Rescue, I was told that the eagle very possibly had a fight with another eagle, was injured, and may just recover. Getting off the ground was a good sign. But the lady on the phone said that you can’t win them all. A lot of eagles perish, even though they have the weaponry to be at the top of the food chain. It is an odd thing. I see dozens fly by the house at close range most every day, and many in the forest as well. And many islanders see them in great numbers too. Yet, despite their relative abundance, there is something about them that makes them so very special to us. The man who helped me, for example, was the owner of a logging business with a crew that he was responsible for. Yet when I told him of the injured eagle on his woodlot, he had his crew stop their work assignment and go looking for it, and he himself guided me through his forest as a passenger in my car so that I could find a shortcut to the scene. It seems that even the almighty profit motive will bow down to the spiritual, if it is pursued on a community scale by people rooted in that community. Tim Murray, Quadra Island, BC Canada March 24/08

There was a fascinating pay-off in James Sinnamon's predictably unsuccessful bid for Lord Mayor in the recent Brisbane elections. In his "Courier Mail provides 'boring', yet unbalanced, coverage of Brisbane City Council elections"₁ (March 17-20, 2008) correspondence between Sinnamon and Emma Chalmers, the Courier Mail journalist responsible for much of that paper's election coverage, provides a valuable sociological tool for what it reveals about the media and politics.

Teachers, students, and citizens, take note.

Mr Sinnamon's dialogue demonstrates that the Courier Mail does not treat all candidates in an election equally.

In their defense that newspaper might say that equity and fairness are up to the formal process of the election and that newspapers just publish the news.

But some might say that it is the mainstream press that determines the outcome of elections, or at least, who is really in the running, which is not the same thing as who is actually running.

On page 11 of the Courier Mail of election day Saturday 15 March, journalist Emma Chalmers asked: "Have these been the most boring Council elections?"

In response, James Sinnamon points out that Ms Chalmer's coverage of the elections made them boring. He later says that he realizes he cannot hold Ms Chalmers responsible for everything that is wrong in the Brisbane Courier Mail's coverage of Brisbane council policy and practice, but, as he adds, he can only address these problems by asking the journalist questions, taking her work at face value.

Indeed, how responsible is Ms Chalmers for the quality of political analysis in her articles? In an Anglophone world of internationally syndicated political blanding, Emma Chalmer's writing is entirely appropriate. There is a theory (which seems self-evident) that media owners choose media editors and those editors choose the journalists in a self-perpetuating cycle of intellectual and political supineness₂.

If crucial elections are reported in an incredibly boring way, Mr Public will hold them in contempt, and protests about democracy and the information distribution monopolies will remain minimal.

Can others recognize these trends? For so many Australians, compared to television and sports, electoral participation remains a chore of mysteriously over-rated importance because, due to the destructive skill of mainstream media, this supremely interesting area which would normally eclipse Neighbours, since it is about real neighbours, comes across as if it does not concern anyone but a few blandly suited men, who have inexplicably risen to the top of the pile. In the case of the Brisbane Mayoral Elections, only two men in suits were given more than token importance. One looked as if he strayed out of a men's clothing ad, and the other, in shirt-sleeves, a salesman ready for the Saturday morning customers. Apart from these minor differences in style, there was little to tell them apart.

Yes, it was not the election which was boring; it was the exceedingly limited but repetitive coverage.

For this election contained a really new, important 'angle,' indicative of a fundamental desire for political and economic change. And that was that FOUR candidates, not just James Sinnamon, declared that they had policies against population growth.

Of course these candidates for a major policy change ran right up against the big vested interests in a business-as-usual outcome for the Brisbane Council election. Those vested interests are the property development industry and its upstream and downstream dependents, which include the Courier Mail. Many are grouped under the umbrella of The Australian Property Council. Such industries have chosen to structure themselves around continuously increasing population growth, without which most would not survive.

To this end they naturally prefer mayors and councilors who will not seriously challenge their objectives. "Can Do" Newman has been giving them what they want and telling Brisbanites that this is what Brisbane needs, for years now, in what the Property council of Australia describes as the "Council's high quality working relationship with the State Government" and "the cooperative relationship between the State Government and Liberal Lord Mayor Campbell Newman."₃

The other candidate taken seriously by the press, Mr Greg Rowell, a retired professional cricketer, and the ALP counterpart to Campbell Newman, has been employed by the Property Council of Australia as a 'senior policy advisor' since 2005, working "extensively with the State Government and Brisbane City Council." ₄

The Property Council sent questionnaires to all the candidates, promising a later press release. The questionnaires were, not surprisingly, looking for supporters of more and more development, with fewer restrictions and fewer costs to developers.

