Melburnians have been told to save water to ensure that the city’s population can double in size:
Greater Western Water, Melbourne Water, South EastWater and Yarra Valley Water have launched a campaign to help Melburnians cut their water use…
You may have been wondering when and who would point out the silver lining in the current situation, where the interruption of decades of mass immigration has seen employment prospects and living standards for many ordinary people looking good in Australia for the first time in decades. If so, you will be very pleased to catch the following interview between 2GB's Michael McLaren and the Sustainable Australia Party's William Bourke, on this very issue. We are living through fascinating times.
On 10 May 2021, Michael Mclaren (2GB radio) was joined by William Bourke, President of the Sustainable Australia Party, to comment on the RBA’s report that suggests that the pause in immigration due to the COVID-19 pandemic will lead to higher living standards in Australia and could spark wage rises in some regions and industries - even though the economy will be smaller than previously expected. In its quarterly statement on monetary policy the preceding week, the RBA noted, “The Australian economy is transitioning from recovery to expansion phase earlier and with more momentum than anticipated.”
[Candobetter editor: Note that this was done via automatic transcript then corrected by a human editor. Please let us know if you find any mistakes.]
MICHAEL : Well, there has been a lot of side-effects from the Cornona Virus … we’re probably all sick to death of talking about it but, one that probably hasn’t been mentioned is that it has done a couple of people probably out of a job – at the very least, it has proved them right – I’m talking about the team behind the Sustainable Australia Party – because, if nothing else, COVID has closed the borders. There are now no real prospects of masses of migrants coming in to work or to fill job vacancies, or whatever the story was, prior to the pandemic.
However, as I said, I think it has proved the point, because, for many years, William Bourke and the whole team behind him at Sustainable Australia and people like Dick Smith, who’ve supported them, have been banging the drum of logic, saying that Australia does not need unsustainable levels of growth in the population to remain wealthy, to remain prosperous, indeed to grow.
And, sure enough, they have now got an ally, I don’t know if they meant to or not, in the form of the Reserve Bank. In their quarterly statement, on monetary policy – it was released on Friday - most people don’t read it of course – but they made the point that the level of GDP – Gross Domestic Product – is expected to remain a little below forecast before the pandemic – mostly due to the lower population growth – however, in per capita terms, GDP is expected to be on a higher trajectory, supported by higher per capita household income and a strong contribution from public demand. In other words, the pause to Big Australia will lead to higher living standards and could spark wage-rises in some regions and some industries according to the Reserve Bank.
Now, the Big Australia advocates said this was impossible. Many of us said they were wrong all along and motivated by greed.
Well, William Bourke is the President of the Sustainable Australia Party and on the line. William, nice to talk with you again.
WILLIAM BOURKE: Good to be with you, Michael.
MICHAEL: Sadly, I suppose, COVID has done you out of a gig. The borders are closed. The population will flatline for a while, and the experiment that you’ve called for will happen, for no other reason than medical science has demanded it happens. I suppose, if you are proved right, you will go out a happy man, won’t you?
WILLIAM BOURKE: Well Michael, obviously population growth is something we’ve been concerned about, since we’ve been going – probably a decade or so. We’ve got some other issues we do stand for, overdevelopment and environmental issues, but yes, absolutely, it’s amazing that COVID has revealed, once and for all, that high immigration is notnecessary to either keep the economy growing, or to create jobs.
So, it’s great to see the RBA coming to their senses. And many other mainstream economists are also saying things like, ‘Lower immigration is equalling higher wages.’ So there’s a great lot of things that are coming out of this unfortunate COVID pandemic.
MICHAEL MCLAREN: And it’s logical, is it not, because, when you flood the economy with workers, obviously the whiphand is that of the bosses. They can say to Bob, well, if you don’t want to work for that amount of money, I’ll go over there to Frank. He’ll do it. But when the number of people available for jobs is smaller, Bob and Frank both start, all of a sudden, to have a bit of bargaining power, don’t they!
WILLIAM BOURKE: Indeed, and obviously, when you bring in highly exploitable people, who really don’t have a lot of bargaining power, who aren’t part of … I guess, unions and so forth, then you can beat down wages. And we’ve seen a lot of – you know – probably the lowest growth in wages over the last decade in the last century.
These things are now starting to see a pick-up in wages, and that’s a good thing for the average Australian.
MICHAEL MCLAREN: They are. I saw that Tom Dusevic of the Australian said, and I quote,
”During recent years, when population growth averaged a rich, world-leading, one and a half per cent a year [...]"
- which is just madness -
“with two thirds of it due to net-overseas migration, per capita incomes fell, even though national output was expanding at a fast clip, compared to our peers.”
In other words, the nation was getting wealthier – that’s National GDP, the individuals that make up the nation, that do the work, were actually going backwards.
WILLIAM BOURKE: Exactly, and the point there being that GDP per capita is really the proxy for living standards. So, the aggregate growth in GDP really doesn’t matter, if all of us are going backwards on average. And we know that there has been a lot of discussion about, you know, this 20 plus year run of ‘no recessions’ and so forth, but if you look at it on a GDP per capita basis, there were three recessions over the last 25 or so years, where GDP per capita went backwards, two quarters in a row. So, there’s a lot of misinformation out there, and we really need to look at the per capita of GDP, not the aggregate level.
MICHAEL MCLAREN: Yep. Now, none of this is to gloat. There are some sections of the economy which are doing it particularly difficult. The business model was heavily reliant on the migrant labour workforce. Hospitality, for example, their business model has been disrupted. A lot of people are doing it tough, but on a per capita basis, the average Australian looks like they may come out in front. And, of course, again, to be completely up-front, a huge amount of stimulus from the Federal Government also helps in that respect, and to remove that might have created a different story, but it just goes to prove the point, does it not, William, that you don’t need record levels of migration to continue economic growth?
WILLIAM BOURKE: That’s exactly the point. There’s a lot of studies out there about the impact of immigration on the economy, but a lot of it is based on, you know, assumptions. This is empirical evidence. This is very very very clear now, that where there is no immigration, we are still growing our economy and we are still creating jobs, and we have actually reduced the unemployment rate. So we’ve gone from seven odd per cent down to about five and a half per cent, and we look like going down to around four and a half per cent. That’s because a lot of people who have been long-term unemployed are now getting an opportunity to get a job. And isn't that a great thing?
MICHAEL MCLAREN: Well, it is and the tighter labor market Also pushes an important extra emphasis on behalf of government, and even business, on the issue of skills or re-skilling the Australian population, including those that are unemployed.
Most unemployed people want to work. They take they take no pride in not having a job but they may not have the skills to do it, so, you know, it's great. We've got the budget, of course tomorrow night. There may be something in there about this too, but there is a greater emphasis on business and government to say, well, look, you're not going to get the fresh blood in anytime soon. There is a bit floating around here though that needs a gig. Train them up, get them in a job.
WILLIAM BOURKE: There's a much greater focus on training and education as you say Michael and I'm sure that Treasurer Josh will be mentioning much more investment in training and education in the budget, and I've seen, you know, some media reports to that extent. So that's it. That's a really encouraging thing, because at the end of the day, we do have the labour here in Australia. We do need to continue to evolve our economy and evolve our skills. And that's what's happening right now, and it's a good thing.
MICHAEL MCLAREN: And, Will, to add to all of this, the re-emphasis, or the newly emerged emphasis, on needing to be more self resilient, more independent, instead of relying on international supply chains and there. And, there again, all of a sudden, you are incentivising people to re-establish, or freshly establish, sovereign industries in this country, particularly manufacturing-oriented industries, which – again - will help mop up a percentage of the unemployed.
WILLIAM BOURKE: Exactly right. And, at the moment, you're probably aware, the Upper Hunter by-election is on in New South Wales. We've got a candidate running there and he works on the railways.
He's an engineer working on railway maintenance and, you know, we built the Tangara trains in Newcastle, you know, the Hunter area and now we're importing them from South Korea. So we need to turn back to making our own trains. And manufacturing, you know, our medical supplies. All of those issues that we thought we can just outsource overseas. I think we're now realizing finally that that's not a sustainable way to run an economy.
WILLIAM MCLAREN: Why then for so many years, we mention those record levels of immigration, despite the average Australian not wanting it. People are in favor of some immigration, sure, a bit of fresh blood doesn't hurt, but there's sort of nonsense of one-and-a-half percent growth per year. It was just a disaster on the property , on traffic – everything. Services. Why did it persist for so long? I mean, I'm a bit ignorant, I suppose, but I thought that democracy was basically the elected officials representing the will of the people, but on that issue, it couldn't have been more opposite. So, why did it persist for so long?
WILLIAM BOURKE: So, I think Michael there are some groups in our society, in our economy, in our political environment, they have a little bit more power than the average person. And obviously, you know, the property industry, you know, big business and so forth. You know, they have a fair bit of sway. They've been complaining, even very lately about skills shortages and, Immigration Minister Alex Hawk, has just allowed a doubling of the hours of foreign students from 20 to 40 hours a week. So they're having a lot of influence, you know, because of political donations and other aspects of the body politic. And I guess that it would be nice if we did have a plebiscite or a referendum. Do we want to grow our population at this extreme rate of 1.5 plus percent when the developed world really should grow at, you know 0.2 per cent at the most.
MICHAEL MCLAREN: I was a little facetious early when I said that covid had probably done you out of a gig. Sustainable Australia, as you quite rightly said, stands for more than just a population issue. Just talk us through a little of what else it is that interests your party.
WILLIAM BOURKE: Well, we're a fairly centrist party Michael. So, you know, we talk about the big picture issues that matter. Obviously sustainable is about protecting our environment, and we really do want to make sure that, you know, we're not sprawling our suburbs, over our agricultural farm land. For example, we really want to stop overdevelopment and return planning powers to local communities.
I'm running in the North Sydney council elections in a couple of months. So, you know, making sure that local people have a say on the character of and the heritage values of their neighborhood. So those are some of the issues.
Corruption is an increasingly big issue that we're focusing on and I think there's a bit of corruption in this Big Australia, where vested interests are influencing our politicians rather than the public interest being put first. So that's just a couple of things that we stand for.
MICHAEL MCLAREN: A lot of common sense. Always good to talk to you. We’ll speak again, soon, William. Thank you so much for all that time.
WILLIAM BOURKE: Thanks for having me. Michael.
MICHAEL MCLAREN: That's my pleasure William Burke. As I said the President of the Sustainable Australia Party
On 27 March 2020, the AWU and Master Builders Australia jointly called on governments to ensure the continued operation of the building and construction industry, claiming that without it the economic knock-on effects would be devastating on a scale that would dwarf what we have seen to date.
There is no question that many dependencies on this very costly and demanding industry would cause more economic disruption, but what about safety with regard to COVID-19? Although the industry argues that it can be safe, we will argue that the industry is not suited to workers keeping safe distances. On the principle that a stitch in time saves nine, it would be better to shut down sooner rather than later because the later action is taken, the worse the grip of COVID-19 will be on the economy. Since the virus has caused the government to cease the mass migration that has driven huge expansion in the construction industry, demand has dropped, and now is the perfect time to massively curtail construction industry activity. In the meantime, will the industry take responsibility for the return home of the many temporary migrant construction workers from China and Indonesia who, unlike international cruise-ship passengers, are already onshore, virtually invisible, but numerous? And an industry worker argues that the industry is not capable of adapting to safe distance practice.
“The shutdown of the construction industry would jeopardise not just those employed directly, but the whole livelihoods of millions of Australians employed in precarious sectors like manufacturing. It would devastate nationally important industries in the building supply chain, like the $30 billion steel industry,” say the AWU and MBA.
This shows that we have become too dependent on this industry. It has an unhealthy hold on our economy, our political system, our politicians and political parties. This hold has destroyed business, industry and employment diversity in Australia, because agriculture and ordinary manufacturing cannot compete with the inflated profits of the rapidly metastasizing property development sector, which attracts finance away from other sectors.
