Andrew McLeod

We applaud the initiatives of the Gillard Federal Government today in refunding Aged Care. PM unveils $3.7bn overhaul of aged care, Friday April 20, 2012. We are particularly impressed to read that: "The [Gillard] government rejected a Productivity Commission recommendation that proposed allowing the use of reverse mortgage facilities to help fund care costs." Good on the Gillard government! Reverse mortgages steal inheritances, impoverish youth and render them homeless, and amount to double charges for old age care provision (on top of taxes). We republish a relevant and well-researched article on this matter. See also "Ageism" and ABC article on reverse mortgages.

Article by Sheila Newman with Jill Quirk. First published June 16, 2011. Republished for news relevance on April 20, 2012. Title changed at this time to include 'Reverse mortgage and other'.

Original 'teaser' for 2011 publication

This article applies to all Australians, including men. Women live longer, however, so age discrimination is actually also a feminist issue. The Australian system builds in a bias of financial vulnerability for women. Any property women may have accumulated despite this bias is at risk in old age due to discrimination against the aged for health care. If you have assets worth more than $39,000 you may be levied up to $30.55 per day. Unless the people who live in the house you occupied are your partner or relatives who qualify for some kind of income supplement, which is similarly assessed. There is a “financial hardship” provision but it is assessed on a case by case basis, which amounts to secretly, and, given the income criteria above, one would expect it to be Dickensian. And population pressure makes it all worse.

Main points

Women live longer so age discrimination is also a feminist issue

Any property ordinary people may have accumulated is at risk in old age due to discrimination against the aged for health care

• If you have assets worth more than $39,000 you may be levied up to $30.55 per day
• Unless the people who live in the house you occupied are your partner or qualify for income support, but then only if they qualify for some kind of income supplement, which is similarly assessed.
• There is a “financial hardship” provision but it is assessed on a case by case basis and, given the income criteria above, one would expect it to be Dickensian.

Aged Care robs the poor of their Land and Inheritance

• This algorithm obviously doesn’t take property inflation into account, either as a cost or as a so-called “asset” and it doesn’t ensure that your children and grandchildren will be protected and sheltered after you have gone. It makes it even easier for the banks to own everything and for everything you have worked for to go into the hands of private business interests.

How the government is making the elderly pay again for their health care

Nursing home care: The residential care facility becomes the chronically ill person's home. It counts as medical care for income tax purposes, but is not counted as medical care for other purposes. Arguably this is a breach of citizens' rights to free public medical care in Australia, denied them on the basis of age.

High land costs erode affordability of nursing homes and shrink profit margins

What else is really wrong with the health care system: why so many elderly people occupy ?80% of beds

• Ambulances misused
• Lack of visiting nurses
• Lack of visiting GPs
• Lack of trained Personal Care Assistants
• Rental and Land costs erode funds for wages, so we cannot pay these people properly
• Many of the 80% elderly in hospital beds could be dealt with better and more cheaply at home

Some fixes for the Oz Health Care system within the limitations of the current [insufficient] paradigm

Recommendation: Close beds and divert the funds to community-based care.

Conclusion: Why the costs of aged health care are not the taxpayer or the elderly person’s responsibility, but the government’s. (Land costs and failure to provide services in the community)

Women live longer so Age-Discrimination is a Feminist issue:

Although this article definitely concerns elderly men, age discrimination affects more women than it does men and they are materially more vulnerable to its effects. Why does age-discrimination affect more women? Simply because more women live longer, by a substantial margin.

We choose here to attract the attention of elderly women to this matter because it tends to take them unawares. We want men to read this article as well though because it directly concerns them as well. It also concerns peoples' children because it affects their inheritance rights to shelter in a country where most people can no longer guarantee indefinitely against homelessness.

The Australian System builds in a bias of financial vulnerability for women

Why are women more materially vulnerable to the effects of age-discrimination?

By materially vulnerable, we are referring to the average earnings, savings, shares, superannuation and property held by women. It is well-known that women earn less overall than men because women’s work is less well-paid. For elderly women this was actually true in legislation until 1972 when women were awarded equal pay for equal work, however 40% of women did not do work which was considered equal to men’s work, and this situation is still not entirely remedied. Many women also work fewer hours due to caring for children. Women are also less likely to be promoted into high management with higher pay in any workforce situation due to positive discrimination towards men in the work-force.

Any property Women accumulate is at risk in old age due to discrimination against the aged for health care

Some of the positive discrimination in the work force towards men is partly rectified by the tendency for wives to inherit from their deceased husbands. This however works against women whose husbands remarry, for it is likely to be the last wife who inherits what the husband has accumulated. Divorce also tends to leave women worse off than it leaves men if they have children, particularly if the married couple’s income relied on the man as the sole wage-earner. Although divorced couples are obliged to split up their property, they are not obliged to split up the wage ongoing. The man (or the woman’s wage) is their own. Courts will award payments to the children, but these tend to be rather inadequate. That means that if the woman is caring for the children and cannot work, she must rely on subsistence allowances from Social Security. If she is a mother then her chances of having a history of equal wages, education and training are less than a man’s, as are her future chances of getting these.

Historically British territories and colonies have tended to have inheritance laws favouring males, notably in Britain where, until 1922, only the first born male could inherit land. Although parents may now leave their estates to whomever they please, the tendency is still to leave more to boys than to girls. This situation puts women at an immediate disadvantage in life and is one of the reasons that women are intrinsically more dependent on marriage to raise children in our society than in France, for instance, where equal inheritance by children is the law.

Where a person marries more than once, the tendency of the law is to award all the estate to the latest spouse. This usually leaves any earlier wives, including de facto wives, in the cold, along with their children, who are very poorly protected under Australian law. These situations increase the bias against female property accumulation and mean that when women are old they have lesser means to enjoy their retirement and to pay for health care.

[There are exceptions which you can read about in a good 2010 transcript and interview on the ABC Law Report http://www.abc.net.au/rn/lawreport/stories/2010/3016770.htm] Note however, that few ordinary women can afford to pay a lawyer, let alone go to court.

