Collected letters

Another round-up:

31/7, H-S:

Slower growth

THERE is nothing virtuous about perpetual growth — it is a cancer eating away at the world’s environmental balance, its diversity, its flora and fauna and its moral compass.

Once there may have been a need for growth, but that need has passed and growth is now more about wanton greed.

The planet is all we have and in a more enlightened and responsible era, growth will be condemned.

– Bruce Mullinger, Kurnell, NSW

2/8, The Age:

Growth is abnormal

IRRESPONSIBLE levels of population growth, encouraged by state governments, have resulted in increasing difficulties for residents, particularly in the outer suburbs (“Northern growth corridor residents driven to despair”, 1/8). It is negligent in the extreme to send people to the outskirts where infrastructure is inadequate. There has clearly been a lack of foresight as to how the city can continue to function with never-ending growth.

It is a no-brainer that transport infrastructure and services such as kindergartens are required before people move in to an area. If the necessities are not put in place first, the people of Melbourne will be living in a constant state of deficit of those elements that make a reasonable urban life possible. According to demographer Graeme Hugo, Australia’s annual rate of population growth is more than three times the average of advanced countries. It is time our politicians and planners stopped treating this as normal.

– Mark O’Connor, Lyneham, ACT

A related article from that link noted that almost 1000 people a week are immigrating to Melbourne (from interstate and overseas). No wonder traffic has become almost gridlocked in many areas, and housing unaffordable.

Melbourne was also recently voted most livable once again. The city is still much better than many others in the world – one reason being its relatively small population and low-density layout – but its livability is rapidly being eroded due to population growth and urban densification.

4/8:

Planetary predators

BARNABY Joyce is right when he says the $244 million threshold for an assessment of a proposed farmland purchase was so high it was ridiculous (“Hands off farm: Coalition”, 3/8). Globalisation has given rise to planetary predators trying to pry open weak national borders. Foreign owners of agricultural land will give priority to their populations, and only sell the leftover to Australia.

There is also prevalent an assumption that because we now produce more food than we need, this scenario will continue, despite climate change and global population growth.

Brazil and Argentina, poorer nations than Australia, have limited foreign land grabs. No agricultural land can be bought by foreigners in China. Australia is a leader in harnessing the short-term profits from globalisation, to our detriment.

– Vivienne Ortega, Heidelberg Heights

Selling off valuable arable land to other countries is foolish in the long-term for food security reasons. I wonder, though, if the government has plans to re-appropriate the land if the food security situation ever gets really dire?

14/8:

Discard convention

THE simplest and obvious solution to the boat influx is to withdraw from the 1951 Refugee Convention. Having an international organisation dictate to us on this global problem is inappropriate and contrary to our sovereign interests. We should be free to make a deal with Malaysia or Indonesia.

People smugglers see Australia as a “rich” country, an “immigration nation” and a soft target for resettlement. Yet this country is losing jobs, thousands of people a year are being turned away from housing and homelessness services, infrastructure is under pressure, and food security and environmental concerns in a continent largely composed of semi-arid desert are growing.

We should discard the UN convention and replace it with an orderly processing queue offshore. We could easily accommodate more refugees if we slashed our heavily imbalanced permanent skilled migration program, and our family reunions and unlimited temporary employer-sponsored intake.

– Vivienne Ortega, Heidelberg Heights

18/8:

Sort out our backyard

MICHELLE Grattan makes a valid point about the need to provide services, education and training for asylum seekers on Nauru and Manus Island (Comment, 17/8).

However, we need to look at the wider picture in our own cities. In Melbourne there have been reports of troubled youth in western suburbs who don’t have access to these services, education and training. A report on housing shortages for the disadvantaged this week highlighted further problems. Surely we need to look after our own backyard before we provide money for refugees who may or may not end up coming here. There is a limited amount of government money; it should be spent first on much-needed infrastructure to help those already living here.

– Irene Ritchie, Balaclava

I have been mostly refraining from commenting on the farcical situation involving asylum-seeker boat arrivals, but the situation is well and truly out of control (nearly 7000 arrivals this year alone). I can only feel exasperation at weak-willed Government policies that are all but encouraging this. Some idealistic fools in the Green political party are just as bad on this issue – they practically want to throw open the borders to all. Another concern is that many already in Australia are becoming a part of a disadvantaged underclass here. To put it bluntly, we can’t take in everyone in the world who wants to come here, not if we want to retain some quality of life and maintain the public services and welfare systems we have now. My own policy would be to withdraw from the Convention and refuse to take any illegal/boat arrivals (I could imagine the outcry at that!) – only accept applications when done the proper way.

I am also baffled by those who support illegal immigration (which is a massive problem in the USA) – they don’t seem to understand the meaning of “illegal”. Problem is, if you criticize their policy you get branded as “racist” and “xenophobic”, even if this never enters your argument.

