Mark O'Connor - Australian Poet

Cathy Freeman and the poem "Coming Home Strong"

2011-08-22T09:21:00.000-07:00

I sometimes get emails from school students asking me to explain a poem of mine that they're "doing".

I tend to be pretty terse with the lazy student who emails "Hello Mr O'Connor. I've got to write 300 words on your poem. What does it mean?"

But something in the quality of the questions asked by one Shaya Laughlin, a 16 year-old Year 11 student, caused me to email back some answers. She was examining one of my poems about the Sydney 2000 Olympics -- in fact the one about Cathy Freeman winning the 400 metres.

It begins:

Coming Home Strong
for Cathy Freeman, winner of the 400m at the Sydney Games, 25/9/2000
Running into that ocean roar of welcome
with the face of a hurt child striving,
among tense rival queens
whose castles are built of milliseconds,
you came from behind.
Our roar rose till it seemed
sheer decibels must push you clear...

[The full text is quoted below.]

I was at the homebush Stadium on the night Cathy Freeman took out the 400 meters final. I think the race was about 8 pm; and as she ran, and afterwards as she did her lap of honor, I began jotting lines for a possible poem. I was staying with the poet Paolo Totaro in Balmain for the Games. By the time I got back from Homebush to his house it was after 9 pm, and I was fairly sure I had the makings of a poem. ABC Radio's Breakfast Program had been in the habit of interviewing me by phone while I followed the Olympic Torch Relay. So I contacted one of the producers who was still awake, and arranged for them to leave a note for the Breakfast team (who of course are early-morning people) that "Mark O'Connor has a poem to recite for you about Cathy Freeman". I then stayed up till 1 a.m., working on the poem until I thought it would do, and then set the alarm. Early next morning the Breakfast program phoned up, interviewed me about the race, and had me read the poem.

It generated an extraordinary response -- in fact they later kindly sent me a compilation of the congratulatory letters they received. One ran "I found myself in the unaccustomed state of being moved to tears as I drove to work this morning - the reason being Mark O'Connor's beautiful reading of his remarkable 'poem-in-progress' on Cathy Freeman and her triumph of the night before. Thank you for broadcasting that interview, and the poem."

I had feared that having to write poems about the Olympics at such short notice might bring poetry into disrepute; but it seemed instead to increase the popularity of poetry. Many poets complain that poems are not considered news and don't get into newspapers, or at least not the more popular tabloids. Yet this poem was an exception. I received a request to publish it in the most populist magazine of all, the iconic Australasian Post, which was now in the last months of its very long life. So the poem (with of course a large photo of Cathy) was first printed there.

--Back to 2011.
A few days later Shayla sent me her essay, which turned out to be quite brilliant. She can clearly become, if she chooses, a major literary critic. I responded with some more detailed comments, cautioning for instance against seeing the athlete too simply in terms of her racial identity as an Aborigine. Shayla partly accepted this comment, and others, and incorporated them into a final version of her essay. Her analysis is not the only way in which the poem could be seen -- different readers will of course have different ideas and responses -- but it is such an impressive piece of criticism that I have asked her permission to put it on the Web. (Take a bow, too, Shayla's teachers!) Here it is

Coming Home Strong

“Running into that ocean roar of welcome
with the face of a hurt child striving,
among tense rival queens
whose castles are built of milliseconds,
you came from behind...”

Inspired by Cathy Freeman’s gold medal win, Mark O’Connor wrote Coming Home Strong the night of her 400 meter victory. Born in Melbourne in the year 1945, O’Connor inherited the love for Australian nature and sport and was unofficially appointed poet for the Sydney Olympic Games. Within the introductory lines is the message of the poem, portraying Cathy Freeman’s on-going struggle to victory, which invites us to recognize on a deeper level the on-going struggle for Aboriginal recognition in white Australia – a struggle which is still so prevalent in modern society.

The title Coming Home Strong suggests a search for identity. It has an echo of the phrasing of the "Bringing them home" report and the issue of the "Stolen Generation”. Throughout the poem, Mark O’Connor writes on two different levels. On one level, he describes Cathy Freeman’s foot-race, and on a deeper level, her race for identity and recognition as an Aboriginal. The word race itself also has a double meaning and the poet effectively uses this to portray both the struggles of a running race and of an Aboriginal race. The poet states that Cathy Freeman wasn't just an Aboriginal champion; she was Australia's champion, a popular favorite. She had already won over her fellow Australians, but on the night she also needed to win her race -- and for her race.

The admiration offered for Cathy Freeman’s overall social and personal victory is expressed by the poet by describing, through an extended metaphor, her high leveled rivals as queens and their sporting careers as castles in the first two stanzas. The sporting queens are tense quite literally in that they tense for the starter’s pistol, but also in that their royalty is so precarious, being open to repeated assaults by competitors.

In the second stanza, O’Connor states that Cathy came from behind. She did literally come from behind to win the event, so the statement is again true on the literal level. However through this line the poet also evokes Aboriginal social inequity and reveals that like many Aboriginal children, Cathy Freeman was disadvantaged due to racism and social ignorance. And of course Australians love an underdog, which she almost was, since many doubted she could stand up to both the media pressure and the strong international field. One of her main competitors, the poet recalls, had seemed to collapse under the strain.

In the fifth stanza, the reader is shown that the poet was one of many who admired Cathy Freeman. –such sacks of their self esteem you’d carried. So many punted their hearts on you. This focuses on Aboriginals and Australians who idolized Cathy for her strength to overcome barriers that Aboriginals face. There was no obvious reason why winning the women's 400 meters should have been more important to ordinary Australians than many other events, but at the 2000 Games it was so. Many of them admired her and rested their self esteem on her in hope for an Aboriginal social victory nationwide.

In the next stanza, the poet stirs the reader’s imagination by use of load to refer to the Aboriginal self esteem Cathy was “carrying” on her shoulders. Yet it wasn't just the self-esteem of Aborigines but of millions of white or non-Aboriginal Australians (including many battlers for whom identification with sporting kings and queens provides self-esteem that is hard to find in their daily lives) that she carried, with of course the risk of being rejected if she disappointed them. The poet uses the powerful word sack to create a vivid image in the mind of the reader to appeal to the senses, it also gives a sense of heaviness to the phrase. By this line, O’Connor shows that in Cathy’s victory she obtained for her people an acknowledgement so desperately ignored over the centuries.

The enormousity of Cathy Freeman’s achievement is bought home to the reader in the eighth stanza; You have entered Dawn Fraserdom. Beware! During the Olympic opening ceremony, although Cathy Freeman hadn't yet won her race, Cathy was given the same iconic status as Dawn Fraser. By using beware the poet is suggesting that Cathy has entered and been accepted in the ‘White Man’s World” which is personified in Dawn Fraser. But yours was a victory that meant in the eleventh stanza also emphasizes the importance of this particular victory for Aboriginals. Mark O’Connor, coming from a white- Australian discourse, suggests that one reason Cathy was so popular is that white Australians so badly want Aborigines to do well and get ahead. He believes white-Australians are frustrated that very often it doesn't happen, no matter how they try to undo the disadvantages of the past (and present). Cathy was seen as a successful Aboriginal, which was surely one reason her win mattered so much to the media and to Australians. She was also liked as a person, and as a gutsy competitor who was known to be under great pressure, who though obviously shy allowed the media to probe her feelings, and who did not complain about the media and other pressures upon her.

The message of the poem is also vividly presented in the last stanza. Last night at least one lost child came home makes reference to the “stolen generation”, a time when Aboriginal children were taken away from their mothers and never reunited again. On a deeper level, O’Connor portrays Cathy Freeman and overall Aboriginal children as lost socially and searching for their identity in society, yet when Cathy Freeman won that race, suddenly hope was raised for indigenous cultures, a hope for Australia to finally be integrated.

In this lyrical poem of blank verse, which has a definite rhythm created by alternate long and short lines, there is no rhyme which brings out a sense of struggle in the poem. In the second and ninth stanza roar appears, alliteration is then noticeable in the same line for both cases.
Our roar rose and

our huge roar was harmless

This gives the reader a sense of a rising sound and helps create images of a stadium filled with people cheering. Apart from this alliteration, the poet uses no other poetic devices of sound. This once again raises the sense of struggle as the poem is not read melodiously. This sense of struggle is present throughout the poem and terms such as hurt child, push, pain and load all add to the tense and hopeful mood.

Mark O’Connor reflects that poetry is memorable speech, on subjects of general importance. Within an Australian discourse, O’Connor thinks highly of the importance of sport; this can be seen in his other Olympic poetry such as "Thorpedo" in which he recalls Australian swimmer Ian Thorpe’s race, while making a comment on Australian pride. Mark O’Connor believes that “although Cathy Freeman did identify as Aboriginal, she had an American husband and her reality was the international world of a well-funded elite athlete traveling the globe to compete at international events. There is sometimes an excessive politically correct tendency to identify people with, and only with, the "minority" elements in their heritage and their daily life. This can be patronizing or even reductive. Yet despite saying so, I doubt that a non-Aboriginal athlete could have so captured Australia's heart.”

The poet is still alive to this day. After his Sydney Olympic poetry, he has decided to concentrate on raising environmental issues in his poems. However his sporting literary legacy to Australian poetry has offered Australian literature a sensitive and insightful understanding of Australian social issues by using creative approaches to engage audiences.

[End of Essay]
----------------------------------------------

Here's the full text of the poem:

P.S. For other critical accounts of Mark O'Connor's poems see http://www.australianpoet.com/reviews.html http://www.australianpoet.com/reviews.html and especially Rachel Turner's Study Guide.

Updates to the book: Overloading Australia

2011-07-04T07:38:00.000-07:00

This blog-page, from July 2011, will be the site for on-line updates to the book
Overloading Australia: How governments and media dither and deny on population,
by Mark O'Connor and William Lines

This book came out 2 years ago and is now in its 4th (updated) edition.

The book's original, and still very useful, website is at www.australianpoet.com/overloading.html. This includes useful material on the Replacement Rate Fallacy, and on the errors of cornucopian economists, and on the Monbiot Fallacy. However that site is no longer updated.

If you merely want to order the book (it is $20 and there is no change for posting copies to you within Australia) the order form is here.

But statistics and even public debates do date. So even if you have the latest edition of Overloading Australia you might like to look through the adjacent entries in my blog for updates on the population debate.

It is my intention to include in this particular blog entry any corrections to the book, or important updates to its statistics, and perhaps some material that William Lines and I are planning to include in the book's next edition.

As of July 4 2011 there are as yet no updates here, but there are plenty of de facto updates in the adjacent parts of this blog.

-- Mark O'Connor

P S
My poetry books can be ordered from a different page:
http://www.australianpoet.com/books.html

Bernard Salt abandons his “baby bust” claim

2011-06-06T16:05:00.000-07:00

In one of the most sudden retractions in recent Australian political debate, KPMG’s Bernard Salt has abandoned his central thesis: that the impending retirement of Australia’s baby boomers will create a “Baby Bust” or a “Big Tilt” that only high immigration can prevent.

This was supposed to occur in 2011 when “of a sudden baby boomers born in 1946 exit the workforce at a faster rate than Generation Y can enter the workforce.”

The retraction is bound to re-open debate about whether Salt is a demographer. He has on at least one occasion emphatically stated that he is not, and implied that media carelessness is responsible for him being so described; yet the back cover of his latest book calls him “Australia’s number one demographer”.

Salt had been arguing his “Baby Bust” line for months, but recently it reached a crescendo. He persuaded the ABC to put his claims to air, unopposed and as simple fact, in the ABC TV evening News program on May 24. Then on 28 May his Facebook page told his fans: “Beware the Baby Bust. See the central thesis to my new book out today The Big Tilt in The Weekend Australia at http://tinyurl.com/3cr8uzk”.

Indeed this Australian article “Baby boom to baby bust” claimed that “The baby bust, the big tilt, whatever you want to call this bold new demographic world, is like nothing we have experienced before. It works silently, eating away at the consumer and the tax base.”

Salt ridiculed those opponents of Big Australia who could not see that, “This is no ‘growth-ist plot’ to ramp up the level of immigration. If 30,000 more people turn 65 and exit the productive phase in the life cycle than 15-year-olds enter, who is going to pay the taxes to support the lifestyle to which we have all become addicted?”

Over the years Salt has offered many different arguments for population growth, but of late this one has been his bedrock. It was music to the ears of the pro-growth lobby, which is well aware that it has lost round one of the Big Australia debate.

Polls show that about 70% of Australians believe we do not need more people. They can see that rapid population growth destroys other species and makes our cities crowded. Yet folk might be susceptible to the argument that we need to go on rapidly pushing up population through immigration --- just as an emergency measure for the next 15-20 years to counter “the baby bust”. Bernard Salt was emerging as the growth lobby’s ace in the hole.

Yet less than a week later, in an article in the Australian on June 2, Bernard retracted. He admitted that there was no such generational imbalance – or rather that it was the other way. Gen X and Gen Y are not smaller than the baby boomers. They are larger! In his words
There are 4.1 million boomers, 4.4 million Xers and 4.6 million Ys in Australia.

With those words, Salt’s “Baby bust thesis” was caput!

Two questions arise.

1. How did he get his calculations so wrong? and 2. What woke him up to his error?

The first is easily answered. Here is Salt’s miscalculation, in his own words [with my comments in square brackets], from his article of 28th May 2011 in The Australian:

"THE Big Tilt is the proposition that from 2011 onwards there will be a fundamental shift in the demography of Australia.

"This is the idea that over the past 60 years the number of people entering the workforce has exceeded the number exiting through retirement. But with what some demographers are calling "the baby bust", and with the first baby boomer born in 1946 turning 65 in 2011, this means that during the 2010s more people will exit than enter the productive stage of the life cycle. [In point of fact, untrue].

"This is best demonstrated through the interplay between the 15 and the 65 cohorts. [He means that if you can count 15-64 as working years, and if you know the number of people who turn 15 in a given year, and if you subtract the number who turn 65, that gives you the number by which the potential workforce has grown. So far a demographer would agree.]

"Between 1981 and 1985 the number of 15-year-olds increased by 23,000 to 271,000, whereas the number of 65-year-olds increased by 7000 to 122,000. This means that in the early 1980s the working-age population expanded by 16,000.

[Excuse me!!

[Bernard, you should have studied demography. The correct calculation would be more like this: 271,000 15-year olds joined the workforce in 1985, and 122,000 65-year olds left it. An overall gain of 149,000 potential workers in one year alone.

"This is good news for the economy: more workers, more consumer demand, more tax. [That’s typical Bernard. Punchy but tendentious assertions that enliven his argument. Yet note his failure to distinguish between per capita GDP (which is a rough indicator of standard of living) and total GDP (“the economy”, which is not).]

"Fast forward 30 years to the 2010s. Over the four years to 2015, the number of 15-year-olds will increase by 3000 to 290,000, whereas the number of 65-year-olds will increase by 33,000 to 246,000. This means that in the early 2010s the working-age population will contract by 30,000."

[Excuse me!!
[Bernard, you’ve done it again! The correct calculation is that in 2015 the working-age population will increase by 290,000 minus 246,000 = plus 44,000.

One of the most basic skills required of a demographer is the ability to distinguish between a decline in the size of something (in this case Australia’s potential workforce) and a decline in its rate of increase. It’s the same elementary error as in the claim, quoted above, about how “30,000 more people turn 65 and exit the productive phase in the life cycle than 15-year-olds enter”.

As one demographer commented to me, “Salt does not do any labour force projections. The only data he has is an unsourced table from ABS purporting to show the net growth in the 15-64 year old group. Broadly, he is right that the numbers aged 65 are converging on numbers aged 15 -- though it will take longer than he claims.” ]

---

That comment “He does not do any labour force projections.” – surely one of the first things a real demographer would do – is crucial.

It’s not just that Salt made a howler in mathematics. If Salt had tried to do a properly documented demographic calculation, with defined assumptions, he would have been forced to notice his error. And of course real demographers don’t just get their sums right. They also stay in touch with their peers, and notice if others are getting results very different from their own.

For instance Salt, in his June 2 piece in the Australian, claims as a supporter the pro-growth demographer Professor Peter McDonald. It’s true that McDonald’s first degree was in Economic Statistics, and he remains a passionate believer in economic growth. Yet McDonald publicly stated as recently as 13 May 2011 that Australia’s labour force is growing, even without immigration, by something under 100,000 a year. If Salt were properly aware of the academic demographic community, then he would know of McDonald’s calculations, and be aware that they contradict his theory.

Now to the second question.
What was it that forced Salt to admit that “Gen Y” is bigger not smaller than the boomers?

Academic demographers don’t commonly comment on what a populist like Salt writes, so he had long flown under their radar and received little criticism – yet much adulation from the big end of town and the Australian newspaper.

Yet my May 19 posting Bernard Salt is not a Demographer contained a detailed refutation of his “Big Tilt” theory. (This became a separate post on 26 May as “Baby boomers retiring. Is there really a crisis?”)

To add to his troubles, the book Dick Smith’s Population Crisis appeared in the same week as The Big Tilt. Salt found himself head to head with Dick Smith in two major ABC interviews. Dick Smith pursued him on both issues: not being a demographer, and mistaking the baby boom for a bulge in generation size rather than a bulge in the fertility rate. Salt gave ground considerably, and then published in the Australian on June 2 his admission that Gen X and Gen Y are larger than the boomers.

At this point I would draw the curtain of charity -- except that Salt did not admit that he had previously claimed the reverse. Instead he stridently titled his article Let Dick have his say, but case for growth is overwhelming

Salt also made it sound as though he was originating the discovery --- rather than being forced to concede it -- that there is not and will not be any sudden decline in labour-force due to Gen Y being too small to replace the boomers.

“By my measure,” he wrote magisterially, “there are 4.1 million boomers, 4.4 million Xers and 4.6 million Ys in Australia.” He even suggested that he had not been particularly prominent in propounding the Baby Bust theory: “The idea of holding up net overseas migration to offset the retirement impact of the baby boomers is not a Bernard Salt invention.”

Salt then dug a deeper hole for himself by arguing that if he is not a demographer then neither is Bob Birrell, whose results Dick Smith had cited: “Professor Birrell's CV shows degrees in history, economics and sociology, not in demography.” Salt ought to be aware that in the academic world demography is a category within sociology, and that Birrell has been publishing detailed research articles on the interactions of demography, economics, and society in peer-reviewed journals for several decades.

Salt then tried to resile from his admission last year that he is "not a demographer at all" and suggested that if people accept him as a demographer then he can be considered one. He even offered the odd argument that:

I... was admitted to the Paris-based International Union for the Scientific Study of Population three years ago. The IUSSP is a professional body for demographers.

Sorry Bernard, No. The IUSSP includes many demographers, but I am reliably informed you don't need to be one to join. You just need to get a member to nominate you. The main obstacle is that you do need to pay a very hefty fee.

One might also ask why, two years after this supposed elevation, he was stating publicly that he was "not a demographer at all".

Salt also uses another odd argument: that it's alright to call yourself a demographer when you're only writing for the business community: "Business calls anyone who deals with population, workforce or market numbers a demographer, including pollsters." Similarly on his Facebook page he told Kate Case who asked about him being called a demographer "The Australian column is pitched to the business community so the editor gives me the tag of demographer. I tag myself as KPMG Partner."
Perhaps it's all the Australian's fault?

From there Salt passed to arguing, “I have advised business and government on demographic issues for 25 years and have written a national weekly column on the subject for eight years.”

This, though intended as a self-recommendation, is perhaps better taken as a reflection on the way business, government, and Murdoch’s Australian newspaper favour the belief that population growth is good.

And without admitting that his main argument about the baby boomers was in ruins, Salt tried to transpose back into the old plain-vanilla variant of the aging population scare:

The issue is not the 10 per cent jump from boomers to Xers; it is the 60 per cent jump between pre-boomers and boomers. We are used to providing services to, say, 2.5 million retirees now; the funding required to deliver the same services (let alone to ramped expectations) to boomers in retirement will be 60 per cent higher. Who's going to pay for that?

The answer is of course that this is largely an imaginary problem, as Dr Ben Spies Butcher recently pointed out in his , “The myth of the ageing ‘crisis’” and as the government’s recent report on sustainable population makes clear.

We are moving towards a “normal” population in which there will be roughly equal numbers of people in each ten-year age group (up to those ages at which people begin to die off). Yes there will be more people too old to work --- but fewer too young. That is no economic disaster, since the young are far more economically dependent than the old. (In simple terms, grandparents mind children; children don’t mind grandparents. And remember that even now Australia each year has twice as many births as deaths.)

Many in the Property Council, and among those big employers who demand a surplus of workers to keep down wages, believed the aging population argument would prove that current or somewhat higher levels of immigration are needed and justifiable. Justifiable because they will significantly solve our aging "problem".

But they won't. The government's Productivity Commission has already looked into this argument, and has reported its findings in a recent submission to the Minister for Population.

The Commission says that to delay the aging of Australia's population for 40 years to deal with baby boomer retirements "would require a net migration-to-population ratio of 3 per cent per year, leading to a population of around 85 million by 2044-45." (!!!!! ) That's more than twice the Big Australia figure of 35.9 million in 2050 that so alarmed Ken Henry. They add, "It follows that, rather than seeking to mitigate the aging of the population, policy should seek to influence the potential economic and other impacts." Professor Peter McDonald has produced a similar calculation. How come Bernard doesn't know about this?