Women and Age Discrimination in our Medical Care System

There is a lot, a lot wrong with the way that our medical system treats the elderly - male and female. Women however bear the brunt of this medical system age discrimination.

We are born in a women'’s hospital, a general hospital or at home. At this point in our lives all efforts are made to give us the best start in life. New babies are screened for medical and sensory defects and early intervention is commenced where any needs are detected. Whilst maternal care is probably not as luxurious as it was a few decades ago when mothers were relieved of normal responsibilities and full care of their babies for about 10 days after the birth, they are still at least cared for in hospital for a day or two, funded through the medical system.

During childhood, serious illnesses and accidents are dealt with through the medical system and children’s' hospitals. Of course where long term care is needed for a disability, the system is seriously inadequate. Institutions and processes caring for the seriously disabled are universally underfunded and under-resourced.

Treatment of other accidents or injuries are paid for through Medicare national medical insurance –(up to a point) in the public hospital system or the private hospital system where, ironically, if you carry private insurance, you end up paying far more in out of pocket expense than you would if you carried no insurance and were treated in the public system. Still - one has a choice – if one has the money!

How the situation changes when you are elderly

When you are classified as elderly, the situation changes. You go into hospital as a normal adult, with, for example, a leg break from a fall at home. When hospital treatment has gone as far as it can you are then assessed by a team of medical and social work professionals in conjunction with your family (if you have one). If, following this, you are unable to go home again you will need to go into long term care.

At this point your whole accumulated wealth over a lifetime and income will be assessed in determining how much you now pay for essential medical care.

If you have no wealth apart from your house, this may need to be sold or remortgaged to pay a deposit on a place in an aged care facility. Medicare does not care for your next hospitalization - the nursing home. The Act that provides for this is The Aged Care Act 1997. The exceptions for low-income earners are truly Dickensian:

According to Elderly Rights Advocacy (www.era.asn.au):

“The following people are not required to pay an accommodation charge:
• residents whose assets are worth less than 2.25 times the annual single age pension ($39,000 as at 20/3/11);
• users of respite care;
• anyone who is suffering financial hardship (this is decided by the Department of Health and Ageing);
• residents entering low level care or an extra service facility to receive either low or high level care (these residents may be asked to pay an accommodation bond instead): and
• “concessional” residents.”

Aged Care robs the poor of their Land and Inheritance

Whatever the thresholds and grab-back clauses, an important consideration that is never canvassed is the effect on peoples’ inheritance. Land and housing go out of the family and into private business. In a context of rising housing prices family homes and other assets which might have compensated children for the harsh economic conditions they have been born into, are not available to them.

What do people pay taxes for? Most people pay somewhere around one third of their income in income tax. On top of this there are rates and charges for services, and on top of these, the Goods and Service Tax (GST).

What do we get in return?

Before the second world war the rate of income tax was a great deal less – perhaps around 10%. Income tax was introduced to Australian states between 1880 and 1907. In 1849 in NSW income tax was introduced at the rate of 6 pence in the pound. (A pound contained 240 pence]

Overall we work harder for many less basics and we need more costly items, such as cars for travel. The major cost which has risen is the cost of land, which underpins all other costs and cuts profits.

The care of elderly people and of disabled people used to be provided mainly by the state, using crown land, for which no rent was charged. The state did not need to make a profit and costs were paid for by income tax. The state has since sold off most of the land where buildings with suitable services were provided to private developers. Most of those developers have turned this land over to private housing. So the services it once provided have disappeared. As population has increased in this country (due to government policies to increase it through immigration) the price of land for any building or business, including agriculture, has greatly increased – to levels among the highest in the world.

Nursing care and special accommodation is now provided by private business, which needs to make a profit.

Now old age care providers complain that they not only cannot make sufficient profits, but they cannot even make ends meet. All sorts of adjustments have been made to the supply and remuneration of labour in order to mitigate this problem. For instance doctors and nurses have been imported from other countries and these people are taxed at a much higher rate than Australian nationals. In this way the government actually cuts the cost of wages in some government facilities. Another instance is where registered nurses and state enrolled nurses have been replaced by Personal Service Attendants, with no professional health delivery training, who are placed in charge of frail and elderly persons with medical problems and who need their medication supervised.

The one adjustment that needs to be made is the reduction in the cost of land and rent.

This discriminatory treatment of a whole class of citizens has far-reaching undesirable consequences for most of our population, but it advantages the property development and conveyancing industry. Probably due to their enormous influence over Australian governments, this economically and socially unsustainable situation continues to consolidate.

Ageist growth-spruikers normalise dispossession and unfair imposts

For instance Bernard Salt, of KPMG, and Andrew MacLeod, of The Committee for Melbourne, with the help of Murdoch's Herald Sun, recently tried to market the idea of older people selling their low density properties to make way for higher density ones for younger people.

"If they are an empty-nester living near a school they are actually taking a role that from a society's perspective would be better taken by a family." (Andrew MacLeod)

See the article, "Should Jeannie Pratt and Elisabeth Murdoch downsize to high rises in Activity Centers to give young people more room?" There was no acknowledgement that, in the normal course of life, old peoples' properties go to their children or other relatives who survive them. For the property industry, this traditional legacy is undesirable because it cuts down on their potential opportunities to make money on property transactions. It does this by avoiding a commercial transaction in the transmission of property. The state still makes a quid, through death duties, but the State and the property development hanger-ons (conveyancers/lawyers, subdividers, builders, agents etc) get few or no bites at the property of the deceased.

“Now Australia's "Productivity Commission," is advocating so-called "reforms" for the $10.1 billion sector, which would force people to pay between 5% and 25% of their incomes towards old-age care, and which would include their actual homes as part of their incomes. This proposal has been called "HECS for the elderly."” (April 22, 2011, Herald Sun

In fact this proposal does not seem much different from what is already happening. Basically no person with any assets above $39,000 can keep ownership of their home and get aged care unless those who live in their house are pensioners of some kind with similarly small asset bases.

