Got my letter in response to yesterday’s article published in today’s Herald-Sun:
The Water Minister’s refusal to consider restricting population growth to conserve dwindling water supplies (“Population Boost”, May 26) is symptomatic of a government addicted to growth – despite the negative social and environmental consequences. The Brumby Government appears obsessed with protecting its mates in the building industry.
Words fail me. From today’s Herald-Sun:
Population boost
The State Government has ruled out cutting population growth as a way of dealing with the acute water shortage.
Water Minister Tim Holding said rapid population growth should continue, despite record low dam levels.
“We’ve seen strong population growth in Victoria as something that’s contributing to the strong economy that we have, the strong jobs growth that we’ve seen, the growth in the building and construction sector,” he said.
The Water Minister’s refusal to consider restricting population growth to protect dwindling water supplies is symptomatic of a government addicted to growth – no matter what the social and environmental costs. The Brumby Government appears obsessed with protecting its mates in the building industry.
“Brumby’s planning law bypass”, The Age, 21/5; “Constructing a city behind closed doors”, 20/5. The Brumby State Government continues to change planning laws under the excuse of creating jobs, without caring what impact this will have on the residents who have to endure ugly and inappropriate development. Some letters from today’s The Age:
Residents left to deal with fallout
Having spent a day at VCAT this week and many hours preparing a submission in support of our council, which had refused a permit for a box apartment block for an otherwise single-dwelling residential street, we are dismayed at what may be built under the State Government’s takeover of planning regulations.
We argued that kitchens with no natural light and, in some cases, no space for a fridge, were not acceptable; that bedrooms with no direct natural light were not acceptable; that apartments requiring large inputs of energy to keep them liveable in summer and winter were not acceptable in this age of climate change; and that a basement car park on flood-prone land was inappropriate. We argued that the loss of privacy to neighbours, the lack of open space and myriad design faults had undesired social consequences.
And yet all this developer has to do is declare the least desirable unit as “social housing” and the plans will be rubber-stamped by the Planning Minister.
And who has to live with the fallout? Not the developer who walks away with his rich profits, not the Government ministers and bureaucrats who allowed this “development”, but the local residents who have to share their overstretched or non-existent community support services and put up with the eyesore dominating the previously pretty street.
When do we start labelling the Brumby Government as the second coming of Jeff?
– David and Lauren Gates, Notting Hill
Exemption scandal
As a town planner I would usually embrace Mr. Brumby’s fast-tracking of social housing. However, an examination of the details of the provisions highlights that the removal of these projects from the public realm is scandalous.
To qualify for the “social housing” exemption and be excluded from public participation and comment, there is no need to provide a minimum percentage of social housing. Indeed, since the announcement, a number of planning consultancies have begun offering to help commercial residential projects through the “social housing exemptions”.
Mr. Madden, a 100-unit commercial residential project with two social housing units is not social housing, but rather a “wolf scantily dressed in lamb’s clothing”.
– David Vorchheimer, Brighton
Long-term damage
Under the excuse of creating jobs, John Brumby is sacrificing democracy to increase his developer mates’ profits. This Government has been waiting for an excuse to bring in centralised planning, to get it out of the hands of councils and the dreaded residents. The real worry of this takeover is the long-term damage it will do to Melbourne and the state. Allowing developers to do what they want will change the face of Melbourne forever in a very short time and residents and their elected councils will be impotent.
– Mary Drost, convener, Planning Backlash, Camberwell
Bulldozing strategy
The latest bulldozing attempt by the Brumby-Madden behemoth reminds me of Albert Speers’ vision of a new Berlin – nothing must stand in its way. But instead of a misguided grand vision of a fascist state, we have a botched smorgasbord of developments that will be subject to abuse by those who will profit from them. There will be token amounts of social housing or educational institutions but in the end, the much bandied-about investment in infrastructure will be dominated by commercial profit rather than public good.