In any case, this older and simpler version of the aging population scare is one over which Salt has no special ownership. The failure of his Baby Bust theory threatens to leave him a guru without portfolio.

Back in 2004 when the Property Council asked him to explain his success as a “property guru”, Salt obligingly explained that the secret was to be impartial and fearless:

In order to be a property guru you cannot have a vested interest. A guru must be an advisor, not a developer.... I do think that gurus can set the agenda. All you need is a genuinely good and new idea that has a commercial edge. And all the better if that concept is pitched to a rising market.

Well Salt’s Baby Bust idea was certainly pitched to a rising market, or at least to a property and developer audience that wanted to believe any reasons he could offer them for thinking it was not selfish to demand a continuation of Big Australia.

But, to paraphrase Dr Johnson, the parts of Salt's big idea that are true seem not very new, and the parts that are new now seem not to be true.

- - - - -

Nola Stewart on the Online Population Forum points out that in concentrating on Bernard Salt's dubious demography I have passed over his tendentious economics. This is deliberate, since he has got public attention by claiming to be a demographer rather than an economist. However Salt commonly uses tendentious economic assumptions that tend to conceal the holes in his demography. Thus his June 2 article shows him sliding out of discredited demography to take cover in tendentious economics.

Salt invites us to believe our prosperity depends on the number of taxpayers we have. (See also his “Big Australia is a taxing problem”). This might be true if Australia had limitless resources, so that our productivity and wealth depended simply on the number of workers. Yet, as Nola puts it:

Nowhere does his argument touch on environmental limits or the fact that all money to support the retirees comes from the environment, by the productivity of the Earth in agriculture, mining, forestry and fisheries. He presumes it comes from work alone. It comes from work plus these Primary Industry 'resources', which are finite. If population in a given area goes up exponentially then, since the area is finite, resources per capita must decline like the mirror image of the population graph. Our worry then is not how many people exist in what age groups but what the resource depletion graph looks like.

Dr John Coulter adds that the extreme simplicity of Salt's populist writing makes it difficult to know if he could grasp such issues:

The fallacy is, as is usual with Salt and others of his kind, the bald assertion with no justification that, "Economic prosperity in this era has been delivered and ensured by population growth derived from the 1950s baby boom and by a program of intercontinental immigration.”

Typical of Salt's economic confusion is his claim that "We have become addicted to a tax subsidised lifestyle." Probably what he means to say is that we need to pay high taxes to maintain our level of infrastructure. However the infrastructure argument is deadly for him, since Jane O'Sullivan and others have shown that the cost of expanding our infrastructure for an expanded population is the main reason we have trouble covering the costs of infrastructure! (For instance the main reason everyone’s electricity bill is going up is the need to extend the electricity networks to more suburbs.)

As well, we don’t in fact have a surplus of jobs (let alone desirable jobs) over workers, so the number (or even the proportion) of Australians in their working years may not be crucial. And it’s not only workers who pay taxes. Everyone who consumes pays GST. And so called skilled immigrants (a bureaucratic category that in fact includes the dependants the alleged skilled workers bring with them!) may not on average be any more skilled than the existing workforce. And in many or perhaps most cases they do not even work in the trades or areas for which their skills were allegedly in short supply.

I could go on, but “Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?”

Bernard Salt in Damage Control: re-edits his website

2011-05-29T03:00:00.000-07:00

My posting Bernard Salt is not a demographer seems to have spooked Mr Salt. He has re-edited his website at http://www.bernardsalt.com.au/ to remove the admissions to which I drew attention.

I am going to leave that original posting of mine essentially unchanged, while dealing here with Salt's present (or future) attempts to re-edit 1. his website and 2. his facebook page (see below). I plan to keep on record some of the material he has removed from public view.

First, the story to date, in 5 short paras: ...

Big business in Australia spends a fortune on trying to convince us that we need to grow our population at at least four times the average annual rate of developed nations. It sees this as a source of extra customers, larger and cheaper choice of workers, and of course as a way to make huge sums through property speculation/investment.

We have both overt population growth lobbyists (e.g. BCA, HIA, the Masterbuilders, etc ) and what might be called non-overt growth lobbyists who are often presented as independent experts and who may declare no vested interest.

Bernard Salt describes himself on his website as a KPMG partner who heads "KPMG’s Property Advisory Services practice … a ‘Centre of Excellence’ in demographics as it relates to the business sector."
Yet few ordinary readers know this; and the seemingly endless stream of pro-population-growth articles he places in the media (currently he averages at least one a week) are often by-lined "Demographer Bernard Salt".

My original posting argued that this is unacceptable granted (a) that Salt has actually advertised on his website that he will write pro-development brochures "on commission" for developers, and (b) that he himself has publicly recognised that he cannot and should not be called a demographer.

His embarrassment, revealed in this audio clip from last year's Future Summit, suggests that he thinks he may have a problem here.

However my posting gave him the benefit of the doubt, and suggested that he may be the victim of careless journalists or assistants, and noted that he has often taken care not to describe himself as a demographer. The obvious implication was that he should now be consistent and take care to publicly disavow any such claims made for him by others.

I am afraid he seems to be going the other way. Let's look at his responses. In my original posting of 19 June I wrote

Take a look at Bernard Salt’s website, where he describes his and/or KPMG’s advisory services. At http://www.bernardsalt.com.au/advisory, in words that require no comment, he writes of himself:

“Bernard Salt also writes on commission brief ‘article-like’ overviews of development projects. This work is often published by the client as a brochure or booklet. These one-off publications written by Bernard Salt often receive wider media coverage. To view these overviews please visit the Reports page.”

This paragraph had been there for months if not years. I had checked it quite recently. Yet on Saturday 28th May I discovered that Salt had removed this paragraph from his "Advisory" page.

However if you google phrases from it, you can still find it online in slighter older versions of the same website as cached by the various search engines. For instance, as late as 2 June 2011, it could still be found here. And on 24 June I found it here.

A little later in my original posting I had written:

Among the samples anthologised there, you can find for instance the arguments he produced to justify what some would see as the destructive development of Merimbula, a pleasant seaside town on the South Coast of NSW.

This piece, paid for by the Carrington group, is titled “Marvellous Merimbula”. It contains some demographic and financial research, though with a strong brochure-ish feel, including praise of a proposed development’s leading-edge architectural design and a finding that it will provide the town with desirable “beach chic”. The main point of the research is clear from the final paragraph:

Merimbula is a pretty Cinderella town that has to date been overlooked by the property industry. Merimbula is a town whose time has finally come.

On 28 May I also discovered that the "Marvellous Merimbula" report had vanished from the Reports page of Salt's website.

However Salt or his webmaster had failed to remove it entirely. You could still (as of 29 May) find it online at http://www.bernardsalt.com.au/pdf/Coast_pdf.pdf -- though you needed to know the exact URL to go there. I mentioned this fact, and provided the link.

By 2 June, Bernard had removed even this page! (There's not much doubt he's reading my blog.)

However, as of 2 June 2011, a google search for "Bernard Salt" + "Marvellous Merimbula" still turned up several cached versions, like this one. Or this.

It still contains the brochurish sentences of pro-developer rhetoric I had quoted -- seemingly incompatible with seeing Bernard as an impartial or unfee'd expert. To quote Bernard himself: "In order to be a property guru you cannot have a vested interest. A guru must be an advisor, not a developer."

And those sentences I've quoted above are not the only ones! Here are some more:

Aroma's coffee shop and pavement tables is a direct lift from the culture of Paris' Left Bank....The leading-edge architectural design of Merimbula's Coast development injects "city sophistication" into a seaside village. Here is a prime example of how urban chic meets the beach: it is no less than an entirely new concept "beach chic".

The cached versions of this Merimbula article will before long disappear from the internet search engines like Google, but I have downloaded a copy and am happy to email it to anyone who wants to see it. And it is still on line here.

---

Meanwhile, I was sent Giuseppe Tauriello's article in the Adelaide Advertiser, about how Salt was targeted by activists when he appeared at at a "Sustainable Communities Symposium" (sic) in Adelaide. (Someone has dated this PDF, as it appears on line, "8/7/2011, but I believe it in fact appeared on 8 June 2011.) The Property Council, which arranged this event had billed him as a demographer, and the protestors objected.

Tauriello claims Salt told him "I have in no part presented myself as a demographer". However Michael Lardelli of Adelaide University suggested to Tauriello that Salt's assurance might be equivocal.

Salt's Facebook page is called "Demographer Bernard Salt".

This facebook page, like Salt's main website, has been much re-edited. In particular, several postings have vanished since Kate Case asked him why he was calling himself a demographer.

Bernard seems to have realised that his own attempts at justification (and her rejoinder) might do him more harm than her initial query. So his current policy seems to be to leave up the initial query but remove most of what followed.

In fact the page has been changing so fast I may not be able to keep up with it -- he has more motivation to keep changing than I to keep recording. But here are the public postings that I have recorded, in sequence:

Kate Case
At the DAVOS Future Summit conference in Melbourne on 25 May 2010, you apparently stated :
"I’m not a demographer at all and I’m sure real demographers . . . er . . . I’m sure real demographers er . . . are amused by that tag in the media. I’m actually a historian. I have a master’s degree in urban history, specialising in Australian urban history, so a very good sense of where we’ve come from and where we're going to."
Yet here you are using it as your description. What gives?

May 26 at 7:39pm · Like · Comment

[Currently -- 7 June 2011 -- this is the only part of the exchance I can still find on Salt's Facebook page -- or am I missing something? Salt's reply can however be found cached on the search engines like Google. -- M O'C]
---

Salt replied on the 2nd of June

"Bernard Salt Demographer wrote "Hi Kate, sorry for the delay in responding. I have been busy with the new book. I have no qualms about expalining to the world what my academic qualifications are and are not. The fact is that i am known, rightly or wrongly, in the business and media community as a demographer. The Australian coumn is pitched to the business community so the editor gives me the tag of demographer. I tag myself as KPMG Partner. Thisfacebook page was set up as a forum for comments for, dare I say it, fans of column and which is tagged Bernard Salt Demographer. Simple really. I suggest you also read my column today as Dick Smith has had similar concerns. And to be fair there is confusion on this issue. Dick refers to Professor Bob Birrell as a demographer (which i think is fair since his body of work is clearly demographic). In either case I would be very pleased if you would come to the dinner as my guest. Hope this response provides all the answers you were looking for.
Kind regards,
Kate, see today's column at It's the Bernard Salt versus Dick Smith book fest. See my column in today's Australian at http://www.facebook.com/l/86dfb/tinyurl.com/3ces7fv"

[I have added the underlining for emphasis. Note the suggestion, which also appears in his article of 2 June in The Australian, that it's alright to use the term demographer more loosely when you're writing for the business community. MO'C ]

-------------------------

Kate Case responded:

I guess my objection stems from someone calling themselves something but it is not acknowledged that they don't actually have a formal qualification in that field. And yet they are labeled as that in media articles, interviews and even in a column they write for a national newspaper. Usually such titles would be reserved for an appropriately qualified person, someone who has done advanced study in that specific area, published articles in peer reviewed journals etc wouldn't they?
You seem to be saying that your editor and others have arbitrarily decided to call you a demographer, and that is ok, because that is how you are generally known in the public arena. But you are only known as that because, presumably, at some stage, you must have called yourself that. Your facebook page is very explicit in its use of the label. The medias' continued use of the term must have your approval, implicit or otherwise.
Dick Smith has just written a book on population, does that mean he can now call himself a demographer?
Bob Birrell has a PhD in Sociology and has headed up the Centre for Population and Urban Research since 1991. He has served as Federal government advisor and served on the Commonwealth National Population Council from 1987 - 1993. Recently he was a member of the independent Review of the General Skilled Migration Program which reported in May 2006. (from Monash Uni website)
I don't know whether all of the above makes him a demographer in the strictest sense of the term. But as an academic, he would have to be independent. He's not employed by a corporation which has a vested interest in promoting their own agenda, and that of their clients.

With respect, Bernard, the work you do for the corporate sector means that you can't claim to be independent. Obviously your clients and your employer are going to want to promote population growth, that means more bucks for them. Your promotion of that same growth is totally in line with their interests. This is why your continued use of the title "demographer" (with all its connotations) is inappropriate.
Thanks for the offer of dinner, it would be most interesting to discuss some of this in person. Alas, I am in Tasmania, so a bit out of the question. I hope it goes well.See More
Friday June 3 at 7:42pm

----------------

Salt replied:

Bernard Salt Demographer wrote "Thanks Kate. The bottom line is this. Business call people like me demographers. I write a column in the business part of the paper. This facebook page is an extension of the column. I freely and repeatedly explain that I have no 'demographic qualificatgions' including on this facebook page, in my coliumn yesterday and as you yopurself cited a year ago at the Future Forum. I am hardly putting up a charade. I find it odd that you would be so hard line on the demographic qualification line with me but happily accept Bob Birrell the sociologist as a demographer because of this body of work. Are you aware that i have written and have had published by the AGPS research reports on internal migration, that I have advised Tony Burke on population, that I have advised Anna Bligh on demographics, that I was asked by government to represent the population stream at the 2020 summit. Let me also say that my views on Australian demographics are my own. By your logic the only people commenting on this issue would be academic demographers employed by government or universities. In a democracy everyone gets a say; even those whose views you may not like.

My offer of coming to dinner still stands; I am in Tassie quite regularly; if you would like to discuss this personally of if you would like to hear me speak there drop me an email at bsalt@kpmg.com.au"

Kate Case replied:

"No I'm certainly not saying that people can't comment on this issue if they are not a demographer, of course not. Only that labels should be accurate, especially ones that relate to qualifications. I don't believe I said that I accepted Bob Birrell as a demographer, I only pointed out his relevant professional experience and the fact that his academic position makes it incumbent upon him to be independent.

By the way I was somewhat amused (bemused?) by your call in the article for the business community to be more vocal, when we saw such an orchestrated and coordinated barrage of commentary hit the media in the immediate aftermath of Tony Burke's report. They're not exactly being shrinking violets when it comes to getting their message out there :-)

Thanks again for taking the time to respond."

Salt replied:

"Thanks Kate. I really do appreciate your feedback. I thionk we've both aired our views. I am serious about inviting you along to one of my Tasmanian presentations. And the dinner. But I appreciate tyhat you might not like to fork out for an airfare to hear me speak. Then again the offer is there."
--

[Note by Mark O'Connor: Salt's remarks about Bob Birrell fail to help his cause. On Birrell's very real qualifications to be called a demographer see my other posting: Bernard Salt abandons his "baby bust" thesis. ]

---------------

I have taken the precaution of downloading the cached copies of the pages Salt has altered, so that I can demonstrate the comments in my original posting are accurately based upon what Salt has revealed about himself.

----In another worrying sign, Salt published a piece in The Australian on 2 June 2011 called "Let Dick Smith have his say, but case for growth is overwhelming".

In this he expresses concern that

Salt then tries to resile from his admission last year that he is "not a demographer at all" and suggests that if people accept him as a demographer then he can be considered one. He even offers the odd argument that:

Stop-press:

Recent revelations about Salt have come at an awkward time for CEDA, the Committee for Economic Development of Australia. CEDA had given Salt pride of place (as an expert speaker) in its advertisements for a major conference on Australia's future (20-21 June 2011, Hotelm Realm Canberra). Indeed the reverence with which the big end of town treats advocates of growth and of "business as usual" helps explain, if not excuse, Salt's view that it's alright to call yourself a demographer (or at least to let others do so) if you're only talking to the business community.

Christopher Dorman who attended that CEDA conference described it as
"The big end of town, as they say. Government ministers falling over themselves to be seen there. No less than 4 government ministers and the Shadow Treasurer."
Dorman asked Salt some questions about his claim that Generation Y is not big enough to replace the baby boomers in the workforce. He reports that Salt did not defend his claim but skipped across to the plain vanilla version of the Aging Population scare, as described in my posting on the supposed Baby Bust crisis. One wonders how many members of CEDA noticed.

----------

One of the problems Dick seems to have with me, as evidenced by his ABC documentary Population Puzzle, screened last August, is that I am not trained in demography.

Baby boomers retiring. Is there really a crisis?

2011-05-26T20:44:00.000-07:00

This began as an out-take from my posting Bernard Salt is not a demographer.

In this, I mentioned how much Bernard Salt relies on a demographic argument about the baby boomers, and noted that if valid, it would go far to prove his point:

Salt claims the huge bulge of the baby boomers are now reaching retirement age. Their old-age pensions will overload the smaller generations that follow them into the workplace, producing a shortage of workers and a need to increase taxes. Hence, he claims, at least for much of the next 20 years we will need to continue with high immigration.

This is an argument that goes down very well in the business world, where Salt is a much loved speaker. Managing a company is a quarter to quarter, or a year to year, proposition. Few CEOs are much focussed on 20 years ahead, and most know they are unlikely to be still there in 20 years. An argument that gives them an excuse to go on demanding that government provide them with more customers and hence more profits, even if this means monstering the environment and driving up greenhouse emissions, for just another 20 years suits them fine.

And the argument that we must contend with an acute temporary spike in retirements and pensions is also convenient for Salt. It gets him off the sharp hook of Dick Smith's counter-argument: that bringing in more immigrants (so their taxes can pay the pensions of the existing population) is "a giant Ponzi scheme". After all, migrants get old too.

But is Salt's claim true? Here's how he puts it in his Demographic outlook for the Australian Nation: Notes for an address to the Pacific Institute, 15 March 2011, admiringly quoted on Henry Thornton’s blog.

Big Australia as his notes put it, “Shores up tax base - supports boomers in retirement”.

Skills Shortages: The Australian nation passes through a fault line in 2011 when all of a sudden baby boomers born in 1946 exit the workforce at a faster rate than Generation Y can enter [Note that "can"; in a moment it will turn into an implied "will"] the workforce. More exiters than enterers to the workforce means a slowdown in the rate of growth in the tax base. [If you read carefully, he's not actually saying the "tax base" won't grow.] We have become addicted to a tax subsidised lifestyle. [This seems to be a confused reference to the high cost of modern infrastructure -- but Salt neglects to mention that, since 2% of infrastructure comes up for replacement each year, a 2% annual increase in population doubles our infrastructure bill.] Also, baby boomers paid tax all their working lives but the government of the day didn’t provision for their retirement. [Perhaps because rapid population growth faced governments with impossible infrastructure bills.] We have a short term retirement liability in this nation. [In fact it would be a very long-term one if we took Salt's advice, since few migrants bring superannuation with them.]

[Pardon my interpolated comments, but they do help to suggest how very flaky Salt's arguement is.]

This argument occurs repeatedly in Salt’s other articles. For instance “At least until the mid 2020s - in order to offset the impact of retiring baby boomers - Australia needs strong growth based on an average of 180,000 migrants a year.”

In an article called “Inconvenient Truth on Ageing” in The Australian of 4 February 2010 “Demographer Bernard Salt” claimed the real problem the 2010 Inter-generational Report addresses is that “from 2011 onwards more baby boomers exit than Generation Ys enter the workforce.”

Salt's article doesn't make clear which demographic projection he is using that shows this will begin to be the case from 2011. Perhaps we are meant to take it on his own authority.

In January 2010 Salt told the Property Council, in an article in urging them to be less “timid” in standing up for their own interests (“Is the Property Council too timid?”):

My response throughout the frenzy [he means the 2009 “Big Australia” debate] was to calmly and rationally explain that this nation needs strong population growth to grow the tax base at a time when baby boomers are exiting the workforce.
We have no choice. Either we ask Generation X and Generation Y to pay more tax per capita, or we ask baby boomers to ease up in their demands in retirement.

Could I suggest that neither of these options will fly? The only way to offset the impact of the baby bust next decade is to grow the tax base through immigration. That’s why we need a big Australia, at least in the short term. And, make no mistake, this trajectory is good news for the property industry.

Going nuclear, tight water restrictions, and abandoning “outdated notions” like “the garden State” are all according to Salt just a necessary price to pay for solving this crucial problem of the retiring baby boomers.

Indeed in an article in the Australian on 19 May 2011 he scolds Population Minister Tony Burke for not incorporating Salt’s pet theory into the government’s population strategy:

I was surprised to see scant regard in the report to the impact of the retirement of the baby-boomers generation. Oddly, this demographic faultline that affects the nation and others in this decade does not seem to have been a factor in the Sustainable Australia document.

Salt’s suggested remedy is — you guessed it — to continue growing Australia’s population at four to six times the average growth rate of advanced countries. (Not that he mentions that comparison -- or asks why other countries have not adopted his remedy.) In fact similar ideas were offered to a British parliamentary committee, but were rejected as special pleading. See Sir Andrew Green, “Devastating demolition of the case for mass immigration”.)

Similarly, in Australia the economic expert Dr Ben Spies-Butcher, dismisses such claims as false. See his "The myth of the ageing ‘crisis’", The Conversation, April 26 2011. He says "It is true that the [Treasury] reports predict a deficit in the future. However, much of this is unrelated to ageing. The biggest growth in spending is in health, and most of this is related to technology, not demographics." He adds "Given the imprecision of the estimates, the current figures do not suggest any evidence that there will ever be any deficit due to population ageing".

BUT --- the crucial problem is that Bernard Salt, the man jumping up and down about this huge demographic “problem” is not a demographer, and may not understand some basic points about demography.

