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Far right snuggles up to depopulationists

By Malcolm King - posted Friday, 11 July 2014


Today is World Population Day. It's a special day for Australia's depopulationists who are quietly infiltrating environmental and community groups, initiating fear campaigns and spreading an anti-migrant message. According to them, every person is a consumer and therefore a parasite on the earth.

Over the last couple of years I have investigated the Sustainable Population Party (SPP) and it's mothership, Sustainable Population Australia . The latter is a registered 'charity' and claims tax deductible donations from its members, while running political campaigns pushing the SPP's zero population growth agenda. The SPP is funded by Flight Centre boss, Graham Turner and Dick Smith.

Neither the SPA nor the SPP have any environmental credentials. Their 'chief scientist' is a yam expert. The leadership group is packed to the gills with blokes from IT and engineering backgrounds. The future with this mob isn't Animal Farm. It's ant farm.

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But of late, a more sinister story has emerged from the SPA. On it's Facebook page this advertisement appeared in June from a Queensland member.

I need your ideas! SPA has obtained around $5K to fund a project in Australia with the aim of reducing unwanted pregnancies. Ideally the idea would achieve this goal and also raise awareness of the population issue. Please let me know any ideas you may have and I will present them to the next SPA Brisbane meeting mid July.

Some years ago I helped the Democrats get the RU486 bill passed on a conscience vote. What I did not conceive of was that today, grant money would be used to reduce Australia's population and make political capital from it, rather than assist the mothers.

The anti-population movement has a brutal past. Between 1960-1980, more than 20 million people in developing nations were cajoled or forced into having IUD implants, hysterectomies or vasectomies, at the behest of the Population Control lobby in America. Infection was rife and tens of thousands of people died. The SPA and SPP are seeds of that poisonous tree.

In the United States, the anti-population push had another sinister side – eugenics. People who had mental illnesses were sometimes sterilized so they couldn't breed. In Melbourne in the 1920s and 1930s, three Mental Deficiency Bills were presented to the Victorian Parliament but did not pass. The Bills sought to institutionalise and sterilise slum dwellers, homosexuals, prostitutes, alcoholics and those with low IQs. Aboriginals fell within this cull.

Why should we be bothered with these ratbags? They have been infiltrated by far right international anti-immigration groups such as Numbers USA. Their aim is to use the currency of the environment movement to build an anti-migrant movement here. The migrants crime? They eat.There are others on the far right in Australia - clandestine organisations in the main - who see these so called 'anti-people groups', as easy pickings for national socialist thuggery.

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The SPP blame the Chinese for causing the housing bubble, the Lebanese for high crime rates in Sydney, Muslims for terrorism and the Vietnamese for drug importation. It goes on and on. Its Facebook page sails close to hate speech. When people complain about the racist comments, the complaints themselves are removed.

Over the last 20 years, more oil and gas have been discovered off our coasts. We currently produce more than $35 billion in foodstuffs and our domestic energy use is declining. In the contraindicated world of the no-growther, that's bad news.

One of the lead thinkers in the global population control movement, Professor Hans Rosling recently recanted his position. Professor Rosling's story is here.

Arguments to reduce immigration and population play upon our fears of others. That strangers are not to be trusted or that we will miss out on our share of the economic pie. According the SPP's sociobiological stance, people are just units of consumption and mothers give birth to 'carbon emitters'.

A larger home market attracts greater economies of scale (less cost in production per unit with increase of volume).But you need the businesses to trade in the first place. The anti-population lobby is anti-industry and employment.

A larger well-educated population attracts investors. This stimulates investment in R&D and knowledge, which generates new ideas and improves productivity. The SPP's and SPA's ultra nationalist policies want international students and visiting academics out.

Greater population concentration forces social changes in the direction of a greater degree of organization; changes are costly in the short term but in the long run, increase a society's ability to reach its economic and social objectives. The de-populationists want to return us to a medieval village.

In 1990 the World Hunger Project calculated that the ecosystem could sustainably support six billion people, and then only if they lived on a vegetarian diet. More than two decades later, with 7.1 billion people living on the planet, global beef production has increased by 5 per cent per capita, pork by 17 per cent and chicken by 82 per cent.

The World Food Program estimates that there are 170 million fewer malnourished people than there were in 1990. The inconvenient truth is that the human beings have, since the dawn of time, created more than they used on average over the course of a lifetime.

The SPA and SPP represent instrumentalism, reductionism and racism at its worst. So if your train is packed full of people, it's the fault of over-population – not that there are too few trains running. If you don't get that important job, it must be because a migrant took it. If it takes you an hour to get to work, it's because there are too many people – not because every single person is driving a car.

Cast the light of liberty on these dangerous misanthropes and send them scurrying back to the dark corners of society, from whence they came.

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About the Author

Malcolm King is a journalist and professional writer. He was an associate director at DEEWR Labour Market Strategy in Canberra and the senior communications strategist at Carnegie Mellon University in Adelaide. He runs a writing business called Republic.

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