The same industry has successfully lobbied decades for faster and faster population growth, via mass immigration, to drive demand for its product. Now the demand will dry up as immigration has been stopped, finally providing an interruption to property-development’s hold on our economy.
As well as importing customers, the industry has also exploited many temporary migrants, undermining immigration rules, safety, wages and other employment conditions. The industry may have profited, but prices have risen and standards have dropped, to the extent that buildings over three stories are now uninsurable.
The AWU and MBA argue that, “Forcing the industry’s closure would also blunt the impact of federal, state and territory government stimulus packages as infrastructure projects would immediately grind to a halt. Civil construction, in particular, must continue to build the nation and can do so safely given the nature of its sites.”
The cry of ‘nation-building’ has led to overdevelopment with disastrous drops in building standards and environmental amenity. Australians have suffered from constant upheaval and loss of democracy as government outsourced planning to developers. In the name of catering to unprecedented population growth, Australian cities, suburbs and regions have been taken out of the control of their residents, subjected to constant infrastructure expansion, road-building, traffic diversions, and destruction of loved environment.
The AWU and MBA’s line is: ”Indeed, the catastrophic threat of a construction shutdown means the whole construction industry has a civic duty to impress upon authorities it can operate while ensuring compliance with social distancing and hygiene requirements.”
How could anyone have confidence in an industry known for corrupting government at all levels, bullying, unaccountability, uninsurability, and lawlessness? This industry has seen thousands of Australians bankrupted and homeless. Multiple inquiries into its dysfunctionality have failed to reform it. It is time to stop dancing to the demands of this industry. Australia has been living beyond its means in an artificially and unreasonably accelerated growth period.
The AWU and MBA try to present a picture of reform and responsibility:
“That means everyone in the industry has to step up and be accountable. Construction companies and project managers must ensure that protocols at their site are enforced. Construction workers owe it to each other and their families to be responsible and do the right thing. This is only the only way the industry can continue working while reducing the risk of COVID-19 transmission.”
An industry worker, who prefers to remain anonymous, says:
“Practising safe distance at building sites for most activities is impossible.
It is generally not safe for one person to work alone in the industry. Usually construction sites involve many people in many activities simultaneously, crisscrossing each other in small and often confined spaces, sharing narrow temporary paths and causeways.
In multi-storey building construction, hoists are used to bring people to various floors. These hoists are always crammed with people. It is not affordable to take people (or loads) one at a time.
Concreters work closely together when they lay concrete, frequently in small areas. You might have one worker using a scrider, and two others using a shovel or a vibrator, not even half a meter from each other. You will often get four or five people a couple of meters square, due to the need to act together to carry out the work. It would be hard or impossible for one person to do such work alone. It would be uneconomical for less than four or five.
High-rise work employs huge crowds of skilled and unskilled workers. It is common in the construction of a multi-storey building to have 40 steel-fixers and 40 form-workers operating simultaneously on one floor.
The nature of the industry entails very basic conditions of hygiene and shelter. Disinfection and maintenance of disinfection in such areas, where many workers are coming and going, would require a large-scale dedicated team of cleaners and supervisors with the authority to stop and start work. It would be dangerous to have such teams present on building sites.
Construction sites are scenes of intense activity, with many people interacting on many processes, helping each other. The cost of construction means that things are done as quickly as possible.
When trucks are unloaded, you often have many labourers unloading next to each other.
It is rare for one person to work alone. Generally speaking, in this industry, safety requires workers to work in pairs or in larger groups.
People are often required to work in confined space and they then need another person to assist with tools and equipment, physically handing these from one person to the next.
Transport is often shared. People habitually organise to come and go to work in one vehicle because many jobs are not accessible by public transport.
Many temporary migrants are moved in and out of construction sites in busloads from densely shared accommodation. A large proportion are Chinese and Indonesian. They often do not speak or read any English, and certainly not enough to know how to protect themselves. They tend to be insecure in their employment and visa status and are not likely to exercise their rights to safety, if they know them. These workers are like a separate population on construction sites, with whom only basic communication is possible, usually via their own foreman.Will the industry now take steps to finance these workers’ return home?”
The AWU and the MBA say in their press release:
”In times of crisis people look to unions, industry, and government to work together. We have to show we can not only slow the spread of COIVID-19 but ensure there's an economy left when the crisis is over.”
The problem is that unions and government have been working for industry and against democracy for too long. Let’s hope the AWU and the MBA, the Property Council of Australia and all the other corporate coercers who have been calling our tune start to adapt to reality for a change.
Poverty, unemployment, homelessness, and overcrowding stalk more and more Hong Kong citizens. The United States is pushing for regime change, but that won't change anything for the better. In this half-hour video about the Hong Kong riots, and more about the US attempts at regime-change there than you will hear elsewhere, Michelle Greenstein gives a rundown on the social problems that have made the Hong Kong poor ready to riot. Although Greenstein talks about wealth inequality and the need for better distribution, she fails to identify what it is about Hong Kong's system that has caused these massive social disparities and housing shortfalls. The Hong Kong inheritance system is probably a major contributor to Hong Kong's wealth disparity and homelessness, however. Hong Kong's system is similar to Australia's and that of most American states. Inherited from Britain, it allows parents to disinherit their children and to leave property to anyone they choose.[1] This permits the alienation of property from families and its aggregation within corporations, other families or individuals, in fewer and fewer hands. The people lose control of the place. It is in this way that property speculation has come to rule over democracy in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong population and property growth lobby has taken over by engineering Hong Kong's population growth, with immigration numbers about three times as high as natural replacement numbers since 2014. A pretext, as in Australia, is that immigrants are needed to combat 'population aging'. We can see that Hong Kong citizens have been trying to control things from their side by having lower and lower birth rates, but the ruling classes have simply overruled them by pushing high immigration, to push up housing prices, despite the homelessness this creates. The rules for immigration are similar to Australia's, especially in the encouragement of foreign students to apply for permanent status.[2] Foreign domestic workers make up 4% of Hong Kong's population! [3]
Hong Kong's population history is one of foreign takeover of a small fishing village, then population explosion.[4] When the British took over in 1841, the population was 7,541. In a century it grew to 1,600,000. After the Battle of Hong Kong, the population fell to 500,000 in 1945. Many Chinese migrated to Hong Kong to escape natural disasters and the Taiping Rebellion of the 1850s. 60,000 Chinese left in 1914 due to wartime fears. The population increased to 530,000 in 1916, then to 725,000 in 1925, to 1.6million in 1941, then to 2.2 million in 1950. By 2001 Hong Kong's population was 6.7 million. Demographers expect its population to reach 8.469 million by 2041, with 52100 births and 82,400 deaths predicted by The Census and Statistics Department.[4] After that it would plateau out, due to low birth rates, but the growth lobby will do everything it can to prevent that, of course.
The same thing is happening to Australia, which has similar inheritance laws and has been saddled with malignant growth by the property development lobby, which has taken over all the main political parties and governments, and pushes mass immigration.
Some may be surprised to know that the Republic of China does not allow the dispossession of children except in extraordinary cases. It has similar laws to France. These laws, which make parents financially loyal to their children also have a wealth-equalising principle. Whilst it is true that people can be come very rich in China and France (although less so), Australian or Hong Kong inheritance laws would make things much much worse.
Lawyers love this kind of law, for obvious reasons - it gives rise to so many disputes. See this comment from "Testamentary freedom and disinheritance in Hong Kong.">
"[...] unexpected exclusions in a loved one’s will can cause untold pain, and bitter dispute that can divide families for years to come.
Many countries choose to pre-empt such issues with strict laws covering succession and inheritance. One such example is France, where the estate of the deceased is automatically divided equally between their surviving spouse and children. [...]
Inheritance Law In Hong Kong
Here in Hong Kong, we have the right to testamentary freedom. Broadly speaking, this means we are all free to leave our estates to anyone we wish – be that a relative, friend, favourite charity… or even a total stranger!" (Source: "Testamentary freedom and disinheritance in Hong Kong.">
[2] See https://web.archive.org/web/20120623220528/https://www.immd.gov.hk/a_report_09-10/eng/ch1/index.htm
[3] "Foreign domestic helpers make up 4% of Hong Kong’s population. The estimated 250,000 foreign domestic workers mostly come from the Philippines and Indonesia." Source: https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/hong-kong-population/
The otherwise informative and insightful News With Rick Sanchez bulletin of 11 October trivialised attempts by the the U.S government to enforce its immigration laws. This is in contrast with the treatment of illegal immigration by Mike Papontonio, presenter of RT's America's Lawyer in Corporations defend DACA: Don’t deport our cheap labor! (10/10/19) its most recent weekly episode. (Both programs are embedded within this article.)
Near the end of RT America's News with Rick Sanchez, the usually insightful and informative presenter, Rick Sanchez, together with Lee Camp, the presenter of Redacted Tonight spoke mockingly of how the U.S. Secretary for Homeland Security Kevin MacAleenan was confronted by a group of pro-refugee protestors at Georgetown:
Lee Camp: I talk about how the Secretary for Homeland Security Kevin MacAleenan, went to speak at Georgetown and protestors stood up - protesters unhappy with the way we are treating immigrants at the border - migrants, refugees, and they shouted him down and he tried many times to speak -probably lasted about seven minutes and eventually just left. And for, that's my Super Bowl. I was sitting there with my phone there in the one hand.
Rick Sanchez: Yes!
Lee Camp: I was having a blast.
Rick Sanchez: It seemed to me when I was watching that Video that he probably could have challenged them a little bit and said "Let's talk about this." He exited real early. I think he's a bit of a wuss. I don't know.
Lee Camp: (laughs)
Rick Sanchez: Because we all know that a guy who just came to the United States not long ago and is making minimum wage. (raises his hand, shakes and points to Lee Camp) He's the problem!
Lee Camp: Yes!
Rick Sanchez: He's why America's in its downfall!
…
The full 28 minute episode is embedded below.
In contrast, on 10 October, one day prior to this, Mike Papantonio, presenter of America's Lawyer, presented in the episode, Corporations defend DACA: Don’t deport our cheap labor! a sober and informed discussion of how many large U.S. corporations use cheaper labour from the migrants that U.S. Secretary for Homeland Security Kevin MacAleenan was trying to stop from illegally entering the United States to undercut the wage and working conditions ofthe United States' current workforce. That video is also embedded below.
RT's Redacted Tonight, hosted by Lee Camp, has, for years effectively spoken up against the crimes and lies of the ruling elites of the United States and its allies, with parody, humour as well as sound and insightful reporting. One exception to this is Redacted Tonight's ill-considered and strident advocacy for immigrant rights. In the latest episode of 12 October 2019, Lee Camp has taken this much further and has clearly violated one basic principle of investigative journalism. He has unashamedly applauded the censorship of view opposed to mass immigration and the enforcement of the United States' immigration laws. As he explains in the video, he considers this view to be so odious that 'refugee rights' advocates are entitled to silence them at public meetings such as Secretary for Homeland Security Kevin MacAleenan was, as shown in the video footage of the meeting at Georgetown University. As far as I am aware, MacAleenan's 'repugnant' views are supported by the overwhelming majority of United Staes' citizens.
The following is Trump official shut down, class solidarity from the rich, attack drones the 12 October episode of RT's Redacted Tonight.
The episode starts off with the host Lee Camp celebrating the way that Secretary for Homeland Security Kevin MacAleenan was shouted down by crown of refugee and immigrant advocates at a public meeting at Georgetown University. Camp describes Kevin MacAleenan as "a piece of shit" and a "sack of garbage".
Later on, he says, "I think it's very important that we as citizens of this fine nation give him a chance to tell us about all the wonderful things he does you know maybe he'll tell us how he he can fit a child in a small Tupperware container and maybe maybe he'll let us know how to best teach he'll let us know how to best teach Border Patrol agents to be so very racist …"
However MacAleen was not given a chance to explain the U.S. government's immigration laws, border control policies and why the government felt them to be necessary. Each time he tried to speak, he was shouted down by the crowd.
