The reason (as our government and industry groups argue) for getting a higher worker ratio by ramping up Australia’s population appears to be a weak excuse. If our government were serious about this matter, Centrelink would not discourage people on the age pensions from continuing working by deducting 50% of their working income already from a low level (now up from 40% deduction before). On top of this, such working people may have to pay tax from the rest, leaving them a pittance from their efforts. And employers usually don’t want to employ people of that age. Because of this, only few people continue working beyond the age of 65 years, a waste of human resources, since the knowledge and experience of a lifetime is then not put to good use any more. If the conditions were right, we might have a very large additional workforce (which would contribute greatly to the Australian economy plus increase the tax take by our government) and no need for such high immigration as at present.

I regard your above article as valuable enough to be shown in all larger newspapers in Australia. Would this be possible for you? The effect would be that not only people in Canberra but in our whole country could read it – and hopefully – can help planning and acting for a better future.

World-wide, not even a one-child policy is going to work fast enough to avoid famine and irreparable damage to the planet. Remember that Garnaut has said that Australia may, in usual times, be a net importer of food by the end of the century – what country will have food to sell?

Rapid population decrease must occur to save human civilization to a boutique 1 billion only. It has been suggested that what is needed is a decline of probably greater than half the population every 25 years.
See: http://www.skil.org/position_papers_folder/ottowadisentorspres.html

Alarmist or reality?

The discussion of human beings purely, and only, in terms of CO2 emissions as if nothing else about them matters.

The underlying thesis that there are just too damned many people, and that this should be changed. The hint (just a hint, mind you) that many, amid this thronging mass of people who shouldn’t exist, just might have dodgy skin colours and jibber-jabber in unusual accents or foreign tounges.

The pean to authoritarianism in its support for China’s one child policy. No democratic fiddle-faddle there! Decide on a policy then implement it at gun-point. Just the ticket, really, when you need to get something done.

The support for family planning – but not for any human reason (which I would fully support) but for the deeply inhuman reason that it prevents human beings from existing. Which leads me to the thought that if you are in the business of preventing people from existing, as an end in itself, and you think there are already too many people, you might run a serious risk of thinking what might be done about those who exist but shouldn’t…

It’s nice to see this set down in writing, for once, where it is available for inspection, rather than being an unstated set of attitudes which dominate so much of “deep green” thinking.

I have attended the climate change talks in Bonn, Bangkok and Copenhagen and, while reference to population was excluded from the later texts, it was there when there were still 200 pages of text (it ended up with a mere six, I gather). More and more people in the side events have mentioned population as a problem – both in mitigation and in adaptation terms – but few are willing to come to grips with the problem. There are still big cultural obstacles to overcome. Nevertheless, a number of countries have included the need for population stabilisation in their NAPAs (National Adaptation Plans for Action) and if we could get all countries to include this, and get it appropriately funded, then we are half way there.

Keep up the good work.