Your editorial (21/5) has accurately predicted the beginning of the end of an otherwise reasonably successful government. Like everything else, the notion of power has a way of corrupting the minds of well-meaning politicians.
– Alex Njoo, St Kilda
Perhaps frustrated residents can resort to illegal means to combat such developments, such as burning them!
“City’s growth boundary expanded”, The Age, 20/5. Melbourne continues to expand outward over the grassy plains like a metastasing cancer. The Planning Minister, Justin Madden, conveniently found that:
“We now know the grasslands are not as prolific in this area as originally thought,” he said in a written statement. This allowed the Government to look at a larger area for land use and transport.
I would like to see Madden given a public lynching! He has been Planning Minister for far too long and is corrupt and incompetent.
From New Scientist, 16/5:
Land clearances turned up the heat on Australian climate
Deforestation by European settlers may be to blame for making Australia’s drought longer, hotter and dryer than it would be otherwise.
The “big dry”, Australia’s 11-year drought, has been blamed on greenhouse gases and natural variability. To see if deforestation played a part, Clive McAlpine of the University of Queensland in Brisbane and colleagues used a climate model to simulate Australian conditions from the 1950s to 2003. They then compared the impact of today’s fragmented vegetation, obtained from satellite images, with that of 1788, prior to European settlement.
Over much of south-east Australia, where the drought has hit hardest, less that 10 per cent of the original vegetation remains. The team’s model showed that this land clearance has increased the length of droughts in the area by one to two weeks per year. In years of extreme drought, the loss of vegetation caused the number of days above 35°C to increase by six to 18 days, and the number of dry days to increase by five to 15 days (Geophysical Research Letters, in press).
“Land clearing may be having a similar impact on the drought as greenhouse gases,” says McAlpine. Reforestation could minimise future droughts, he adds.
“It’s a nice piece of work,” says Andy Pitman of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, but he adds that the modelling needs to be confirmed.
Trees and vegetation attract and retain moisture, so it is not surprising to attribute one cause of the ongoing drought in south-eastern Australia to continued land clearance. Population expansion is accelerating this, with former open grasslands being smothered under the continued assault of housing developments (“More loss than gain in encroaching urban sprawl on threatened open plains”, The Age, 31/5/2008).
“David Attenborough: Our planet is overcrowded”, New Scientist, 15/5. An interview, where David Attenborough gives his views on the problem. He is somewhat restrained in his opinions, perhaps because he does not want to alienate.
The latest venture for this veteran of wildlife documentaries is as controversial as anything he has done in his long career. He has become a patron of the Optimum Population Trust, a think tank on population growth and environment with a scary website showing the global population as it grows. “For the past 20 years I’ve never had any doubt that the source of the Earth’s ills is overpopulation. I can’t go on saying this sort of thing and then fail to put my head above the parapet.”
There are nearly three times as many people on the planet as when Attenborough started making television programmes in the 1950s – a fact that has convinced him that if we don’t find a solution to our population problems, nature will. “Other horrible factors will come along and fix it, like mass starvation.”
Trying to pin him down about the specifics of what to do, however, proves tricky. He says it involves persuading people that their lives and the lives of their children would be better if they didn’t exceed a certain number of births per family. And that dramatic drop in birth rate rests on providing universal suffrage, education – particularly for women – and decent standards of living for all. It’s a daunting task, but the first step, he argues, is to acknowledge that population is a problem.
But isn’t the problem solving itself, as people have fewer children and population growth rates slow? Yes, he says, if you discount immigration, the UK’s population is more or less static, but it is not so elsewhere. This troubles Attenborough: sounding off about high population and fertility rates in other countries can sound patronising – or worse.
The world at the start of Attenborough’s career half a century ago was clearly a very different place. His passion about population seems to connect to a feeling that part of the joy of living rests in the natural world – a world without too many people, where seeking out wildlife means hard days canoeing rather than watching tourist boats arrive twice daily.