Eventually, Kevin MacAleenan gave up and left without being able to put his case to the meeting - an outcome which Lee Camp applauded.
Lord Mayor Clover Moore has nothing to congratulate herself on with regard to homelessness in Sydney. The City of Sydney’s most recent street count has revealed that homelessness has risen and crisis shelters are at capacity. Although the City has been collecting levies from developers to create affordable housing since 2004, it has only created 835 new affordable housing dwellings in that time. Whilst the *official* number of homeless in Sydney reached 592 in August 2019 (with so many more couch-surfing and living on credit), Australia has continued to import approximately one million immigrants every two years, pushing up the price of housing and causing pressure on Sydney's very scarce land, to the extent that NSW State Premier, Gladys Berejiklian asked the Federal Government to halve the immigration numbers - to no avail. Lendlease private developments is forcing new suburbs into koala territory despite years of organised protests from nearby residents. It is clear that property development is disorganising human communities, extinguishing wildlife, and over-riding every democratic measure in our society. It is ironic that the City of Sydney, in a country run by property developers for their own enrichment through population growth, should give the biggest private landowner in Australia (the Catholic Church) $100,000 to pay various humble workers to telephone between services looking for empty beds each night for the homeless. The same Catholic Church is a notable property developer, owner of the oldest bank in the world, and a chronic promoter of mass immigration.
According to a press release from the City of Sydney, while the number of those sleeping rough fell by 24 people compared to the count in August last year, occupation of temporary or crisis accommodation rose by 16.8 per cent to 592 people – 94 per cent of available bed capacity.
August 2019
People Sleeping Rough: 254
Occupied Crisis and Temporary Accommodation Beds: 592
August 2018
People Sleeping Rough: 278
Occupied Crisis and Temporary Accommodation Beds: 495
Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore said that the high level of temporary bed occupancy showed outreach services run by the NSW Government, City of Sydney and non-government organisations were working, but that those numbers would remain high without the provision of more stable, long-term affordable and social housing. In 2017 she had blamed the State Government for not providing enough accommodation, and had refused to move people out of Sydney's "tent city".
In NSW State Premier, Gladys Berejiklian's defense, Ms Berejiklian had, in 2018, asked the Federal Goverment to reduce immigration to NSW by half, with no success.[1]
Sydney's Mayor has a complete disconnect about the problem of massive immigration numbers driving up demand for housing and personally welcomes 1000 international students each year, observing that there are now more than 35,000 studying in the City's local area. Whilst homelessness is increasing, she actually describes student immigration as 'increasing Sydney's livability'.
"International students enhance Sydney's vibrancy and liveability through contributing to our city's cultural diversity. The international student community also plays an important role to grow and strengthen Sydney's global connections – today and in the future." [2]
According to Australia's 2016 census, the number of homeless people in Australia jumped by more than 15,000 — or 14 per cent — in the five years to 2016. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) said 116,000 people were homeless on census night in 2016, representing 50 homeless people per 10,000.
Let them eat cake, eh, Clover?
“These figures tell us that people experiencing homelessness are seeking help, and know where to find the services that can offer them a bed or a free meal for the night, but these are temporary solutions to a systemic crisis,” the Lord Mayor said.
“254 people sleeping on our streets is 254 too many. In a prosperous city like Sydney, this is an unacceptable situation demanding decisive and compassionate action. To break the cycle of homelessness we need the NSW and Federal governments to fund provide more social and affordable housing in the inner city. We cannot allow Sydney to become an enclave for the rich. We need a diverse range of housing to accommodate our diverse community.”
Minister for Families, Communities and Disability Services, Gareth Ward, participated in the count and said the figures showed the NSW Government’s assertive outreach programs are making a real impact.
“Since 2017, our assertive outreach teams have helped house more than 450 people previously sleeping rough on inner city streets,” Mr Ward said. “Our staff are compassionate, skilled professionals and to see a drop in the number of people sleeping rough compared to last year is encouraging, but of course there is still more work to be done. The reality is that across the state, homelessness is an issue. That’s why we recently announced the expansion of assertive outreach to Tweed Heads and Newcastle and the extension of the street count to regional areas. We’re delighted to partner with the City of Sydney in tackling this issue and we will continue to work with other local councils and non-government organisations to build on the strong foundations we have set.”
Member for Sydney Alex Greenwich welcomed the joint action between local and state government on homelessness.
“Sadly, it is no secret that homelessness has reached a crisis point in NSW,” the Member for Sydney said. “The latest street count results prove once again that people are seeking help, but that the system is at capacity – we need to provide safe and affordable homes in order to truly stop the cycle of homelessness in our state.”
The homeless in Sydney count was conducted in the early hours of Tuesday, 6 August. A total of 195 volunteers made up of residents, sector workers, students, local businesses 15 advisers who have lived experience of homelessness and 30 City staff members took part in the count from 1am to 3am.
In February, the City signed an agreement with the NSW Government, the Institute of Global Homelessness, St Vincent de Paul, St Vincent’s Health, Mission Australia, Salvation Army, Wesley Mission, Neami National and Yfoundations to:
- reduce rough sleeping in the City of Sydney area by 25 per cent by 2020
- reduce rough sleeping in the City of Sydney area and NSW by 50 per cent by 2025
- work towards zero rough sleeping in the City of Sydney area and NSW
These goals are totally inadequate given the number of new migrants coming into Sydney every day plus all the overseas immigrants and the likely total by 2025.
The City has contributed $100,000 to the St Vincent de Paul Society[3] to establish a Sydney office to coordinate the project. It says that the local, *independent* organisation is bringing together organisations and services working to reduce homelessness. The city believes that this will allow for greater information sharing and enable a more coordinated response to reduce the number of people sleeping rough and to prevent people entering in to homelessness.
It is ironic that a City in a country run by property developers for their own enrichment through population growth should give an organisation affiliated with the biggest private landowner in Australia (the Catholic Church) $100,000 to pay various humble workers to telephone between services looking for empty beds each night for the homeless.
The City has also invested $6.6 million over three years to help reduce homelessness in the city. This includes a $3.5 million contribution to the NSW Government’s Department of Family and Community Services over three years to fund specialist homelessness services.
The City of Sydney says that it has helped build 835 new affordable housing dwellings since 2004, by collecting levies from developers and selling *our* land to affordable housing providers at discount rates.
Meanwhile, between 2014 and 2017 'Cloud Arch', a single ribbon of steel shaped sculpture intended to be installed over George Street in Sydney, had its budget rise from A$3.5 million to 11.3 million dollars. It has been criticised on cost and aesthetics, but the mayor has said that it will become a "drawcard for residents, workers, tourists and visitors." She obviously hasn't figured out that Sydney isn't coping with its current population, if she wants to attract even more people.
[1] "On Wednesday the New South Wales premier, herself the daughter of Armenian immigrants, called for a halving of the state’s migrant intake, citing concerns about population growth in Sydney. But a Guardian analysis of immigration data shows any reduction in migration in Australia would involve hard and potentially costly choices for the state’s economy. While permanent arrivals in Australia are at the same level as they were under the Howard government, the increase in net overseas migrants has been driven by the lucrative international student market, tourists and skilled workers." source: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/oct/10/gladys-berejikilian-calls-for-immigration-cut-but-it-could-cost-nsw.
[2] Source: https://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/community/community-support/international-students
[3] "The St Vincent de Paul Society is a lay Catholic organisation and does not receive any direct funding from the Catholic Church. The Society enjoys a close relationship with the Catholic Church and is assisted through parishes and schools." (Source: https://www.vinnies.org.au/page/About/FAQs/Is_the_St_Vincent_de_Paul_Society_a_part_of_the_Catholic_Church/)
The Vatican, on the other hand, manages $64 billion of assets on behalf of its 17,400 customers, according to a Dec. 5, 2014, article in International Business Times .
The Vatican bank owns $764 million in equity. The bank keeps gold reserves worth over $20 million with the U.S. Federal Reserve. (Source: https://www.nasdaq.com/article/how-much-money-does-the-vatican-have-cm500605.
A recent interview of the Prime Minister by Leigh Sales in the 7.30 Report on Tuesday 29 January 2019 provided a good illustration of the lack of understanding of economics by ABC journos or their deliberate and calculated rejection of some simple truths. John Coulter has written to Leigh Sales as follows.
Dear Leigh,
Last evening in your interview with the Prime Minister you raised the issue of government debt. You suggested to Morrison that he was not really such a good economic manager because government 'debt' had increased on his watch and you allowed the PM to go on and claim that he had to pay back the debt that Labor had created. This part of the interview was initiated by you and predicated on the undesirability of government debt.
What you should have asked Morrison, 'to whom is government debt owed' for it is actually owed to itself and is not a matter of concern as long as certain conditions are met. You may then have gone on and asked whether 'if the government does achieve a surplus is this not likely to lead to an economic downturn?' A government surplus means that the government is taking more from the economy and there is less for private investment.
Nearly all the ABC interviewers are firmly embedded in the existing economic paradigm which regards endless growth of GDP as both desirable and necessary whereas it is one of the fundamental drivers of our environmental degradation and not actually leading to improvements in human welfare.
With best wishes,
John Coulter, former leader, Australian Democrats
Economic experts have warned the Government faces a challenge in meeting its new jobs target if it restricts migration, and even if it does deliver on its pledge, Australians may not be the ones to benefit.
It follows a similar pledge by Tony Abbott prior to the 2013 election to create 1 million jobs by 2018.
Peter McDonald, Emeritus Professor of Demography at ANU’s Crawford School of Public Policy, said it was an “achievable” target and that a recent projection of labour market demand by Victoria University had already earmarked a similar level of demand.
But he also noted migration was the largest contributor to the growth in employment numbers in Australia since 2013, ahead of the growing trend for older Australians to stay in work.
The permanent migration program was reduced from around 190,000 to just above 160,000 in the past two years.
Mr Morrison revealed last year it’s likely the intake would remain at this new, lower level.
Deloitte Access Economics partner Chris Richardson said his firm forecasted that, at this stage, jobs growth would fall short of the Government’s 2023 target.
“You get, basically, growth in jobs pretty much anyway — over time, there are more Australians, that typically means more jobs, but it does get more complicated than that,” Mr Richardson said.
“An ageing population means more people are retiring, that makes it harder.
“The migration debate — if it means winding back the number of migrants — that also makes it harder.”
The Department of Jobs’ Employment Outlook, released last year, projects employment to increase by 886,100 over the five years to May 2023.
Mr Richardson said the ratio of new skilled adult migrants to jobs growth was “pretty much one to one”, despite community concerns over migration fuelled by “barbecue logic”.
“People think, ‘well if migrants arrive, surely they’re taking jobs and if other things are equal, that means less jobs for everyone else’,” he said.
“If somebody puts up a hand to take a job — a migrant, a married woman, a Martian — they get the job, they earn the income, spend the income, then create the next job.”
Professor McDonald said if the Government restricted permanent migration, the employees needed by Australian businesses would not come from the ranks of the local unemployed.
“If labour demand is strong, and permanent migration is not filling the demand, then it will come from temporary migration or New Zealanders,” he said.
A reduction in immigration, he argues, would not necessarily lead to more jobs for Australians.
"What this debate is really about is not who gets what jobs but which elements of capital win along the way. McDonald and Richardson are obsessed with supporting the immigration-led urbanisation sectors to the detriment of tradables and wider community living standards as infrastructure fails to keep up, wages are crushed by the rush of cheap foreign labour and house prices shoot to stupid levels. McDonald is a demographer not economist so has no idea. Richardson has simply lost the macro plot. Before these dills came along with their immigration voodoo Australia and its labour market fared just fine and it will afterwards as well. In fact it will be better in time as the permanent supply shock of cheap foreigners killing wages and productivity ends, boosting income."
(Article by Houses and Holes, first published at https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2019/01/migration-shills-tie-job-knots/ on January 30, 2019.)
Via the ABC:
Economic experts have warned the Government faces a challenge in meeting its new jobs target if it restricts migration, and even if it does deliver on its pledge, Australians may not be the ones to benefit.