Four candidates openly stated they opposed the unfettered development resulting from the turbo-charged population growth which blights Brisbane and costs ordinary people money, time and comfort, ruining amenity and the natural environment, raising the cost of housing, water and land.

Four candidates lined up to represent the side that opposes growth.

Yet Newman and Rowell were promoted as the only show in town through mainstream media's extremely boring treatment of this potentially riveting, not to say crucial, election.

Ms Chalmer's view of the Brisbane elections gives almost no coverage to anyone other than what she calls, the 'major contenders'. She writes, "we have an obligation to adequately scrutinise the promises being made by the major parties and major contenders." But not the major issues, apparently.

Democracy in Paris and in Brisbane: two different systems

Brisbane can't hold a candle to the recent mayoral elections in Paris. There the press treated respectfully a 27 year veteran street mendicant in the swish suburb of St Germain des près (6th arrondissment), and he actually retained 3.7% of the votes.

That is, at 577 out of 15,000, slightly fewer than James Sinnamon, who, with almost no publicity, achieved less than one per cent of the Brisbane vote.

The big difference for these two unknowns was in the attitude of the press and the public towards democracy and values over social and strategic position.

French mainstream media has nothing like the connections to property and population growthism that afflict Australia and other Anglophone countries. The French electoral system also permits many more parties and individuals to make a running.

This is perhaps not surprising in the country which symbolised a successful revolution by storming the Bastille in 1789, only one year after Australia became a penal colony for political prisoners of poverty. Child of the revolution, himself, politician and author Victor Hugo wrote Les Miserables, in which escaped convict, Jean Valjean, imprisoned for stealing bread, becomes Mayor by popular demand because he is so good and kind.

Here is how TFI, French television online, reported on the person and policies of Jean-Marc Restoux, street-dwelling candidate for the Parisien mayoral elections:

"Even if he doesn't have the political bearing, he has the rhetoric and the determination. His remarks are well thought out, his words are well-chosen, his ideas considered. [They quote him:] 'Today, in the 6th arrondissment, buildings are resold to luxury brand-names, rather than being made into public housing. There is nothing left here except luxury businesses'.(...). 'Exorbitant rents push old people out. We must, at all costs, maintain the local businesses, in the knowledge that wealth lies in their diversity', he exhorts, wishing 'to show another way to people' and to integrate into the social dialogue more people who, like himself, survive precariously . Among his ideas is one of encouraging people to mentor and assist people in difficulty. 'That those who are able to, assist the homeless by offering them a place to live with low rent and help with administrative tasks, providing a leg-up for them. It should not be forgotten that accidents in life can happen to everyone.' ₅(My translation)

James Sinnamon's program₆ was not dissimilar, but received no similar interest from the Australian media of course.

A different land-use planning and housing system

At least in Paris property speculation is severely hampered by speculation and inheritance taxes and the state has an obligation to see that everyone is housed. This year it became possible to sue a European state if you are homeless. Paris does not have the insane problem of out of control development and mass immigration from other states and the rest of the world, albeit it does have a problem with family reunion and a stock of 'clandestins' which ebbs and flows with the seasons. Not only are citizens owed shelter by the State but so are any legally present immigrant workers. Population-building for the simple purpose of enriching land-owners would cost too much to publicly funded programs for ordinary citizens to allow it to happen. Paris real-estate does have a problem of its capacity to attract the rich, chic business and the corporations, which have an upwards impact on rents. But France and Paris ceased to pull down buildings to intensify development when they abandoned their costly policy of population numbers-building in 1973. Since then the accent has been on restoration and structural insulation. In fact, over the period 1973-1975, due to the pull-back by the state from the policy of expansion and intensification of development, many developers and builders went broke. Those who survived adapted to a relatively steady-state situation. No major influence in France developed power through population building in the past 35 years.

Australian information production, treatment, and distribution

In Australia a few semi-dynastic media owners have obtained from successive leaders what amounts to a license to control the distribution of most of the information in the country and to decide what will be treated as important and what and who will be sidelined or ignored.

Our political, legal and business figures depend on those media-organs for almost all their profile and influence. By providing the powerful with a voice, the media derives more power through their authority. From this arises a situation where the public has been educated to take seriously only candidates who have press profile. To gain that profile, public figures (with the possible exception of notorious criminals) are generally notable for saying nothing which will make the media look upon them unfavourably. This seals the situation where the media confers authority upon certain ideas, individuals and industries, in a rim of brilliant limelight, whilst casting a shadow over most of the rest of the planet and its people, plants and animals.