Two dumb letters (for obvious reasons) from the Herald-Sun this week:
Future needs population plan
The Budget speech and responses to it seem to have missed the most important issue. Australia is not producing enough children. If a society has a shrinking population, it will automatically have a shrinking economy. The most important issue for the Australian Government to grapple with is not the economy, but the shrinking population.
Where are the measures to ensure men at family-forming age (16-30) are able to earn an income that will support women at their prime age of fertility (16-30)? Women will not have babies if they cannot see reliable support into the future.
– Jeremy Hearn, Carnegie, 14/5
Jeremy Hearn (“Future needs population plan”, May 14): Babies are the solution to our problems. More babies, more workers, growing nation and more money.
– Brian Harris, Glenroy, 18/5.
Incidentally, Brian Harris has been writing anti-abortion letters to the H-S for years; he seems obsessed with the issue.
I sent in a letter, but it might be too late to get it published:
Jeremy Hearn (“Future needs population plan”, May 14) evidently hasn’t noticed that Australia’s population is already at an unsustainable level – with water supplies dwindling and infrastructure unable to cope with the increasing numbers – so the last thing we need are more babies.
Spaceflight is one of my interests, but I get very irritated by the growthists who seem endemic in the space community (many are of a Libertarian or Conservative political outlook, which tends to encourage such a mentality). They believe the human population can (and should!) keep growing indefinitely if humanity can access resources in the Solar System (via asteroid mining, etc.). Of course, the technology to enable this is nowhere near developed (perhaps not before the end of this century, if ever), but they continue espousing their deluded fantasies. This article, “The Philosophy of Space” by Dennis Wingo is an example of such thinking.
The reason for human spaceflight beyond the pure adventure is as old as mankind, moving outward to build a better life and make money. Obtaining riches for God and country as well.
The mentality that has got humans into trouble before (the current economic crisis being one): greed and hubris.
I use the New Scientist issue as a foil as it pretty much represents the arguments today that descend from the Club of Rome study and those that advocate the contraction of our industrial civilization and perpetual life on our one small planet as the only possible future that we have. Space advocacy at its finest rejects the notions embodied in this mindset and lays down the gauntlet to posit that not only is the future bright, it is unlimited through the economic development of space, our solar system, and the incorporation of its resources into our economic system here on the Earth. Rather than belabor this through highly technical explanations, a vision of the Earth in the year 2100 is laid out for inspection to see if it is more desirable than the bullet points above for the year 2099.
The mindset he derides espouses the philosophy of not living beyond one’s means, and caring for the environment. It is a prudent and sustainable way to live. His philosophy is about greed and exploitation, whether of Earth or of the space beyond it. For the forseeable future we are confined to Earth, and it is beholden upon humanity to live responsibly.
I found this via “Dennis Wingo - Why Space? Why Now?” at NASA Watch. Most commenters agree with him; one posting as “Reality” offers an opposing view. Of course Dennis Wingo virulently attacks him two posts down (perhaps he does not want to see the truth). There are also comments at the Public Population Forum.
Good luck with that. Technology has produced more freedom, longer lifespans, and greater opportunity for humans than any other cultural construct in the history of the planet. As for Gaia, maybe she likes plastic and created humans just to make some for her. What you are attempting here is to use a “good panic” to achieve some quasi-socialist-neoluddite world that is optimum as you see it. We are approaching these problems as human beings to create the conditions for the continuation of freedom and the expansion of humanity into the cosmos.
Technology has also caused a lot of problems (I am not anti-technology, but anti-misuse of it). As for the frivolous comment about plastic, read this online chapter, “Polymers are Forever”, from The World Without Us. He then inevitably mentions the “freedom” word (it had to come out sometime). It’s the typical Libertarian mentality: do away with governments and regulations so you can do whatever the hell you want – they see space as the “next frontier” which will enable them to do that.
An extract from an entry at the Steady State Blog on the Space Cadet mentality that technology can solve anything. They don’t address the possibility of going into space to find more resources – but as I noted, the technology to enable that could be decades away.