It follows a similar pledge by Tony Abbott prior to the 2013 election to create 1 million jobs by 2018.
Peter McDonald, Emeritus Professor of Demography at ANU’s Crawford School of Public Policy, said it was an “achievable” target and that a recent projection of labour market demand by Victoria University had already earmarked a similar level of demand.
But he also noted migration was the largest contributor to the growth in employment numbers in Australia since 2013, ahead of the growing trend for older Australians to stay in work.
The permanent migration program was reduced from around 190,000 to just above 160,000 in the past two years.
Mr Morrison revealed last year it’s likely the intake would remain at this new, lower level.
Deloitte Access Economics partner Chris Richardson said his firm forecasted that, at this stage, jobs growth would fall short of the Government’s 2023 target.
“You get, basically, growth in jobs pretty much anyway — over time, there are more Australians, that typically means more jobs, but it does get more complicated than that,” Mr Richardson said.
“An ageing population means more people are retiring, that makes it harder.
“The migration debate — if it means winding back the number of migrants — that also makes it harder.”
The Department of Jobs’ Employment Outlook, released last year, projects employment to increase by 886,100 over the five years to May 2023.
Mr Richardson said the ratio of new skilled adult migrants to jobs growth was “pretty much one to one”, despite community concerns over migration fuelled by “barbecue logic”.
“People think, ‘well if migrants arrive, surely they’re taking jobs and if other things are equal, that means less jobs for everyone else’,” he said.
“If somebody puts up a hand to take a job — a migrant, a married woman, a Martian — they get the job, they earn the income, spend the income, then create the next job.”
Professor McDonald said if the Government restricted permanent migration, the employees needed by Australian businesses would not come from the ranks of the local unemployed.
“If labour demand is strong, and permanent migration is not filling the demand, then it will come from temporary migration or New Zealanders,” he said.
A reduction in immigration, he argues, would not necessarily lead to more jobs for Australians.
What total drivel. Australia has a large surplus of labour which is why wages are stuck in the gutter:
If migration is cut then we’ll see a shift in the patterns of demand in the economy not the end of the world. There will be less urbanisation and therefore less jobs in that area. That will result in lower interest rates and a much lower currency triggering greater offshore demand and boosting the 40% of the economy that is tradable. Ironically this will prevent any serious shakeout from hitting urbanisation sectors while rising prospects for exporters and import competers will create more jobs in those areas of the economy and they will all go to locals. When the labour market tightens enough and shortages appear then wages will rise. Fancy that!
If these wage rises get excessive then interest rates will rise and job creation slow or firms invest more heavily in automation for greater productivity and the gains be shared with fewer needed workers. these are also the dynamics that will easily resolve any aging population issues.
This is simply called an “adjustment”. The economy is not set in concrete (unless you’re paid by property developers to say so), it is a living system designed to compensate for such shifts.
What this debate is really about is not who gets what jobs but which elements of capital win along the way. McDonald and Richardson are obsessed with supporting the immigration-led urbanisation sectors to the detriment of tradables and wider community living standards as infrastructure fails to keep up, wages are crushed by the rush of cheap foreign labour and house prices shoot to stupid levels. McDonald is a demographer not economist so has no idea. Richardson has simply lost the macro plot.
Before these dills came along with their immigration voodoo Australia and its labour market fared just fine and it will afterwards as well. In fact it will be better in time as the permanent supply shock of cheap foreigners killing wages and productivity ends, boosting income.
YaleGlobal announces: "Prepare for the 21st Century Exodus of Migrants ... Cross-border immigration accounts for much of the population growth in developed countries with low fertility rates. Such immigration has also become an election issue around the globe." Unfortunately open borders are being promoted in order to maintain constant population growth; the 'developed world' ideas managers are not really trying to avert this disaster. "If those taking steps necessary to migrate were to immigrate to desired destinations, the result would expand UN-projected annual numbers for major migrant-receiving Western countries by more than tenfold," writes Joseph Chamie, (this Yale article). That would mean immigration at about 2.5m every year in Australia, or about 10% of Australia's current population. This would have Australia's population initially doubling in 10 years, but of course it would then grow faster and faster, due to compounding natural increase and an increasing population base! 75% of Australia is rangelands and arid desert, similar to North Africa. Australia's politically engineered immigration-fed population growth rate is already overwhelming its infrastructure. The increased demand means money for developers, but increased prices for most people. Reading Chamie's article makes me again wonder whether modern economics has actually confused people with dollars.
Joseph Chamie first launched these ideas via the UN in 2000, “Replacement Migration: Is it a Solution to declining and Ageing Populations,” 6 January, 2000 and for the final report, released on 22 March 2000. At the time it was received with laughter from demographers in Europe, but taken seriously by absurdist economists in the Anglosphere. The absurd is now becoming reality, constantly promoted in the corporate press. The process promoted is more dangerous than Hitler, because demographic inertia has a life of its own and engineering population age-cohorts to balloon is nuts.
The idea is to constantly increase world population numbers in guise of maintaining youth cohorts at the same unusual proportional levels as they were at the time of the 'Baby-boomers' and cheap oil. This plan would lead to grotesque distortions in demand and individual survival that business people, naive about the numbers, imagine would keep them rich. Indeed, a small number of elites and corporates who control resources, would become even richer than today - for a short time - but at these rates of growth, the world's capacity to feed itself and remove waste would collapse - very quickly.
As French Demographer Henri Leridon wrote in 2000 [1] about Chamie's "Replacement Migration solution", the numbers would be “frankly extravagant”. They would involve 12.7 million immigrants per annum in Europe, amounting to a total of 700 million from 2000 to 2050, “for an initial population of 372 million inhabitants; 1.7 million per annum in France, that is to say, 94 million in 55 years – one and a half times the initial population...”. He added, “As for poor South Korea, which is included in these projections for reasons that remain a mystery, South Korea would have to take in more than five billion immigrants over the period, and the population density there would exceed 62,000 inhabitants per square kilometer in 2050.”
It is never clear to me whether Chamie is advocating this horror-scenario or trying to warn the world. Either way, he is failing, because most people simply have no idea of the numbers and those who suspect the numbers, cannot believe that their 'leaders' would do this to them. As an evolutionary sociologist who writes about human and other species population dynamics (Demography Territory Law: The Rules of animal and human populations), I find it remarkable that the economists and demographers most seen and heard in the mainstream media, think that disproportionate youth cohorts are a good thing. They seem to be operating as if the laws of nature had been entirely suspended by the laws of finance. If anyone wants to read more about Henri Leridon's analysis in English I have republished parts of his texts most recently in an article called, "The plan to flood Europe with migrants - UN 2000 report," at https://www.candobetter.net/node/5579.
With regard to the population growth in the 'developing world', the replacement of traditional economies with cities is the cause of overpopulation and this has been made possible by modern transport. It has brought greatly increased fertility opportunities to peoples and tribes that were previously limited by endogamous restraint in viscous populations. Everyone and every creature once lived in viscous populations. Immigration factors has been magnified by new transport technologies, all over the world. We need to preserve and promote viscosity everywhere we can, not more and more cities and population movement. If turbo-charged capitalism had not got control of world ideation, this might be possible.
Henri Leridon, “Vieillissement démographique et migrations: quand les Nations unies veulent remplir le tonneau des Danaïdes...”, Population & Sociétés, No. 358, Juin 2000.
Nobel Peace Prize winning economist Milton Friedman once said that you can have mass immigration or you can have the welfare state. But you can't have both.
Aged hospitals, atrocious wait times, fewer cutting edge treatments, fewer new drugs, a shortage of doctors, a paucity of acute care hospital beds, unfunded liabilities that constitute 46% of the national economy, a middling performance about among countries with universal medical access----yes, the truth is out about Canada’s acclaimed health care system.
You know, the one that American progressives love so much from afar. The one that Canadians ardently loved too---until the 1990s. Then two things happened.
One was a dramatic shift in immigration policy taken by the then Brian Mulroney government at the end of the 1991, when it was announced that annual immigration intakes would virtually double. The second thing to happen was that wait times for necessary surgical procedures grew longer. And longer---until today, the median wait time today of over 21 weeks is twice as long as it was then.
Coincidence? It would stretch credulity to the extreme to deny a connection. The greater the number of patients, the greater demand that is placed on the system, and immigration-driven population growth has added more than 7 million medical consumers to the queue since the departure of “Lyin’ Brian”.
Last year, Canadian taxpayers spent roughly $250 billion on health care, an expenditure equivalent to ll.5% of Canada’s GDP. That works out to over $6,600 per person. Now, one would think that that would be enough to provide us with the comprehensive care we crave. But it’s not. Ours is not an integrated system. Unlike the British National Health Service for example, physiotherapy, dental care and vision care are not covered. Neither are ambulance rides, plus a host of other out-of-pocket expenditures, including, for most of us, the crippling cost of drugs. If the Trudeau government delivers on the promise of a national pharmacare program, you can add another thousand bucks to the $6,600. A figure that’s been growing 4% a year of late.
That $6,600, however, is just an average. What of elderly parents sponsored by adult children under the rubric of ‘family reunification”? What of the unskilled migrants from “non-traditional” sources who don’t earn enough income to offset the cost of the social services provided to them? Migrants who impose a net fiscal burden of approximately $35 billion a year on Canadian taxpayers? And what about the many tens of thousands of refugee claimants whose settlement costs anywhere from $12,000 to $20,000 a pop? It would be reasonable to assume migrants from Less Developed Countries come with a backlog of unattended medical problems.
Already the big ticket item in every Provincial budget---accounting almost half of all program expenditures----health care spending in this country is on an unsustainable trajectory. The reasons are many. Rising drug costs, the price of new medical technology, over-centralization, the lack of community health clinics, a failure to shift toward preventive and holistic medicine, a failure to implement economies, the under-funding of home care and the refusal of many Canadians to take responsibility for their own health---all factor into the conversation. But the elephant in the hospital room, immigration policy, is a no go zone.
This is not just an issue of financial impositions. There is a human cost as well. The cost born by Canadians who must endure acute pain while waiting in a long line up to get a CT scan or see a specialist, only to join another long line up to have the actual operation. If you want to gauge their suffering think not in terms of faceless millions, but of individuals you may know who suffer in silence or turn to pain killers to get them through the night, and the many months ahead. When I do that, I think of my late mother and the hardship she endured in her final years. I think of the evening when, at age 86, had a medical event in a Vancouver suburb.
Mom was rushed to hospital only to have to spend the night lying in a gurney in the hallway. All beds were taken. According to protocol, the paramedics who carried her in from the ambulance had to stand around until she was admitted to the emergency ward. They had a long evening. So did I. When morning broke when all knew each other's life stories.
There was a lot of talking done that night, and at least half of it was in languages other than English. The signs posted near the waiting room and receptions were multilingual. English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese and another from the Indian subcontinent. Our other official language---French---was not on the menu. Quite telling that. At times the scene was chaotic because staff were running around trying to make themselves understood.
That's a common problem in Lower Mainland hospitals. Hallway medicine, stressed out nurses, and very long surgery waits---that's the reality of our much vaunted health care system, a system that was not designed to cope with the crushing demands now made upon it, never mind the demands which the immigration and refugee lobby would further add. It is confounding that many of the people who grumble about having to wait 6 months to see a specialist or 8 months to get a hip replacement are the same people who favour open borders policies. They don't connect the dots.
Thankfully, my mother survived the night, but her lifelong socialist convictions did not.
My parents were among the founding members of Canada's democratic socialist party in 1933, the CCF, re-branded as the NDP in 1961. They fought for the establishment of a welfare state -- a 40 hour week, unemployment insurance, government auto insurance...and of course socialized medicine. When the NDP finally formed the government in British Columbia in 1972, they were elated, like most working class people of their generation. Having met the brutal challenges of the Depression and the War, it seemed then that their sacrifices would be rewarded with a worry free future. They would never have to worry about getting the kind of care they would require in their golden years.