Yes, the baby boom represented a maximum bulge in the birthrate per woman (or per couple) but not necessarily in the total number of children born!

In the USA for instance, it is well known that both Generation X (the children of the baby boomers) and Generation Y (their grandchildren) are larger “cohorts” than the Baby Boomers. I have not been able to find evidence (and have not seen Salt produce evidence) that it is significantly different here in Australia.

So he may be making a simple mistake in demography. If so, it is one that I dissected (before I had ever heard of Bernard Salt) in a 1995 talk on “The Replacement Rate Fallacy” for Radio National’s Ockham’s Razor.

In this talk, to clarify the issues for those with no head for demographic abstractions, I told the story of my maternal grandparents’ family. Their four children all became parents during the baby boom, and averaged 5 children each, producing 20 children in all.

But we 20 baby boomers were more moderate. We averaged only 2.6 children each, producing (with our spouses) 52 children in all – a smaller birthrate, but a larger generation. And the next generation, if those 52 people average 1.9 children each (the current Australian average) will also be larger than our generation.

To put the point in more general form, Dr Katharine Betts of Swinburne University commented recently on the Australian Population forum:

It is often said (by Salt and others) that the Australian labour force faces an unusual and one-off shock through the retirement of the baby boomers: people born between 1946 and 1964.

For the purposes of this note I’m redefining them as those born between 1946 and 1965, and thus aged 45 to 64 in June 2010. This is because the ABS publishes the data in five year age-groups and redefining the boomers in this way makes the arithmetic easier.

When you hear about the wave of boomer retirements it’s easy to imagine a great bulge working its way through the population pyramid, and then swamping the pension system. But it’s not a great bulge. Twenty five per cent of the population was aged 45 to 64 in June 2010. The cohort coming after them of those aged 25 to 44 made up 28.5 per cent, and those aged 5 to 24 made up 26.5 per cent.

So now that we have moved into the demographic transition (low birth rates and low death rates) it’s normal to have a population pyramid with relatively straight sides, and any block of people in an age group which includes a twenty-year age span will include around 25 per cent of the population. I attach a table with the relevant data.

And the pain for Bernard Salt’s absurd argument doesn’t just end there. For one thing, the boomers are not all going to retire in a block. Many will work on well past age 65; but many others have already retired, and quite a lot of them as much as a decade ago.

For instance, most of my age cohort at the Australian National University in Canberra went into the Commonwealth Public Service and were semi-compulsorily retired at age 54 years and 11 months – because the public service has too many employees, and the younger ones were cheaper than the older.

Just as importantly, the workplace is not some passive tunnel that workers enter and leave at a rate determined by the turnover of the generations. Employers actively select and hire people when and as they need them.

And despite ambit claims by some employers who would like a surplus of workers to select among, there is little evidence that workers rather than jobs are in short supply. (Ask anyone who has a teenage child trying to find work. Or who is trying to get re-employed in middle age. It's hard to get so much as a job interview for anyone over 35.) That's why Julia Gillard and co. were chanting "Jobs, jobs, jobs" before the last election.

The whole claim that there aren’t enough workers to replace the retiring baby boomers has been trounced by the Australia Institute’s recent calculation showing that Australia’s real unemployment rate is more like 15% -- or even 20% if you add a further 5% who would like full-time work but can only find part-time. In an age of computers,automation, and gigantic mining and construction machinery, it’s no surprise that jobs are not plentiful -- although big emplyers keep pretending the reverse.

In March this year (2011) 17.6 per cent of young Australians (aged 15-19) were recorded as unemployed, compared to 13.3 per cent in March 2008. As Dr Betts remarks, this looks less like a growing shortage of young entrants to the labour market than a growing "longage".

Mind you, the very notion that working years are 15 to 64 (on which Salt bases his calculations) is pretty absurd. 20 to 64+ would be more like it today, and with retirement age being increased towards 70, 20 to 69 may soon be the figure.

Citing the traditional 15 to 64 exaggerates the proportion of the population that is too old to work, while greatly minimising the proportion that is too young. And of course all such calculations become academic when we can't, as at present, employ all those in their working years. A bread-winner out of work often means a whole family on social security, and is far more expensive than a person on the old age pension.

To complete the rout of this absurd argument, Jane O’Sullivan provides credible evidence that the alleged costs of pensions etc for this aging population of baby boomers are about one thirtieth, that’s right, one thirtieth of the infrastructure costs of the migration program that Bernard Salt proposes as a financial remedy for the problem. “Can we really be so stupid?”, she asks.

(For further refutation of Salt’s varied and tendentious arguments for population growth see Sheila Newman’s Bernard Salt page at CanDoBetter.)

Conclusion: Salt’s arguments for Big Australia are often based on dubious demography. Many, like this one, scarcely deserve discussion until some real demographer can be found to endorse them, rather than to dismiss them as one of the world’s most senior demographers appears to have done. See Dr Joseph Chamie's analysis of what he calls Ponzi Demography.

This argument began as a side-issue in the posting Bernard Salt is not a demographer, to which you might wish to return.

Bernard Salt is not a demographer.

2011-05-19T08:04:00.000-07:00

How do we know? Because he has stated so himself, and in the strongest terms. And has implied that careless journalists are to blame for so describing him.

I was present when Bernard Salt made a strong statement on this at the DAVOS Future Summit in Melbourne last year. I later mentioned it on the Australian population forum.

Since then, I’ve had emails from several people complaining that some journalists and some interviewers are still describing Salt as a “demographer”, and that they could not convince them this was wrong. I have been asked to post some factual information on the topic.

The following article has three parts:

1. How we know that Bernard Salt is not a demographer

2. Does it matter? If so, why?

3. How then can Salt best be safely or accurately described by those discussing his views or interviewing him?

- -

1. How we know that Bernard Salt is not a demographer

Here are his own words from the DAVOS Future Summit conference in Melbourne on 25 May 2010.

I’m not a demographer at all and I’m sure real demographers . . . er . . . I’m sure real demographers er . . . are ... are amused by that tag in the media. I’m actually a historian. I have a master’s degree in urban history, specialising in Australian urban history, so a very good sense of where we’ve come from and where we're going to.

Bernard Salt agreed to have the proceedings of his session at the Futures Summit recorded. I have transcribed his words (including the um’s and ahh’s) from the official recording of the proceedings. His words were uttered in front of about 100 other persons, including Hugh Morgan and various other business identities. The Chair of the session was Jane-Frances Kelly, the Program Director of the Grattan Institute.

It’s worth hearing the MP3 audio of Bernard Salt saying these words --. Click on the blue video box below.

Salt’s words are clearly a non-retractable statement. If its author were to later turn around and say – Note I am not suggesting that he ever has or would do this – that he is a demographer after all, or that anyone is free to call themselves a demographer if they take a strong interest in Australia’s population statistics, then his reputation for integrity would be in tatters.

The DAVOS statement makes it clear that Bernard Salt understands “demographer” (as most of us do) to mean a person who (a) has been trained in specialised mathematical and other academic skills that allow them to navigate (and to pilot us through) the complex world of population statistics, and who (b) is currently working in this area at a university or other genuinely independent and academic institute.

Salt clearly recognises that he cannot claim to be such a person, and says that real demographers must smile when they see him so described. (I understand he made similar remarks on another occasion, when speaking to demographers at ANU.)

In short, Bernard Salt is “not a demographer at all”. He could not have made it more plain.

- -

A An alternative proof, at least for those who know a little demography, that Salt is not a demographer --- and indeed that he struggles with the mathematics of demography and seemingly with some of its basic concepts --- can be found here. This alternative proof has the bonus of also making clear why it is important that such a person should not be presented as a demographer.

-
A

So just how much “careless journalism” have we been subjected to about Bernard Salt being a demographer?

I googled the phrase “demographer Bernard Salt” on 18 April 2011 and got “About 55,000 results”.

The phrase “Australia’s leading demographer Bernard Salt” got 79 results. (You may not be surprised that Google found the Property Council of Australia so describing him.) And "leading Australian demographer Bernard Salt" got a further 62 hits. The vaguer "leading demographer Bernard Salt" got “About 2,260 results”.

That seems an awful lot of careless marketing (by organisations advertising talks by Bernard) and/or careless journalism (mainly by editors and interviewers hosting Bernard Salt or his articles).

Yet a study of Salt's own Media Releases shows that they mostly do not include the claim to be a demographer. Many end simply with the statement “Bernard Salt is a KPMG partner”. How is it that so many radio and TV interviewers and newspaper sub-editors have got this wrong? There might be an investigative story in this!

- -

P.S.: A little more about that session at last year’s Future Summit where Bernard Salt stated “I am not a demographer at all”.

I was his debating partner in that session. It was structured as a 2-person debate on whether Australia should stabilise or (as he argued) should go on increasing its population.

Though well aware that he was not a demographer, I was very gentle with him. At 4 minutes into the debate I did put a little pressure on him by remarking: "Neither Bernard nor I are trained demographers, but we’re both good amateur demographers I think, and pick up on the statistics."

That seeming compliment may have set his brain stewing, because, at 22.5 minutes in, without further prompting, he said, rather nervously for such a polished performer,

Er...um... In fact Mark is right. I’m not a demographer at all and I’m sure real demographers . . . er . . . I’m sure real demographers er . . . are amused by that tag in the media. I’m actually a historian. [etc., as quoted above]

I made no comment. Considering that he had repudiated the image of himself as demographer, I thought it unkind to question the alternative claim that he was a historian or ask questions about how many articles he had published in peer-reviewed historical journals. (I understand he works for KPMG on identifying social and demographic trends, especially ones that may create business opportunities or influence property values — an area that is at least adjacent to historical research.)

2. Does it matter that Bernard Salt is not a demographer? If so, why?

I suggest it matters (a) because of what Salt is arguing, and (b) because he is not simply an expert or a researcher on the Big Australia debate but a close to full-time advocate.

Salt is a fluent producer of articles and talks arguing that Australia needs a bigger population. As he reminds readers at the start of an article in The Australian on 1 July 2010 titled A Small Australia means Big Taxes, “I should first re-declare my position as an unabashed supporter of a bigger Australia.” He also calls himself a “proponent” of Big Australia. Salt's output of pro-growth articles is a remarkable feat, and makes him a major, perhaps even Australia’s major, advocate/public-lobbyist for rapid population growth.

A very high percentage of all his published pieces are on this subject, and he has used a great variety of arguments for population growth. He has threatened us with high taxes, moral condemnation from (or even an invasion by) overpopulated foreign nations, social problems, crumbling of the pension system, resurgence of "White Australia", “a tsunami of ageing and demanding baby boomers”, and much more, if we do not accept “Big Australia”. (For detailed refutation of such claims, see the report of Population Minister Tony Burke’s Sustainable Development Panel especially pp. 24-27 and 37-40.)

Salt’s many articles on this theme are very similar, but skillfully penned in such a way that each is sufficiently different to get published as a new and topical piece.

However a feature of his articles is that they offer few reasons for their conclusions. It often seems that (at least once sub-editors have added a description of him as “demographer Bernard Salt”) readers are expected to take his assertions on trust, because they are the assertions of a demographer or of a “leading demographer”. This is why media descriptions of him as “demographer” get up the noses of those who disagree with his claims.

Take for instance the article mentioned above: A Small Australia means Big Taxes. Despite this title, Salt offers no compelling reason to think that a smaller Australia means larger taxes; and such reasoning as he does produce is entirely circular.

Here is as near as he comes to offering proof for his main contention, in all his 878 words:

Shouldn't [Population Minister Tony] Burke's brief be to examine what changes are needed in order to support the population (and tax) base we need to maintain our standard of living?

Naysayers never seem to apply their minds to finding solutions to congestion, water, power, housing affordability and infrastructure issues. Do you really think these issues will disappear with a significantly reduced rate of population growth?

I would also point out that those who oppose strong growth never fully explain the options: managed growth and moderate taxation; or low (or no) growth and raised taxation.

Contrast Dr Jane O’Sullivan’s article The Downward Spiral of hasty Population Growth (On Line Opinion, 8 March 2010), where there is careful weighing up and laying out of evidence, plus rigorous economic argument of a sort not found in Salt’s articles. It leads her to a detailed and credible conclusion that recent levels of population growth in fact impoverish Australia and necessitate much higher taxes.

However there is one argument that Salt repeatedly uses (albeit not in the last-mentioned article). It is a demographic argument about the baby boomers, and if valid, would go far to make his case.

Salt claims the big bulge of the baby boomers is now reaching retirement age. Their old-age pensions will overload the smaller generations that follow them into the workplace, producing a shortage of workers and a need to increase taxes. Hence, he claims, for much of the next 20 years we will need to continue with high immigration.

To save overloading this article, I have moved discussion of this claim to a new posting. See : Baby boomers retiring: Is there really a crisis? [Later note (23 June 2011): Salt has since been forced to withdraw the claim.]

There I argue that it's a myth, and based on bad demography. Yes, the Baby Boom was a bulge (followed by a notable constriction) in the fertility rate --that is, in the number of children per woman. But there was no such notable constriction in the size of the succeeding generations. "Generation X" and "Generation Y" are much the same size as the baby boomers. And with Australian women currently averaging 1.9 children, we seem headed for a continuation of roughly even-sized generations. Salt's Big Argument about the baby boomers seems bunkum.

Conclusion: Salt’s arguments for Big Australia are often based on dubious demography. Many, like this one, scarcely deserve discussion until some real demographer can be found to endorse them, rather than to dismiss them as one of the world’s most senior demographers appears to have done.

Complainants to the Australian Broadcasting Commission and other media have a real grievance, inasmuch as it is unlikely Salt’s claims would get such prominent coverage but for the misapprehension that he is a demographer, or a ”distinguished Australian demographer”.

(For the prevalence of this misapprehension see “Henry Thornton’s blog” 16 March 2011)

3 How then can Salt best be safely or accurately described by those who are discussing his views or interviewing him.

Well, Bernard Salt works for KPMG. He can be described quite neutrally as “KPMG partner” or more informatively as “KPMG partner and Big Australia advocate”.

On his own webpage he cautiously avoids calling himself a demographer, and describes himself as “Business Advisor, Author, Speaker, Columnist”. Also as a “trend forecaster” for business and government. And as a KPMG partner based in Melbourne.

Elsewhere on his site he makes it clear that KPMG’s main interest in “demographics” is in the effects of population growth on property values. As he puts it:

KPMG’s Property Advisory Services practice is a ‘Centre of Excellence’ in demographics as it relates to the business sector. It is comprised of a team of seven specialists and is headed by Partner Bernard Salt. The practice sits within the Audit & Risk Advisory Services division of KPMG Australia.

KPGM , if you’re not in the business world, is a very big accounting firm.

Doing the books for big developers can be very lucrative, and KPMG naturally enquired, some years back, if there were any other similar services its clients needed. The answer was predictable: most of them could use help with making the case (or doing research to make the case) for their all-important applications to get approval for projects.

Similarly, they could also use help with booklets and brochures for media campaigns to make their projects seem beneficial or inevitable, or both.

Bernard thrived as a researcher who could marshal arguments for growth, and who often gave these arguments body by including selected demographic statistics. Many of these statistics, such as those that are available on the Australian Bureau of Statistics website, were quite sound. He would present the demographic facts in a way that supported development projects.

Take a look at Bernard Salt’s website, where he describes his and/or KPMG’s advisory services. At http://www.bernardsalt.com.au/advisory, in words that require no comment, he writes of himself <quotation last checked 21 May 2011>

“Bernard Salt also writes on commission brief ‘article-like’ overviews of development projects. This work is often published by the client as a brochure or booklet. These one-off publications written by Bernard Salt often receive wider media coverage. To view these overviews please visit the Reports page.”

[STOP-PRESS: Bernard Salt has responded swiftly to my drawing attention to this paragraph of his. My comments went up online on 19 May 2011. On Saturday 28th I discovered that Salt had removed this paragraph from his "Advisory" page. It had been there for months if not years. However if you google phrases from it, you can still find it online in slighter older versions of the same website as cached by the various search engines. For instance, as of 2 June 2011, it could still be found here. For more see my later posting Bernard Salt in Damage Control.]

Among the samples anthologised on Salt's Reports page, you can find for instance the arguments he produced to justify what some would see as the destructive development of Merimbula, a pleasant seaside town on the South Coast of NSW.

This piece, paid for by the Carrington group, is titled “Marvellous Merimbula”. It contains some demographic and financial research, though with a strong brochure-ish feel, including praise of a proposed development’s leading-edge architectural design and a finding that it will provide the town with desirable “beach chic”. The main point of the research is clear from the final paragraph:

Merimbula is a pretty Cinderella town that has to date been overlooked by the property industry. Merimbula is a town whose time has finally come.

[STOP-PRESS: Also by 28 May 2011, the "Marvellous Merimbula" report had vanished from the Reports page. However you can still (as of 29 May) find it online from the link 2 paragraphs below. [Later note: By 2 June, Bernard had removed even this page. There's not much doubt he's reading my blog.] For more on this, see again my later posting Bernard Salt in Damage Control.]

Bernard Salt does I think believe, in general, in the pro-growth propaganda he creates; but it is also the side his bread is buttered. A feature of his debating style is that quite far-fetched arguments are pressed into service, so long as they support either specific developments or the general principle that we need ever more people and projects to keep our economy humming.

Many in the property “industry” and other trades that thrive on growth find Salt’s vision “inspirational”. However he is a champion and a polemicist rather than an academic expert, and (as suggested above) his arguments may not stand up to objective examination. Hence it is wrong to describe him as a demographer, which implies an independent academic expert.

- -

An important question remains. How did the myth of Bernard Salt being a demographer take root? I suggest a possible answer can be found in Bernard Salt’s Media Release of 9 December 2009, which contains the flat statement “Bernard Salt is Australia’s best-known demographer.”

It seems likely the poor fellow is being sabotaged by some careless personal assistant at KPMG who calls him a demographer. Perhaps the same person is also responsible for carelessly calling him a demographer here.

Interestingly, a google search for the phrase “Australia’s best known demographer Bernard Salt” gets only one hit (from Stephen Mayne in the Mayne Report). It seems that careless journalism is not always easily triggered.

Anyway, let us all hope that Bernard can get on top of this terrible problem, and present himself to the world as what he is: a KPMG business consultant, or more specifically a business opportunities researcher who also “writes on commission brief ‘article-like’ overviews of development projects”, and an unashamed member of Australia’s growth lobby.

--------

P.S.

For those who would like to hear some or all of the 1 hour debate between Bernard Salt and myself at the Futures Summit (where he made the admission about not being a demographer) you can click on these URL's

Debate: Bernard Salt - Mark O'Connor Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Growth lobby can’t get its story together. Urban Task Force versus UDIA

2011-03-29T08:53:00.000-07:00

Spooked by the fact that 70% of us think Australia has enough people already, and by a fall in the immigration figures to September 2010, two branches of Australia's well-funded growth lobby brought out media releases this week. They managed to contradict each other utterly.

You can find both described on page 48 of Tuesday’s (March 30^th) Financial Review. “Developers push for bigger cities”.

The “Urban Development Institute of Australia” tried to run Peter McDonald’s line of selective fatalism, whereby it’s no use arguing with them because population growth is inevitable.

In its submission to the federal government’s Sustainable Population Strategy for Australia, the UDIA said population growth beyond 36 million was inevitable. [ Note: 36 million is the figure that Treasury projected for 2050 in its 2010 Inter-generational Report – a 60% increase on the present 22-23 million. This would require net migration of 180,000 a year, just under the latest figure from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.]

‘The arguments are not around the forecasts… the arguments are now around what this means for the future of Australia,’ said the UDIA.

The Fin. Review described UDIA as a “lobby group which represents those in the development industry”. Predictably UDIA went on to argue that government should somehow provide infrastructure for all these new people, despite Jane O’Sullivan having proved that this is financially impossible at recent growth rates [http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=10137&page=0 ].

UDIA then bizarrely claimed that “Sustainable population [sic!] would also require that new home buyers not pay for so much new infrastructure” – presumably because this would make them less able to pay developers’ prices for housing. [A recent study from Curtin University suggested that the infrastructure cost of connecting up each new house in Perth was now around $300,000! -- a cost that UDIA would rather see the tax-payer required to cover most of. It then suggested we need more skilled building workers (no doubt so it could keep wages low) and saluted the shibboleth that “urban policies should be integrated and support growth in regional centres”.

To further reduce to meaninglessness the concept of Sustainable Population, UDIA "argued that a sustainable population policy would include education [sic] about the benefits of a larger population; identification of required infrastructure; and faster rezoning, approval and development" Truly, the voice of greed is rarely soft or subtle!

Unfortunately Aaron Gadiel of the absurdly-named “Urban Taskforce”, another lobby group which describes itself as "a non-profit organisation representing Australia's most prominent property developers and equity financiers", had decided to take an opposite tack. So far from such huge population growth being inevitable, there was a terrible risk that government would “cap the populations” of our capital cities at once, causing a fall in property values.

The one scenario was as childish as the other. Yes, government can largely determine our future population by setting immigration quotas and by not paying baby bonuses. But it does not have the power to stop population growth on a dime.

There is almost no chance that the Gillard government is considering a move to zero net migration (which means not no migration, but the same number of people coming in as going out).

Even if it did, our natural increase (the surplus of births over deaths) is currently well over 100,000 a year; so such a sudden stop is simply not on the cards.