Substitution
Objection: “As we use up resources, we will find substitutes or alternatives.”
Reality: This argument is akin to the technology argument – it rests on the notion of humans using their cleverness to solve the problems of over-consumption of resources. Although people have demonstrated some successes in finding alternatives to meet needs when resources become scarce (e.g., fiber optic instead of copper wire or particle board instead of timber), some materials and services are not so readily substitutable. What are the substitutes for clean supplies of fresh water, pollination, intact species habitat, or climate stability? Several characteristics of resource scarcity events are negative for long-term sustainability. Oftentimes substitutes are simply extracted from other areas of the planet to avoid local scarcity (e.g., oil from the Mideast nations to feed U.S. demand). Scarcity and price increases often provide an increasing incentive to liquidate natural capital (e.g., oil corporation profits when demand outstrips supply) even as alternatives are being developed. Substitutes are often not developed or manufactured sustainably. For example, in the search for a substitute for fossil fuels, renewable energy from biomass is spurring transformation of tropical forests into palm oil or sugarcane fields.
Case Study: What resources will be used as substitutes for Haiti’s forests and the ecological services they once provided? Economic growth on Haiti generated widespread deforestation, first through sugarcane planting, then through timber sales, and finally through subsistence farming and provision of fuel wood. Already impoverished, with only 1.4% of their land in forest, the citizens of Haiti face ongoing soil erosion, serious floods, and loss of biodiversity.
Technology
Objection: “Humans are clever. Our technology will allow us to manage any problems with resource use, energy, and ecological health.”
Reality: Some economists think that, because a particular production process can become more efficient (more output per unit of natural capital), there is no limit to economic growth. These economists and “technological optimists” are disregarding the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy law, which tells us that we cannot achieve 100% efficiency in the economic production process. When the entropy law is applied across all economic sectors, or in other words when the limits to efficiency have been reached, the only remaining way to grow the economy is by using more natural capital (including energy).
Case Study: Besides the limits to efficiency, there is another issue with technology. Societies have wielded it in many ways, some useful for long-term sustainability, and some harmful. When gasoline prices rose in the 1970s, automobile companies developed new technology to increase the efficiency of engines. Marked improvements in vehicle mileage occurred with a resultant drop in pollution from transportation. When gas prices dropped in the 1980s and 1990s, fuel efficiency in the United States stagnated. The technological improvements were used to provide increased horsepower to smaller cars and sufficient horsepower to big cars, trucks, and SUVs. Technology that could have continued to improve the fuel efficiency of the U.S. auto fleet was used instead to power bigger and faster vehicles, resulting in a less sustainable transportation systems and more pollution (e.g., smog and greenhouse gases). In addition, technology has widely been used to increase the liquidation of natural capital. Readily recognizable examples include technologies for logging and fishing.
“One and only: singled out for the special treatment”, The Age, 10/5. This article says that single-child families are increasing (which would seem to conflict with the increasing birth rate?). Having one child is sometimes a deliberate choice, but sometimes because parents are older. Some parents, as featured in the article, have come from large families where they were “lost in the crowd” and conversely want their offspring to have more attention. Small families should be actively encouraged worldwide as this will help reduce population growth – one way would be to provide government benefits for a woman’s first two children, but none after that (those who remarry and want more children would also not receive benefits).
The usual counter-argument is that the old will outnumber the young if this trend continues, and that there won’t be enough tax-paying young people to support previous generations, but it is a demographic trend that governments will just have to deal with. Not all old people are infirm, and they can still make useful contributions to society. Perhaps the idea of a fixed retirement age could be done away with – assuming older people can work in jobs they enjoy.