But like the loyal working class supporters of labour and social democratic parties in Britain, Europe and Australia, they were betrayed by the politicians who claimed to be their advocates. They worked hard and paid their taxes, only to see people who had never put a nickel into the system bumped to the head of the queue. It was sad to see their bodies fail, but it was heartbreaking to witness their disillusionment. Their God had failed them.
Mom and Dad never left the NDP. The NDP left them.
Nobel Peace Prize winning economist Milton Friedman once said that you can have mass immigration or you can have the welfare state. But you can't have both. The NDP chose mass immigration.
Tim Murray
July 30, 2018
House prices are higher in Sydney and Melbourne than in almost all other developed-nation cities with the result that most young households cannot afford to buy a detached house. Why? Part of the explanation is a combination of generous tax benefits to investors and upgrading home owners. This has prompted massive investment in dwellings, but mostly in established detached housing. This investment drives up prices without adding to supply. New research report, 3 July 2018Bob Birrell and Ernest Healy, Immigration and the Housing Affordability Crisis in Sydney and Melbourne
However these investors and upgrading home owners are competing for detached housing with large numbers of young resident and migrant households. Tax advantages together with high levels of immigration-fuelled population growth have meant that there has been only one way prices could go; that is up.
The Greater Sydney Commission along with the Grattan Institute and the Reserve Bank (as well as most planners and commentators) assert that the solution to the affordability crisis is to abolish zoning constraints on medium-density housing in existing suburban areas.
They all ignore the migration factor. Yet net overseas migration (NOM) is responsible for about 64 per cent of Sydney’s household growth, and thus 64 per cent of Sydney’s growth in demand for dwellings, and 54 per cent of Melbourne’s.
This study indicates that the abolition of zoning constraints will not solve the affordability problem. This is because the price escalation Allfor detached houses has simultaneously pushed up the site costs for potential new medium-density housing. The result is that developers cannot produce affordable family-friendly units or town houses on these sites.
In the recent past, in both Sydney and Melbourne, zoning constraints in established suburbia have been relaxed. However, the study shows that this has not led to significant increases in medium-density housing, for precisely this reason. We argue that a further relaxation of zoning rules will not work in the future.
The encouragement given by both the NSW and Victorian state governments to the construction of high-rise apartments has also not worked to solve the affordability crisis. This is despite the jump in the number of such apartments in both cities over the past few years. This supply has not solved the problem because apartments do not meet the needs of most new resident and migrant households, needs which are primarily for family friendly housing.
A cut back in migration has to be part of the solution to Sydney and Melbourne’s housing affordability crisis.
Anyone that lives in Sydney or Melbourne will have experienced the crippling rise in congestion on our transport networks first hand. Morning and evening peaks now run for hours, traffic is forever thick on the weekends, and the time taken to travel from point A to point B now takes longer than ever. Article originally published at https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2017/05/mass-immigration-grinds-big-cities-to-halt/
Over the weekend, The Australian confirmed what we living in the big cities already know: commuting is fast becoming a nightmare:
The number of vehicles travelling in Australian cities
has grown almost tenfold in the past 70 years and, with exponential
population growth not being met with adequate road infrastructure
upgrades, traffic speeds are crawling to a standstill…Last year, a report from the Committee for Economic Development of
Australia said congestion could cost the nation more than $50 billion in
lost productivity by 2031 unless addressed.The latest congestion bill was $16.5bn in 2015.
Congestion levels on major arterial roads are at a high, with most
cities suffering much slower travel times and lower average speeds than
previously recorded…Sydney, which last year was named the nation’s most congested city by
peak transport body Austroads, has seen significant reductions in
average speeds even since 2011. The population of Greater Sydney has
risen by almost 300,000 people during that time, reaching almost five
million…Melbourne is growing by 2000 new drivers each week, with more than
200,000 vehicles travelling across the West Gate Bridge between the CBD
and western suburbs each day…Between 2006 and 2013, speeds on Melbourne’s major arterial roads
have slowed by an average of 13km/h, with speeds on the West Gate
Freeway entry ramp from Williamstown Road slowing to half the speed
limit of 100km/h during morning peak hours…
The primary culprit is pretty obvious for those that care to look:
the explosion in population growth, which has seen Melbourne add one
million people over the past 12 years (a 27% increase) and Sydney add
821,000 people (a 20% increase):
In October last year, Infrastructure Partnerships Australia (IPA) released a report that used Uber driver information to measure “road network performance” in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth to drill down into average travel times at different hours of the day.
The results were based on the following number of drivers in each city:
And found that “efficiency” pretty much followed the level of population growth:
In Melbourne, which is the population ponzi king, travel times have
worsened materially, followed by Sydney, which has also experienced
strong population growth. Brisbane only experienced a minor worsening in
travel times. Whereas in Perth, where population growth has cratered,
travel times have actually improved.
The Bureau of Infrastructure and Regional Economics has also forecast soaring costs of congestion, particularly in Sydney and Melbourne, over the next 15 years:
The underlying driver of this population growth and rising congestion
is the ‘Big Australia’ mass immigration program being run by the
federal government and supported by the three major political parties –
the Coalition, Labor and The Greens.
While net overseas migration (NOM) has fluctuated as long-stay
temporary migrants have come and gone, the fact remains that Australia’s
immigration settings are set at turbo-charged levels and are projected
to remain so for decades to come, thus maintaining Australia’s
population growth at around 400,000 people a year – equivalent to adding
a Canberra to Australia’s population:
Underpinning this high NOM is Australia’s permanent migration program, which is currently 200,000 a year, comprising:
This permanent migration program was ramped-up massively from the early-2000s, as shown in the next chart:
Accordingly, in the 16 years to 2016, Australia’s net overseas
migration (NOM) rocketed to an annual average of 200,000 people a year –
almost triple the historical average of around 70,000 people a year.
As shown in the next chart, which comes from the Productivity Commission’s (PC) recent Migrant Intake into Australia
report, 86% of immigrants lived in the major cities of Australia in
2011, whereas only 65% of the Australian-born population did:
The situation is set to deteriorate even further, too, with
Australia’s population expected to grow to around 40 million mid-century
under current settings, driven almost exclusively by mass immigration:
And because of this mass immigration, Sydney’s population is
projected to grow by 87,000 people per year (1,650 people each week) to
6.4 million over the next 20-years – effectively adding another Perth to
the city’s population:
It’s even worse in Melbourne, whose population is projected to
balloon by 97,000 people per year (1,870 people each week) over the next
35 years to more than 8 million people – effectively adding 2.5
Adelaide’s to the city’s population over this time period:
It’s common sense that ramming 80,000 to 100,000 extra people into
Sydney and Melbourne each year will create immense pressures on housing,
infrastructure, congestion, and overall livability.
Even former Treasury secretary Ken Henry gets it, last year sounding the alarm that rapid population growth has overrun infrastructure and housing in the big cities:
“My observation in Sydney, in Melbourne, today is that
people already think – with very good reason – that the ratio of
population to infrastructure is too high,” he said.Australia will need to construct a new city every year as big as
Canberra or Newcastle to accommodate the expanding number of people, he
said. Or, every 5 years,Australia would need to build an entire new city from scratch for 2
million people; or an entire new city as big as Melbourne every decade.Without such action, there will be more congestion, longer commute
times to work and increasing problems with housing affordability…
Where is the national plan to cope with this mass immigration? How
will Australia’s governments and businesses ensure that incumbent
Australians’ living standards will not be eroded by the associated
pressures on infrastructure, housing, the environment, and the dilution
of Australia’s fixed mineral endowment, which is a key driver of our
wealth and living standards?
Residents of Sydney and Melbourne, in particular, know that their
living standards will be smashed if mass immigration is allowed to
continue. Therefore, reducing immigration back to the long-run average
of 70,000 people annually, as advocated by the Sustainable Australia party,
is becoming critical. This would see Australia’s population stablise at
around 32 million mid-century, rather than the current projection of
around 40 million.
Because as it stands, Australia cannot possibly hope to build enough
infrastructure to supply a Canberra-worth of new residents each and
every year for decades to come, which is what we are facing under
Australia’s current mad immigration settings.
Alex Jones! Infowars! I hear you say. Aren't they the far-right conspiracy theorists? Isn't Alex Jones a card-carrying nutcase? Well, that's what the mainstream press say about him and his followers, all 50 m plus.[1] Mainstream media is on the way out, but Jones is on the way up and he really puts on a show. Maybe judge the pudding by its contents, which vary. But sometimes Infowars seems to really hit the nail on the head. Before you scoff, check out the following video, which is about planning threats to self-government in Austin Texas. Remind you of Australia's cities and towns? You won't hear it on the mainstream news.
Quotes from the video:
"[...]Codenext wants to change existing single family housing development and implement a new 'sustainable' model that contains massive apartment buildings, some of which contain 200 square foot coffin appartments. And, by raising peoples' property taxes to unlivable standards, people are forced to sell their homes to giant developers which could knock down, say, four houses in an area and put up giant high-rises, thereby increasing the property tax base even more and crowding more and more people in to smaller and smaller areas. This also increases traffic congestion, so Codenext also makes driving lanes smaller, even adds concrete embankments, or bike-lanes. Anything to impede the natural flow of traffic.
But what's the true incentive for programs like Codenext? Beyond their claims of being the 'progressive left', the progressive left has been caught many times engaging in voter fraud. President Obama even encouraged illegal immigrants to vote on election day [...] And, with an abundance of cheap rooms and small coffin-like appartments being built in once-middle-class communities, you can turn conservative districts into leftist progressive districts."
"They have an admitted plan under Codenext to take over Austin, to take over the surrounding towns like a cancer, take over the A45 and I45 corridors and fully bring in the third world population to drive down wages, to house them in overpriced coffin appartments and to bring down the standard of living massively, then use those political groups as a checkmate on the rest of the population and kill the middle class once and for all. "
"The bureaucrats win by creating a vertical property tax base. Instead of one house paying one set of property taxes, you now have 400 little appartments all paying tax on the same piece of land. Breaking apart residential communities and adding small, rent-controlled efficiency appartments, popularly known as 'the projects' can have serious effects on a community as well. [...] "
[1] https://www.quantcast.com/infowars.com#trafficCard
http://www.infowars.com/is-the-mainstream-media-dying/
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/infowars.com
"Alex Jones is a bona fide force in mainstream American politics. His radio show is syndicated from his Austin, Texas, studio to 160 stations nationwide, and it reaches many more listeners over the internet. According to the web analytics company Quantcast, his website InfoWars reaches about 7.5 million unique readers per month, with 6.5 million of the site’s visitors based in the United States. Those numbers aren’t far behind Quantcast’s statistics for the long-running liberal publication Salon, which counts 9.1 million global and 7 million U.S. unique monthly visitors. (That probably says as much about Salon’s declining influence as it does about InfoWars’s grasp on the American psyche, but still.)" Source: http://www.spin.com/featured/the-invisible-empire-of-alex-jones/
In the article the writer questions the whole idea of governments making top-down decisions about the size of a country's population.
A question that often comes up when discussion population related matter is, "What should the population be?" or "What level of immigration/growth do you think is suitable?". I don't have an answer to that question, and I don't intend to provide one.
In "What a Population Policy means to a People" we discussed the dangers of having a population policy. A government which imposes a population policy is doing more than simply deciding how many people exist within the geographic areas that it governs, its also making a determination on the composition of the population, which becomes unavoidable when any other population target than that which would have been arrived at naturally must involve. As we are subject to population policies which seek to increase the population, this means that the immigration program must unavoidably act to the detriment of the original populations, diminishing their representation and power in order to achieve an abstract target. The issue isn't whether a government decides to increase the population, decrease it, or keep it constant, the issue is the belief that the government has a right to decide this matter in the first place. The issue is the belief that population size is a matter for the state, and like interest rates, tax rates, tariffs and the number of taxi licences issues, is a matter for a bureaucracy to decide.
