"My objective, with your help, honourable members, is to make Melbourne, and even Victoria, a great place to live. Not merely a great place in population size or area to rival such places as Shanghai, New York, London or Sao Paulo. Such greatness would be mere obesity, with all the disadvantages of such. Not a city or a state where people are crammed into dogbox apartments, living on crowded and congested streets in an environmentally unfriendly concrete heat island. But a spacious city with open skies, open and tree-filled streets, with gardens. An environment where children can play safely, where the car is not king but a servant.
Walkable patchworks of various styles of housing, where one would enjoy walking, cycling or travelling through by public transport. A city of learning, education, the arts and self-supporting industry, where families and communities can thrive. Where the less fortunate who may be living on lower incomes are not segregated into high-rise towers but live in affordable detached or medium-density housing spread throughout the suburbs. Where their children have the same opportunities as other children. Where ghettos of crime and despair are not created. A city where the environment—the living environment—is prized and of prime importance. A sustainable city or cities in a sustainable state. This can only happen when people are proud of their neighbourhoods and where they, as citizens, have control over what they create—the built form, the environment, the infrastructure. This is what, I believe, we as a Parliament can achieve." (Clifford Hayes, Extract from speech.)
Exhibition opening Friday 19th April, 5.30-7.30pm. Art Space, Lord Street, Port Campbell.
This article reproduces a leaflet written by Jim Quirk, who was my father. The leaflet advertised a 'Nature Show' at the lower Melbourne Town Hall in 1966. The Field Naturalists Club of Victoria and the Society for Growing Australian Plants sponsored the Nature Show to help the plight and status of the wombat in Australia. I wonder if the same results could be achieved today. Have we advanced at all? Reading of the particularly 
Videos of KELVIN THOMSON and all panel speakers have been added to this article. Open mic part now published here too. Today, June 14, 2014, a packed hall with people standing at the back in the Hawthorn Arts Centre voted for a national plebiscite to ask the people what size population they wanted. The forum interacted with a panel of four speakers: Kelvin Thomson, MP for Wills; Sheila Newman, Evolutionary Sociologist and Candobetter.net editor and writer; Clifford Hayes, former Bayside Council Mayor and planning activist; and William Bourke, Leader of the Sustainable Population Party. There was a queue for the open microphone and the meeting closed later than expected. All motions passed with an overwhelming show of hands.
This article features videos of the four Victorian based candidates for the Stable Population Party - Jill Quirk, Clifford Hayes, Michael Bayliss, Steven Armstrong and Jonathan Page - not necessarily in that order. It is very interesting to see what the candidates have to say and how they present. Australians have a chance of making a crucial difference by voting for these candidates in the Senate and in the lower house for the next Federal Election. Candidates are also running in other states. Check this website for details: 
Monash University's Dr. Bob Birrell of Monash University Centre for Population and Urban Research spoke at the Sustainable Population Australia AGM on July 20, 2013 to a conference center packed to standing room only. The speaker was retained for questions until long after the end of the talk. "It was chilling the way Dr Birrell calmly and factually revealed the deep globalised shit we are in. It just doesn’t make sense at all. If only the public understood what is being done to them and their children...not to mention our environment." Videos by Steven Armstrong.
“Mr. Rudd needs to be severely questioned on the title of his talk but the context makes this unlikely. Were he speaking in parliament or the public realm he might be questioned but his speech on Thursday will be heard at a forum of an industry known for its bias to high population growth with no practical or logical end point.” (Jill Quirk, President, SPAVicTas)
Not so livable Victoria - Melbourne rally calls on government to curb immigration and stop advertising for new settlers overseas for Victoria in view of environmental and amenity impacts of huge population
Jill Quirk (President Sustainable Population Australia (SPA) Victorian and Tasmanian Branches, and National Representative) will host Dr Geoff Mosley to speak at the AGM, this Saturday, 7/7/2012, at 2PM. Dr Mosley was Executive Director of the Australian Conservation Foundation from 1973 to 1986 and is currently the Australian Director of the 
By upwards engineering population growth, the Victorian and Australian Governments are showing disregard of "ultimate deprivation" and leaving "future generations with the task of rationing energy, oil and food..."