None of the above is intended to deny that we should plan carefully for the demographics of a population in which the number of older people is steadily rising (as the age-cohorts become more even-sized). But we should remember that the old are in many ways less of a burden than the young. Even in retirement, people are often highly productive, performing a myriad of useful and unpaid services, and deploying the skills and experience of a lifetime. By contrast the young, whether babies or school-age children, are too immature or too busy with their studies to be economically “productive” – and in fact need to be looked after by adults.
– Overloading Australia, page 100
This post at the Public Population Forum unfortunately brings racism into the topic – namely an overused assertion that white people are being “outbred” by people of other colors. She makes the mistake of associating skin color with culture, when they are entirely different things. Here’s how I try to express this:
Racism is defined as discriminating against or disliking a person purely because of their skin color and/or ethnicity. As all humans share the same biological makeup and heritage, such a distinction is superficial; skin color and other physical characteristics evolved to adapt to different locations and climates, and are not reflective of a person’s intelligence (or lack of it!). Therefore, on biological terms, such racism is illogical. It comes from a basic suspicion of people who “look different” from those one grew up with; such aversion can be overcome through education and familiarization.
Culture, however, is a different matter; it is not related to human biology. Some cultures are considered more desirable than others to live in, which is why there tends to be high rates of immigration to the former. Some cultures are just odious (e.g. those which regard women as chattels) and deserve to become extinct. Culture is thus not relevant to a person’s race; people of different skin colors who grow up in a particular culture will share the characteristics of that culture.
The countries with high population growth are often those described as “developing”, which happen to be places like Africa, etc. Women in these countries often do not have access to education and family planning, and their role is primarily to reproduce. This is a cultural feature, one that can be overcome when women are given access to such facilities – something that women in First-World countries (USA, UK, Australia, etc.) take for granted. Educated women will often choose to limit their family size, or decide not to have children, as they have control over their fertility.
A few articles collected during this week, so I’ll list them by date order.
“Higher immigration not an economic magic bullet”, SMH, 4/2. Article from February saying that increasing immigration has some benefits but also some negatives.
“Getting a UK job a song and dance”, The Age, 4/5. The UK is tightening its immigration requirements for foreign workers (Australian ones in this case) due to rising domestic unemployment. Some of those skilled Australians are needed back here!
“Melbourne needs to grow up and end urban sprawl”, The Age, 4/5. This editorial asserts that Melbourne’s urban sprawl must be contained – no disagreement there – but by accommodating the increasing population in high-density developments, not by restricting population growth:
The ABS outlook represents even more rapid growth than anticipated in the State Government’s Melbourne 2030 strategy, which has made little headway in preparing for the city population to expand by a third. A revolution in planning is needed because the urban area has already spread across 100 kilometres from south to north and east to west. A city this big – and a 10,000-square-kilometre footprint is big by any standard – is reaching the limits of growth. The Government is already struggling with the challenges of connecting and servicing the whole city, much less ensuring its sustainability. Some argue that the answer is to cap the population, since the forecast growth is based on assumed annual immigration intakes of 180,000 (slightly below recent levels). Yet how else will Australia sustain its economy and tax revenue as its ageing workforce, dominated by baby boomers, retires?
Maybe we should adapt a different outlook – a steady-state economy, not a forever-growing and unsustainable one? A few letters were published in response. Most disagreed, but the third one, from the so-called “Friends of the Earth” organization, thought the plan a good idea, using that word I have come to loathe, “vibrant” – which apparently means having huge numbers of people swarming about. A lot of people are concerned about Melbourne’s unsustainable population growth, but the State Government just does not want to listen. We will know who to blame when Melbourne degrades into a nightmarish megacity in a decade or so.
Too much of this good thing will come at a price
Melbourne does need to grow up, but not in the way suggested. A mature city, as with any organism, does not grow, but develops sustainably. Growth is like a cancer – you can have too much of a good thing. We should not be enslaved by the economy, but use it as a tool to improve our quality of life, shifting resources to where they are needed – to support the elderly, the ill or the environment – instead of using it for baby bonuses and freeways that encourage higher population growth and car use, leading to yet more overcrowding and congestion.