Also flawed is the idea that a government can set population targets democratically, if it puts forward its policies before the electorate and allows the population to vote for one which they prefer. This assumes that there are sufficient options put before the public, that the parties are given equal treatment in the media, and that the population vote according to their own interests and reason, instead of how the establishment pushes them with scaremongering and propaganda. This isn't what we observe, so if our democracy is anything less than perfect in offering a full spectrum of choices, each of which stand a change, we can't rely on a vote. But even if we were to vote, we still have a population policy in the first place. We still legitimise the right of the state to set a policy, which can very quickly and easily turn pathological. Even a sensible population policy doesn't solve this problem, as we are still ceding to the state the right to manipulate us, to displace and diminish us, or otherwise make judgements on the suitability of us as the population of the nation.
People vote democratically with their wombs
The alternative is to allow the population size to be set by the people by the most democratic means available, the individual reproductive choices that we all make. With cheap and readily available birth control, we more or less are capable of choosing or ourselves how many children we have. The birthrate of the nation is therefore nothing more than the accumulative decision making of all people manifesting itself. If people think the population is too low, they will choose to have more children, and the population will increase. If they think the population is large enough, and we don't need growth, they'll have fewer children and the population will stabilise or even reduce. Below replacement birth rates in the Western world are an indication that the people have voted with their ova and sperm, and don't perceive the need for a 'populate or perish' mindset. [This idea of below replacement is abused a lot by our masters. I suggest removing the 'The' which makes it sound like a widely established phenomenon, and just having 'Below replacement' which doesn't suggest such statistical dominance.]
So where does the state fit in? It is the role of political and economic leaders not to force a population outcome that they desire or which suits their own objectives, but adapt that that chosen by the people. The low birthrate is only an issue because our political and economic ruling class cannot handle or adapt to this new reality. We have growth forced upon us because the dominant political class refuses to adapt, refuses to implement new solutions, refuses to reform and instead asks us to adapt and even to destroy ourselves, for their own security and posterity. In short, if a stable or falling population is a problem for the political and economic ruling class, then it is the ruling class which is deficient, which has the problem, not the people.
Immigration therefore has to fit in with this. As population policy is largely implemented through the immigration floodgates, and immigration is used to override the peoples' wishes, immigration policy therefore has to be synchronised with birthrate. Therefore, a sensible immigration policy would be in-line with the birthrate, and not seek to counteract it. Ideally, it the net population intake through immigration would be a function of the total birthrate. If the birthrate rises, then the immigration rate increases and conversely, if the birthrate lowers, then the immigration rate lowers. Immigration could be set at a fixed percentage of total births, where it represents at most, a small percentage. In Australia at the moment, immigration account for more than half of all additions, which is way to high. A better figure would be about 10%, allowing some people to enter Australia if they need to, but not being significant enough to override Australias chosen birthrate.
For those concerned about future population growth, such a stance should be acceptable, because birthrates being just below replacement in Australia (1.93 births per woman as of July 2016),[1] this should act as a limiting factor for future growth. Further measures can be taken to lower the birthrate by removing government incentives.
For Australia's pattern up to 2013 http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/Previousproducts/3301.0Main%20Features42013?opendocument&tabname=Summary&prodno=3301.0&issue=2013&num=&view=
This video is of an interview by RT with Marine Le Pen, leader of the French Front National, on the problems of the European Union for itself and for Europe. As usual she goes directly to the point, displaying her characteristic piercing wit. We have included much of RT's article below the video, in the absence of a transcript. The original article and video were published here: https://www.rt.com/news/343715-eu-collapsing-france-lepen/
RT ARTICLE: The EU is on the brink of collapse, as two of its main “pillars” are “crumbling” despite the billions of euros spent on keeping the structure from falling, far-right French leader Marine Le Pen told RT, adding that the union would fail if France left it.
“I believe that the European Union is in the process of collapsing on itself for one simple reason. The two pillars on which it’s founded – Schengen and the euro – are in the process of crumbling,” Le Pen told Marie De Douhet of RT France in an exclusive interview. “So they’re in a sort of mad downward spiral in which they’re capable of anything today to try and keep this building standing.”
The leader of France’s hard-right Front National party believes the collapse is not a matter of “if” but “when,” saying the EU “shines from the light of a dead star” while its leaders are struggling to play for time “at the cost of billions trying to hold this structure up.”
As a “revealing” piece of evidence supporting her opinion, Le Pen cited one of Brussels’ recent punitive measures.
“The threat of condemnation of countries which do not accept migrants – a €250,000 fine for each migrant not taken in – is in itself revealing,” Le Pen said.
The European Commission unveiled plans earlier in May to impose a penalty of around €250,000 per rejected refugee on countries that refuse to share the burden of Europe’s migrant crisis.
For countries such as Poland, which is adamantly opposed to taking in refugees, the new compulsory measure would result in a fine of over €1 billion ($1.1 billion), given its existing quota of 6,500 people.
“The threats, the blackmail, now used systematically by the European Union is, above all, a gigantic problem of weakness,” Le Pen said.
Commenting on the migrant crisis, Le Pen said the EU is using immigrants as a tool to drive down labor costs across the 28-country bloc.
READ MORE: Human traffickers exploit EU migrant crisis to increase child smuggling – EU report
“That’s why the European Union supports tens of millions of immigrants in the coming years which will come onto the European Union labor market to push down wages,” she said. “So, in fact they have betrayed, if you like, the working class.”
Marine Le Pen has been a vocal supporter of the UK leaving the European Union, a move that the National Front hopes would inspire a similar “Frexit” campaign.
According to a March poll, 53 percent of French citizens surveyed would like to hold a Brexit-like referendum on France’s membership in the EU.
When asked if she feared any consequences for a “Frexit,” or Brussels’ retribution if it should go through, Le Pen said, “If France leaves the European Union, the European Union no longer exists.”
The leader of France’s hard-right Front National party believes the collapse is not a matter of “if” but “when,” saying the EU “shines from the light of a dead star” while its leaders are struggling to play for time “at the cost of billions trying to hold this structure up.”
As a “revealing” piece of evidence supporting her opinion, Le Pen cited one of Brussels’ recent punitive measures.
“The threat of condemnation of countries which do not accept migrants – a €250,000 fine for each migrant not taken in – is in itself revealing,” Le Pen said.
The European Commission unveiled plans earlier in May to impose a penalty of around €250,000 per rejected refugee on countries that refuse to share the burden of Europe’s migrant crisis.
For countries such as Poland, which is adamantly opposed to taking in refugees, the new compulsory measure would result in a fine of over €1 billion ($1.1 billion), given its existing quota of 6,500 people.
“The threats, the blackmail, now used systematically by the European Union is, above all, a gigantic problem of weakness,” Le Pen said.
Commenting on the migrant crisis, Le Pen said the EU is using immigrants as a tool to drive down labor costs across the 28-country bloc.
READ MORE: Human traffickers exploit EU migrant crisis to increase child smuggling – EU report
“That’s why the European Union supports tens of millions of immigrants in the coming years which will come onto the European Union labor market to push down wages,” she said. “So, in fact they have betrayed, if you like, the working class.”
Marine Le Pen has been a vocal supporter of the UK leaving the European Union, a move that the National Front hopes would inspire a similar “Frexit” campaign.
According to a March poll, 53 percent of French citizens surveyed would like to hold a Brexit-like referendum on France’s membership in the EU.
When asked if she feared any consequences for a “Frexit,” or Brussels’ retribution if it should go through, Le Pen said, “If France leaves the European Union, the European Union no longer exists.”
In this riveting Press TV video-debate, Gearóid Ó Colmáin, a political analyst and journalist from Paris, and Sean O'Grady, a finance editor with The Independent from London, discuss France's nationwide demonstrations against the government's controversial changes to labor laws. These 'reforms' are really an attempt by the EU to disorganise democracy in France and impose the savage capitalism of the Anglophone countries, Britain, the United States, and Australia. Gearóid Ó Colmáin is amazingly on the ball and candid on the disorganising purpose of mass immigration. O'Grady typifies the globaliser rhetoric. One thing not mentioned by Gearóid here is that the very high land and housing prices in the Anglophone system (a) drive wages up because people have to pay rent (b) drive up the cost of everything else (c) increase base-costs for business (d) erode profit margin. It isn't the workers who use up the profits; it is the property speculators who rely on continuous increase in demand through mass immigration. Listening to O'Grady's 'case' one has to wonder whether he actually believes what he is saying, in which case, does he go round with his eyes shut? This Video first published on PressTV, Iran, http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2016/05/20/466608/Massive-antireform-labor-protests-France
"France’s labour regulations have famously been symbolised by the labour code, a weighty 4 thousand page treatise. But the government now wants to loosen a number of rules. By proposing controversial reforms, the French government aims to curb the country's unemployment rate. But at what cost? These reforms will give employers more scope to lay off workers and cut costs and make it easier to fire workers on economic grounds when companies run into difficulties. Protests against the controversial labor reforms have exploded all over France. With just over a year to go until France’s 2017 presidential election, President Hollande is making a final attempt to cement his place in French history, be it of notoriety with these controversial reforms." (Press TV, Iran). This Video first published on PressTV, Iran, http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2016/05/20/466608/Massive-antireform-labor-protests-France
The globally unique and lovable Carnaby's Cockatoo exists only in the South West of WA. They are a totem for Noongar people and a part of our shared cultural and natural heritage. But the cockatoos are endangered and we are at risk of losing them forever.
Instead of helping the cockatoos to recover, the State Governments own analysis shows the Government's Green Growth Plan would further drastically reduce the population of these beautiful birds, intelligent, social and long-lived birds.. By locking in the clearing of thousands of hectares of bushland that the birds rely on, numbers of these already rare birds would be reduced by half and the long-term survival of the population would be placed in question.
While the State Government has hailed this Plan as a great environmental initiative, the grim reality is that it will result in the deaths of thousands of cockatoos through starvation as their vital food sources are bulldozed to make way for more unsustainable urban sprawl.
The public submission period for this plan is open now. Tell them to send it back to the drawing board.
See also an ABC report on the problems associated with this WA land-grab by a developer-government. "Carnaby's Black Cockatoos at risk if Perth-Peel land-use plan goes ahead, says leaked report." Note, however, that the ABC is part of this problem because it promotes the idea that mass immigration and population growth in Australia is inevitable.
Mention in your submision that we don't need the massive human population growth, or urban sprawl, and there's nothing "green" about it.
Please visit: https://ccwa.good.do/cockatoos/stopcockatoodisasterplan/"& and see candobetter.net's other pages on the Carnaby's cockatoo and previous efforts to save it in Perth - which these plans will wreck.
"The Noongar people saw the arrival of Europeans as the returning of deceased people. As they approached from the west, they called the newcomers Djanga (or djanak), meaning "white spirits".#cite_note-5">[5]#cite_note-6">[6] There were a number of reasons for this. Firstly their white complexion reminded the Noongar of corpses; their unclean odour of early 19th century Europeans was said to resemble the dead; the fact that the ships arrived from the west, the direction of Kuranup, the setting sun location of the soul in traditional beliefs;#cite_note-7">[7] the fact that Europeans seemed to have no memory of kinship relations; and that Noongars who associated closely with Europeans were apt to die from European diseases over which Aboriginal people had little resistance, supported this claim."
And the devastation continues at an ever greater pace. We must stop this industrial savagery and civilise ourselves.
The term 'diversity' is being used as a euphemism for chaos and social disenfranchisement in mass people movements which are politically packaged as both positive and inevitable, much as slavery was in the 18th and 19th century. UN Deputy Secretary General Jan Eliasson has said that 'the refugee crisis in Europe has created fear and hatred among local residents, which should be combated by bringing to light the positive contributions of migrants to creating a diverse society'.[1]
See also: The phoney « refugee crisis » (7/9/15) by Thierry Meyssan | VoltaireNet and other articles about the European refugee crisis.