Such measures entail mortgages being taken on the family home, to be paid after the death of the home-owner. This makes the bank the owner of the home and capable of dispossessing any future inheritors or that they simply inherit colossal debts.

Serfdom for Australians

This is a form of serfdom.

It is all part of a trend toward dispossession of a larger and larger class of people. Ask yourself what will happen when - as in feudal times - only a very few people in society own all the property, all the assets and all the means of production. Everyone else will have only their labour and skills to sell in an employers' market.

Why would any free people allow such a thing to happen? If Australia were really a democracy, how could any government auspiced commission dare to propose such abrogation of basic rights through enslavement and theft? The excuse is always 'economic efficiency', but this is really only an excuse. It does not stand up to examination because economic efficiency in Australia is constantly undermined by huge land and housing prices which erode profit margins. The only give in the system involves legislating for undemocratic wealth transfer - robbing the poor to give to the rich. Since the property moguls are constantly making laws and policies to push property prices up, that only leaves wages that can be pushed down and privately owned homes that can be acquired through debt induced by such government policies as mortgaging elderly peoples' homes by threatening to leave them with no services as they near death.

Under European law, the State not only has the duty of providing health care for people of all ages, but it also has the duty to provide shelter. And, when a person dies, if their property does not go to their nearest kin, taxes penalise those who acquire it. We need such laws in Australia.

What happens to elderly peoples' property when they go into homes? What happens to their children's inheritance? How much does it contribute to homelessness?
What can we do about it?

Can we demand back our rights to property?

Some fixes for the Oz Health Care system within the limitations of the current [insufficient] paradigm

80% of public hospital beds are taken up with people over 65 years old, of which a good proportion are over 75 years old. Private hospitals are different because people are admitted for elective surgery and discretionary treatments. Private hospitals can also pick and choose who they take.

Most hospitalisation for any person is in the last two years of life. Medically the most expensive time of anyone's life is in the last two years, regardless of age.

The aim of the nursing home care is to keep the person as independent as possible. Often the services they are paying for would cost less if they were delivered in their real homes.

Unfortunately, health cover - public and private - doesn't cover home care, except where it is provided by medical practitioners. Some private insurers do cover some post-hospitalisation care, such as rehabilitation.

Most chronic conditions could be treated preventatively and conservatively in the community. Take, for instance, the need of many diabetics for frequent continuing podiatry. With medicare you can get five visits per year, but this is often insufficient. Because podiatry access is insufficient, complications become more serious and require expensive and extensive hospitalisations for problems like ulcers, resistive infections and amputations. Those complications affect blood sugar and increase the risks of blindness, cardiac complications and muscle wastage.

People with chronic or end of life illnesses, like respiratory problems and heart failure, can live in the community for years with occasional medical crises and readjustments. When they have these crises in the community, their options boil down to General Practitioners, ambulances, hospitals and nursing homes. GPs are flat out and almost never make home visits any more. In many cases outside of big Australian cities, you just cannot get a G.P. if you don't already have one. You also cannot change to another if you don't like the first.

Ambulance services spend a lot of their very expensive time and taxpayer funds attending to crises caused by simple handicaps of age or disability - such as falls which interrupt the person's capacity to care for themselves only because the person is unable to get up unaided, even though they are not injured. These do not require specialist attention, but simple mechanical help. Just imagine if you could call 000 or another number and ask for prompt and necessary assistance from a non-specialist person employed by the council for residents. This could solve a lot of problems.

Respiratory problems and heart failure need good oversight in partnership with the patient in the home, as well as crisis plans. The person with such a slowly deteriorating condition should be able to ring their GPs if necessary. Because GPs are so busy, however, they ring 000, end up in a public emergency department, in an acute system, and the hospital goes into overdrive with admission, treatment, and tests.

Allied health professionals, such as physiotherapists, can be very useful for keeping people mobile. There are not enough allied health providers working in the community. For example, one large regional center might have only one physiotherapist for 10,000 people which is not sufficient, compared to three physiotherapists for six thousand, in an inner Melbourne suburb.

Personal Carers are skilled to help in all kinds of non-medical situations that can cause problems for people with medical conditions like frailty or poor balance. They can help with gardening, cooking, cleaning, tidying, posting letters, etc. Local government provides Personal Carers, but they are in high demand, badly distributed, and low-paid (of course). Wealthy people have greater access to them through private agencies, but it is very hard for ordinary people to get enough of these services. For this reason many people finish up in hospital with avoidable problems like malnutrition, falls, severe depression from isolation and helplessness.

In most states of Australia Community Care is very fragmented. You might get someone something through one scheme and someone else something through another scheme, but you need to know the ropes intimately. The knowledge and skills to source and find funding for scarce services is not available to everyone, which means that people often don't get access to things that are available and which they need, although often enough those things are not even available.

There is a crisis of insufficiency. It's not just a matter of coordination. Coordinating nothing does not lead to something. There is a catch-cry of "Stop Duplication," but why not have duplication if that is what is needed? Multiply services by four or five and you might begin to provide what is needed

Recommendation: Close beds and divert the funds to community-based care.

20 per cent of the population are admitted to Australian hospitals in any one year. This is much higher than in other countries.

It is obviously very costly to have lots of elderly people with mild problems taking up acute hospital beds. If we diverted the funds from a proportion of those beds to the training and deployment of usefully skilled non-medical staff in the community, so much more could be achieved, saving elderly Australians and their children from losing their homes to pay for unnecessarily expensive residential care.

So, why should Australians pay, not just with their taxes, but with their homes and inheritances, for aged care when the high costs of hospital care are ridiculous, avoidable, and not very effective?

Article by Sheila Newman with Jill Quirk, based on their presentation on 3RPP's Freewaves Feminist program, on 16 June 2011.