– Jennie Epstein, Little River
Get off this wheel
Your editorial (4/5) does not appear to take into account that Bureau of Statistics projections of high immigration-fuelled population growth depend on past and present assumptions of immigration intakes.
If the Federal Government continues with its immigration policies, then future population growth projections will become a political self-fulfilling prophecy – and so will the need for ill-founded radical solutions to be forced on a disenfranchised electorate.
– Arthur Bassett, Blackburn South
Done well, it’s a solution
The issue of urban infill is such an emotive one that it can be hard to come out in support of Melbourne “going up rather than out”. Therefore, congratulations should go to The Age for yesterday’s editorial.
Urban infill is a key way we could finally rein in the seemingly endless urban sprawl that has Melbourne stretching for more than 100 kilometres from east to west. As anyone who has travelled to Western Europe will know, compact and dense cities can be beautiful, vibrant and liveable. Allowing for greater density in suitable locations should be encouraged. To achieve this we will need to be able to convince people that this doesn’t mean open slather for property developers, a legitimate concern. We need to ensure that growth planning gets this right.
At last week’s COAG meeting, the states signed up to uniform six-star energy ratings for new homes. This is a good start but still far short of what is technically possible and economically viable.
We urge the State Government not to rush forward with speeding up housing development without giving serious consideration to improving energy ratings in housing and channelling much of the new construction into infill rather than the urban fringe.
– Cam Walker, campaigns co-ordinator, Friends of the Earth, Fitzroy
Look after our heritage
It is true that the people of Melbourne will be unlikely to tolerate the imposition of developers in the process of increasing urban density.
What is also true is that the people of Melbourne seem to have no say at all in what developments of any kind look like. How is it that our political representatives are required to seek expert opinions on technical matters and not on the visual aspects when buildings are being created?
Melbourne is being subjected to a rash of buildings that look cheap, impermanent and ugly. I love modern but believe it must, and can, have grace and charm. I love “green” buildings but they must also offer peace and beauty to the people who live in them, and they must offer connections to the visual-scape around them.
We have a right to expect that our leaders will ensure that we enhance our heritage, modern or not. At the moment, we have multi-storey boxes copying historical styles, Lego-like concrete boxes with cheap-as-chips decoration and large, wiry public extravaganzas dominating our vanishing visual heritage.
Imagination, courage and a genuine desire to contribute to the whole community has been conquered by the big dollars that belong to only a few. Melbourne should not be for sale.
– Carol Oliver, Daylesford
RIP democracy
Your article spells out exactly what I have been predicting (“Rudd millions may bypass planning system”, The Age, 4/5). The Rudd billions (actually our taxpayer cash) is going to be put into the hands of the developers to build anything, anywhere.
The move to centralised planning that is obviously where Mr Brumby is taking Victoria will bring about the death of “marvellous Melbourne” and democracy. They don’t want to hear council or resident voices. Their planning zealots know better than us, the great unwashed.
Mr Brumby, give the people a voice. Have an open and honest discussion about how many people Melbourne can actually have without becoming unliveable. There are alternatives to overcrowding. If you lose touch with the people, it is time to go.
– Mary Drost, convener, Planning Backlash, Camberwell
“Quake survivors start bittersweet baby boom”, The Age, 6/5. Survivors who lost their children last year’s earthquake in China’s Sichuan province are being permitted to have another child. Yet again there is implied criticism of China’s one-child policy.
The motives are not purely humanitarian. The Government needs to quell resentment over its unpopular limits on family size. Sichuan has long been a battleground over the policy, with the Government strictly enforcing the one-child limit. (In many other parts of China, farmers can have a second child if the first is a girl, but not in Sichuan.) Among Sichuan’s predominantly rural population, most people have no retirement plans other than the ingrained Chinese tradition that children care for their elders. “The earthquake very much highlights the vulnerability of the one-child policy,” said Gu Baochang, a professor of demographics at the People’s University in Beijing. “These people are not covered by any social security program. They rely completely on their children for elderly support. And it’s not just money. Once they are old, without children they have no place in society.”