This might not be so awful, were the media merely a dynastic system, ruled by variously colorful or petty kings. The problem is that the media is a monster network of corporations of which newspapers, television, radio and digital media are only the face and mouth. Behind this public façade are financial, land and commodity interests permeating every facet of human enterprise. Perhaps the most fundamental and far-reaching of these interests is the property development empire that the great bulk of Australian print media is intimately involved with.

Whilst many readers probably are aware that newspapers carry huge amounts of real-estate adds, and those readers may assume that those papers are therefore reliant on the patronage of property marketers, few realize that the situation goes much further even than this.

The fact is that Australian newspaper corporations now own and control the bulk of Australian property marketing on an international level. Our newspapers do not rely on getting advertisements; to a large degree they control the Australian portal to the entire world property market because they control the distribution and diffusion of information about this market and for several years they have been in the business of actually marketing the property market itself at local, national and global level.

This has been made possible on a level never previously conceived of due to the global Internet, through property dot coms like www.realestate.com.au and www.domaine.com.au, but also through very rapidly converging and mushrooming of industries and professions across government and private sector, so that we have, for instance, on the one hand, at the Federal level, the National Foreign Investment Review Board (NFIRB) positively facilitating foreign investment in local real estate and facilitating purchases by temporary immigrants for high turnover, and, on the local level, realtors touting local property internationally with the assistance of privatised migration agents and local solicitors, and at State level (where land use planning is controlled), organizations like the Property Council of Australia (APC), closely involved with determining government policy.

In a document called its "Report Card," summarising policy, the APC demonstrates nationally coordinated planning and international objectives, and massive reach for political power in every area of Australian politics. It is clear from this report that the APC believes it is responsible for major press articles and detailed government policies in areas of tax, planning, trade regulation, and international borders (to name just a few big areas). What is still not clear is whether there are any direct business links to media ownership or control. _7,8

With knowledge of the evolution of this system of corporatised government and media, one finds oneself wondering if the Australian Property Council (and its dependents, allies and similars) run Brisbane (among other states) and the Courier Mail helps them. Unless it is that the Courier Mail (News Ltd/Murdoch) runs Brisbane and the APC helps it. If this is the case, with the entire city and region given over to aggressive property development, one cannot help but wonder if any real government or citizens remain, or whether the whole Brisbane region (and indeed Australia) has simply been transformed de facto into privately owned, publicly managed real-estate, inhabited by renters and rate-payers with no more real say in government than feudal serfs.

I should conclude by saying that I do not think this situation is hopeless. I do not for a minute believe that the property development lobby groups and the media are consciously homogeneously malevolent forces. What I do hope is that, by bringing the impact on government and the environment of their perseverative success to public notice, I will stimulate a conscientious response to solving this problem. It will take serious electoral coverage and voter involvement on the one hand, careful government and law-making, and serious cultivation of overlooked principles of ecological and democratic well-being by the property, finance and media industries. For the good of Australia and for the good of the world, the Australian property industry and its dependents, must turn off their overly successful money-making machine and start to plan for the winding down of business to one of consolidatory long-term infrastructure maintenance in a consolidated democracy. It is time to stop growing bigger and taller. It is time to grow up and become responsible and kind.

Sheila Newman

Footnotes

1. See candobetter.net/node/371

2. "The House of Representatives Select Committee on the Print Media report, News and Fair Facts The Australian Print Media Industry (March 1992) acknowledged the importance of editorial independence, but rejected calls for legislative requirements for mechanisms to support it." Kim Jackson, "Media Ownership Regulation in Australia," Analysis and Policy, Social Policy Group, Parliamentary Library, Australia, http://www.aph.gov.au/library/intguide/SP/media_regulations.htm

3. pcalive.netattention.com.au/act/page.asp?622=280779&E_Page=17720

4. www.qld.alp.org.au/01_cms/details.asp?ID=37 as retrieved on 16 Mar 2008 19:26:19 GMT.

5. See tf1.lci.fr/infos/elections-municipales/0,,3721508,00-clochard-qui-voulait-etre-maire-.html

6. See candobetter.wikispaces.com

7. In its report card, which summarises policy, demonstrating nationally coordinated planning and international objectives, and massive reach for political power in every area of Australian politics. It is clear from this report that the APC believes it is responsible for major press articles. What is still not clear is whether there are any direct business links to media ownership or control. www.propertyoz.com.au/PowerHouse2010/Congress2007_Reportcard.ppt

8. In its online policy publication, "Powerhouse 2010 advocacy priorities, 2006/2007", www.propertyoz.com.au/PowerHouse2010/Congress2007_Reportcard.ppt, APC National President informs members that "In our tenth year as the Property Council, your association's political influence continues to grow and pay dividends in advocacy wins. 2006/2007 sees a big focus on economic development, infrastructure, tax and cutting red tape." The claim is borne out in this remarkable document, which indicates that the APC takes responsibility for stimulating various state governments to engage in what the many environmental and democracy activists would call extreme levels of development, debt and population growth.