For further absurdity, Gadiel claims to have got his figures about the dire effect of capping population from an “independent economic authority” which turns out to be Brian Haratsis’s Macro-Plan. Haratsis, as his website will confirm, is an extreme proponent of high population growth, in which of course his company has an obvious interest.

In any case, as Jenny Goldie remarked in a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald:

Urban Taskforce Australia claims if there were a cap on population then Sydney house prices would fall 18 per cent (Cap on population in cities could slash the value of houses, SMH, March 29). With such a vested interest, they would say that, wouldn't they?

Your paper reported on 24 January this year that

'Sydney ranks as the second-most-unaffordable housing market in the English-speaking world, stoking fears runaway price increases have made Australia a less equitable country' (The second last straw in affordable housing). In the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey of 325 English-speaking countries, Sydney ranked 324 and Melbourne 321.

More recent reports reveal that such essential workers as nurses and teachers can no longer afford to buy a house in these major cities.

Cap population and bring down house prices? What a good idea!

The on-line response to Gadiel’s nonsense was typified by this posting:

Shelter would be less expensive? Young families could afford a place to live? People wouldn't have to be slaves to banks for as long? We must stop this immediately! Can't the government borrow money in our kid's names to make shelter more expensive like it did in 2008?

Well done, Fin. Review for correctly identifying these two voices as lobbyists and in effect, hired mouths. Brickbats to some other media that were conned into reporting them as if they were expert opinion.

Immigration Department Report shows Australia's population growth is irresponsible

2011-03-16T06:56:00.000-07:00

DIAC, Australia's "Department of Immigration and Citizenship" tried to bury its own report on the Long-Term Physical Implications of Net Overseas Migration: Australia to 2050 by releasing it on Xmas Eve. However the Report broke back into public debate last week when Barney Foran's article about it appeared on "The Punch" and mine on ABC's "The Drum".

Barney's piece is titled "Population policy is driven by the Dolly Parton syndrome", and begins

Bigger is better even if it’s top heavy and somewhat false.

Carbon tax or not, Australia’s carbon emissions will keep rising, driven by rapid rates of population growth (A Bigger Australia) and increasing affluence.... [The Report shows that by 2050 Australia will face] a doubling to a tripling of greenhouse emissions, a looming oil dependence, increased traffic congestion and critical water shortages in three capital cities.

This is bad news for the legions of corporate suits who see rapid population growth as the only way to maintain their cash flow in an economy based on house building, personal consumption and mining....

You can read the rest here.

My own piece begins:

It has been a bad two months for Australia’s Department of Immigration and Citizenship. First came the Freedom of Information revelation in January that senior officials had told Julia Gillard in a “red book” briefing after the election that they were quite uncertain “what level or range of NOM (net overseas migration) is compatible with sustainable population growth”.

Yet they were nonetheless so certain Australia’s labour force must “continue to grow at around 1 per cent per annum” that they advised Julia to break her campaign promise and return to Rudd’s unpopular “big Australia” policies. (See my "Red Faces over the Immigration Department's Red Book".)

Now a worse scandal is brewing.

It seems the Immigration Department has very good reason to know that none of the levels of immigration or work-force growth it has recently pursued are either responsible or compatible with a sustainable population. This emerges from Long-Term Implications, a significant report which the Immigration Department commissioned and funded but is now trying to discredit.

Prepared by the National Institute of Labour Studies at Flinders University, its full title is Long-Term Physical Implications of Net Overseas Migration: Australia to 2050. (You can find it here ).

Like the CSIRO’s earlier Future Dilemmas report of 2002, Long-Term Implications finds that neither the environment nor our resource security nor our quality of life are likely to benefit from the very rapid growth of population that Treasury predicts — and that business lobby groups continue to demand.

The report looks systematically at differing levels of Net Overseas Migration (NOM), from zero up to 260,000 a year. It shows that all of them lead to worryingly unsustainable positions, but that higher figures for NOM lead to much worse outcomes. Water supplies to Perth, Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney for instance are insecure already, but will be far worse at higher NOMs.

None of this should surprise us. The 2010 Inter-generational Report noted that Australia’s oil – the increasingly expensive commodity on which modern civilisation runs – is expected to be gone by 2020. Indeed a graph on page 132 of the report suggests the oil situation will be disastrous for all but the zero NOM scenario. As well, nitrate fertilisers, without which Australia could not feed even its present population, are made with enormous energy inputs from oil or natural gas; and their price tracks the upward curve of energy prices.

Even more disastrously, the world is running out of phosphate fertilisers, which Australia’s soils desperately need. Price has tripled, quality is falling, and supply is erratic. Hence Long-Term Implications finds in effect that Dick Smith is right: “The security of production of food in Australia (and imported from overseas) is in question,” it says (pp 129-130).

--That's the first half of the article. You can read the whole piece on The Drum.

Megalogenis's growth propaganda rebuked - Quarterly Essay

2011-03-10T17:00:00.000-08:00

[Note: George Megalogenis is a journalist who writes for Murdoch's Australian newspaper, and embodies many of its views. For background see my previous posting: Murdoch's Australian pro-growth propaganda machine.]

I had not particularly focussed on George Megalogenis's views till he became the author of the summer edition of Australian Quarterly Essay (no. 40).

In the following issue, no. 41, just out in early March 2011, I published a lengthy rejoinder dissecting his views and showing how little substance there was behind his confident front.

In his right of reply (in the same issue) Megalogenis tried to slide past my criticisms, "I enjoyed Mark O'Connor's contribution, even when it got a tiny bit personal". But he has clearly learned nothing. He was soon using the same kind of circular logic, plus factitious accounts of Australian political history similar to those I had dissected in his original article. For instance:

"There are too many examples of Australia taking the soft option in its history. Slowing population growth and erecting the tariff wall were the easy things to do after Federation... That's why I err on the side of growth; it helps keeps Australia younger than most and increases the chances that one of the new intake, or their children, or one of their locals, will come up with a smarter way to live with our boom-bust ecology. Then there is the live case study of New South Wales, the only state in the federation that actively pursued a slower population-growth policy over the past decade. Two things happened to New South Wales. Its population grew at half the national figure --as intended -- but so did its gross state product. [Fancy those frustrated Sydney commuters not realizing that their problems were due to Sydney not growing fast enough !] ... All roads in the reform debate lead to the dead end of New South Wales, the state with arguably the shortest attention span. The NSW disease infected national politics under Howard Mark II, Rudd, and now Gillard...."

Like Colonel Gaddafi, George Megalogenis often seems to inhabit a parallel universe where laws of logic and relevance do not apply, and where a version of history can be found to validate whatever one wishes to believe. Perhaps it was a waste of my time to take issue with someone like this. But here is my rejoinder to his original article.

---

George Megalogenis's essay Trivial Pursuit: Leadership and the end of the reform era

(Quarterly Essay no. 40, December 2010)

Comment

George Megalogenis is a very talented fellow. Astute and witty, sane yet mordant, he illuminates the oddities of Australian politics. He plows through political exchanges most of us never got to the bottom of; yet he keeps us entertained, and every now and then flashes out with a witticism Oscar Wilde might have envied. Thus he remarks on the Menzies-Murdoch controversy “I think a reverse burden of proof should apply in these cases: a politician should be assumed to be paranoid unless he can prove otherwise” (page 81). He also describes Hawke and Keating last year as “Like two old bulls who didn’t know when to stop charging”. One can forgive the odd oversimplification when it leads to quotes as memorable as these.

Such were my first impressions as I skimmed the piece. Then I got a jolt on page 24 where he accuses Julia Gillard of “joining the dots from the boats [i.e. boat-people] to the immigration numbers to the population debate”, and claims in the same breath that “the notion of a sustainable Australia” was “a dogwhistle” that Julia herself had invented. This is simply too tendentious to pass. The fact that Megalogenis has (fairly clearly) no understanding of the sustainable population issue does not give him the right to malign those who do see it as a major policy issue; and the implied conflation of boat-people and immigration numbers is simply innumerate. Boat people number in the very low thousands a year, whereas gross immigration has been over 500,000, and net migration close to 300,000. The boat-people are all but irrelevant to the population debate; immigration numbers emphatically are not. Differentiation please, George!

As yet my response was not so much annoyance as an old editor’s instinct to protect authors from themselves, to say in effect: “Hang on! Do you need to say that? You just might be losing (or confusing) half of your audience there.” —Or in this case at least 70%. Research in People and Place[i] shows that barely 30% of Australians accept George’s view that Australia needs more people, and one might suspect only a minority of that 30% would deny that the sustainable population camp has a valid point.

Yet, the problem recurred. Population policy, it seems, is his King Charles’s head — it gets in everywhere; and each time it does, there is something strange about Megalogenis’s take on it. Oddities start on page 1 with his imaginary letter to Murdoch during the 2010 election campaign: “Dear Rupert … Neither candidate deserves to win. Julia won’t talk the country up, Tony keeps talking it down.” This is simply untrue unless he is referring not to nationalist rhetoric but specifically to Murdoch’s and the Australian’s agenda of promoting indefinite growth of Australia’s population under the slogan of “big Australia” —in which case it is also untrue. Neither leader promised any end to Australia’s rapid population growth, only a certain scaling back in the speed of it. Neither would stop paying baby bonuses. We need to remember that Australia’s annual rate of population growth has been running at nearly twice Indonesia’s, and between four and six times the average of industrialised countries.

A few lines later Megalogenis goes further, asserting that in the election campaign both leaders screwily “competed for the right to shrink the nation”. This again makes little sense unless he is talking primarily about population — in which case it still makes little sense! With natural increase (surplus of births over deaths) running at well over 100,000 a year, no political party, not even the new Stable Population Party which wants to keep net migration (immigrants minus emigrants) around zero, does or could offer any current program for “shrinking the nation”. The statement, as made, is innumerate, and extremist.

A central thesis of the Essay is that our politicians showed lack of courage and idealism by giving in to those who made the most noise on (a) population and (b) emissions. Yet Megalogenis’s easy amalgamation of these two causes makes little sense. The climate sceptics party in 2010 got only 0.03% of the vote, as he himself admits; whereas those who want population growth scaled back are not some claque but a vast majority of Australians, and even of immigrant Australians, and are backed by an array of experts.

Though he can’t leave the topic of population policy alone, Megalogenis shows no signs of having done his homework in the area. I get the feeling that it’s an emotional issue for him, one on which he can’t bear to read those who disagree with him. There is, for instance, no reference to Flannery, or to Barry Jones. The Australian Academy of Science’s warning that to push population beyond 23 million (not far from the present 22.5 million) would damage both the environment and the quality of life of future generations, has clearly passed him by.[ii] So has Birrell and Healy’s demonstration that it is simply impossible to reduce our greenhouse emissions in the way Rudd promised if we let population blow out towards Treasury’s prediction of 32 million by 2050. Also missing is CSIRO’s Future Dilemmas report —still our most detailed look at Australia’s future options.

Megalogenis ignores the Australian Conservation Foundation’s formidably documented nomination of population growth as a threatening process for the Australian environment, and likewise the stern warnings about population growth in Australia’s recent State of the Environment reports and in Australia’s official report to the UN on its rapid loss of biodiversity. He seems unaware of resource depletion and Peak Oil; and he badly needs to read the Carr Report’s lucid warnings against the Ageing Population Scare, and against the myth (which seems an article of faith for Megalogenis) that pushing up population makes us wealthier.[iii]

Indeed this growthist view, though universally advocated by the Murdoch Press’s economics and politics writers, has only patchy support from economic and political writers elsewhere in what I am tempted to call the free press. Economists as varied as Saul Eslake and Richard Denniss demur. As Ross Gittins puts it, “the economic case for rapid population growth is surprisingly weak”; indeed two recent comprehensive articles by Gittins leave the growthist case in tatters.[iv]

Interestingly, this Essay’s publication coincided with the latest edition of Dissent, in which the former Queensland Labor Minister Andrew McNamara argues that "Any talk of sustainability without a commitment to population stabilisation is not just spin; it is a dangerous lie", and accuses Gillard, Abbott and the Greens of failing “to call for the massive cut to immigration levels that is necessary to be creditable on the environment”.

Megalogenis suggests that Gillard’s populist cowardice led her to invent an imaginary population problem, or alternatively to project upon other Australian cities an urban congestion problem that primarily affected Sydney. (“Gillard’s Sydney-led race to the bottom on immigration”, page 22). This sounds tendentious. In fact FOI material recently obtained by the West Australian shows that the Prime Minister’s own department warned her that “demographic pressures will negatively affect living standards, particularly in cities, as housing prices rise, congestion increases and it becomes more difficult to access services." Also that voter anger is rising, based on “the perception that the quality of city life is declining [which] is supported by declining measures of liveability (including from greater congestion and longer commuting times) … and a lack of affordable housing." [v]

Yet Megalogenis talks as if population growth was a sort of free lunch to which only foolish populists could object. There are paragraphs of pure Murdochery like the claim on page 25 that “We should be expanding the immigration program to mine the youth belts of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Continental Europe… Pay their airfares if need be”. Concerns about urban congestion and commute times are sneered out of existence. (“Voters were more worried about congestion, about asylum-seekers, about any damn thing really.” p. 21).

As for the environment — who cares if it takes another hit? Treasury Secretary Ken Henry admitted in 2009 to being appalled at the thought of the further damage population growth to 32 million by 2050 would probably do: “Must it mean an even greater loss of biodiversity - difficult as that might be to imagine, given our history of species extermination?” Megalogenis magisterially brushes the issue away. “I’m prepared to argue that Australia is better off putting the people ahead of the services, and taking the risk of straining the environment in the short term” , he says on page 24. (And just when would this short term be over?)

There follows a seriously loopy attempt to claim that Sydney’s congestion is due to Labor’s not being willing to grow the city as fast as Brisbane.

None of this shows any lack of intelligence; but there is willfulness, and a lack of rigor. Argument is largely lacking in Megalogenis’s essay. Mostly he just asserts, or else narrates a highly selected story. There is of course some awkwardness in a Murdoch journalist offering us an account of how our politics are corrupted by media influence and plutocracy. His demand for even higher immigration strikes me as an odd amalgam of Murdoch-press growthism camouflaged by what might be called the migrant pride stance: we immigrant Australians must be an endless benefit to Australia, otherwise we might be in your debt for taking us in, and that would wound our pride.

The oddities of viewpoint grow as the Essay proceeds. Gillard’s “back-sliding on immigration”, he tells us on page 11, reflected “the policy cowardice of the times.” Well yes, Gillard did backslide, in the face of business and media pressure (some of it applied by Megalogenis himself) on her initial promise to break with “big Australia”.

When Scott Morrison persuaded Tony Abbott, shortly before the 2010 election, to promise a small but symbolic reduction in the Immigration Department’s projected future levels of net migration (from 190,000 a year to 170,000), she refused to match it. But one gets the feeling that this is not what Megalogenis means. In his lexicon, ‘backsliding on immigration” means suggesting the public’s wishes should be respected.

Gillard’s real backsliding came at a cost. The population vote, which she had seemed sure of, slipped away while she and Tony Burke havered; and most of it wound up with the Greens, nearly costing her government. But Megalogenis can’t accept this moral. He pretends it was her initial promise to break with big Australia that cost her the public’s respect. Granted that the public solidly opposes big Australia, this is implausible.

But then, Megalogenis is ambiguous about public opinion, and indeed democracy. To the business Right (by which I mean roughly the ideology that emanates from the Australian newspaper) democracy means not government by the people or for the people so much as government of the people by those who know best.

When he does try to take on the other side in this debate, it becomes clear he has only the vaguest idea where they are coming from. For instance, one deep concern about Australia’s rapid population growth is to do with house prices, “mortgage slavery”, and the pressure on marriages, families, and quality of life as both partners are forced to work full-time and overtime, etc. Yet Megalogenis tells us we should be grateful (page 21) that “large-scale immigration kept our house prices rising”. He slightly distances himself (page 25) from “the business case for immigration”, but still sees nothing much wrong with the argument that we need the world’s highest per capita immigration rate “because they [the immigrants] will pay well above the reserve for your house.” Note that “your”. It is assumed the reader is a house-seller, or a house-speculator, rather than a house buyer.

There are odd points in the piece where he suggests that he sees himself as being roughly where he claims most Australians are: a little Left of centre. He could not be more wrong! George is clearly of the big-business Right — by which I mean not necessarily intolerant on social issues, but anti-populist, rigid in its belief that what matters most is the economy, and pro whatever conditions help the rich (and therefore, he would argue, most of the rest of us) get richer. These conditions, it seems, include indefinite growth of GDP and of population.

In an essay full of false segues, the crucial failure comes on pages 17-25, just before he asks “So when did polling gain the right of veto over policies such as immigration and climate change?” Megalogenis tries to show that Gillard’s and Abbott’s hostility to immigration was based on slavish following of the polls when evidence and logic pointed the other way. But neither is in fact hostile to immigration; both seem to be partly defying the polls on both issues; and Megalogenis fails to show that much evidence or logic are on his side. At this point his essay’s structure is in tatters.

It’s not that one couldn’t tell a fascinating narrative — beginning perhaps with the Howard Government’s 1999 promise that Australia’s population wouldn’t need capping because it was only heading for 23.5 million[vi] — about how our politicians sold out the national interest on population policy. But first Megalogenis would need to make a cogent argument (a) that the national interest demands rapid population growth, (b) that the politicians knew that, and (c) that they found or were offered improper inducements to change what should have been their decision.

Megalogenis does none of these things, and especially not the last, because of course the truth is the reverse of what he claims. Strong inducements were offered, especially in the form of electoral “donations” and media support (both carrot and stick), but these were offered by those on his side of the debate. His essay tells us nothing of the tactics (which Dick Smith has described) by which various vested interests (employer groups, white-goods sellers, property speculators, media moguls) constantly badger the government to increase population growth. Instead he attempts to invert the story. The entire blow-out in immigration under Howard and Rudd seems to be (to judge from his sub-title “leadership and the end of the reform era”) a “reform” carried out by decisive leaders.

I had no idea, when I began to pull at some strands in Megalogenis’s logic, that a full analysis of it would prove so destructive. The experience was like trying to pull off a surplus thread from one of those magnificent bulky-knit sweaters — only to find that instead of perfecting the garment’s appearance you have somehow tugged loose what binds it, and are left with a mess of tangled threads.

So what remains of Megalogenis’s thesis? The fact that Australian politics is in a cowardly and mendacious and media-driven phase? True, but as he says at the start, we knew that already. What his Essay might have offered was a philosophically accurate account of the moral mess, plus an authoritative history of how it got that way, and some possible remedies. That task is largely still to do.

[End]

[i] See Betts, K 2010b, ‘Attitudes to immigration and population growth in Australia 1954 to 2010: an overview’ in People and Place, 18(3), 2010, pp. 32-51.

[ii] See http://www.science.org.au/events/sats/sats1994/Population2040-section8.pdf

[iii] Sustainable Development Panel Report, 2010 , at <http://www.environment.gov.au/sustainability/population/publications/pubs/sustainable-development-panel-report.pdf >

[iv] See “Punters well aware of economic case against more immigration”, SMH November 24, 2010; and “A few facts would be useful in the migration debate”, SMH December 11, 2010.

[v] “City life in decline, PM warned”, by Shane Wright, Economics editor, The West Australian December 20, 2010, http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/breaking/8536559/city-life-in-decline/

[vi] Australian Government response to the Jones Report on carrying capacity, AGPS, 1999.

Murdoch's Australian pro-growth propaganda machine

2011-03-10T16:35:00.000-08:00

Perhaps the most blatant misuse of media power in Australia today is the Murdoch Press's pro-growth propaganda.

It is an open secret that no one gets a senior journalistic position in the Murdoch Press (at least in any of the areas related to economic or political news) who is not a proponent of endless growth. Editorials regularly demand "growth" and excoriate doubters. Writers often see themselves not as investigative journalists -- there is less and less of that -- but as Murdoch's cattledogs, whose job is to herd politicians and public figures in the right direction, and to punish with a sharp nip on the rump anyone not actively attending to the boss's agenda. Growth is understood in the simplest and naivest terms, not even as GDP per capita but simply as gross domestic product.

It is not hard to see how this benefits Murdoch's interests. You don't get to own so much of the world's media without aggressively leveraging your initial capital. In plain English, you take risks, and possibly larger risks than your shareholders or bankers would be happy with if they knew what was going on. Many such venturers crash and wind up in jail; and even many who seem to have made it to the top, like the Canadian media tycoon Maxwell, eventually take one chance too many. Any sort of downturn in economic growth threatens such men (they are almost all men to date) because that's when bankers become narky about loan security, and start refusing to renew loans. Hence such fast-mushrooming tycoons loathe any notion of economic downturn, or even of a level or Steady State economy.

As well, of course, a media tycoon benefits directly from population growth. More people equals more customers, and also more stuff being sold (and hence more advertising revenue). In particular, population growth inflates house prices, and the steeper these become the more lavishly house sales are promoted, and the greater the revenue from real estate advertisements.

It is to the credit of the Fairfax papers that while basically pro-growth they allow alternative opinions. The economics editors of the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald seem to speak from another world.

Senior Murdoch journalists know that they would not have their jobs if they did not follow the Murdoch line, and in some cases might not be able to get jobs as journalists or as senior journalists at all without their willingness to write to order. They cover any sense of inferiority and any pangs of conscience with an aggressive and often hysterical defensiveness. Anyone who questions their peculiar mindset must be scoffed out of existence or represented as an extremist.