"The number of international migrants reached 244 million in 2015, an increase of 41 per cent compared with 2000, the United Nations says in a report. The report published on Tuesday, the latest biennial revision of migration trends, found that the number of people who had moved to another country - voluntarily for economic reasons or because of conflicts - had risen by 71 million since 2000."[1]
The influx into Germany and which is overflowing to the rest of Europe amounts to an invasion because permission was not sought from the ordinary people who bear the impact on jobs, housing, social and natural environment of these colossal numbers of people. At the same time the immigration flows are the result of wars that European leaders and global commerce are inflicting on the sending countries.
Talk of 'diversity' as if different ethnicity/religion is the only feature of the problem of mass immigration to Europe is to ignore the sheer numbers of people seeking work and housing. Such huge changes in demand form the greater part of economic and social impact and the resultant hardship and inconvenience is an affront to citizens who were not consulted.
Talk of 'diversity' in the face of this huge and largely irrevocable change to numbers and composition of society has the effect of further reducing the scope of citizen input into self-government (which is a kind of cooperative population management). Self-government involves cooperative apportioning of work and housing as well as supporting infrastructure within a society defined by its membership (citizens). It is usually managed through long established civil legal and institutional processes only available to citizens or visaed immigrants.
How a population evolves is a traditional and anthropological prerogative of its members, not commercial 'stakeholders' or global political players. A sudden redefinition of membership without consultation is a fundamental problem.
When external forces produce massive population changes, this is usually referred to as war. Whilst we do know that US-NATO members have a long history of and a current responsibility for the wars in the Middle East that are producing much of these mass migrations, it is difficult to pinpoint what organisations and people are really behind the manipulation of numbers in Europe through open-door policy. This is because they hide behind rhetoricians like the UN Deputy Secretary, national leaders such as Merkel, and a pro 'diversity' corporatised and syndicated global media that obviously has interests in labour market, weapons manufacture, international trade and the transmission of power through chaos. In fact, apart perhaps from Putin's Russia, most of us do not know who is in charge of nations anymore; policies seem to be influenced from many transient global hats.
The mainstream press have had a criminal role along with EU and European governments in suppressing discussion of the numbers involved and manufacturing an apparent consent to them against real citizen feelings. In tandem these actors have consistently talked up US-NATO roles in wars that have caused these population disruptions in the Middle East. These arrogant attitudes and manipulations of perception have caused chaos, suffering and death.
'Diversity' is a non-sequiteur in the face of western warmongering overseas and manipulation of European population numbers and institutions to reduce wages, inflate housing prices, and generally place pressure on established social gains and citizens rights.
Unfortunately many commercial ventures use the UN as a respectable umbrella for advancing their own selfish interests. Any organisation may register as a UN member on a variety of bases and the UN attracts government, property and banking lawyers, ideological entities with strong links to business and government, such as the Australian Multicultural Foundation, and a variety of businesses in various guises looking for opportunities. (See http://www.unaavictoria.org.au/our-partners/. Associated projects are often described as 'development' initiatives but they are about taking over land and resources, changing local laws, exploiting and disorganising workforces in the sending and receiving countries.
The people behind some of these trends are so craven that they do not seem to think twice about provoking and stoking protracted wars and genocides, except to justify them with flimsy excuses.
Another aspect of these problems is a growing division between 'left' and 'right' in population politics as reported, endorsed and incited by the mass media. In a strange way it is reminiscent of the setting for the rise of fascism in Germany. In those days the right (the Nazis and the Italian fascists) were encouraged by big business and the mass media as a means of combating the 'left' or the rise of communism. The communists were for the uniting of workers against exploitation and war but the fascists were for exploitation and pro-war. Today we have a situation where groups identified by the mainstream press as 'left' and 'anti-fascist' are coming into conflict with groups identified as 'right-wing'. Counter-intuitively the left-wing, as presented by the mainstream press, seems to think it is okay to have disorganised mass immigration and has almost nothing to say against the wars producing these population movements. The right-wing seems to be the only voice criticising US-NATO involvement in wars in the Middle East, and they are definitely against uncontrolled mass immigration. At the same time, the center left and center right that control most governments and are aligned with the mass media encourage mass migration and encourage war. That leaves unrepresented people of a center left or center right disposition who are neither in favour of war or mass migration. This is a glaring omission and one senses that it is deliberate on the part of the mass media that claims to represent public opinion globally.
Why Illegal Migrants are Good for Turkish Business? (21/12/15) | New Eastern Outlook, Refugees as "Weapons" in a Propaganda War (21/11/15) by Eric Draitser | Global Research, The Flood of Refugees into Europe: "The New Slave Trade" (8/11/15) by Peter Koenig | Global Research, Merkel Overwhelmed: Chancellor Plunges Germany Into Chaos (4/11/15) | sputnik News, The phoney « refugee crisis » (7/9/15) by Thierry Meyssan | VoltaireNet, Refugees as Weapon – and Germany shifting Alliances? (17/7/15) | Global Research.
Item: Statscan reports that Vancouver and Toronto residents are the least happy of Canadians
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-626-x/11-626-x2015046-eng.htm
Interesting. According to a recent Statscan report, people in Vancouver and Toronto are less happy than folks in any other Canadian city. How can that be?
Don't they like the massive and relentless influx of "New Canadians"? Don't they like "diversity"? Don't they like higher density, unaffordable housing, traffic congestion, ethnic gangs, crime and job competition from a growing pool of cheap imported labour? Don't they like being told they must fork out more and more money for improved transit and infrastructure because Vancouver will add another million to its numbers? Don’t they like being told to move over and squeeze tighter to make room for more and more people? Don't they like listening to city politicians who want to "welcome" migrants and grow the population while promising to make the city the "greenest" in the world at the same time?
The unfortunate truth is that while many Vancouver and Toronto residents are unhappy, they can't tell you exactly why. Yes, they don't like unaffordable housing, traffic congestion etc. But apparently they can’t connect it to the federal policy of mass immigration. And anyone who tries to connect the dots for them is buried by media outrage and driven off the stage. Just ask Ontario's former Environment Commissioner, Gordon Miller.
Meanwhile, after reporting Statscan’s findings, the CBC featured a story about a Harvard academic whose research has demonstrated that with enough effort, we can all “choose” to be happy. All it takes is practice. We can train our brains to be optimistic and positive. Translation: don't try to change your circumstances, change your attitude! If you work in a sweatshop or a fast food restaurant or at Walmart for the minimum wage, don't worry---be happy. Be happy with mass immigration. Be happy with your displacement. Be happy with 'diversity'. Be happy with Euro-Canadian cultural suicide. Don’t worry.
You see, it is all about how you look at it. Instead of being unhappy about the surrender and betrayal of your country or how your community and your neighbourhood has been rendered unrecognizable thanks to policies that were enacted by governments that never had a mandate to do so, you can focus on the positive. As Bing Crosby said, you've got to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, latch on to the affirmative and don’t mess with Mister-in-Between!
Each day you should endeavour to count your blessings, meditate and be kind to strangers and friends. If you keep doing that, one day you will suddenly wake up and realize that you are happy.
So give it a try, won't you? Say, "Despite the fact that Chinese millionaires have demolished heritage homes on the West side of town, inflated local real estate beyond the reach of ordinary Canadians and replaced English signs with Chinese-only signs, I'm happy!" Or, "Despite the fact massive numbers of Muslim immigrants are unwilling to accept our cultural norms or respect our traditions and impose a net fiscal burden on Canadian taxpayers, I'm happy! Then meditate and think about it.
Voila! Suddenly you understand what Vancouver City Council and Mayor Gregor Robertson meant by “Reconciliation”. You are happily reconciled to your own displacement! You are born again! You are at one with the Multicultural universe! You are “welcoming”. You are ready to run to the airport and like a Walmart greeter shout, “Welcome to Canada, Home-to-the-World!” Or, “Welcome to Vancouver, The World-in-a-City”!
You are ready to be kind to strangers, strangers like the ones who came from China to rip down good housing stock, price you out of the local market, and drive your wages down as not-so-temporary foreign workers. Or ready to be kind to vitriolic imams who preach anti-Western hate from the safety of their mosques while their agents and front men wage law-fare against critics or threaten them with a human rights complaint. It is amazing what a little kindness will do.
If people in Vancouver and Toronto are so unhappy, then why don't they take that advice? Decide to be happy. Decide to change their attitude. As that Harvard academic said, the world is what you perceive it to be. Change your perception and you change the world. Your world.
So tomorrow morning, I am going to do just that. I am going to perceive the world differently . And I am going to start by perceiving my VISA bill and my mortgage debt as being paid off. Poof! Gone! See!
I wonder if the Royal Bank will accept my perception of reality?
Tim Murray,
April 22, 2015
And now a word from our Minister of Immigration, Chris Alexander (with apologies to Bob Marley):
"You say mass immigration has robbed you of a job so you ain't got no place to lay your head? Somebody came and took your bed? Don't worry, be happy. The landlord say your rent is late and he may have to litigate, don't worry, be happy. Look at me I am happy!
Here I give you my phone number. When you worry call me. I make you happy—or I’ll call the police and shut down my constituency office until you go away!
Is Australia governed by morons? Australia preaches about the Asian Century but behaves like the 18th Century British colonists who originally invaded Terra Australis. If Australia understood what it means to be Asian it would realize that most Asian countries have predominantly indigenous populations. For example, Indonesia, China, Japan, Korea, Myanmar, Thailand and the Philippines to name but a few.
None of these countries run mass migration programs like Australia’s. Australia leads the world in this category. Asian countries are not selling off their assets and housing to foreigners like Australia does; while crying crocodile tears about carbon emissions as they rapidly expand their fossil fuel exports to pay for population growth that the country cannot afford. With one of the highest costs of living of any country the annual growth of the Federal Budget combined with growing Government debt far exceeds the capacity of the growing economy to finance.
Asian populations grow at varying rates, depending on the level of development and the rates of natural births and deaths. None of these countries subject their people to mass migration as a tool to drive GDP growth in irrational contempt for the social, environmental and economic consequences.
If China used mass migration at the same rate as Australia's, it would be flooding the country with over 16 million migrants per year. China's reported population growth rate is 0.6% per annum. Australia's deliberately engineered population growth rate is 1.8% per annum.
Australia is a dishonest, hypocritical country built on a lie that government media fully supports while it preaches about humanity and the environment.
The death cult of Migration Assured Destruction is alive and well in Australia. Even the US example of how to screw up a country is not enough to educate Australia’s ruling class. This is a unique recipe for a cock up.
The argument that population growth is inevitable is as defeatist as the argument that the human race must destroy itself together with the environment that supports it.
The 20th century saw the developed world set the example of fossil fuel consumption for the developing world to follow. Now, in the 21st century, Australia insists on continuing to set the example of ridiculous and unsustainable, migration-based population growth as an example of how underdeveloped countries should behave once they have developed?
The premise of most demographic gurus is that population growth will slow as developing countries become wealthy. If that is true, then why does Australia deliberately drive population growth rates as high as those of some of the most underdeveloped areas of Africa and roughly 4 times the OECD country average? It certainly isn't about prioritising refugee intake.
Australia is an insult to the intelligence of most Australians. The primary responsibility for this reckless stupidity lies with both Government and its tool the ABC; both of whom are beyond the control of the Australian people.
There is no democracy in Australia when it comes to open public policy debate of population growth management and maximising Australia's potential to act humanely and sustainably both at home and abroad. It's just not up for discussion; and that is the essence of what Australia's autocratic "death cult" is all about. Cut philanthropic aid at home and abroad and destroy the environment; all in the name of profit - otherwise misdescribed as "economic growth".
Bandicoot writes in Our rights to jobs negotiated awayabout how Australian government has signed away the rights of Australians to self-govern on the question of mass immigration, a problem now affecting our employment opportunities and conditions. Indeed, many problems affecting Australians arise from a trend of the late 20th century to conflate trade in goods across borders and trade in people across borders. Goods-imports depress our prices and people-imports depress our wages and conditions, but, even more importantly, they depress our democracy. In the end neither producers nor workers win, unless they are multinational corporates.