Introducing a social security scheme would seem an obvious solution!
“Migrant figures jump the slump”, The Age, 9/5. Another study of Bureau of Statistics figures showing Australian immigration has increased – but another report on the same day says the skilled immigration figures will be cut again (but not by very much):
Skilled migration intake to be slashed
Australia’s skilled migration intake will be slashed for the second time in the past two months.
Next week’s federal budget will cut the general skilled migration intake for the next financial year by about 7,000 people to 108,000, Fairfax reports. The government’s move follows a decision taken in March to shed 18,500 places.
The total reduction of 25,000 places will constitute a 20 per cent cut to the program. The cuts are the deepest since the previous recession, Fairfax reports.
The move is expected to go ahead despite figures released this week which show the unemployment rate fell from 5.7 per cent to 5.4 per cent, or 27,000 jobs, last month.
According to this letter-writer in the 8/5 The Age, advocating population control is “dangerous” because it encourages urban sprawl!
Destructive fantasy
In the debate over planning, a dangerous furphy has emerged – that of eliminating population growth as a “solution” to urban growth woes.
It is not simply that this is unachievable. It is dangerous because it perpetuates a destructive fantasy – that we can continue to help ourselves to what we want (quarter-acre sprawl) without having to face the inevitable consequences (an unsustainable, unliveable urban mess). The recession demonstrates how the Western world deluded itself that the good times would roll on without end. We now find ourselves bewildered because we refused to acknowledge that getting what we want would eventually exact its price.
Planners have known for decades that car-dependent sprawl would end in choked roads and destruction of liveability. We cannot simply switch off urban growth just because we have realised the costs of doing it badly.
We need to transform our city into one that is capable of providing for our future. The one-dimensional sprawl we have pursued for 60 years is incapable of doing this.
– Kris Hansen, Ringwood
A reply I emailed in (not yet published):
Kris Hansen’s odd assertion (The Age, Letters, 8/5) that controlling population growth is “dangerous” because it encourages urban sprawl is lacking in logic – a low population density will contain such sprawl while ensuring people can still enjoy their quarter-acre blocks and gardens. Forcing people to live in high-density apartment towers is not an acceptable substitute, and is an environmentally-unfriendly solution.
“IVF a future investment”, Herald-Sun, 10/5. The virulent IVF lobby gets another hearing on Mother’s Day.
If the speculation of cuts to IVF funding is true, such treatments will be out of the financial reach of many Australian couples from next week. Having a baby could become a luxury. I’m appalled a Labor government would let that happen – making money a deciding factor in who has children. Infertility is not nature’s way of eliminating unworthy parents. Nor should it eliminate those with limited incomes.
In some cases, infertility is Nature’s way of eliminating genetically-defective parents (if IVF treatment is given, that infertility can be passed to the next generation). And if people can’t afford to have children, well, that is self-evident!
My letter to the Sunday Age last week did not get published, but some others did, all very critical of that ridiculous opinion piece (26/4/2009 entry). I will reproduce them below:
One-child policy may not be enough
Chris Berg’s response to reported comments of Sandra Kanck and a one-child policy was facile, ignorant and unscientific (“Depopulate and die of boredom”, 26/4).
Whether or not we like trees or crowds is utterly irrelevant to how many people this country can sustain. What is relevant is how much food can be grown in an energy-constrained world facing temperatures of up to six degrees higher by the end of the century.
Has Berg even heard about peak oil? Is he not aware that if and when we get even four degrees warming, we can kiss Australian agriculture goodbye?
Sandra Kanck certainly said we may have to consider a one-child policy. That may be what we will have to have if we do not stop our population exploding right now.