China has sent in 30 extra aeroplanes to bring its people home and France is doing likewise, but at this time when immigrants are fleeing Japan like proverbial rats, Committee of Melbourne "Disaster Management Expert," Andrew McLeod, recommends that Japan actively boost its population and economic growth by importing masses of 'skilled workers'. Reinsurers have been warning people for years that the impact of disasters rises in line with population numbers, density and complexity of infrastructure. Andrew McLeod, however, tries to turn this upside down. At the end of this article we present another view, "Sustainable Japan," from a writer living in Japan, inland about 20 km from Sendai.



China has sent in 30 extra aeroplanes to bring its people home and France is doing likewise, but at this time when immigrants are fleeing Japan like proverbial rats, Committee of Melbourne "Disaster Management Expert," Andrew McLeod, recommends that Japan actively boost its population and economic growth by importing masses of 'skilled workers'.

Population Numbers and natural disasters

Reinsurers have been warning people for years that the impact of disasters rises in line with population numbers, density and complexity of infrastructure. Andrew McLeod, however, tries to turn this upside down.

Listening to Andrew's interview on ABC News Breakfast, March 15th, 2011, you could be excused for thinking that Japan's relatively low birth-rate and slowly unbloating population were the cause of the earthquake and the Tsunamis. With the Japanese themselves fleeing Tokyo for fear of radiation, it seemed odd that Andrew didn't even mention the looming cloud of radiation dust as reactors explode and cores heat up and rods in dry cooling ponds start to fuse, but then, he's mixed up with the growth lobby in Australia, and they sure don't want to talk about anything embarassing to do with nuclear reactors. That's because nuclear reactors are all part of the growth lobby deal, which says, "We must have population growth" on the one hand and, "We have to have nuclear power because of all this population growth." Of course 'we' could simply allow our populations to decline, but then we might get by without nuclear power, and that would disappoint certain investors seeking to diversify their assets. See "Bernard Salt on the Population Debate, "Nuclear power, totalitarian spin and overpopulation in Australia," "Normalising endless immigration and coupling it to nuclear power in Oz," "Ziggy Switkowski, Population Numbers and Nuclear in the Australian," and, "Scanlon report underpins threat to Australian democracy"

However:

"The idea that nuclear capacity will double between 2011 and 2035 is now regarded as absurd. Even China has called a halt to its nuclear program to appease community concern about a reactor problem that may deliver radiation to China." Source: Chanticleer, "Fossil fuels ride the big wave back," Australian Financial Review, 18 March 2011, p.60.

[Of course Chanticleer doesn't mean that there will be more fossil fuel available; he means that the cost of fossil fuel will rise as we try to spread round what is left in the absence of some past and projected nuclear power plants and any other important new source of fuel. Not good news for the growth lobby.]

Walking and talking disaster

On Andrew's bio you will find that he describes himself as the recipient of awards associated with development projects in poor countries hit by disasters. Perhaps it is his natural modesty, but on ABC News Breakfast he didn't mention one of his greatest disasters - Melbourne. Melbourne is a disaster because of overpopulation, after receiving the same kind of treatment that Andrew is recommending for Japan - mass immigration. Indeed, who better to be CEO of the Committee for Melbourne than an ex-senior advisor on disaster management for the United Nations to manage Melbourne's growth-lobby-engineered disaster? Reading his bio further, you get the impression that Andrew is mixed up in the construction business somehow and that he may even be involved in international migration management, with his extreme focus on population growth and property development and from the kinds of 'boards' he is on, mostly of the identikit marketing corporate 'leadership' type. These boards include:

- The Committee for Melbourne
- The Conversation Interim Board (Committee of Melbourne)
- The UN Global Compact Cities Program Advisory Council, urban development, including big private water projects in poor countries. (Note that the UN describes "The United Nations Global Compact" as "a strategic policy initiative for businesses that are committed to aligning their operations and strategies with ten universally accepted principles in the areas of human rights, labour, environment and anti-corruption." And, "UN procurement: The United Nations buys everything it uses: from paper clips to dams; from emergency food to clean water. It buys training services and uses consultants involved in every facet of sustainable development. The UN and its agencies spend $US30 billion a year on helping the world to help itself. The United Nations Association of Australia offers Australian companies advice and information in tapping into this market. This services is available from the Victorian Division of UNAA.")
- The ADC Future Summit Advisory Board http://www.futuresummit.org/files/Documents/FS_2009.pdf
- The People.Productivity.Planet Advisory Board, which seems to be run by a marketing organisation, Wellmark Perspexa.

You may care to read the following Candobetter.net ABC interview transcript of the video and ask yourself why Andrew would be invited to address national radio on the subject of Japan's catastrophic situation.

Andrew McLeod on the Effects of Japan's Disasters, ABC News Breakfast, March 15th, 2011

The videoed interview begins with Trioli observing that Japan "is a very different situation when it comes to a disaster of this kind, because it is a highly skilled, well-developed country, with an educated, sophisticated population, and also it's accustomed to dealing with earthquakes."

McLeod sees in this as a "different resilience equation." He says that there is "higher collective resilience in developed economies, but that their "individual resilience is much lower." "In the developing world people are used to not having food and water in regular supply every day, but in a developed economy, "when you take away those basic substances, electricity, water, food, individual resilience is really struggling."

[This last remark seems to suggest that people feel hunger and cold more in developed countries than people do in undeveloped countries. It doesn't make much sense, since people everywhere cannot do without basic daily necessities, such as food and water.

A better way of putting it could be that 'developing countries' (as opposed to complexly urbanised countries) have localised self-sufficient economies so that disaster in one area doesn't knock half the country out and people are often able to get what they need from the next village or relatives. In a 'developed country with complex infrastructure, hardly anyone produces food themselves and it isn't feasible to leave the city and look for food in the country, because the food is stored in depots and requires road transport; you wouldn't know where to look and transport costs a fortune, even if you can leave your job. That's if you still have a job, which is also not such a problem in 'undeveloped countries' with local self-sufficiency and a lesser reliance on money.]

Male Interviewer: "Based on what you've seen, how is the recovery effort unfolding in japan?"

McLeod indicates that the biggest problem he sees is the scale of clearing away the rubble in an "environmentally sensitive way".