The seeds of the predicament that Bandicoot so ably documents in "Our right to jobs negotiated away" were contained in the multilateral trade agreements that people protested in 1994 when a trendy-sounding Mr Keating signed us up for them. Arguably the Greens and the so called socialists of the Socialist Alliance that field a lot of potential youthful energy for protest, could have led Australians against this had they educated their followers. It seemed then, and seems now, however that the Greens and the Socialist Alliance failed to defend Australians rights on this matter because they have a core that defends immigration against any criticism, for reasons best known to their leaders.
The problems we are now deeply affected by arise from a trend of the late 20th century to conflate trade in goods across borders and trade in people across borders. Goods imports depress our prices and people imports depress our wages and conditions. In the end neither producers nor workers win, unless they are multinational corporates. This is because of an ideology that pretends that all our interests are promoted by economic liberalisation. It is obvious, however, that economic liberalisation (the ability to go to any bank in the world looking for the best rates, the ability to buy any commodity or product from anywhere) does not apply generally to most people. For instance, ordinary Australians cannot go to the Bank of Paris and access better terms for chequebooks and housing loans. Similarly, authors cannot publish with amazon.com and expect their earnings to be paid electronically into their accounts unless they are located in a certain few countries and you cannot usually freely download electronic books and dvds from French Amazon.com because the rights are restricted to certain countries. And you cannot off-shore your personal accounts to tax havens if you are a PAYE employee.
The philosophy of free trade, such as it is, is that ordinary people benefit from the transfer of wealth to international business entities because it may trickle down in the form of employment via these entities or in the form of the very cheap goods that flood our countries to the detriment of local small to medium business. Australia has also almost abolished the notion of property rights for ordinary people; Free trade in property acquisition means that land-prices have become inflated - affecting housing, farming and business rents so that Australians must compete with corporates and wealthy international investors and landlords to buy property where they only competed with each other previously. The same inflationary pressure on land is now acting on water and power because of the ideology of privatisation which is also associated with free marketeering.
History of cheap worker flood
Primeminister Howard
The absolute flood of immigrants now taking Australian jobs was not possible until Mr Howard's WorkChoices. Before WorkChoices, it was not generally profitable to import immigrant workers in Australia because our conciliation and arbitration system required any worker in an industry with an award to have the same wages and conditions as his/her fellows. This also applied to foreign workers. So you could not, until very recently, import a worker from overseas and pay them less than Australians and treat them worse.
However our capacity to bargain industrially has been pulled apart in a series of successive damaging attacks on our Conciliation and Arbitration system that was the hallmark of the Australian Federation democratic agreement.
Primeminister Malcolm Fraser
Primeminister Malcolm Fraser set the rot in motion with his laws against Secondary Boycotts which meant that workers could not withhold their labour from industries that behaved badly towards them. This fundamentally altered the human rights of Australian workers in a process that set in motion their degradation.
Premier Jeff Kennett
Industrial Awards were a very strong defense against a flood of cheap labour, especially State Industrial Awards.
These were first dismantled at State level, beginning with the Kennett Government in Victoria. Gradually industries were thrown into the disorganised mess of individual workplace agreements, stored in the tangled morass of the federal system. Unions lost rights to represent us at the same time as the laws they used to back us up on were watered down into uselessness.
It was obvious the whole time, to anyone who knew about the trade agreements that outlawed national differences in worker protection among signatories, that this situation would open up the sluice gates on cheap worker immigration in Australia. It was therefore obvious to the people responsible for signing us up with the WTO agreements and for dismanteling our industrial system.
Primeminister Keating
Keating set the scene for the undermining of citizens rights to determine our industrial laws and conditions as well as our rights to set limits on imports and foreign workers at the Marrakesh Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization 1 in 1994.
In Under "PART III,SPECIFIC COMMITMENTS, Article XVI, Market access:
1. With respect to market access through the modes of supply identified in Article I, each Member shall accord services and service suppliers of any other Member treatment no less favourable than that provided for under the terms, limitations and conditions agreed and specified in its Schedule.[152]
2. In sectors where market-access commitments are undertaken, the measures which a Member shall not maintain or adopt either on the basis of a regional subdivision or on the basis of its entire territory, unless otherwise specified in its Schedule, are defined as:
(d) limitations on the total number of natural persons that may be employed in a particular service sector or that a service supplier may employ and who are necessary for, and directly related to, the supply of a specific service in the form of numerical quotas or the requirement of an economic needs test;
PART IV, PROGRESSIVE LIBERALIZATION, Article XIX, Negotiation of specific commitments, commits the signatories to continuous relaxing of trade barriers and, presumably, movement of people across national borders and the granting of work permits. Obviously this agreement abrogates the rights of citizens to determine wages and employment conditions which are an intrinsic part of self-government in a democracy and were a notable feature of Australia until this agreement to free trade.
Primeminister Hawke
Hawke was responsible for instituting an ideology of multculturalism which was subsequently used to intimidate Australians from criticising mass immigration. A document of his involvement in setting up the Multicultural Foundation of Australia is available here. Whilst the Multicultural Foundation of Australia might seem a quite innocuously unimportant organisation, the fact that its small list of members contains the then Executive Director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Australia and every Australian primeminister and most opposition leaders since Hawke leads one to question this first impression. For more see Background on the Australian Multicultural Foundation
Hawke was also responsible for negotiating - in the Accord, against the background of the post 1970s oil shock, a centralisation of industrial unions that entailed the breaking up of diverse local and state power bases. These changes were probably necessary to weaken the union movement so that there would be no chance of Australians finding purchase to stand and fight against the slippery slide into third world conditions. The corporate model of huge unions had an inbuilt tendency to make unions allies of banks and the wealthy with professionalisation of traditionally voluntary offices, becoming stepping stones for parliamentary opportunists.
Corrupted Socialist movement helped destroy union solidarity and sense
Geoffrey Taylor (who writes for candobetter.net) would argue that a corrupted socialist movement in Australia kept up significant unwarranted agitation and confusion within unions so that workers and employers were unnecessarily alienated from their own interests. That is, he would argue that the socialist movement led poorly founded strikes and protests but that it also undermined well-founded protests and strikes - and does to this day. The underlying theory here is that the corrupted socialist movement was actually working for the government and the power elites of the day, and against the very principles that caused so many to pay their dues to it and follow its orders.
Did Fraser, Hawke, Keating, Howard et al all realise the harm their policies would do Australians or were they just caught up in a tsunami of Chicago School economics (called 'shock doctrine' by Naomi Klein) that seemed clever at the time? If there had been no oil shock in the 1970s, I do not think that their ideas would have gained purchase, but that series of shocks and countershocks helped to divide the 'developed world' into two different economic policy schools. Amongst the anglophones, the Thatcher-Reagan view of the world evolved to chisel away at citizenship and democracy in favour of a contractual society where we were all just economic units, in contrast to Western Europe, where a more citizen-focused solidarity created a bulwark for democracy, with smaller economic differences between citizens and a humanist view of one's fellows.
Oil scarcity still looms however and Anglophone elite dominance of world political economy is now magnifying the division between the oil producing economies in the Middle East, Africa, South America and Russia and the massive consumer economies in the West. International banking deregulation has broken down Western Europe's solidarity with its citizens by investing government and personal funds in the USA stock, housing and futures markets, which are totally overcapitalised. These banking and investment institutions that have invested in the United States have created of the United States a monster debt that must be fed to keep its investors alive. To feed that monster, 'austerity measures' now erode the solidarity of citizens and government in Western Europe. In a related pact, The USA, England, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany and others are now aligned temporarily in illegal wars for trade where they are historically competitors.
I know only some parts of the history of Australia's loss of citizens' rights and welcome contributions and criticisms from others.
Two thousand “Temporary” Foreign Workers ---Chinese miners---are coming to extract coal from northeastern British Columbia, Canada, close to three First Nations reserves who suffer unemployment rates over 70% !
Two thousand “Temporary” Foreign Workers ---Chinese miners---are coming to extract coal from northeastern BC, close to three First Nations reserves who suffer unemployment rates over 70% !
Government and industry tell us that we don’t have enough trained workers of our own. But maybe the real problem is that our workers are not trained to accept substandard wages for hard, dangerous work, that neither government nor industry has taken a serious inventory of our labour needs or resources, and that they are gripped by a quick-fix mentality that looks overseas rather than investing in the training of our own people, particularly of native youth.
And there is another elephant in the room. The primary question. Why the mad rush to “develop”, mine, drill and transport every resource in sight? Whose agenda are we following? The long term needs of Canadians, or the shareholders of foreign corporations and revenue-hungry debt-addicted governments? What becomes of the extra millions we import in a generation, when the ‘gold rush’ is over?
These miners are being brought in as “Temporary” Foreign Workers. A labour category whose numbers have tripled in just six years. But as the saying goes, there is nothing so permanent in Canada as a “Temporary Foreign Worker”. The trade union establishment, in fact, wants to smooth their transition into formal immigrant status. This reflects the ambition to “bring them into the union”, rather than to protect Canadian workers by demanding their expulsion. One often gets the impression that unions care more growing their dues-paying membership base and about exploited temporary workers than about the jobs of Canadians that those workers have displaced. Whatever happened to the ancient understanding that the best friend of the working man (or woman) is a tight labour market?
Until recently, it was the cross-party consensus that Canada should have a ‘tap on, tap off’ immigration policy. That is, Canada would open the gates wider when times were good and foreign workers were needed, but close them when times were tough, as they are now. That consensus was blown apart two decades ago when the Mulroney government dramatically jacked up immigration quotas to unprecedented levels, motivated not by economic considerations but by political ones. Namely, the desire of the Conservative government to woo ethnic voters away from the Liberal Party by expanding immigration. Since then, successive governments have kept up that unwarranted intake for fear of chasing ethnic voters away into the embrace of the opposition parties eager to capture their loyalty.
The truth is, we don’t need to dig up and ship out our resources at breakneck speed. We don’t need to follow the classic boom-and-bust cycle that has cursed our resource economy for a century. And we don’t need to recklessly import millions of foreign workers to pursue that kind of roller-coaster economic model.
The aim of public policy should not be to get rich quick, but secure economic stability over the long haul. The word “sustainable” has been abused beyond meaning. But nonetheless, it applies here. It should be clear that a sustainable economy is better than one that rises like rocket, and then crashes. A sustainable economy for a sustainable population level.
Tim Murray,
October 27, 2012
GEERT WILDERS (witnessing the Dutch experience):
“People are waking up. They see that we are losing our identity, that neighborhoods are unsafe, that women are shouted at and hassled in the streets, that schools are unsafe. If my party were extremist, we’d be at the margins and we’d be getting 1.5 or 2 percent of the vote.
We’re not. In Holland, fortunately, we don’t have many racists. The Dutch are a very tolerant people. We have no problem to be tolerant of the tolerant, but we should be intolerant of the intolerant.
Source: ‘The Jerusalem Post’: What does the rise in support for your party say about Holland?'
Free speech is indispensable in a free society, and many a great man has fought for that principle, some of them going to prison for it. It is a longstanding if hard-won principle in the West that Wilders has a fundamental right to make whatever comment he likes about Islam, its prophet, or its scriptures, and so do all of us. To the extent that Dutch law contradicts that principle, it contradicts what is best in Europe’s heritage.
Furthermore, Wilders is an elected parliamentarian, leader of the third-largest party in his country. Public figures not only have a right to speak out, but a duty...
The Wilders trial has also to be seen in the international context. The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) purports to represent, and speak for, all Muslim countries. This body is now campaigning in various forums, including the United Nations, to criminalize all criticism of Islam. Any such privileging of Islam would block all possibility of reform and condemn Muslims to perpetual intellectual stagnation. Freedom of expression for Wilders also means freedom of expression for Muslims.
It is retrograde and shameful that a Dutch court should now be aligned with the OIC in the business of making criticism of Islam punishable by law. And highly dangerous, too.'
Source: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/250038/what-wilders-trial-means-editors
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