Within this narrow church there are individual differences of viewpoint. Even Murdoch cannot get a staff of fellow tycoons to write for him, and so he must often use journalistics whose conservative or rightwing views come from a slightly different source than his own. Conservative Catholics like the Shanahans are prominent on the staff of The Australian. These sometimes have reactionary views on, for instance, global warming that Murdoch himself does not share. Others get away with being less socially conservative, so long as they are firmly with the business Right on issues like the need for endless growth of population and GDP. . .

[I wrote the above originally as a lead-in to the piece on George Megalogenis, but decided it is better as a free-standing comment.]

Postscript:

A day before I published this post (I have since discovered) Bob Ellis published on ABC's The Drum a piece called Murdoch at 80: Lear on the Heath. It attacks not so much Murdoch's Australian newspapers as Murdoch and his international operations. It's a wild and whirling piece, in typical Bob Ellis style, but worth a look. It certainly makes my criticisms look restrained, even though (as one would expect with Ellis) it is largely uncritical of Murdoch's growth-propaganda.

A graph of Australia's recent population growth.

2011-03-06T06:40:00.000-08:00

It's surprisingly hard to find a clear graph of Australia's recent population growth. (See below).

A little background. Australia's annual rate of population growth is bizarrely high. Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) figures for recent quarters have fluctuated between 1.8, 2.1% and 1.7% (the most recent). Depending on which table of world statistics you use, this is between 6 and 4 times the average rate for industrialized countries. Indeed many Third World countries have lower growth rates. For instance Australia's neighbor Indonesia is growing at about 1.2% a year, and making efforts to reduce this figure.

I went looking for a historical graph of Australia's population, googled "graph of Australia's population", and was amazed to find nothing very clear or recent. Though the data is readily available from Wikipedia and ABS, no one seemed to have turned it into a graph, except for a rather miniature one labelled "ESTIMATED RESIDENT POPULATION" that ABS provides (for the years 1989 to 2009).

I am indebted to R. Cully for the larger graph below, and for permission to put it in the public domain. Also of course to ABS for the underlying information. So now we have a good historical graph of how Australia's population has grown over the past 110 years.

From the same sources, here are two maps that disprove two other common myths:

(1) that Australia's population growth is due purely to net migration (the surplus of immigrants over emigrants) and owes little to natural increase (the surplus of births over deaths).

And (2) that the government should pay a baby bonus, because "births in Australia are not keeping up with deaths" (Costello, Bracks, and various lobby groups).

Ken Henry, Treasury Secretary, says Australia's sustainable population is about 15 million.

2011-03-05T07:23:00.000-08:00

Ken Henry has delivered his last speech as Treasury Secretary, and in it has suggested that Australia's sustainable population is about 15 million persons, some 8 million less than currently, and less than half what it is predicted to have by 2050.

In 2009 Ken Henry ignited the population debate by remarking that he was "profoundly pessimistic" about Australia's ability to safeguard its environmental heritage if population grew as predicted. (He was referring to a Treasury projection that Australia's population might grow from 22 million to 36 million by 2050.)

As a result, ABC TV's veteran current-affairs presenter Kerry O'Brien woke from a 20-year slumber on the population issue and asked Prime Minister Kevin Rudd a question about Ken Henry's remarks. Rudd, whose minders seemingly hadn't briefed him to expect a question on population, promptly claimed responsibility for the recent blow-out in Australia's annual population growth. (This had reached a more-than- Third-World rate of 2.1%, and without the slightest electoral mandate. Rudd when running for office had concealed his intention to raise immigration). Public reaction was savage. Even the pro-growth Australian newspaper admitted in an editorial that "Labor's focus groups went ballistic". Rudd's stock's tumbled, and Labor's approval rating never again passed 50%.

Six months later Rudd fell, nearly taking Labor with him. The story is told at more length in the preface to the 4th edition of Overloading Australia: How governments and media dither and deny on population, by Mark O'Connor and William Lines, available from http://www.australianpoet.com/docs/oa_order_form.pdf

Now in a speech on March 4th, his last working day as Treasury Secretary, Henry has returned to the population issue.

According to a transcript of the ABC TV program Lateline he told his audience at the Giblin Lecture:

A sustainable population for Australia, well I don't know, maybe 15 million, something like that, that's one-five not five-zero.

It is evident in the environmental degradation that one sees, the loss of biodiversity, species extinction and so on, it's very clear that the population growth that we've experienced to date, to give us a population of 21, 22 million has not been sustainable population growth in that sense.

However Henry seems to have something in common with those growth-economists who assure us that environmental problems can be solved by good "planning", without the need to cap population, since he added

And yet I can imagine a set of policies, a set of regulations, a set of taxes which would be commensurate with a sustainable population considerably larger than the one we have today.

Perhaps he differs from the extreme optimists, like Glenn Withers and Peter McDonald, in his willingness to recognise that we have limited ability to improve the current system, and that therefore under current circumstances more people = more environmental damage.

An Environmental History of Australia

2011-03-05T06:36:00.000-08:00

A Short Environmental History of Australia

by Mark O’Connor

As published in The Edinburgh Review, no. 128, February 2008 -- (A special edition about Australia).

There are few things more pleasing than the contemplation of order and useful arrangement arising gradually out of tumult and confusion; and perhaps this satisfaction cannot anywhere be more fully enjoyed than where settlement of civilised people is fixing itself upon a newly discovered or savage coast. The wild appearance of the land entirely untouched by cultivation, the close and perplexed growing of trees… are the first objects that present themselves… But by degrees large spaces are opened, plans are formed, lines marked, and a prospect at least of future regularity is clearly discerned.

(Captain Arthur Phillip, first Governor of New South Wales, describing the new colony, 1789)

When you, gentlemen, first got your estates your ground was well furnished with beautiful shrubs. You ignorantly set the murderous hoe and grubbing axe to work to destroy them, and the ground that had been full of luxurious verdure was laid bare and desolate… No person of taste who has seen the rocks which border the shores of Port Jackson [Sydney Harbour], and the beautiful trees, flowering shrubs, rock lilies and other plants growing there indigenous in masses and groups, unequalled by the art of man, must but admire them. No rocky scene in England or Scotland can be compared with it.

(Thomas Shepherd,

Australia

's first professional gardener, 1830s)

Since 1788 the ecology of Australia’s dry continent has been profoundly affected by the verbal filters through which Anglo-Celtic or English-speaking Australians perceive it.

Many of the terms they found for Australia’s strangeness, like ‘Down Under’ and ‘Topsy-turvy Land’, were unhelpful, even silly. The best term was already in use for one of Britain’s earlier conquests: ‘the new world’. North America was the new world only in the sense that it was like the old world, being a sort of second Europe, with (thanks to a recent land-bridge across the Bering Straits) much the same trees and animals.

But Australia was genuinely new. It was hard for folk from the UK to understand its climates (forever alternating between droughts and floods), its rivers that flowed inland and vanished, its eucalypt forests that seemed immemorial yet might burn to a cinder tomorrow, and its lack of topsoil (or of the rich glacial and volcanic sub-soils of other continents).

Above all, in its extraordinary biology, Australia seemed like a second and separate creation. Gone were the placental mammals of other continents (apart from a few rodents that had been rafted there, one of which was evolving into a sort of otter, plus of course the recently introduced dingo). In their place was a whole suite of marsupial grazers, predators, and arboreal animals. Plus platypus and echidna, two diverse survivors from an unknown era when mammals laid eggs. A symbol of Australia’s otherness might be the bounding two-legged gait of the kangaroo, so different from that of European ungulates, yet clearly and robustly efficient.

Australia

was, and still is, even though much trashed and abused, a treasure-house of biodiversity. Its biological regions vary from high mountain snowfields to tropical rainforests, and then to tropical, sub-tropical, and temperate deserts, sclerophyll forests, and grasslands. Indeed it was taken and settled by Great Britain partly for ecological or botanical reasons.

Sir Joseph Banks, a passionate botanist, paid £10,000 towards (and to be part of) Lieutenant James Cook’s expedition that explored eastern Australia. It was Banks who some years later (in 1786) helped make sure that Britain’s next colony would be in Australia, and at one of his two landing spots. He misinformed HMG that the climate of Botany Bay (Sydney region) was ‘similar to that about Toulouse in the south of France’– though he knew that the real parallels in latitude were with North Africa. Intending colonists were fed a similar line. To this day Australia’s first and most populous state is known as New South Wales (hereafter NSW) rather than, say, New Morocco or New North Africa.

The botanic riches of Australia probably lay behind Banks’s recommendation. The lure of finding new species glittered like gold in people’s imagination then – a point well made in David Attenborough’s Amazing Rare Things exhibition, which was recently on show at the Queen’s Gallery, Edinburgh. And Banks had a special interest in ‘economic botany’. He understood, perhaps better than anyone else in Britain, how much the wealth and power (and the populations) of the empire depended on certain new plants that Columbus and others had found in the Americas. Beans, pumpkins, maize, pawpaw, potato, tomato, tobacco, peanuts, sweet potato, were already important; but Banks might have guessed the future rise of crops like capsicum, avocado, custard apple, passionfruit, rubber, blueberry, cranberry, asimina (‘North American pawpaw’), tomatillo, pepino, cherimoya, quinoa, yacon, oca, pecan, naranjillo, hickory, casimiroa, feijoa, tamarillo, casana, cocona, cocoa, and more. Once enough new-world crops had been added to the existing old-world range, there was a profitable crop for almost any region, from the acid peats of Ireland to the alkaline soils of coral atolls. The sweet potato, for instance, had led to the clearing and farming of much of upland Asia.

Union of these two crop-suites is still far from complete, even after 500 years. It was delayed by the old world’s sluggishness in accepting new and often frost-tender crops. It became not an explosion but a sort of steady propulsion down the centuries behind humanity’s rocketing growth. As the Australian National University geographer Michael Bourke points out, the modern world is still living off the dividends.

Banks might have been even more excited had he known the truth (which perhaps he glimpsed at Botany Bay). Australia is not, as the maps of his day suggested, a mere extension of SE Asia, but a drifting relict of Gondwanaland, and the world’s most long-isolated habitable continent. Radically new crops and herds might come from such a place. Moreover, the separation between Australia and the much larger continent of Antarctica is quite recent. (One side of the rift valley produced is still visible in the spectacular cliffs of the Great Australian Bight.) If the innumerable lost species of Antarctica, which was not always polar, are to be found other than as fossils under Antarctic ice, it will be in Australia. What riches might Australia’s vastness, once properly explored, bring Britain and the world?

The explorers did meet plenty of promising species. Australia had mound-building ‘scrub-hens’, which consort readily with domestic hens and lay excellent eggs a third their own body-weight. It had edible wombats and emus, almost begging to be domesticated—in vain. It had geese, ducks, and ‘plains turkeys’. It had over a hundred edible fruits, including a collection of wild citrus and rubus as promising as any continent’s. One of its so-called ‘native grapes’ Tetrastigma nitens was already comparable in size and flavor with the best domesticated grapes. It had delicious chestnut-sized bunya nuts, and heavy-bearing large-seeded acacias from whose seeds Aborigines made high-protein flour. It had wild grasses, unrelated to those of the fertile crescent, whose grains had long been a staple for desert Aborigines. Even its spectacular semi-edible ‘kangaroo apple’ Solanum aviculare was at least as promising a candidate for domestication as the original tomato, being productive, perennial and frost-hardy to boot.

The hungry settlers did eagerly sample ‘native fruits’, yet found most of them disappointing. In Asia monkeys and apes offer rapid dispersal for seeds, and trees respond by evolving large sweet fruits to tempt them. Most Australian trees relied on birds, and produced small acrid or sour fruits. Above all, the Aborigines who had occupied Australia for about 60,000 years (far longer than Europe has been habitable) seem not to have cultivated trees or developed varieties. It was as if the apple, instead of being steadily improved for millennia, had been left in the same semi-edible state as the rowan. By contrast in New Guinea, a part of the Australasian plate that became a separate island only about nine thousand years ago, agricultural societies did develop, and numerous crops were found. Sugarcane, taro, bananas and breadfruit may well have originated there.

Yet in every case the early settlers, faced with the problem of quickly establishing themselves in a harsh environment, preferred to use or adapt already familiar crops. They simply could not afford the many generations of selective breeding (even if they had fully understood the process) to turn wild plants and animals into reliable crops or flocks. The same globalisation that had brought the British to Australia was making it impossible for the world to adopt new crops, unless a wild fruit or grain was already comparable to what centuries or millennia of improvement had achieved with domestic species. (One need only consider the ongoing neglect of so many of the ‘lost crops of the Incas’, and of two of the world’s finest fruits, cherimoya and feijoa.) Only one Australian species, the macadamia, a sub-tropical nut as good as domesticated hazels, proved competitive without much alteration. (Yet there too the early settlers were out of luck; they did not realize it was safe to eat.)

Thus ‘Botany Bay’ became a receiver rather than a donor of new species. The settlers embarked on an orgy of often disastrous introductions: starlings, sparrows, mynahs, rabbits, foxes, trout, water buffalos, camels, prickly-pear cactus, scotch thistles (introduced by a sentimental Scot); and later two bizarrely misconceived ‘biological controls’, gambusia fish (‘mosquito fish’) and giant toads; plus the unintended stowaways: rats, mice, garden snails, and weeds galore… as well, of course, as more useful crops and herds. (One of the latest arrivals, courtesy of container shipping, has been the European wasp.) The settlers did adapt many of their new crops to Australian conditions. Famously, they replaced the UK’s lanky wheats and stubby sheep with short drought-adapted wheats and long-legged merino sheep.

It was only in recent decades that CSIRO (Australia’s premium scientific research body) set out to help some Australian species ‘catch up’. They started with the desert quandong, a relative of sandalwood, that boasts an appealing cherry-sized fruit as well as an almond-sized edible nut. There were a series of steps: identifying economic potential, solving the problems of propagation by grafting or tissue culture, then having knowledgeable botanists collect cuttings or seed from promising trees across the species’s wide range, and finally growing a large orchard of such trees from which one or more cultivars might be selected. The ‘winning’ specimen promptly became the world’s most amputated tree, supplying twigs for hundreds of grafts. Quandong orchards are now in fashion, and many thousands of the new cultivar have been planted.

There have been similar successes since, most recently with the Australian desert lime Citrus glauca, both a good fruit and a promising rootstock for other citruses in dry or alkaline regions. There are many others – details can be found by googling ‘bush food’ – yet most of the new crops are as yet largely of ‘boutique’ or gourmet interest.

To return to the pioneers. Those who would soon call themselves the Australians found they now owned the partly unwanted and sometimes resented heritage of a stunning biological richness but one that was not much suited to feed or clothe humans.

Creating wealth and comfort involved introducing domestic animals, from honey bees (originally absent) to cattle, and destroying native ecologies. So began the age of introduced animals. Humans would in the long run prove the most damaging of these, with their endlessly expanding demands for consumer goods, food, and export earnings. Yet stunning damage was quickly done by three other early arrivals: fox, cat, and rabbit.

Early explorers reported dozens of small native marsupials, both herbivores and carnivores, that they saw every day: wallabies, bandicoots, potoroos, bettongs, bilbies, quolls, numbats, ‘hopping mice’, etc. Within decades almost all had vanished – down the throats of introduced cats and foxes. (The selfishness of those who introduced foxes to mainland Australia, so that gentlemen could have a more familiar animal to hunt, has been surpassed only by that of those as yet unknown persons who recently introduced foxes to the island state of Tasmania – perhaps as a revenge on conservationists. It is also difficult to praise the Tasmanian politicians who did not then make fox eradication a priority.)

Yet predators, however efficient, need their prey animals, and can rarely wipe them out unless there is some other source of food. That source was the introduced rabbit, which bred unstoppably, having left behind its own diseases and parasites. The damage done by rabbit plagues is famous. What we may never know is how many plant species they wiped out as they ate the country bare. This went on till the 1950s when CSIRO introduced a lethal strain of myxomatosis, and then around 2000, as rabbits began to develop immunity to ‘myxo’, calicivirus. The rabbit plagues had a faint silver lining. Nobody starved in Australia during the Depression – though many got awfully tired of eating rabbit! CSIRO had another great success when it introduced the cactoblastis insect and saved much of Australia from vanishing under prickly-pear.

With fox and cat, it seems it was the combination of two unfamiliar predators that drove most species to extinction. In Tasmania, in parts of the central deserts where foxes cannot find drinking water, and in parts of northern Australia that foxes seem to find too hot, many more small marsupial species survive. Elsewhere the small species vanished and were soon forgotten, but the big kangaroos that live in the open often proliferated as the land was cleared. Thousands of small dams, intended for cattle, allowed kangaroos to live permanently in the semi-arid regions and to exterminate many plants during the droughts. Kangaroo and emu became the iconic Australian animals, that hold up the Australian coat of arms. The ‘real’ mammal ecology of Australia had largely perished by 1900. Or perhaps it had vanished thousands of years earlier, when the diverse marsupial megafauna ‘vanished’ (as some prefer to say – though there is little doubt that in Australia, as on some other continents, hunting by early humans was a major cause). The ‘giant’ kangaroos of today, a little under two metres tall, are really the babies of the kangaroo set.

The ecology European settlers encountered was already much modified, not just by the omnipresent Aboriginal hunters but by the fire regime they imposed. In Australia one should not ask ‘Has this forest been burned?’ but ‘When was it last burned?’ The dominant eucalypts (‘gum trees’) are what Californians have recently learned to call ‘fire weeds’. Their inflammable oils create hot fires that destroy other species (and often themselves). Phoenixes of the tree world, their seeds usually germinate only after fire, and from their own ashes. The giant Eucalyptus regnans, the world’s tallest flowering plants, reach sequoia-like heights in just 300 years. Yet they are dead of old age by around 400 years. 500 years without a major fire might see them extinct. But these are plants of semi-rainforests. For smaller eucalypts growing in drier areas, fire may be needed each hundred years, or fifty, or even ten!

The Aborigines obliged. In several regions they constantly set fire to the country as they travelled across it. They did this partly so they could always tell where the rest of a foraging band were, and partly to maintain habitats or to ‘clean up the country’ – to make it passable and to bring on green grass for the animals they hunted. (They also used fire as a hunting tool.) As a result, some researchers believe, dangerous large fires were rare, and much of the country was a varied mosaic of patches in different stages of recovery from relatively cool blazes. (The archaeologist Rhys Jones dubbed this ‘firestick farming’.) Early explorers often described the resulting effect as ‘park like’, and imagined that it was natural. The numerous small marsupial species they found were the survivors that had adapted to these conditions.

Today those who seek to preserve Australia’s forests indefinitely from logging and woodchipping are often accused of folly. ‘If you don’t harvest it, it will burn sooner or later, and the carbon will go into the atmosphere.’ (Not that the loggers show much willingness to leave the ‘old-growth’ rainforests alone.) Fire-fighting techniques keep improving, but there is such a thing as ‘fire weather’, especially during Australia’s el niño years, when forest fires can be unstoppable.

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I have taken a detour through ‘economic botany’ in part as preparation for a theme that runs through Australia’s ecological history: the clash between the desire to protect biodiversity versus the need of an ever-growing ever-richer human population to make a quid from it. Australians are genuinely proud of their wildlife. They protect it, and allow only a handful of its species to be shot. (As a magistrate’s son, I remember how often during the 1970s recent immigrants from Europe were up before the beak for assuming they could go out and shoot the birds ‘for sport’.) Most graziers like having a few kangaroos on their property, and urban gardeners tolerate the nightly rampages and unwelcome prunings of the omnipresent brushtail possum – a protected animal. The extreme case of tolerance is found in tropical Australia where the once-endangered crocodile is now totally protected. As a result, its numbers have built up enormously, making it impossible for humans to swim in most inland or ocean waters – no small sacrifice to make in the hot tropics!

Another success story has been the ‘high country’ of the Australian Alps (aka Snowy Mountains) south of Sydney. This was treated as a communal stock reserve to which vast herds and flocks were driven in time of drought, with devastating results. The practice was stopped in NSW in the 1950s, but only much more slowly repressed on the southern side (in Victoria). Banjo Paterson’s iconic poem ‘The Man from Snowy River’ (though it is not in fact set in the mountains) is regularly trotted out as proof that Australians will lose their heritage if the ‘mountain cattlemen’ are not allowed to graze the mountains.

Australia

today has large national parks and is a world leader in managing them, sometimes with the help of Aboriginal communities. Protected Area Management (Oxford University Press, 2001) by Worboys, Lockwood and De Lacy, an encyclopedia of the skills practiced by Australia’s park rangers, proved so ground-breaking that in 2006 it was expanded and re-issued with the support of the IUCN as Managing Protected Areas: a Global Guide.

Yet habitats and species are vanishing. Bandicoots for instance. The mammal extinctions that occurred a hundred years ago in southern Australia are now, for reasons not entirely understood, but including no doubt the relentless spread of the imported toads, sweeping into the north. Tim Flannery has suggested that National Parks may no longer be the answer for conserving small mammals. Yet the vast effort by conservationists that has seen 10.7% of Australia incorporated into a strategic network of protected areas will not be wasted. Under predicted climate-change some parks will become, at particular times, more important refugia for particular species, but all will be useful. The rangers have a fascinating project, called Alps to Atherton, to create linking corridors of natural vegetation, with the help of private landowners, between Australia’s East-coast national parks, all the way from north to south, as a precaution against global warming.