Iran going backward

Some dismaying news reported this week was that Iran had gone into panic mode by deciding to abolish its state-sponsored birth control program (mentioned in my 4/2/2009 entry) due to a falling birth rate – its population is currently around 75 million. The usual fear of an aging and decreasing population is a reason given, but by any other definition the program has been successful, with women having access to family planning. Now it looks like that will be made much harder for them. The last thing the country wants is a surplus of young people – that factor is one reason for the revolutions in other Middle Eastern countries. A New York Times article from April, “The Other Arab Spring” notes:

Especially when you consider the other stresses. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, the executive director of the Institute for Policy Research and Development in London, writing in The Beirut Daily Star in February, pointed out that 12 of the world’s 15 most water-scarce countries – Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Israel and Palestine – are in the Middle East, and after three decades of explosive population growth these countries are “set to dramatically worsen their predicament. Although birth rates are falling, one-third of the overall population is below 15 years old, and large numbers of young women are reaching reproductive age, or soon will be.” A British Defense Ministry study, he added, “has projected that by 2030 the population of the Middle East will increase by 132 percent – generating an unprecedented ‘youth bulge’.” […]

If you ask “what are the real threats to our security today,” said Brown, “at the top of the list would be climate change, population growth, water shortages, rising food prices and the number of failing states in the world. As that list grows, how many failed states before we have a failing global civilization, and everything begins to unravel?”

Another recent NYT article, “What Can Mississippi Learn From Iran?”, gives some details of Iran’s health care program, which a US state was looking to model for its own.

The Iranian reforms were relatively inexpensive to implement there. It was the early ’80s, just after the Ayatollah Khomeini’s return and the Iranian revolution, which had promised the country’s rural villagers the kind of social justice that had been lacking under the shah. At the time, more than half the population lived outside major cities, in or around more than 60,000 villages. The Iranians built “health houses” to minister to 1,500 people who lived within at most an hour’s walking distance. Each house is a 1,000-square-foot hut equipped with examination rooms and sleeping quarters and staffed by community health workers – one man and one or more women who have been given basic training in preventive health care. They advise on nutrition and family planning, take blood pressure, keep track of who needs prenatal care, provide immunization and monitor environmental conditions like water quality. Crucially, in order to gain trust, the health workers come from the villages they serve.

People who become very sick, or require surgical procedures, are referred up through a single, multitiered system: from health house to rural health center to district hospital. The integrated nature of the system is what makes it unique. Today, 17,000 health houses serve 23 million rural Iranians. Health disparities between rural and urban Iranians have narrowed; the Iranians have reduced rural infant mortality by 75 percent and lowered the birthrate. Iran’s reforms won praise from the World Health Organization, which has long advocated preventive, primary care.

And now they will abandon some or all of that? Utter madness.

If you’re thinking of moving to Melbourne …

Please don’t! That’s my reaction when I see threads on that topic on forums such as r/Melbourne, though I refrain from saying thus as I will inevitably get downvoted. I might sound churlish, but almost 1000 people a week are arriving, as reported in The Age and Herald-Sun today: “Growth pains on the city’s fringe” and “Booming in the ’burbs” – the latter reproduced below as it is not online:

THE booming outer suburbs have helped Melbourne post the biggest population gain of any capital city in the past decade. Almost 650,000 extra residents moved to Melbourne in the 10 years to June last year, pushing the total population up 18 per cent to a whopping 4.17 million. Census figures released yesterday show the top five areas for growth nationwide were all on Melbourne’s outskirts.

South Morang recorded the biggest increase, with the number of residents up 32,200. Point Cook, Caroline Springs and Tarneit in the west followed with growth figures of more than 20,000.

Demographer with id Consulting, Glenn Capuano, said affordable housing within 25km of Melbourne’s centre was helping lure residents from Sydney, where prices were much more expensive. An economic downturn in southeast Queensland was also behind the influx. It is expected to push Melbourne’s population to five million by 2025.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics figures showed inner-city development was further fuelling the population increase. The Docklands recorded the state’s fastest growth, with the area’s population almost 40 times higher than it was in 2001. Taylors Hill, Cairnlea, Point Cook and Tarneit were the next fastest.

Property Council of Australia (Victoria) executive director Jennifer Cunich said more infrastructure was needed for Melbourne to keep pace with its rapid growth. Ms Cunich said toll roads and government partnerships with the private sector were among ways to accelerate investment.

Rachel Mcminimee, who moved to Tarneit from the Dandenongs with husband John 10 years ago, said access to work and the city were big drawcards.

Melbourne’s population gains dwarfed increases in the state’s regional population, which rose about 6 per cent to 1.37 million.

Perth was the nation’s fastest growing capital, with the population up 26 percent, ahead of Brisbane. In NSW, 75 per cent of the state’s population growth was in Sydney. The city now has a population of 4.61 million.

Road traffic has become horrendous and infrastructure is simply not coping – and governments will never manage to catch-up with the unwanted growth. I have lived here all my life and can emphatically assert that quality of life is eroding rapidly and the crowding is extremely stressful and anger-inducing. We are not yet at the level of crowding of megacities of the world, but it seems that government and business wants to make Melbourne that way.