Trioli agrees that that is "the real challenge."

McLeod, "What we did in Pakistan was to fill in a number of valleys and make them into cricket grounds." [The more one hears of Andrew the more one wonders what his definition of 'environment' and 'sensitive' is.]

Male Interveiwer: "How much of a problem is it that Japan's population is aging? The human resources to deal with this aren't as big as they were 20 or 30 years ago."

[How contrived can you get? They are going to make Japan's tsunami and earthquake into an opportunity to frighten Australians into accepting a completely bodgy association between small populations and judgement day-like disasters. How obvious can programming be on the ABC? Does big business simply send in the scripts and the journalists follow them these days?

So now the imaginary scene is set of a mass of confused geriatric Japanese trying to clean up the mess, when in fact most of the Japanese population is between the ages of 15 and 64. Not all of the 64 plus people would be useless. The emperor is praying and others will be offering more technical and practical assistance.]

Andrew McLeod says that Japan has a huge debt and that it is because it isn't growing its population.

McLeod: "Well, exactly. It puts paid to the ridiculous arguments of people like Kelvin Thomson in Australia about population capping."

[Kelvin Thomson has so nothing to do with this- Macleod has used a massive long hook to get him in.]

"What you've had in Japan is over the last two decades... they've moved from the world's largest creditor to the world's largest debtor and that's happened largely because their population is aging and their population is shrinking and they haven't filled that aging and shrinking with skilled migration...."

[It follows then that the Bangladesh, Africa and Haiti must be the world's largest creditors.

Andrew McLeod says that Japan has a huge debt and that it is because it isn't growing its population. However, "A new Monash University study finds population growth - mainly from overseas migration - had masked ''grim'' economic realities including the doubling of Victoria's international trade deficit to more than $35 billion. See, http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/state-election-2010/states-boom-on-shaky-ground-20101027-173w0.html]

McLeod continues: "That means that 20 years ago, Japan had plenty of money to look after themselves. Today there is a genuine question, "Will this disaster tip Japan over the economic edge or somehow will it restart domestic demand and get them going? It's a genuine discussion amongst the economists, but the one thing that's for sure is, if you have an aging and a shrinking population, your resilience to a shock will decrease."

[Andrew's case here is so well proven - not - in Haiti's response to the 2010 earthquake. So, according to his logic, should we expect Japan to do even less well than Haiti, because Japan doesn't have such a large proportion of its population under the age of 15? Time will tell.]

[...]

"Until I see a change in their population policy. If they were to have skilled migration gaps - and by the way - skilled migration at the global level is environmentally good because it encourages education in the developing world and that decreases global population growth, so at a global level it's a good thing, at a domestic level, it's a good thing. But the culture of Japan is not one that opens up permanent migration to other nationalities..."

[Hmm, what exactly, or even generally, is Andrew claiming here? He seems to be saying that the prospect of an opportunity to migrate to another country will tend to make families in developing countries have fewer children so that they can educate them to migrate. Here it is again - Andrew's fascination with international immigrant workers. It crops up in the oddest places. It would be simpler just to ban child labour; that's the tried and true method of reducing family size. (See Doepke) It also means that adults do the jobs and get higher wages. Of course that makes it harder to run sweat shops.

But back to the wierd interview on the ABC:]

Trioli: "And then they have lower status in Japan when they are working there..."

McLeod: "(...) So you've got a continually aging population and continually shrinking population, so the question is, how do you increase your economic activity to make up for the disaster, when they have to continually increase economic efficiency and activity just to stay still, making up for the shrinking population?"

[For an alternative viewpoint to this flatlander 'economic' perspective, see this other economic one, Japan's Broken Window, which contradicts Andrew's GDP maximizing one.]

MCLeod on Immigration: Propaganda passes for news on ABC 24 and in The Age

McLeod has only one song to sing it seems, and, no matter what the topic is, he will talk up migration. And the content is threadbare. The reason for the constant airing of Mr McLeod's dreary demographic dirge is because there is money to be made by the corporate media out of overpopulation and international immigration. In fact, the Age is even a member of the Committee for Melbourne, so is, in effect, giving the megaphone to a business representative. Since state and federal governments are so close to big business and property development these days, it should not surprise (although it does so disappoint) to find similar spruiking on the ABC. If it were you or I talking down immigration, in the most fascinating way, we still would not get this kind of reporting. We might get a letter to the editor in once a year, but Andrew here, well he gets published again and again saying the same old thing. It isn't news. It's propaganda and it comes with the same monotonous repetition as the muezzin. Examples abound:

The Age:
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/victorias-population-growth-fastest-in-nation-20100325-qzvl.html
"Committee for Melbourne chief executive Andrew MacLeod forecasts that Melbourne's population is likely to double again over the next 50 years, to 8 million by 2060.

Mr MacLeod says governments must start planning now for a Melbourne of that size, and work out where the next 4 million residents should live.

He suggests Fishermans Bend, ''currently a giant car park'', should be transformed into ''a great new Docklands'' through higher density housing and business development."

The Age
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/make-plans-for-population-to-double-within-50-years-20100804-11fn5.html

"The chief executive of the Committee for Melbourne, [of which The Age is a member] Andrew MacLeod, said last night that arguments about slow growth were ''incredibly dangerous'' because slow growth would not happen.

Mr MacLeod said Melbourne at 8 million in 2060 was not fast growth, ''it is normal growth''."

[Oh well, if he says so and The Age publishes it, then it must be true, mustn't it? We surely cannot have the temerity to require scientific and democratic justification for this wild and woolly assertion on which so much big money is riding.]

"The committee's report warns that a refusal to accept population growth will hurt Melbourne with poor urban planning, and notes many deficiencies in Melbourne's current planning. It says unfettered land supply ''as a primary driver of short-term housing affordability, is now being allowed to dominate the policy discussions''.

The report is critical of the movement of Melbourne's urban growth boundary, which was pushed out by another 43,600 hectares last week.