Attitudes to Australia’s biodiversity remain mixed. A group of giant kangaroos drifting across the landscape at speed, in a kind of effortless low-level pogo-ing flight, is an inspirational sight. But not if they are crushing, or eating, the crops by which you hope to make a living.

Many people in Australia assign a very high, almost religious value, to conserving ‘nature’. Yet contrary views of the natural world as alien and threatening (for instance in the stories and news-dramas of children lost in the bush) are also widespread. So too is a developer’s or industrialist’s view of the natural world as a mere source of raw materials that is ‘wasted’ if not exploited. For instance the cosmologist Paul Davies has complained of Australia’s Top End rivers ‘going to waste’ in that they are allowed to flow into the ocean, instead of being reticulated into a network of cities. (He forgot that the lucrative prawn-fishing industry would collapse if the wet-season floods no longer reached the sea.) A given individual may also hold different and incompatible attitudes on different occasions.

To describe the literary side of this story—the progression from authors like Henry Lawson who saw the landscape as monotonous bush (‘nothing to relieve the eye’) to those like Judith Wright who respected its complexity—would take another essay; but it is clear that a foreign tradition of appreciating landscape can be almost as lethal as none at all. Many who destroyed Australia’s wonders were not immune to beauty, yet might have said like the poet Elizabeth Riddell ‘But I was thinking of something English, out of a book’.

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Can the fauna be made useful? Native-meat enthusiasts argue Australians should ‘farm kangaroos’ since they do far less damage per beast than hard-hooved cattle. But they also produce far less meat. ‘Bush-tucker for a population of 21 million is nothing but a wet-dream (unfortunately), just like the delusion of continuous economic growth,’ environmentalist Sheila Newman wrote recently. Kangaroo meat is lean, muscular and tasty, but often comes encumbered by mylar-like bands of connective membrane called ‘silvering’ – very time-consuming to remove. Some people argue that farming the surviving kangaroo species would guarantee their survival by making them an economic asset. Others counter-argue that the population dynamics are too poorly understood. To commercialise kangaroos would leave their long-term survival at the mercy of those greedy for short-term jobs and profit.

Australia

’s beef, by the way, is mainly produced by grazing, rather than stall-fed on grain. In fact part of the case for vegetarianism is weaker in Australia than in the USA or UK, in that much of the grazing land is too marginal to have been used instead for crops. However even grazing beef has an exceptionally high greenhouse footprint.

Perhaps the most ingenious conservation initiative was that pioneered by John Walmsley, a maverick who kept foxes as pets to discover what kind of fencing could reliably keep them out. He stocked large cat-proof and fox-proof sanctuaries, like Warrawong in South Australia, with whatever rare and delicate small marsupial species could still be acquired from islands or zoos. It turns out that, thus protected, many of them breed like rabbits. There is talk of asking the army to shoot out cats and foxes from certain peninsulas, which could then be fenced off, and thus gradually ‘take Australia back from the fox’—as is already being done on the Peron Peninsula in Western Australia.

It might all have been so much better if these predators had been kept out, and if, as Thomas Shepherd wished, wide borders of native plants had been left around each paddock, in a beautiful mosaic. But the first settlers, who were almost as many months from home-base as a settlement on Mars might be today, needed to grow food quickly or die. Decent old Arthur Phillip’s duller eighteenth century belief in ‘improving’ the landscape prevailed. (Let us hope he enjoyed his retirement to Bath after he, as Les Murray puts it, ‘recoiled into his century’!) Indeed land was often granted to settlers on condition they improved it, by destroying the native trees and vegetation.

This obsession with clearing the land may have reflected an unconscious need to eradicate traces of a prior Aboriginal ownership. Not that early settlers had the sort of bad conscience about having seized the communal lands of Aborigines that modern Australians have. The ‘right’ of a stronger country to seize a weaker one by force majeure was still widely accepted. The governors chose to believe that Aborigines did not own their tribal lands (which in any case, delivered to European eyes little of value) because they moved across them like ‘vagrants’ rather than settling like European property-holders to cultivate and ‘improve’.

Today we might prefer to praise the Aborigines’ achievement in living sustainably with the land for millennia, and contrast this with the damage eight generations of European lifestyle have wrought. Yet in pre-1788 Australia you could not have found metal, pottery, a horse, a wheel, a post office (or a literate person), an obstetrician… or bought an ice-cream, an apple, shoes, a piece of cloth, a pair of glasses, or a scone. The British were not wrong to think they were bringing a vastly more complex material culture, or that the indigenes, if they lost their communal lands, might still enjoy much improved material circumstances. (Even today, many economists justify giving Russia’s communal lands and assets to private entrepreneurs on grounds that these will then be more productively used, and that ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’.) But the British fatally failed to understand the cultural circumstances that might prevent a stone-age pre-capitalist society from embracing such opportunities. Or the drift of many Aboriginal groups, once they lost their land, into the communal use of alcohol, a drug previously unknown in mainland Australia. (Alcohol, when a whole community adopts it, turns out to be not just a debilitating drug but a de-inhibitory one: it removes necessary restraints on anti-social impulses. The Australian media are currently convulsed with revelations about appalling levels of child sexual abuse in several Aboriginal communities.)

The British also made an ecological blunder, this time with creatures too small for them to see or even be fully aware of: human disease organisms. Should they have realized that, if they settled in Sydney, then measles, chickenpox, influenza, etc., and even the common cold, would destroy Aboriginal societies and cultures? They had already seen epidemics follow ships’ visits to Pacific islands. Yet Australia was not an island; and elsewhere in mainland Asia (and Africa) it was the Europeans rather than the ‘natives’ who died like flies upon first contact. The early governors did not know that Australia’s thinly populated interior impeded the spread of epidemic diseases from Asia, and had left the southern Aboriginal populations with perhaps no more immunity than dwellers on remote islands. To their credit, they set up a quarantine station at North Head near Sydney (its macabre history is now a tourist attraction) and largely succeeded in keeping the major epidemic diseases out of Australia. But minor diseases, not considered justification to prevent a ship landing, often proved just as deadly to the Aborigines.

It became widely assumed that Aborigines were ‘a dying race’—a view that is sometimes dismissed today as ‘wishful thinking’ or prejudice, or even as partly a cover for illegal shootings. Perhaps it might also be described as ignorance of Darwinian selection. When three-quarters of a population dies within a few decades, largely it would seem of diseases for which no remedy was known, one would naturally anticipate extinction. But the survivors may be those with more disease-resistant genes. In the south, a rapid intermixture of European genes probably speeded the process, and today Aborigines in the south (less often in northern Australia) often look racially more European or Asian than Aboriginal. It is now widely accepted that Aboriginality should often be defined in cultural-and-ancestral rather than narrowly racial terms.

My suggestion that European genes provided resistance to disease is based on a priori likelihood. This is one of many areas where speculation has to be cautious because evidence is short, and scholarly and public passions are easily inflamed. The suspicion, or certainty, that some landholders shot the local Aborigines complicates any debate on Aborigines and disease. As does the fact that the common cold was undoubtedly a major killer; and many British people then, and even now, have an unshakeable belief (enshrined even in the disease's common name) that infection with rhinoviruses is caused by exposure, getting damp, or ‘catching a chill’. Hence it is hard to know what to make of the recurrent statements that Aboriginal people died from ‘exposure’ or ‘damp unhealthy conditions’ or ‘inflammation of the brain’, and other primitive medical diagnoses. However the ANU’s Professor Barry Smith cites one clear case where measles, which seems not to have become firmly established in Australia before 1850, subsequently wiped out half the survivors of one Aboriginal tribe in a few months.

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Once the colony could feed itself fairly well, the next problem was to find an export to pay for its existence. In later days it was said that ‘Australia rode on the sheep’s back’; and indeed wool was an excellent non-perishable export, one that could be carried by slow un-refrigerated ships. It could also be produced from infertile land with a small labor force. But in the colony’s first decades it was not the sheep’s but the seal’s back it rode upon. Skins stripped from the hapless Australian seals made excellent winter coats for folk back in the UK; and then as now, most customers did not inquire into the ecological cost of a bargain. That industry was soon exhausted.

Then in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was the rise of wheat. Wheat had been grown in Australia since 1788, but it was labor-intensive, and phosphate-hungry. Yields tended to drop as soil fertility was exhausted. To counter this, much ingenuity was applied in creating better varieties for Australian conditions, and better crop rotations. Stump-jump plows and imported fertilizers helped. Then came the new fuel-driven machines. These made it possible to clear vast acreages, and then to mechanically sow and harvest them. Trains and steamships were now available to get wheat to markets around the world.

‘Banjo Paterson’ (1864-1941), author of Australia’s unofficial national anthem Waltzing Matilda, hymned this re-born crop in his ‘Song of the Wheat’ (1914), ending:

Princes and Potentates and Czars,
They travel in regal state,
But old King Wheat has a thousand cars
For his trip to the water-gate;
And his thousand steamships breast the tide
And plough thro’ the wind and sleet
To the lands where the teeming millions bide
That say: ‘Thank God for Wheat!’

To this day, some councils and local progress associations give out illustrated books in which each line of Paterson’s short poem takes up a page.

Imported ‘superphosphate’ improved Australia’s infertile soils, but in time many soils have turned dangerously acidic. Wheat’s fuel-bill includes nitrate fertilisers (made directly from fossil fuels and incorporating as much energy as explosives), plus fuel for machines and remote-area transport. So far from being solar-powered, Australia’s wheat industry works on a trade-off between the price of bulk wheat and the rising price of fossil fuels. Today, despite its largish acreage and its specialisation in this crop, Australia produces only about 20 million tonnes a year, which is roughly 5% of the world’s wheat --though its willingness to export means Australia provides more like 20% of a hungry world’s wheat imports. Those who claim Australia could feed a far higher resident population forget the need to export much of the wheat to pay for fuel and fertiliser.

Australia

’s wheat farmers are skilled users of technology; and as yet yields are creeping upward, to over 2 tonnes per hectare in years with good rainfall. However many foresee future falls in yield, due to acidification, climate change, and soil loss. Every tonne of wheat exported still costs around fifty tonnes of eroded soil. James McAuley wrote scathingly of how

Flood, fire and cyclone in successive motion

Complete the work the pioneers began

Of shifting all the soil into the ocean.

Even the patriotic poem known to all schoolchildren, Dorothea Mackellar’s ‘My Country’ (1906):

I love a sunburnt country,

A land of sweeping plains,

Of ragged mountain ranges,

Of drought and flooding rains

could not turn a blind eye to

The stark white ring-barked forests,

All tragic to the moon

As well, much of Australia’s farmland lies upon the bed of an ancient sea. Farming (and especially clearing) raises the water table and brings the salt to the surface. Paradoxically this dry continent suffers from rising salty water.

Two maps drawn by Chris Watson, a CSIRO soil scientist, reveal much about Australia’s dependence on wheat. The first is a map of the areas of Australia that have good and poor soils for agriculture. As expected, only a few areas are classed as good. The second is a map of those regions with sufficient and reliable rainfall. Again, the good areas are relatively small. But what is really striking is the map produced by superimposing the two. Areas that have both deep fertile soils and reliable rainfall (like the area around Robertson in NSW where Babe was filmed) are not small, but tiny.

So how does Australia manage to feed its own 21 million humans, and export enough calories for about another 40 million? The answer of course, is wheat. Not wheat grown on fertile soils with good rainfall, but drought-tolerant wheats grown as a winter-and-spring crop in areas where the soil is just middling, and the rainfall, during winter-spring, is usually enough – except in an el niño year. Even so, the yields per hectare are low-ish. Thanks to wheat (and refrigerated meat) Australia is a food-exporting country; yet in a good year it still grows less wheat than France – and in a bad year it sometimes grows less than Britain! A small return, perhaps, for so many square kilometres of fascinating bioregions cleared, and species locally eliminated or totally extinct. (In Australia as elsewhere, it is often the more arid lands, like the famous wildflower belt near Perth, that have the highest diversity of plant species. Nature, like humans, is at her most ingenious when stressed.)

Even more destructive than wheat, within Australia’s relatively tiny rainforested regions (originally about 2 per cent of the land area), has been sugarcane – another economic success and ecological disaster. But for this profitable crop, most of Australia’s lowland rainforest would still be standing. Instead only fragments survive. Fertiliser run-off from the canefields now threatens the Great Barrier Reef.

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A certain distinction may be drawn between the north and the south of Australia. In the south swamps and wetlands were ruthlessly drained, and birds that might damage crops like brolgas (the famous giant dancing crane) and magpie geese were exterminated. The north was less suitable for agriculture, not so much because it had less water as because the water was concentrated in a few months. It is hard to farm flat land that is under water for three months of the year, and dry as a cracked scone for six.

Thus there emerged a sort of de facto agreement to leave the north more natural. Northern Australia’s savannahs and seasonal wetlands are one of the globe’s biological hot-spots. Some sacrifices have been made to keep them. For instance, the giant Ord River dam was intended to grow rice, but it soon became clear that this would mean exterminating most of the region’s migratory flocks of magpie geese (a major tourist attraction). This had been done down south, but was considered politically unsafe; so less profitable crops were grown instead.

Yet even this agreement to spare the north is precarious. Climate change is expected to shift the rain to the north. Already the conservative senator Bill Heffernan has begun agitating for Australian farmers to re-pioneer the north. Predictably, some see him as a man of vision. However the uneven spread of rain through the year may defeat his faith in the wet north.

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Australia

was a convict colony, not a utopian settlement. Governor Bligh (of Bounty and breadfruit fame) who suffered the ‘Rum Rebellion’ in Sydney, was the first of many to discover the near-impossibility of upholding long-term policies against the short-term interests of an emerging plutocracy.

By the mid-nineteenth century, Australia’s press and much of its public life was dominated by the ‘boomers’, economic progressives who believed Australia must and would rapidly acquire a population (and hence a status) comparable to that of the USA, or Europe. As late as 1978 I can remember seeing a large poster outside an Australian embassy in which the outline of Australia was superimposed upon most of Europe, with the relative populations written beneath. The dry salt lakes of Australia’s desert centre had been painted a vibrant blue, and the ephemeral inland rivers were thickly depicted. The message was clear: Come to Empty Australia.

The great geographer Griffith Taylor, when professor at Sydney University in the 1920s, had a blunt answer for such nonsense. He produced maps with Australia turned upside down and superimposed on Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa – a better fit in area, and in rainfall and soil-fertility. He also told the boomers, correctly, that Australia’s population at the end of the twentieth century would be not 100 million, as they predicted, but around 20 million; and that the ‘boundaries of settlement’ would not change much. Indeed, if anything, farms are retreating.

But the debate on Australia’s population-carrying capacity is far older. Captain Cook, not normally a careless observer, remarked that on the coastal plain between Botany Bay (Sydney) and the then-impassable barrier of the Blue Mountains there was pasture for more sheep and cattle than could ever be brought there. Yet 20 years after settlement the herds were almost starving, and the authorities were desperately seeking a path through the Blue Mountains. Once the settlers broke through into the interior, the old pattern of complacency, followed by disappointment and ecological collapse was often played out again, region by region. Exaggerated estimates of carrying capacity were always the first step.

Fire followed by rain can produce a flush of seeming fertility, but Australia’s ancient stable continental plate lacks fertile volcanic soils – and mountains to bring down the rain. Its most important river, the Murray, sometimes fails to reach the coast, and carries less water in a year than the Mississippi in a day. ‘They call her a young country, but they lie,’ wrote the poet A.D. Hope:

She is the last of lands, the emptiest,
A woman beyond her change of life, a breast
Still tender but within the womb is dry. . . .

Her rivers of water drown among inland sands.

Only 6 per cent of the vast land mass has proved arable. Above all, Australia is intensely affected by el niño years which bring savage droughts.

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Thus Australia has played an odd role in the story of world population. Its generosity in taking in people from the ends of the earth, from countries that had no possible claim upon Australia, and even from World War Two enemy countries like Italy and Germany, is a remarkable piece of unselfishness by a nation state. Many a ‘ten pound Pom’ escaped from squalid conditions to a happier life in Australia, as did millions from the wrecked cities of post-WWII Europe, and more recently from Asia. Yet the total numbers that Australia could take in were globally insignificant. Worldwide, Australia probably did more harm than good, by spreading the myth that the globe could not have a population problem, since there was still a huge ‘empty continent’ wanting more people. ‘Land without people for people without land’, as a Catholic bishops’ conference fervently proclaimed. (In reality, Australia’s agricultural frontiers had effectively closed by the time the colonies achieved federation and independence from Britain – simultaneously – in 1901.)

Australia has long been a talking-point in the debate between proponents of endless ‘growth’ and Malthusian ‘limiters’ – because it was one of the two new continents that Britain seized, thus invalidating or postponing Malthus’s prediction that his motherland would soon run out of farmland for its expanding population.

Today the first group are typically economists who believe humanity can never run out of ‘resources’ because the ‘market’ will always find either cheaper means of supply or substitutes. Or else science will produce a breakthrough. (There is no faith in scientific miracles like a growth-economist’s faith!) Their opponents are typically biological scientists who see limits to the numbers of humans – and the lifestyles – that a finite planet can sustain.

The well-planned South Australian colony saw a major battle between ninteteenth century boomers and authorities. As the colony expanded into the increasingly arid lands north of Adelaide, its surveyer, George W. Goyder, drew careful maps of the rainfall and established a line (corresponding to 30 cm annual rainfall) beyond which land would not be offered for farming. The boomers were indignant at ‘Goyder’s Line’. How could Australia grow into a second USA if there was room for only a few hundred farmers in their state! Lines on the map were arbitrary, they thundered, and a barrier to human Industry. God would provide. Besides, it was a well known geographic fact that ‘rain follows the plow’.

Following unusually wet seasons in the 1870s, settlers broke down the authorities’ resistance and surged across Goyder’s Line. A nobly-planned town, significantly named Farina, was constructed, as well as a railway line to carry off the anticipated huge harvests of grain – which never came. Today Farina is a sand-covered ruin.

But boomers never learn, especially when there are fortunes to be made on the mere expectation of growth. In the 1960s the giant state of Western Australia had a policy of clearing a million acres of ‘scrub’ a year. (In Queensland and NSW, even rainforest was called ‘scrub’.) Advice that much of this land was species-rich, yet marginal for agriculture and likely to be destroyed by salinity, was ignored, with disastrous results.

The myth of the empty land was even written into the national anthem ‘Advance Australia Fair’ (adopted in the 1970s) which includes the words (against proudly swelling music)

For those who've come across the seas:

We've boundless plains to share.

– a nice ideal, but a lie. Immigrants since the 1890s have not, in general, found farmland in Australia, and have paid through the nose even for urban land.

Till recently Australia’s parliament has been one of the last preserves of the global warming skeptics and the ‘nuclear will fix everything’ illusionists. Local and even national media are fed a depressing spiral of puff pieces about how we are desperately short of skilled and willing workers – alternating with pieces on how we are desperately short of major projects to provide employment. The intended solution is of course an endless cycle (or spiral) of increasing population and increasing construction. If only politicians could give Australia the construction industry its population needs, rather than the population its construction industry would like!

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Yet in the C20th, as environmental awareness grew, the boomers did not have it all their own way. In a single year, 1966, three environmental classics appeared: Jock Marshall’s The Great Extermination: A Guide to Anglo-Australian Cupidity, Wickedness and Waste; Vincent Serventy’s A Continent in Danger; and Alan Moorehead’s The Fatal Impact: The Invasion of the South Pacific 1767-1840.

Three years later the polymath farmer and environmental historian Eric Rolls produced They All Ran Wild, The Story of Pests on the Land in Australia. Another of his books, A Million Wild Acres, showed how complicated might be the series of ecological changes, even since 1788, that had created a particular bioregion.

Three decades later the boomers came up against one of the few politicians brave enough to oppose them. Bob Carr was Premier of NSW from 1995 till he retired in 2005, the longest continuous term served by any NSW Premier. A brilliant and bookish man (he once stepped down for two weeks to attend Sydney Writers’ Festival) he overcame the media’s refusal to discuss the issue by himself writing and publishing full-page articles in the Sydney Morning Herald. In one he wrote:

First, we need a democratic consensus on population. We mustn't fall for the line that more is better. A strong, proud and confident Australia doesn't mean a bigger Australia.

Those who advocate an Australian population of fifty million aren't talking about the verdant stretches of cultivated land in the central tablelands or the western plains, let alone in the continental interior. They aren't talking about inland cities, conjured into being by benevolent developers and the Burley Griffins of our time. They are talking about the urbanisation of the eastern coast from north Queensland to Melbourne: ever more housing estates, more shopping malls and multiplexes, more freeways and petrol stations where now we have rivers and forests, unpolluted beaches and open country, and in a few areas (such as Daintree or Nadgee) coastal wilderness as old as the continent itself.

But Carr was one of a kind: a skilled politician, erudite, environmentally aware, and largely immune to the unsubtle tactics of the growth lobby, since he had no real rivals inside or outside his party. Even so, his refusal to commit to the infrastructure required to turn Sydney into megalopolis bred voter resentment. The other state politicians have all caved in to the growth lobby, though some feebly protest. Former Olympic gold medal runner Ron Clarke, now the mayor of the Gold Coast (south of Brisbane) where rainforests turn into shopping malls overnight, has long been pro-development. Yet he recently mused in print:

Where will the water come from for an extra 500,000 people on the [SE Queensland] Coast, and more than a million in the southeast?