"Despite this grim picture, unlike global population growth, our own population future is very much under our control and we need not be overwhelmed. Stability of population numbers is within our reach this century. We owe it to Victorians who will be born 50 years from now to take control so that those who come after us can enjoy what we have enjoyed – clean air and water and reliable food and housing supplies. To do nothing is the real crime against humanity." Jill Quirk, President, Sustainable Population Australia (SPA) Victoria.
Melbourne people can hear MP Hon. Kelvin Thomson speak at the A.G.M. of Sustainable Population Australia (Victorian branch) on July 16th at 2.00p.m. The topic will be, "The population issue in Australia - post Population Strategy." The title refers to Minister Burke's recent "Population Strategy." In this article we talk about why this meeting is so important for Victorians and Australians and discuss events leading up to it, from Barry Jones's Australia's Population Carrying Capacity Inquiry (1994), through the Bracks Population Summit (2002) and Tony Burke's "Population Strategy" (2011). We at http://candobetter.net hope that subsequent events in Victoria will maintain and support SPA Vic's promotion of a better population policy for Australia. (Inside: Link to Steve Vizard's surprisingly good program contrasting Jones Report with Burke Report.)
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 ?"
This article title is based on the title of a debate at the Municipal Association of Victoria AGM, which took place on Thursday, October 21 at Hotel Sofitel. The article itself is based on speech notes from SPA Victoria's president, Jill Quirk, for her part in the debate. Panel members were: Jill Quirk, President of Sustainable Population Australia (Victorian branch); Pru Sanderson, CEO, VicUrban; and Professor of Physiology, Roger Short, Melbourne University. The Chair was Jon Faine.
Quark writes about how the mainstream press is becoming increasingly hysterical in its promotion of growth lobby propaganda, particularly since the Australian Federal election in August 2010.
Population sociologist Sheila Newman's talk, "Stable Population dynamic demystified," presented fascinating original material using social and biological research showing how most animals, including humans, can maintain steady state populations in different environments and conditions. Whilst showing how small populations can be maintained, it failed to bear out Hobbs' dismal prognostications.
Kelvin Thomson MHR, Federal Member for Wills, is holding a Population Reform Forum at a breakfast at the Zoo on 7 May 2010. These forums are being held at the same time all round Australia. Please note that the Melbourne Forum has been so popular that it is booked out and there is a waiting list! 
This is a really great speech, empowering and intelligent. If anyone can save Australia's democracy, environment and quality of life, it may be Kelvin Thomson, who speaks clearly over the constant dull roar of the growth merchants. Jill Quirk, President of the Victorian Branch of Sustainable Population Australia (SPA) is to be congratulated on attracting much interest in this meeting. 
If Australia's current growth rate continues, the population will double in 35 years. That means our population would be 44 million by 2045. Only one Australian politician - Kelvin Thomson - is trying to do something to stop this democratically. If you would like to help, come along NOVEMBER 29 and give support and discuss. If you support this, so will other people and the other politicians and parties will have to listen. See also:
The overwhelming focus of the mainstream press has been on a detail of Thomson's overall population numbers reform proposal, which was to cut the automatic entry for New Zealanders to Australia. So far the Canberra Times and 
Shortly after his lunch with the "Progressive Business Association" must have ended, Mr Madden, who apparently departed shyly out the back door, looked surprised to be intercepted and presented with the resolutions of the Bastille Day Rally against Urban Expansion and Rotten taxes by Julianne Bell, Rosemary West and Jill Quirk, acting on behalf of the environment and democracy.
The Progressive Business organisation calls itself is ‘an associated entity of the Australian Labor Party [which] from time to time, donate funds to the Party’. It has two membership types : Corporate - $1,550 (incl. GST) and Business - $990 (incl. GST). Corporate members get 5 Tickets to the Breakfast Briefing Program and access to 5 Twilight Briefings for 5 company representatives; Business members get 3 Tickets to the Breakfast Briefing Program and access to 5 Twilight Briefings for 3 company representatives.
"The value of open land is so much more than the dollar price estimated in terms of what it would yield if subdivided and sold to developers or built on to create a revenue raising venue. It is a defect of our land valuing and legal system that it fails to account for many damages to quality of life through changes to land use. Melbourne's founders were far sighted in setting aside areas of land for Melbourne’s people. Unfortunately their provisions for future generations have been exploited for short term objectives (according to Coasian economic values) at the expense of the general population." - Jill Quirk
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