''The development industry has learnt that it is merely a waiting game of when, not if, the UGB [urban growth boundary] line will be redrawn and true to any democracy, its realignments have demonstrated the power of lobbying government,'' it says.

Moving Melbourne's boundary, it says, is ''like releasing a valve on the pressure to find an alternative approach ? the incentive for the development industry to take on the greater challenges of urban renewal in the established parts of the city''.

While supporting increased housing density in Melbourne, the report says there is no coherent government plan to achieve this goal."

Monash University [A big investor in student accommodation construction.]

"Community Campus Summit on International Students": "The second session focused on community engagement with international students. Mr Andrew Macleod, Chief Executive Officer, Committee for Melbourne led the discussion and spoke about the Committee and the Victorian Government?s work on studentcommunity engagement." (http://www.monash.edu.au/community-summit/assets/pdfs/community-campus-summit-report.pdf)

WA Today:

"Gillard's big talk more a case of shift in emphasis," Tim Colebatch, WA Today, June 28, 2010, http://www.watoday.com.au/national/gillards-big-talk-more-a-case-of-shift-in-emphasis-20100627-zc0i.html : "But let's not lose sight of the real issue. As Committee for Melbourne chief executive officer Andrew MacLeod points out, Australia's population will keep growing. We need to plan for that, and build the infrastructure it will need. Cities far bigger than Melbourne work very well if they build a good metro system, and go up as well as out. Good infrastructure and good planning make big cities work."

[Using the word "good" when talking of planning and concluding that things will work is tautological. A good hair cut will make my hair look better, a well designed building will look better and be more functional, good transport system makes a city function better with respect to moving people from a to b and back again. What is it that MacLeod has said that is worth publishing?]

The Australian
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/quality-of-life-must-take-priority-in-immigration-debate/story-fn59niix-1225893663475
"Committee for Melbourne chief executive Andrew Macleod warned that if "no-growth" or "slow growth" proponents won the population debate, pollution and congestion would worsen in the cities because any impetus to plan for it would disappear.

Mr Macleod said the big cities had been able to handle growth until now, and would be able to do so into the future, provided governments hit the right policy buttons on infrastructure, housing and essential services.

He warned that deliberately slowing the international migration rate would damage Australia's reputation as a welcoming country and harm our economy.

"The fastest way to a more polluted, congested city is not to plan for growth. We won't have the infrastructure and roads in place and end up with cities like Manila," Mr Macleod said.

"When people are afraid we can't handle future population increases, are they afraid of the number of people coming in or of the necessary infrastructure -- water, transport etc -- not being built? These are very different issues.""

Andrew McLeod is also listed as providing the "background and policy" ideas for the ALP Members Forum on Asylum Seekers, Policy ideas and statements. http://www.safecom.org.au/pdfs/alpforum-report.pdf

Woodcut by Hiroshige, "Suido-Bridge-and-Surugadai," (Edo period)

Sustainable Japan

Other more informed views exist, however. Here is one based on Antony Boy's work, "How will Japan feed itself without fossil energy?" in The Final Energy Crisis, Pluto Press, UK, 2008, which examines the prospect of a much smaller and safer Japan.

Antony Boys has lived in Japan for over 20 years on a farm located about 20 km inland from Sendai and about 100km from the first reactor explosion. He is an agricultural expert and has written extensively about the history of Japan's economy before oil, looking at the kinds of problems that Japan will have feeding her population as oil dwindles. This analysis is also valuable when looking at survival during the aftermath of earthquake and tsunami, with a large part of Japan's capacity to provide power removed, in late winter, when snow is still falling.

Table IV.21.1. Japan’s Primary Energy Consumption 2005. Source: EDMC Handbook, 2007, Pp.19 and 26.

Antony writes "Whilst the world's dependence on oil for its primary energy consumption is about 39 percent, Japan's was 49.7 percent in 2005. Japan relies on Middle East oil-producing countries for around 89 percent of its oil and was the world's third largest oil consumer in 2005, after the USA and China, and the second largest importer. Domestic primary energy production is extremely low, being about 16 percent in 2005 if electricity from nuclear power is counted as domestic production, and about 4.5 percent if it is considered to be reliant on imports of uranium. Thus if the approximately 2.6 EJ of nuclear electricity production being counted as domestic production is counted as an energy import, the import dependency for energy supplies rises to around 95 percent."

Japan depends on nuclear for about 11.6% of its primary electricity, but a number of the country's nuclear power plants have been closed down due to collapse of infrastructure. With this collapse of power and transport infrastructure, Japan's large cities are vulnerable in a way that no pre-fossil-fuel society could be vulnerable.

In today's Japan, population is concentrated in the cities, where the great part of fossil-energy-based employment has taken place in the last 150 years. Most Japanese do not live where food is produced or where farms might be located in the future.

To import more people to Japan would require more energy and more fuel. Only someone with a fairy-tale concept of energy as something that appears when humans need it, would fail to understand that this vulnerable country would increase its risks by increasing its population. If you don't factor energy/fuel costs into work/production then your economics simply don't make sense.

Stable, Self-sufficient, Edo Japan - 1603-1867

Antony Boys found in Japan's recent Edo period, 1603-1867, a time of relative stability, a model for a a safe and steady long-term future without oil, coal or nuclear power.

"Whilst the Edo economy was almost entirely self-sufficient, today Japan imports 60 percent of its food calories and its population has quadrupled under these conditions which are, of course, associated with plentiful imports of coal, petroleum, natural gas, and uranium.

Historical statistics tell us that before imports of food began, traditional agriculture probably supported a fairly stable population of about 30 to 33 million on the Japanese archipelago from around 1720 to the Meiji Restoration in 1868, when the Edo period ends. At that time there were roughly eight people per hectare, or an average of 0.125 ha of arable land per person in a clan-based peasant economy with some feudal features stemming from a military class but without widespread serfdom or slavery.