How about the roads, public transport, our open spaces, parks and gardens and our beaches – will they support a doubling of our population in such a relatively short time?

Not only farmers but politicians who ignore Australia’s realities sometimes perish. The formidable conservative prime minister John Winston Howard, who ruled from 1996 to 2007, discounted talk of global warming, refused to sign the Kyoto agreement saying it would ‘only destroy Australian jobs’, encouraged uranium exports, talked of going nuclear, provided ‘baby bonuses’ and committed the Dry Continent to relentless population growth. It was his misfortune to fight the November 2007 election at the end of a disastrous drought, with cities running out of water, housing prices (fed by exceptional population growth) going through the roof, and with every week bringing fresh evidence that global warming is a reality. He boasted of a booming economy (based partly on his policy of selling off the continent’s minerals and natural gas as fast as possible). No previous Prime Minister had ever lost an election in unambiguously buoyant economic times. Yet Howard was tossed out of office, even losing his own seat. The new Labor government of Kevin Rudd has had the good luck (like the Hawke Labor government in 1983) to come to office just as a crippling drought ended.

In the recent words of Ross Garnaut, Professor of Economics at the Australian National University, ‘Australia is likely to be damaged more than any other developed country by climate change. Our climate is dry and highly variable already, and this will be exacerbated with climate change, with the effect on agriculture and water supplies being particularly pronounced.’

Australia

’s boomers remain unrepentant. Today they pay only lip-service to the myth of an empty continent awaiting farmers. They know the real money is to be made from the housing market, which is really the urban-land market.

It is a seeming paradox that such a huge country should have urban housing prices comparable to New York or London. Yet land area is irrelevant. Australians no longer found new cities; and granted the huge distances between major cities, the squeeze is on for inner urban land in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, and Canberra. Throw in out-of-control population growth (proceeding currently at 1.5 per cent a year, higher than Indonesia next door, or than many other third world countries) and the result, under present economic settings, is sky- high land prices, which sometimes double in a decade.

These are always called ‘housing prices’ in the Australian media, but in fact the costs of constructing a given structure are steadily falling. It is the price of land that is out of control. Each major influx of population kicks the housing market into another boom-cycle. Apart from moving any given greenhouse target further out of reach, the high cost of housing creates a huge invisible impost that swells the price of everything in Australia: goods, services, and labor. The huge unearned incomes to be made from real estate speculation in turn drive the population-growth lobby, in a python-like vicious circle that is the despair of environmentalists. State governments profit hugely from ‘stamp duty’ on housing sales, but then find themselves forced to provide housing for an increasing number of homeless people.

In the last days of 2006 the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Sydney’s councils had been instructed to accommodate an extra 1.1 million people within 25 years. Each was given a quota:

Densely populated Strathfield Municipal Council is expected to accommodate 9000 new dwellings – double what it considers possible …A spokesman for Bankstown Council said it had been set a total of 26,000 extra residences, which ‘would have to be built entirely in place of existing homes.’

The task of maintaining any of Sydney’s once-impressive environmental amenities against such pressures can well be imagined.

Rapid population growth has long been recognised as central, also, to Australia’s ecological troubles. Those who resent suggestions that human beings can ever be a ‘problem’ sometimes claim that ‘the real problem’ is not human numbers but levels of consumption. But there is at present neither realistic likelihood nor intention of reducing per capita consumption. On the contrary, Labor and conservative governments compete to assure the public that their economic skills will deliver ever higher affluence.

The alternatives to capping population are basically two: to reduce per capita consumption, and/or to devise more efficient use of scarce resources. Recent modeling of Australia’s economy by Barney Foran and David Crane suggests that even if these proposed alternatives could be implemented, they might prove not merely inadequate, but self-defeating. This is because of various ‘rebound’ effects. For instance, the Jevons paradox, well-known to economists, means that when manufacturers find more efficient ways to turn a scarce resource into a product, this lowers their production costs, increases their turnover, and often leads to a ‘rebound’ in demand for the resource, which gets used up even faster. (Something similar applies, in reverse, to greenhouse gases.) Or consider another ‘rebound’: if preaching by environmentalists ever leads to the population as a whole buying less consumer goods, this provokes the relevant industries to shift money from their production to their advertising budgets, until they have restored or even heightened the public’s need to purchase.

Jevons’s economic paradox produces moral paradoxes. For instance, if the public were to heed politicians’ calls for each individual to cultivate a Battle-of-Britain approach to conserving water, the entirely predictable upshot is that politicians would be emboldened to keep recklessly pouring more houses, shops, and people into each coastal river’s catchment area. Thus, in the long run the scarcity of urban water (not to mention the state of the environment) would be much worse than if people had used, or even if they had deliberately wasted, as much water as they could. (There is a surprisingly good case to be made that, in urban Australia, if you love your neighbor you ought to ‘waste’ water.)

A November 2007 UN report classes Australians as even worse than Americans as greenhouse polluters, in fact the world’s worst, producing about 26 tonnes of CO₂ per person per year.

Hence a series of Australia’s official State of the Environment reports have insisted that it is essential also to curb population growth. Tim Flannery, who dealt with such issues in The Future Eaters, once estimated that Australia in the long term might be able to support only 5 to 12 million people – as against some 21 million now, and an expected 31 million as early as 2050. (The Australian Bureau of Agricultural Resource Economics agrees that production may fall steeply.)

Growth economists tend to pooh-pooh claims that Australia needs to feed its own people, and argue that ‘The market will cope. You can always buy food.’ They may be right. Australia’s large area may not produce as much food as some believe, but it possesses mineral deposits (including natural gas) that took all earth’s history to create but which it is current government policy to dig up and sell off rapidly. The resulting export earnings should allow Australia to import whatever food it needs – at least in the short term. Whether this is a good thing for the world is another matter.

The most recent book on Australia’s ecology, On Borrowed Time: Australia's Environmental Crisis and What We Must Do About It (CSIRO/ Penguin, 2007, by David Lindenmayer, Professor of Ecology and Conservation Science at the Australian National University) makes some strong points. Like another professor of science, Ian Lowe, who heads the main conservation body, the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), Lindenmayer blames ‘the three O’s: overpopulation, overdevelopment, and overconsumption.’ He is appalled by the recent decision to dam the Mary River in Queensland, home of the rare ‘living fossil’, the lungfish, so as to provide water for Queensland’s ever-expanding human population. Australia, he says, ‘leads the world in recent mammal extinctions… It is one of the most species-rich places on the planet. It also has one of the worst records of species loss and decline in the world. Almost no Australian resource-based industries can be considered to be ecologically sustainable.’

Yet he sees hope in paying farmers to reward them for ‘better managing their properties for public good outcomes such as revegetation, increased biodiversity conservation and improved water quality’. Indeed one major state, Victoria, over the last 15 years has turned its agriculture from greenhouse negative to greenhouse positive, largely through encouraging private owners to re-afforest their properties. In this, governments have been helped by better public attitudes (e.g. the ‘Landcare’ movement among farmers) and by long-overdue laws that restrict clearing of native vegetation.

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No great attempt has yet been made to make immigrants –or the Australian-born –aware that residing in Australia is a privilege that should involve an obligation to conserve its unique species. The Howard government in 2007 introduced a citizenship test, similar to that in the USA, whereby applicants for Australian citizenship must demonstrate some basic knowledge of the country’s traditions and political system. Donald Bradman is on the list of items they are meant to know; but inexcusably they are not required to know about the arid nature of the continent on whose fringes they are living.

Indeed many immigrants know only the well-watered coastal cities, and don’t understand what the problem is about bringing in their mates. Some even believe such concern is just a cover for ‘racism’. In Australia, as in the USA, the word ‘racism’ is rarely used in its strict sense, as referring to theories of genetic racial superiority, but has become a loose pejorative term for any kind of ethnic or national chauvinism that is disapproved. Thus when Australian Greeks came to the support of tennis player Marcus Baghdatis in January 2008 by endorsing his claim that Turkey’s occupation of part of Cyprus is illegal, Australian Turkish community leaders promptly denounced such views as ‘racism’. In many cases claims of racism become a way of crying wolf about a factitious issue while not attending to real environmental ones.

Mind you, a tendency to cling to the coastal rim is equally visible among older Australians. James McAuley once described Australia as

Bone-dry itself, with water all around.

Yet as a wheel that's driven in the ruts,
It has a wet rim where the people clot
Like mud; and though they praise the inner spaces,
When asked to go themselves, they'd rather not.

–James McAuley, ‘The True Discovery of Australia’

Fifty or even thirty years ago, most urban Australians were still connected to the ‘bush’. They remembered ‘the old place’ where they used to farm, or they regularly visited relatives who were still ‘living on the land’. Time, and a huge influx of immigrants, has changed that. Today the cities seem, to those in them, to levitate free of the landmass whose resources they drain. Most of the young live on a planet called Cityworld. When they travel it is mostly by plane, direct to another city somewhere on the globe. In the myths of economists, money is a crop that exists and multiplies in its own world; while to many teenagers the plight of Australia’s soils and species seems just one of the millions of pages to be skimmed over on the Internet.

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To follow the recent history of Australia’s environment and population requires a diversion into Australian politics. The Whitlam Labor government of 1972–75 reacted to the first global Oil Shock by seeking to limit immigration and population growth and to borrow heavily to buy back Australia’s energy resources for self-sufficiency. It was brought down by fierce criticism from business lobbies and media barons, and was the last Labor government to be broadly critical of business or to think that ideals could matter more than economic growth. The incoming conservative government of Malcolm Fraser promoted indefinite growth, ignored energy constraints, and was made to seem prescient by the easing of the oil shortage.

All recent governments have favored the flogging off (to China, Japan, the USA, etc) of Australia’s (very limited) oil and gas fields as fast as they are discovered. This lets the current government boast of running a surplus, being ‘sound economic managers’, etc. Democratic leaders are ephemerids who know they are unlikely to be around in ten years time, unlike dictators who sometimes make better energy choices because they expect to be around for ever. Sadly, Australian experience shows that democracy is not good at preserving other species – they don’t vote. It is also very bad at conserving resources.

The issue of population returned to haunt the Hawke–Keating Labor governments of 1983–1996. By now Australia was clearly a plutocratic democracy. The voters got their Hobson’s choice every three years in free and fair elections between two major parties that jostled for the middle ground (as defined by the media); but both parties competed for and depended upon ‘electoral donations’ from big money, and saw themselves increasingly as servants of the business-growth lobbies. The battle to ban media monopolies was effectively abandoned, with both parties selling out their own laws in hope of short-term political favors from media barons.

Hawke’s dilemma was that Labor was using the conservation vote to cling to power, yet he dared not offend the growth lobby. The Australian Democrats, who often held the balance in the Senate, had long had a policy of zero net migration, and conservationists were demanding something similar from Labor. Instead Labor had pushed immigration ever higher, till only Canada among the world’s nations aimed for a comparable per capita immigration rate, and polls showed the public was unhappy. In one poll in 1991, 73 per cent of voters said that the numbers coming in were ‘too many’ and, in 1996, 71 per cent were still of this opinion. Only 4 per cent thought immigration was too low. Clearly even Australia’s large immigrant communities thought the point of sanity had been passed, though immigrationists strove to give the opposite impression.

Australia

’s sea borders allow it, unlike the USA and even Britain, to select its immigrants. Hence the character and educational level of immigrants is not an issue in Australia. However the indefinite increase in population that high immigration might produce certainly is.

In this context the Australian Academy of Science stepped in. In a major public statement in 1994 it advocated ensuring that Australia’s population did not pass 23 million, that sex-education and birth-control be encouraged (‘every baby a wanted baby’), and that net immigration should stay in what it considered the responsible range. This meant below 50,000 a year (about a half of what it was in most of the Hawke–Keating period and about a quarter of the 190,000 to which the Howard government would push it by 2007, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics). Aware that Hawke and Keating had traded on the public’s tendency to confuse immigrants and refugees, the Academy pointed out that a much expanded refugee program could fit comfortably within the 50,000 cap. Similar enquiries and reports by Labor’s erudite Party president Barry Jones, and by CSIRO, came to much the same conclusion.

Instead the Labor Party worked out a way to update the old pioneering view that Australia was an empty country. Granted there was no spare farmland, Labor’s spin-doctors removed reference to specific population outcomes and to what exactly all these extra people would do (apart from making our economy ‘vibrant’). More importantly, it was now Australia’s manifest destiny to build not so much a ‘great’ nation as a diverse one. Australia was to become a sort of one-country United Nations, in which a representative blend of the world’s races and ethnicities would co-inhabit, miraculously unhomogenised yet on terms of the highest mutual respect, in a rich and democratic society. This was not a million miles from where Australia was already moving to; but as promoted by Australia’s immigrationists it involved making Australia a permanent country of immigration, long after its colonial and pioneering periods should have been over. In effect, the case for preserving the continent’s biological biodiversity was to be trumped by a new human-chauvinist emphasis on the ‘obligation’ to preserve human cultural and racial diversity: that is, to continually import and sustain these forms of human difference.

Thus instead of being ashamed that we have lost so many of our marsupial species, today many idealistic Australians seem more ashamed that they do not have a flourishing Inuit or Bantu community in their particular city. No one should object to a policy of loving the cultures you have imported, yet why it should be Australia’s duty to turn itself into a representative sample of the cultures of the earth is never explained. Instead, there are constant shouts that any reduction of immigration will lead to us tumbling back into an abyss of ‘racism’ and ‘boring monoculturalism’.

Hawke’s and Keating’s spin doctors also took advantage of the Anglo-Celtic guilt over having immigrated upon the Aboriginal tribes without their permission and having then (in many cases) violently displaced them. Somehow this became a further reason why high immigration, so long as it was no longer Anglo-Celtic, was essential—as if inviting in the rest of the world to share the theft would legitimize it. Conservationists who protested now risked being slurred as white-supremacists or accused of defending Australia’s colonial past.

An explicit policy of de-Anglifying or multiculturalising Australia’s population might itself have seemed ‘racist’. However the Labor Party, ventriloquizing in part through a series of Multicultural Studies centres it had set up, attached to the guilt about Aborigines a further guilt: that non-UK or non-European nationalities had once been wrongly excluded. (In fact the British government had been under no strict obligation to open up to any other nations a colony which was, for it, the fruit of much toil and expense, as well as of its hard-fought naval victories.) Labor’s prize exhibit, however, was the former ‘white Australia’ immigration policy. In reality this policy had been in its day largely a Labor/Trade Union one, insisted on as the price of Federation, because they believed the rich would otherwise import ‘cheap labor’ and destroy ‘the rights of working men’. Spin doctors reworked the story to make it seem a rightwing policy, proof of a ‘fascist’ past. After all, by then there were not too many voters old enough to remember how strongly most Australians back in the 1930s had opposed the real Fascists and Nazis of their time.

By raising the spectre of a pervasive Australian ‘fascism’, Labor was able to defy the electorate’s will and disguise a rightwing policy of relentless growth as leftwing ‘tolerance’. They also hoped, wrongly it now seems, that unsettling the immigrant communities, by keeping up a constant brou-ha-ha about the ‘racism’ they supposedly faced, would win Labor ‘the ethnic vote’—or at least would de-rail the strong tendency for those who move to Australia for economic advantage to mark their success in small business by turning conservative.

Britain

too became a scapegoat; and British people were no longer seen as having a special claim, because of their long contribution to the setting up and defending of the Australian colony, to migrate to Australia. Such attitudes also provided a way to repudiate cultural debts, and be revenged for having been patronized as colonials. (There was an absurd tabloid fuss when Keating, a man proud of his Irish ancestry, broke protocol by placing his hand on the Queen’s back; but the event had some symbolic validity.) Aboriginal groups, like the Aboriginal Deaths in Custody Watch Committee, protested that high immigration was destroying environments and completing the obliteration of Aboriginal Australia—but they found the media selectively deaf. Other Aboriginal groups found it simpler to accept the role multiculturalism was assigning them.

Academics set to work scouring the records of the First Fleet for non-Anglo names to prove that Australia ‘has always been multicultural’, and therefore had a duty to remain ‘a nation of immigrants’. (For a while no conference on Australian Studies seemed complete without such a paper. Since sailors have always been an international lot, and many convicts came from the melting pot of London, they found plenty of non-English names.) Somehow the discovery that the invaders had been a multi-national or multicultural lot only helped prove that increased multi-national immigration was the way to atone for their deeds!

A country that had long been considered to have one of the most strongly-marked national characters of any English-speaking nation began to be told that it had no national identity –or only one created by a mosaic of (often post-WWII) immigrant populations. Keating’s anti-nationalist rhetoric (he once described Australia as ‘the arse-end of the universe’) played well to many richer and tertiary-educated Australians, since (as Orwell once remarked) the rich have always been less nationalistic than the poor. Some of the tertiary educated, too, enjoyed feeling superior to the more nation-bound and monolingual world of the less educated. Early soundings reassured the spin-doctors that this line (borrowed from North America) might win ‘the ethnic vote’, and widespread intellectual support, without getting up the noses of too many voters. But the numerous ‘true believers’ Labor helped to create became more and more extreme. One group of academics, for instance, declared that the very word ‘Australians’ should be seen as misleading and bordering on racism. Yet Australian identity proved harder to deconstruct than Canadian. Some ethnic leaders, while concerned to preserve cultural diversity, regarded perpetual multiculturalism as a pipe-dream, disliked their communities being used in anti-nationalist rhetoric, and shed few tears for Keating’s demise. (In fact the ‘ethnic lobby’ that was so vocal under Labor vanished with suspicious speed.) Late in his term Keating saw the danger, and (without dropping his tone of moral superiority) declared a ‘One Australia’ policy; but voters by then had ceased to listen. One of his most lasting political legacies was the bloated immigration quota he bequeathed to the Howard government. Howard was subsequently able to gain brownie points from the electorate by letting immigration dip for a while, before lifting it still higher.

Meanwhile New Zealand, whose citizens have automatic access to Australia, showed signs of joining Australia’s and Canada’s high-immigration folie a deux. Since the population flow is overwhelmingly from New Zealand to Australia, New Zealand’s immigration policy is not truly independent; it has become a major source of Australia’s population growth. Much like the Aborigines, Maoris protested in vain that high immigration contravened the bi-lateral treaty of Waitangi they had signed with the British, and was turning them into just another minority among their nation’s minorities.

Conservationists, despite some big wins on particular issues, were out-maneuvered in the longer term. They had needed to increase the public’s nascent sense of guilt at the ruthlessness with which humans in Australia were invading the living space of all other species. Instead their opponents trumped them by creating a much stronger sense of guilt that Australians had not been generous enough in inviting in all other nationalities and in parceling out their ‘boundless plains’—to fellow humans. Hence conservation lost momentum, slipped subtly out of fashion. At a crucial moment Hawke and Keating bought the movement’s silence on population by setting up some major (and much-needed) national parks. These parks have supposedly been created in perpetuity; yet there is a risk that further shifts in ideology may leave a future government free to revoke national parks. (It would by then be able to plead the housing and resource needs of a much expanded population, plus its need of export earnings from lands that would be otherwise ‘going to waste’. in fact developers constantly agitate for governments to become less ‘sluggish’ in ‘releasing more land’.) Labor’s utter allegiance to growth became clear when in 1992 Keating’s Environment Minster, Ros Kelly, apologized at the U.N.’s Rio Conference for Australia’s being underpopulated relative to such ‘successful’ regions as Singapore and Hong Kong. (Did she imagine that Singapore and Hong Kong supply their own water, let alone food?)

Even more cunning was shown by the incoming conservative prime minister John Howard in 1996. Though some might doubt if Howard was, as he presented himself, truly a patriotic defender of the average Aussie, Hawke and Keating had striven to present him as an ultra-nationalist ‘racist’. Howard realised he could blind his critics by seeming to live up to this image. Each time his government pushed immigration still higher, he would monster a small group of asylum-seekers, or criticise an ethnic minority, and watch his critics lash themselves blind with moral indignation. Typical of the innumerate commentators was the Canberra Times journalist who scathingly dubbed Howard’s Minister for Immigration, who had introduced the highest immigration in half a century, ‘the Minister for No Immigration’. More astute was the experienced immigration-journalist John Masanauskas, who noted that Howard had managed to double immigration while only being criticised for reducing it. He also noted that though traffic, cost of land, and ‘water, or lack of it’ was on everyone’s lips, ‘yet a major contributing factor for all this is rarely mentioned, let alone properly discussed’. He also noted that there was as yet no sign of change from the incoming Rudd government.

Although Australia’s population had been growing at a staggering 1.3 to 1.5 per cent a year, and half of it from natural increase, Howard’s government ran a scare campaign about Australia’s ‘falling population’ and even introduced a A$4,000 baby bonus – not to improve the care of the new born, but specifically to bribe couples to have more babies. Biologists were not impressed. Recently one of them, Professor Barry Walters, demanded that, since the new Labor government has now signed Kyoto, the baby-bonus be replaced by a A$40,000 ‘carbon tax’ on all babies after the second.