And exploding it is, with 1 million being added every three years or less. She mentioned 7 million in response to a question of what was an ecologically sustainable population for Australia. Given that many leading scientists are now saying the world can only support 1 or 2 billion, or less than a third of the current population, Australia having 7 million fits with that.
Even 7 million, however, may be too many in a post-oil world.
– Jenny Goldie, president, Canberra region branch, Sustainable Population Australia Inc
“Surprising”, really?
Chris Berg’s repulsive piece on Australian depopulation not only suffers from a lack of research, but trivialises a serious issue. Is it really “surprising” that this is an issue for people in a country where urban sprawl and extreme water shortages have become the norm, Mr. Berg? And as for your fear that depopulation will lessen the stock list of your boutique supermarket: many of the world’s “boring” places have given birth to beautiful things. Ricky Gervais (suburban Reading), single malt whisky (Scottish Highlands), pesto (my Nana’s kitchen).
Without crap places, there would be no shining gems for your “cultured” world to pillage.
– Madeline Farrugia, Abbotsford
Great minds v Berg
The world’s most respected scientists, including Sir David Attenborough, David Suzuki and Australian of the Year Tim Flannery, all agree: the world is overpopulated. I’ll take their views over Chris Berg’s any day.
With Australian oil production barely meeting half our needs and world prices on the way back up, and with water restrictions in cities and irrigators having to watch crops die, and with all the uncertainty of climate change, it beggars belief that an intelligent person could claim that this country needs to increase its population lest we “die of boredom”!
– James Ward, Adelaide
Look around the world
Chris Berg should spin the globe and examine Antarctica, the Sahara, the Gobi, northern Siberia, the Andes and several oceans patiently awaiting the blessings of civilisation.
– Brian Spittle, Gooseberry Hill, WA
Standing room only
Chris Berg writes that “over and over, we have demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to innovate our way out of any theoretical ‘limit to growth’ ”. It takes only simple maths to work out that continued growth of anything is insustainable. Yes, Australia is a big country with a small population. At present we are growing at 1.2 per cent per year, which doesn’t sound much. If we continue on this path, by the year 2700 we will have 1000 people per square kilometre, including the deserts. By year 3440, we would have one person per square metre – standing room only.
– Peter Seligman, Essendon
Logic, please
Chris Berg shows that we do not need a particular size population to be bored, we just need the Institute of Public Affairs. They have a template for it. Once you read one IPA article, you’ve read them all. They make the same assumption – private better than public, economic and population growth good, anything “socialist” bad, and that people who challenge these assumptions are deserving of insult, scorn, derision and a range of other put-downs.
Read the IPA articles and look for a well put-together, logical argument. You won’t find one, just the same repeated “template”: abuse, ridicule, cheap jokes and a little benevolent paternalism.
– Robert Yates, Diamond Creek
A Herald-Sun letter also mentioned my last one to the paper (30/4/2009 entry):
Our gardens are our haven
I could not agree more with readers Suzanne McHale and Mary Drost (Your Say, April 30). I too deplore the destruction of lovely houses and beautiful gardens through bad urban planning. The prospect of ugly, high- rise apartments eating up the rest of our leafy suburbs fills me with horror. Throw in the issue of inadequate infrastructure and a population growing too fast, and Melbourne’s future looks bleak indeed.
The majority of people cannot wish to live crammed cheek by jowl in tiny boxes in hideous apartments, surrounded by people. I know I certainly don’t.
Melbourne must retain its parks and gardens (including the backyard variety) and nature strips. Leave us our precious open spaces, or we’ll all go crazy. The Labor Government’s insidious 2030 policy, in collusion with developers, signais the further decline of once beautiful Melbourne.
– Brigid Guymer, Blackburn
Crowded city is maddening
It appears insane we are planning to have another million people in Melbourne when our water supply is not only dwindling, but is under threat. The issue of population growth is one that we seem to ignore and which must have an impact on the issues of sustainability of resources, infrastructure, the environment and climate change.
– Joan Lynn, Williamstown