In Edo Japan, an average hectare inhabited by a family of 6-10 members would contain all or most elements for self-sufficiency.
Some examples of land-use arrangements at this population density have been preserved in old residences of a noble class. A “hanshu” or clan-lord granted such residences, called "yashiki" to the samurai warriors, or "bushi", in his retinue who were then expected to be self-supporting.

One such yashiki, a 6000 m2 igune, or land with a forested area, dating from 1774, can be seen in what is now Wakabayashi Ku in Sendai City (northeast Japan). Vegetable gardens occupy about half the total area, a house and other buildings take up another quarter and the remaining quarter is covered with trees. Rice, grown on fields nearby made each yashiki part of a self-sufficient community organised along clan-based lines.

In the 18th century, when rice yields were around 1.5 tonne/ha, a family of 10 required about 0.8 to 1 ha of paddy field for rice. An adult consumed an average of 1 koku of rice (roughly equivalent to 140 kg) annually, so one chôbu of paddy land (almost the equivalent of a hectare) would support ten adults. Local lords knew the potential population (and fighting force) of their territory simply by knowing the area of their paddy fields. Political and military power was measured in koku during the Edo Period.

169 trees surround the house in Sendai. Over half of them are kinds of cedar, cypress, persimmon, plum, and pine with additional yew, paulownia, chestnut, willow, citron, cherry, walnut, fig and others. Unusually for Japan, there is no bamboo, which is fast-growing and provides an extremely versatile material, but most of the uses which you could think of for trees are represented; food, house-building, furniture-making, tool-making, fuel for heating and cooking. Tree-leaves provide compost and trees act as wind and snow breaks. They also enhance the water-holding potential of the ground.

Far larger yashiki were created in the Santome district of what is now Tokorozawa City and Miyoshi Town in Saitama Prefecture (just north of Tokyo) in 1696, some of which are still in existence today. Each consists of about 4.85 ha in a block of land 72 m by 675 m. A road runs along one end of the block with the house, surrounded by trees, on about 0.6 ha. In the center of the block there are about 2.7 ha of upland fields. At the end away from the road and house is a wooded area (heichirin) of about 1.5 ha. This yashiki was designed with the difference that its samurai-farmers (gôshi) were expected to produce surpluses which could be traded for rice. Famed for its sweet potatoes (satsuma imo) the area was an important food producer in the Edo Period and during the food shortage following the end of the war in 1945.

Japanese culture has thus preserved in the yashiki the memory of what basic self-sufficiency is, what it looks like and how it is done, for Japanese people today, and yashikis are still written about in newspapers, magazines and books.
Few Japanese, however, would conceive that a "return" to a similar form of lifestyle might be necessary within the lifetimes of people alive today – by around 2050.

For a solution to be based on Edo-type land-use structure and social division of work, however, the current population to arable land ratio, 29 cap/ha, is far too high. The numbers would have to come down to around the 8 to 10 cap/ha (0.1 to 0.125 ha/cap) hypothesized above. Or perhaps the internationally sourced approximate 0.134 ha/cap (7.5 cap/ha) which now provides the Japanese population with food would be a realistic ideal to work towards locally.

The problem of feeding such a large population on so little land would be assisted by improvements in alternative agriculture, which have kept pace and possibly now exceed those of industrialized agriculture. At today's yields, the rice for a 10-member family would be grown on 0.25 ha (at a yield of 5 tonne/ha and an average consumption of 120 kg/cap/yr of rice), in contrast to 18th century rice yields of the Edo period, which were only about 1.5 tonne/ha.

Major factors needing to be adjusted to each other in order to tailor an Edo-type land-use solution would be population numbers, land-use availability, social division of work, consumption and technology." Source: Antony Boys, "How will Japan feed itself without fossil energy?" in The Final Energy Crisis, Pluto Press, UK, 2008.

At the moment Tony Boys is too busy looking for food and water to write. I last heard from him on 14th March 2011.

Committee for Melbourne growthers are scraping the bottom of the barrel looking for new ways to get people to move to the hated high-rises the property development lobby has planned all over Melbourne. Mary Drost says, "Both Andrew McLeod and Bernard Salt are obsessed with growth. It is exactly this growth that is making Melbourne less liveable as everything is overstretched." Jill Quirk asks, "I wonder if Salt and MacLeod think widows Jeannie Pratt or Elisabeth Murdoch should vacate their premises for a flat in an "activity centre" or is just people who inhabit more modest post war triple fronted accommodation who are being asked to move over ?"

Committee for Melbourne

A group with an apparent interest in land speculation, with the dignified sounding name of The Committee for Melbourne, is pushing a crude barrow to get elderly people to give up their homes. It wants them to agree to be rehoused in high-density apartment blocks and thinks that if the State government lets them pay less stamp duty, they just might be tempted. This was the subject today of an article by John Masanauskas in the Herald Sun, "Lobby group calls for older couples to give up family homes," 17 February 2011.

Sardine City

It is probably not coincidence that, at the same time, Boroondara Council is trying to force 48 so-called "activity centres" (i.e. high rise developments) on its protesting residents. In a hangover from the Brumby government's human sardine policy, the council hopes to attract some of an additional 17,600 people that a few business hopefuls have promoted as likely to arrive over the next 16 years, based on shaky statistical projections.

Bernard Salt, the well-known KPMG spruiker for population growth and megacities, and the CEO of the Committee for Melbourne, Andrew McLeod, have managed to leave some unfortunate quotes for posterity.

Weird, no fun world of statistical cohorts

Herald Sun writer, John Masanauskas, gives the impression that Salt believes that middle Melbourne (whatever that is) is fraught with the probability that "dad's going to drop dead and mum's going to be living by herself in a three-bedroom home". Salt predicts that the iconic 'mum' will eventually "find that the three-bedroom home with a garden and lawn becomes too much for her and she will therefore want to downsize."

In Salt's world, like Brumby and Bracks's macho-small-minded worlds, all women are 'mums' if they aren't girls trying to overcome a 'man drought' [catch his latest book], and all men are 'dads'. One senses that they are doomed, like cabbage moths, to fly and mate, lay their eggs, then die. Some, however, live on past their use-by date and become 'empty nesters', as CEO, Andrew McLeod calls them, opining:

"If they are an empty-nester living near a school they are actually taking a role that from a society's perspective would be better taken by a family."