The plight of Australia’s cities, of home buyers, and of native species, all worsened notably on Howard’s watch. Yet public opposition to current immigration policies dropped significantly because Howard never mentioned that he had doubled net immigration, and talked as if he were moving the other way. (Ironically, according to ABC TV’s 7.30 Report, one crucial factor in Howard’s losing his own seat was its large Chinese community. Though its rapid growth had been favored by his high-immigration policies, it had believed his rhetoric rather than his deeds! Aesop might have made a fable out of that.) Many voters were confused by the baby bonus and assumed there must be a problem with low population ‘otherwise why would the government be shelling out to solve it?’ –which may have been the point of the policy.

Most of the commercial media were onside, and editorialised in favor of this ‘wise’ policy. (For them, doubling population in an area is like a farmer being able to double his or her area under crop). The Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) rather servilely followed the government’s and business-leaders’ line, though its investigative TV program Four Corners ran a 45-minute documentary by Ticky Fullerton on how the Howard government had suppressed a recent CSIRO Report warning against population growth.

Most political journalists proved to be incapable of distinguishing between a falling population, a possible future downturn in population size, and a projected future downturn in the rate of increase of population growth. (Roughly the equivalent of a racing journalist not knowing the difference between distance, speed, and acceleration. The same tricks are regularly used even in England and Scotland to raise concern about an imaginary fall in population.) Moralising commentators persistently confused immigrants with refugees. (Only a fraction of Australia’s immigrants are refugees; rather, the emphasis is on cherry-picking the rich and skilled; and Australia is accused of poaching third-world doctors more selfishly than any other country.)

Disinformation was also fed to overseas allies. Philippe Legrain’s book Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them (Little Brown Book Group, UK, 2006), which was heavily promoted in Australia, contains a rich harvest of muddled statistics. These include the claim that Australia’s population is 19 million, that its net immigration is only 90,000 a year (see p. 9), that births are not keeping pace with deaths (p. 108, in fact they are twice deaths), that immigration has been slashed by the Howard government (see p. 53), and so on. (A visit to http://www.population.org.au/ or to the Australian Bureau of Statistics website http://www.abs.gov.au/ could have spared him such errors.)

- -

The real masters of the population game are revealed in a recent article by the sociologists Katharine Betts and Michael Gilding, ‘The Growth Lobby and Australia’s Immigration Policy’. This documents how a group of businessfolk (including developers and sellers of white-goods) set out to defeat the scientists’ warnings against population growth. As their summary puts it, ‘Immigration boosts Australia’s population growth. A growth lobby concentrated among interests based in housing, land development and construction profits from this and actively lobbies for it.’ They remark:

The current [immigration] program is now large. But for some lobbyists the numbers will never be large enough. For example, in October 2006 Harry Triguboff, property developer and one of Australia’s 10 richest people, called for a ‘massive boost to immigration’, aimed towards a population of 150 million by 2050. To this end, he argued that national parks should make way for housing saying: ‘If people want to see trees, they can go to Katoomba, there are plenty of trees there.’

The authors comment:

Paul Keating labelled all NSW Planning Ministers the ‘mayor for Triguboff’. Keating added that the ‘wall of money coming at a minister is phenomenal because, as you know, the industry is into political donations which in my opinion should be outlawed’.

For Triguboff, Australia’s economy ‘is based on housing, which is based on a growing population’. ‘Growth begets growth’ and cities ‘must grow or die’. Research by the Australian Greens Party revealed that from 1998–1999 to the present the NSW Labor Party has received $8.78 million from developers and the NSW Coalition parties (which are in opposition) $6.35 million.

The public record shows that growth lobbyists organised a pyramid structure to promote pro-immigration views, that they founded the Australian Population Institute, and that, at least in NSW, they gave large amounts of money to political parties. The interview data confirm that some of Australia’s richest people are fervent supporters of immigration. The public record also shows that, no matter how high federal politicians push the numbers, some lobbyists will press for more. All of this may mean that, rather than having growth for growth’s sake, Australia has growth for the growth lobby’s sake.

As they imply, Triguboff is far from unusual in his class. (One remembers Philip Larkins’s poem ‘Going, going’.) In 2001 for instance the Labor Mayor of Brisbane, Jim Soorley, told the press Australia needed to triple its population in 20 years. What is saddest is not that such views are held by powerful citizens, but that the media, and especially the growth-obsessed Murdoch media, rarely permit any opposition or criticism. Ian Lowe, when asked why he ‘never mentions population’ in his public statements as President of the Australian Conservation Foundation, replied that he mentions it all the time, and the media selectively edit it out.

One reason Australia has never outgrown its pioneering and colonial obsession with ‘filling the country with people’ is that it shares the Anglo-Celtic property system which privileges private speculation in land. Vast fortunes have been made from this system by those who got sufficiently far ahead of the game to buy blocks of land, which they themselves did not need, on the edges of cities.

By contrast, the nation’s capital, Canberra, was built on a French-style system, with the government resuming land from farmers at fair but moderate prices, auctioning it as cheaply as possible, and using the profit it couldn’t help making to provide roads, schools, services and an elegantly planned layout. Canberra remains one of the world’s most livable cities, and (for the developers who control much of Australia’s politics) an embarrassing proof that there is a better way.

- -

Most of the great fortunes in Australia either have been made from or have since been stored in (and augmented via) real estate speculation. The recent conservative treasurer Costello wanted the working class taught to multiply their money through shares and real estate, so they would not need pensions. Yet real estate gains are the ultimate form of Ponzi finance. The additional population you need to bring in, to buy up the houses of the existing population at prices sufficiently inflated to fund their retirements (in presumably some remote location where land is still cheap) means that the existing population come to have a much smaller share of the country they once owned. In Australian terms, such policies are a form of ‘selling off the farm’.

Now, however, peak oil and the mooted demise of the private motorcar is questioning Canberra’s pleasant suburban sprawl. Indeed, all over urban Australia there is confusion between those conservationists who are trying to preserve the suburbs from encroaching high-rise and those more radical (or pessimistic) conservationists who believe that only much denser cities (plus public transport) will cope with future fuel shortages.

Some even doubt there will be fuel to grow the food for Australia’s big cities, and to transport it there across the vast spaces that separate some of the state capitals. At least if the cities could be consolidated, some think, they could be treated as giant feeding lots to which the food could be transported. Others tout de-centralisation as the cure to future shortages; but they are spitting into the wind. Australians seem interested only in moving to the big cities. The country, especially the wheat country, is worked by vast machines and skeletal labor forces. Most rural Australians moved to the cities two or three generations ago, turning Australia into the most urbanised of the world’s nations (other than city-states like Singapore).

- -

One option that is fast disappearing is that of growing food in your own backyard, using the once-generous tap-water supplies. Rising populations, often dependent for their water on short coastal rivers, have begun to dry up the reservoirs. Politicians predictably have blamed the recent draconian water-restrictions on ‘an unprecedented drought.’ In fact what is unprecedented is not the low rainfall but the swollen populations now dependent on those dams and rivers. Throughout the 2006-2007 drought, Federal and State governments went on pouring about a thousand new settlers a month into each of Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane. Hence the next drought is likely to prove even more ‘unprecedented’.

Environmentalists have begun to discuss whether civil disobedience against water restrictions may be one way to bring home to some politicians that the age of endless growth is over. Meanwhile Australia’s gardens have begun to wilt, and there is a thriving business in replacing lawns with xeriscapes. Yet just at the time of writing (December 2007) the planet has begun to flip from the el niño to la niña cycle, and rains have begun again on the east coast.

Early signs are that the incoming Labor government headed by Kevin Rudd is prepared to tackle greenhouse issues provided it can keep the economy booming. ‘We were elected as economic conservatives, and we will govern as economic conservatives,’ was one of his first public statements. His Environment Minister is Peter Garrett, a somewhat conservative conservationist who, when he chaired the Australian Conservation Foundation, earned the ire of poet and doyenne of Australian conservationists Judith Wright for refusing to speak out on Australia’s population growth. In one tersely-worded missive she stated the figures and concluded tartly: ‘Anyone who can’t do the sums, stand up.’

Perhaps Australia is like a cruise liner whose captain is required to sail in the direction chosen by a deck-steward – whose priority is to keep the sun shining on the deckchairs in the saloon section, so that their occupants will order more drinks. In the words of NSW environmentalist Gordon Hocking

Economic growth and population growth are the two main drivers of rising greenhouse gas emissions but neither is up for discussion or negotiation. As long as we stick with an economic system that needs to perpetually grow we will remain trapped on the road to ecological and climate disaster.

On balance, the evidence is, as yet, that Australia can’t do its sums.

--Mark O’Connor December 2007

ENDNOTES:

I have tried to refer mainly to materials available on line.

re ‘No rocky scene in England or Scotland can be compared with it.’See http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-September-2006/rolls.html

Re Banks’s recommendation of Botany Bay:

Banks was presumably aware that to display too much of his private passion for botany might weaken his recommendation. Yet the committee recorded his belief that “It was not to be doubted, that a tract of land such as New Holland, which was larger than Europe, would furnish matter of advantageous return.”

On Aboriginal foods and on ‘bush tucker’ see, for instance: http://www.cse.csiro.au/research/nativefoods/index.htm and
http://www.bushfood.net/bushtucker_full.htm

On the lost crops of the Incas, see

http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=030904264X Also on the neglect and loss of many Solanum crops: http://www.naturalhub.com/grow_fruit_type_tamarillo_relative_new_zealand.htm

On the effects of introduced diseases upon Aborigines, see Barry Smith’s ‘The “History Wars” and Aboriginal Health’, Australian Book Review, April 2005, pages 16-18.

On the three environmental classics in 1966, see historian Don Garden’s lively account of the changing fortunes of environment and environmentalists in Australia, at

http://www.h-net.org/~environ/historiography/australia.html

Re ‘Bob Carr.

See also the transcript of his November 2002 interview with Ticky Fullerton (ref. below). He was not quite unique. The Labor Party president Barry Jones sometimes showed similar independence. Another politician of equal courage, though belonging to a less powerful party, was John Coulter, former leader of the Australian Democrats, who contributes regularly to Australia's Population Forum. During his term as leader he was fiercely targeted by the Murdoch Press.

On the Jevons paradox in Australia, see ‘Powerful Choices: Options for Australia’s transition to a low-carbon economy’, Barney Foran and David Crane, publication pending. Available from foran@cres.anu.edu.au

On population-related issues in Australia:
The main academic magazine is People and Place. For online content see
http://www.highbeam.com/People+and+Place/publications.aspx?date=200606 An informative website for population-conscious conservationists is
http://www.population.org.au/ maintained by the group Sustainable Population Australia (to which the author belongs). Current population news is exchanged and discussed on its Population Forum.
For contrary views see http://www.apop.com.au/ (mottoes: “Populate and Prosper” and “A Vision of a Greater Australia”) the website of the Australian Population Institute, mentioned by Betts and Gilding.

See also Dr Clive Hamilton’s book Growth Fetish, which emphasizes consumption rather than population, but sees the importance of both.

On population pressure in Sydney

See : ‘Revealed the Sydney Flats Squeeze’, Sydney Morning Herald, 26/12/2006; cf. Sydney Morning Herald, 27/12/2006 ‘Residents fear impact of imposed population explosion’. See also Growth Fetish.

State of the Environment reports. See for instance
http://www.aussmc.org/State_of_the_Environment_2006.php
http://www.environment.gov.au/soe/2006/index.html

For discussion of polls on immigration, see
http://www.population.org.au/issues/Growth_lobby_and_immigration.pdf

On enquiries into Australia’s carrying capacity, see http://www.labshop.com.au/dougcocks/abernethyfinal.htm and http://www.cse.csiro.au/publications/2002/dilemmasdistilled.pdf and
http://www.science.org.au/media/pop2040.htm (re the Academy of Science’s 1994 statement, published as Population 2040: Australia's Choice).

On the oddities of multicultural theory in Australia in the Hawke-Keating period, see Robert Dessaix’s essay ‘Nice Work If You Can Get It’, Australian Book Review, Feb./March 1991, no. 128, pages 22-28.

On the word ‘Australian/Australians’ being misleading and borderline-racist, see the book Mistaken Identity by S. Castles, M. Kalantzis, B. Cope and M. Morrissey, Pluto Press, Sydney, 1990.

On Aboriginal and Maori protests against being ‘immigrated on’, see the author’s This Tired Brown Land, Duffy and Snellgrove, Sydney 1998, pages 287-292.

On the Four Corners report re Howard’s attempt to suppress the CSIRO Report on ‘Australia’s Population Dilemmas’: see the transcript at

http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/s718523.htm

and a summary of the report itself at http://www.cse.csiro.au/publications/2002/dilemmasdistilled.pdf

On misuse of terms like ‘diversity’ to trump environmentalist concerns, see

http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc0802/article_698.shtml and http://naf.org.au/stone.rtf On the Labor politician most associated with this line, see http://sunday.ninemsn.com.au/sunday/cover_stories/transcript_1061.asp

On the article ‘The growth lobby and Australia’s immigration policy’:

This was published in People and Place, but is available online at http://www.population.org.au/issues/Growth_lobby_and_immigration.pdf

On the public being confused by government ‘disinformation’ about population stats, see the revealing interviews with university students in ABC Radio National’s recent Encounter program on population. Transcript at: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/encounter/stories/2007/2101209.htm#transcript

On French discouragement as opposed to Anglo-Celtic support of land speculation, see Sheila Newman’s research at http://search.arrow.edu.au/articles/135692

[END]

A Migration Agent's View -- Part 2

2011-03-04T06:21:00.000-08:00

The posting "A Migration Agent's View -- a rare spot of mirth etc" has produced an interesting trail of correspondence on another website.

This began with my posting a short reply on Grant Williams's blog-site to his attack on Kelvin Thomson. I wrote

Upton Sinclair once said “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
For a critical review of the rather convenient biases in this “review” of Kelvin Thomson’s views, see my “A Migration Agent’s view — A rare spot of mirth in the population debate” at http://markoconnor-australianpoet.blogspot.com/

Grant Williams then wrote a fairly civil reply (showing that his views had some flexibility, and making the case for the poor employers who can't find people to work for them, or at least not at the wages they offer) ---to which I replied. Then a more emotional person called Team Oyeniyi cut in. I replied once but found her second piece too incoherent to deserve reply.

Here's the sequence up to then.

GRANT REPLIED

immigrationptyltd | March 3, 2011 at 4:01 am | Reply
Wow Mark that’s an angry response and I’m sorry I’ve upset you with my view from ‘within’ the migration advice industry. I must say I’m saddened that you seek to denigrate me and to sink to sarcasm in your desire to point out what you see as my bias and failings. I’m also saddened that you feel you are the only one who can see a bigger picture or possibly think a step or two beyond the source of their income.
Mark I deal every day with Australian businesses who genuinely find it very difficult, despite their best efforts using all available labour market tools and systems to find staff to meet their immediate needs. I’m all for training and retraining Australians who are out of work but no one can contend that this is an instant process, training takes time, often years not weeks in specialised fields. So what’s your suggestion to the businesses that can’t find the appropriate staff member(s) to enable them to continue in business employing many thousands of Australians? Tough. Wait till me retain someone. This is not commercial reality.
I have not said that the only solution is migrants (these are your words put into my mouth) but I am keen to know what you see as the realistic real-time alternatives for the business sector.
Migration is at an all time high the figures speak for themselves. Again the best you have to offer here is sarcasm and ridicule. There are studies that show that migration has had positive economic impact and there are studies that show a neutral outcome and some that show negative impacts. Like most attempts to apportion outcomes to social and economic policies they are all flawed and built on masses of assumptions and people cherry pick them to help make their point. I’m not making any claims for any point here. My point is that the submission in question has taken only one side and ignored the other studies completely.
You have intentionally misunderstood my point on population growth rates. Please note the word is ‘growth’ as in ‘rate of growth’ – getting bigger. My point, as you well know, despite again more sarcasm, is that the trend for the rate of growth over the period I quote is down. This is not a measure of the absolute number of people, as you seem to suggest with your total population figures.
You say that I have not offered not a jot of evidence for my own claims. What claims would those be Mark? My response is not about claims for anything it is about the process used to generate Kelvin Thomson’s views, and sources he uses and getting the facts straight. I’m happy to show you the factual errors there in but beyond that I make no claims, that would seem to be your area.
I have not forgotten about the abuses to which you refer in fact I’ve been involved in uncovering them, reporting them and encouraging DIAC to respond to them within the scope of their powers and the law.
If you choose to think that I’m doing all this to protect my patch, go ahead I doubt I’ll ever convince you to the contrary.
- Team Oyeniyi | March 3, 2011 at 4:05 am |
  Applauding from the sidelines.

Mark O'Connor | March 3, 2011 at 7:12 am | Reply

Grant,
I’m sure you do see yourself as a reasonable person, but your response to Kelvin Thomson’s careful documentation of the costs of population growth was the response of someone whose prejudices have been offended.
You admit in your reply that “Migration is now at an all time high. The figures speak for themselves.” Yet you attacked Kelvin Thomson for suggesting as much, called him a demogogue and a distorter of the truth, and claimed the facts were transparently on your side: “If we look at Australia’s population growth over a reasonable period say 1950 to today we see that it changes year by year (that’s to be expected) but the trend is unremittingly down not up. ” And no I don’t think you can argue that your readers should have known you intended “trend” to refer to the second differential — i.e. not the size of our population, or even the rate at which it is changing (steeply upward), but the rate of change in the rate of change itself. It’s an old trick in statistical arguments, when you can’t deny that something is big and getting bigger to find a second or even a third differential that is in fact negative. But in fact even this rate of change in the rate of growth of population has itself been upwards, not “unremittingly down” , over most of the last decade.
And why on Earth do you claim “I have not said that the only solution is migrants (these are your words put into my mouth) ” when that claim is right there in the 4th item on your side-bar. For instance: ” We have a number of huge resource projects kicking off that will require many tens of thousands of skilled workers we just don’t have in the labour force.”
Your pity for employers who can’t get staff when they need them seems a bit selective. What about some pity for the young Australians who can’t get into the workforce? (No doubt you expect the taxpayer to cover their social security payments, but who pays for the social and psychologicial costs? ) Sure business would like a reserve of skilled motivated out-of-work people to select from at will, just as workers would like a choice of bosses and of jobs to select from. Wouldn’t you?
True, business can be a brutal environment. Market forces have to rule, and if your business plan doesn’t in fact provide the profitability to pay the going rate for the kind of labor you require, you go to the wall. That can be heartbreaking, but less so than the situation of those who can’t find work on any terms. I suggest you take a look at Mark Cromer’s truly moving account of the harm done to ordinary workers in the USA now that employers have won the lobby battle for the endless cheap immigrant labour they wanted — It’s at http://www.progressivesforimmigrationreform.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/cromer.pdf. and it should shame you out of such selective pity for the employers.

Team Oyeniyi | March 3, 2011 at 1:15 pm | Reply

Let’s try listening to the people, Mark. Like I do. The real people. The taxi driver who took me to the airport is hamstrung on a bridging visa. He has been hamstrung for two years already. His future career is being placed at risk because our government can not do things in a TIMELY, EFFICIENT and RESPONSIBLE manner. He can’t get an entry level job in his profession and start gaining skills and experience because he isn’t a permanent resident.
He says he doesn’t care what the decision is, just give him a decision so he can get on with his life. He can go eslewhere and at least start his career. The longer we hold him here in limbo, the more we are sacrificing his life.
So why stay, you ask? Because he has now invested so much time in Australia, he feels he should wait a little longer for the decision. He has made friends here. THis has become his home. Yet we can’t give him an answer. But when should he pull the pin? How long does he wait? What are the psychological costs to this lovely young man?
I know the effects personally of “the system” and the system needs to be changed. I am not entering into the debate about skilled migrants and whether we need them or not – but the system as it is stinks, quite frankly. YEARS go by. Some young people are single when they originally apply off-shore and a condition is they must enter Australia single if granted the visa. They wait so long they give up. Life goes on, they get married and have a child. THREE years later they are called to provide the final information. This is not acceptable.

Mark O'Connor | March 4, 2011 at 12:28 am | Reply

That last posting is not relevant to my comments Oyeniyi.
Your opening “Let’s try listening to the people, Mark. Like I do. The real people.” is what’s known as a false transition. (Apart from being a bit of dubious rhetoric, too.)

However, if you’re desperate for an argument (like the man in the Monty Python sketch) — here’s one.

Inasmuch as you appear to be saying the solution is to just let people in, you need to remember how very expensive that is. Each new person born or admitted into Australia requires about $200,000 of infrastructure from the taxpayer –that’s by conventional rule of thumb, though Will Bourke has published a credible argument that it may be as much as twice that. See http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/39930.html Remember, that’s quite apart from what an immigrant may require in settlement services, social security, etc. Just the infrastructure cost. And that infrastructure needs to be already there before they arrive, otherwise we all suffer.
As Jane O’Sullivan of University of Queensland points out, when population growth reaches 2% a year (as it did recently) , the infrastructure cost (even on the lower figure of $200,000) surpasses what any government can hope to raise, and infrastructure begins to go downhill fast — e.g. traffic jams,over-stretched trains…. (Take a look on your next taxi ride.) And, No, it isn’t just a matter of trying harder. See Http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=10137&page=0

I wonder how many migration agents remind their clients that immigration to another country is a privilege not a right, and tell them just how much generosity they are asking from the Australian taxpayer.