Here are some extracts:

"Governments will cut property taxes when presented with persuasive arguments for economic growth.

Over the past two years the Property Council negotiated close to $1.7 billion of property tax cuts with state Labor governments. The Property Council's goal is to increase the tax savings pyramid every year.

"Kick starting the growth debate

Ten years ago, urban strategies, economic development and infrastructure were off the agenda. Now they will dominate political debate for the next decade"

"Long term growth strategies

After months of lobbying, the Sydney metro strategy has been released incorporating three quarters of our recommendations, along with draft plans for other regions and key regional cities."

"Plan to Deliver Melbourne 2030

The Property Council stepped in to fill a policy vacuum in the Melbourne 2030 debate by releasing the discussion paper, Plan to Deliver Melbourne 2030. We are now in discussions to make these recommendations a reality."

"Melbourne 2030 demonstration projects"

Melbourne 2030 gained momentum after the Victorian Government agreed to Property Council calls for the development of demonstration projects, such as the Dandenong Transit City."

"Increase use of borrowing

The Victorian Government almost doubled borrowings to deliver much needed infrastructure. The Government's recognition of the benefits of sensible borrowings comes after years of campaigning from the Property Council."

"Land Tax thresholds increased

The Property Council has ensured that the State Government honour its commitment to increase land tax thresholds for individual land tax payers in line with rising unimproved values, saving private investors hundreds of thousands of dollars in land tax each year."

"Water reform

Representations, submissions and public comment by the Property Council have resulted in the State Government acknowledging the need to reduce the considerable water and sewerage infrastructure backlog and undertake structural reform of these council owned businesses."

Rupert Murdoch's Australian Newspaper in an article Migrant workers scoring top pay" has made use of figures which which purportedly show that immigrants earn more, rather than less than their Australian equivalents, , as if to answer any possible objection to Australia's current record high rate of immigration.

SKILLED temporary migrant workers are earning on average $15,000 more than their Australian counterparts, undermining trade union claims that the system is being abused to undercut local wages.

Figures obtained by The Australian show that holders of 457 visas, which allow temporary skilled migrants to work in Australia for up to four years, are earning more than the average salaries of local workers across all industries in which they are employed.

The figures have reignited the debate over the use of foreign workers, with the Opposition seizing on the data as "dispelling the myth" that temporary skills workers are driving down wages, but unions and the Rudd Government insist that many visa holders are exploited by unscrupulous employers.

Of course, notwithstanding these purportedly average figures, there still remains many documented examples of ruthless exploitation of immigrant workers, and their depressing on the value of the labour of many in Australia's current workforce and this remains a valid reason to oppose high immigration.

However, even if it were not true as the figures in the Australian purport to show, the case against immigration should not begin and end with that question alone, rather it should most of all concern what serves the best interests of the existing inhabitants of this country. Displacing existing workers by immigrant workers, whether those workers are paid more or less is not in their interests.

If we are to believe the free market economists, then the unstated conclusion to be drawn these statistics is that immigrant workers are paid better because they are more productive and skilled than their Australian counterparts.

However, other factors may help increase the amounts that skilled immigrants earn. One would be that they are inherently more mobile and hence more able to move to where better wages are on offer.

At this moment in time the Australian economy is hardly a typical economy by world standards. The ever-escalating level of exports of our finite endowment of mineral resources as well as the subdivision of bushland and agricultural land for residential development means that there is a wealth available for those with the niche skills required for this economic activity that would not be available in other economies. It should not be altogether surprising if much of this finds its way into pockets of skilled migrants, but this economic activity is unsustainable in the longer the longer term, and the wealth generated is at an unacceptable cost to the environment and future generations. Without these distortions in the Australian economy the picture would be very different.

Wherever the ultimate truth may lie in claims and counterclaims about relative wage levels in Australia's highly dysfunctional economy, this article is typical of the shallow self-serving treatment given to the complex and socially divisive issue of immigration by the Murdoch press. Amongst the many other questions not even acknowledged here or in any of its other pro-population-growth propaganda is the well understood effect of population growth adding to housing hyper-inflation, traffic congestion, destruction of bio-diversity, water shortages, demands for services that our governments can no longer meet and the ongoing decline in our quality of life.

See also Immigration myths demolished by economics journalist, Immigration as the quick fix