You get the picture. According to this kind of view, societies and their suburbs should be reorganised into age cohorts. None of this bowls club down the end of the street and the little old lady in the corner shop, or the old man sitting on his porch in the sun, surveying his tomato patch, and the children visiting the lady over the road to climb her mulberry tree and use her grown-up daughter's books and toys, while their mother heads down for a game of tennis and their father takes the dog for a long walk up to the top of the hill to watch the sun set over the bay.

Salt and McLeod seem to have an odd and naively statistical view of societies, where people are labelled according to some of their qualities, like cards in packs, and are okay about being moved around in a kind of Lego world on the whim of some boys who never quite got over playing Monopoly.

Jill Quirk, SPA Victoria

Jill Quirk, President of Sustainable Population Victoria, comments:

"I think the rhetoric from Bernard Salt and Andrew Macleod that widows and "empty nesters" should leave their homes" and move into apartments for the convenience of others who would like to buy their houses is opportunistic , sexist, vulture-like, devoid of compassion or understanding, and the language of Grandpa and Grandma and (quote Bernard Salt) "rattling around in their veneers" is belittling to ordinary people.

"I wonder what the adult children of these targets of the hovering developers and real estate agents think of this blackmail? I also wonder if Salt and MacLeod think widows Jeannie Pratt or Elisabeth Murdoch should vacate their premises for a flat in an "activity centre" or is just people who inhabit more modest post war triple fronted accommodation who are being asked to move over ?"

She adds,

"Behind the figure of ridicule, the widow, whose husband has "dropped dead" is a person in shock, in grief and who is making a huge adjustment to a major life-change.

Importantly, she perceives,

"The widow is extremely vulnerable and could well fall prey to the kind of persuasion and pressure that Macleod and Salt seem to want to institutionalise so that everyone these people meet will echo the same refrain. 'Don't rattle around in the veneer, it is your civic duty to move out of your house now and let a young family with children at Lauriston and Camberwell Grammar move in.'"

And then she asks an interesting question:

"I wonder what Barry Humphries might say about this. He ridiculed the Australian suburban lifestyle for decades but I don't think he ever seriously thought of disrupting it and breaking it down."

What next? Will Mr McLeod and Mr Salt be investing in cemeteries and urging everyone to buy vertical plots in order to squeeze more coffins in? With the baby boomer curve on course to crash over the next 20 years, it's a sure thing.

Mary Drost of Planning Backlash

Planning Backlash is the name of an umbrella group under which many different suburban groups gather to protect the rights of citizens whose environments and properties are threatened by intensification of development and the population growth that drives this. Mary Drost is their main spokesperson.

Mary says that all of Melbourne will be affected by this population growth and overdevelopment if the Boroondara Council gets away with it, and that the local people are furious that Booroondara Council is continuing a densification plan dating from when Justin Madden was Planning Minister under the Brumby government, which lost power in the last election. Densification will wreck the area, she says, and Planning Backlash is appealing to their State Member, Ted Baillieu, for help based on promises he made before the election.

Mary is actually pictured in John Masanauskas's article in a photo by Ben Swinnerton (which I have cropped above), leaning, smiling, over a picket fence, with a large sunny garden behind her.

She says,

"Both Andrew McLeod and Bernard Salt are obsessed with growth. It is exactly this growth that is making Melbourne less liveable as everything is overstretched. Their obsession is taking them to new boundaries, now they want the older people to get out of their houses to make way for the next generation. Maybe they want to euthanase us as well. I am not going to be stuck in a dog box to keep McLeod and Salt happy!"

She adds, "They would have done well at the time of the Russian Revolution, move the mobs into the big houses and let the owners live in one room. How would the grandmothers look after their grandchildren in dog boxes? What a nerve!"

As her own lifestyle shows, everyone is not a poor old used up mum or a dad pining away without purpose. For years, in a tradition starting with her mother, young couples have been living rent-free in a little flat that Mary's husband and she had made at the side of the house. In this way they "get a start in life." In return they help where they can.

"People usually stay about three years and then get their own place, after they have saved a deposit," Mary said. "Sometimes our guests have been young couples who were relatives."

At the moment, she is sharing her house with one couple, who "came back for a while." In the flat on the property there is a second couple.

She thinks and I think that this is a good way to use property. But it's not what Salt and McLeod would want, because their objective is to increase property turnover. Their guiding principle is commercial, not social.

Mary says that her brother and his wife, who have grandchildren, could not do without a big house, as they are "forever having children coming to stay and the families come home for dinner sometimes twice a week."

"What nonsense to say that we should all be moving into dog boxes," Mary exclaims. "Some no doubt want to, but I tell you this, it is the quickest way to give up and age and die. If you want to stay young then stay active. Don't forget that the government wants people to age in place and not go into nursing homes. The Dutch do this very well Australia should learn from them."

Mr Salt's residence

Ironically, Bernard Salt, who looks to be over sixty in his photographs, actually lives in a heritage house a couple of blocks from Mary. We googled the address we were given and provide a picture above. We have removed the name of the street from the picture.[1] Candobetter.net doesn't believe in exposing peoples' addresses unnecessarily, but it does seem on the face of it that Mr Salt talks the talk but doesn't walk the walk, and it is of interest to those dealing with the impacts of his marketing to see where he is actually coming from.

Since her photo and some comments appeared in Masanauskas's article, a number of people have looked Mary up in the phone book and have called her, agreeing strongly with her defense of her right to remain in her home.

[1] After an unsolicited comment which complained about this exposure of Mr Salt, we canvassed our editors and writers who all agreed that it was relevant to show how Mr Salt lived. It was felt however that the important thing was to convey how he lived, which should include the suburb (of which it seemed typical, and which was the same suburb as Mary Drost's), but not necessarily the street. Therefore we have reduced the information on the photo. Discussion welcome.