Community Alliance SA protects own backyard

One wonders what young people think of this obstructionism. Affordable accommodation close to the city is hard to come by. If Adelaide is to reinvent itself as a vibrant place to live instead of a large retirement village, it will need the vision of the young in or near the CBD to create exciting communities.

The anti-population stance of the Alliance is very odd. In South Australia the SA birth rate is 1.7 children per female (less than replacement) and currently attracts only about 10,000 people a year from interstate and overseas. In fact, during the 2008/09 financial year, 26,300 people moved interstate, with those aged 20-39 making up half of this figure. If population growth is the blood pressure of capital, then South Australia's has fallen through the floor as migration bottoms out and births decline. The graph below shows how meager South Australia's inward population flow is.

3412.0 Migration, Australia, 2010-11

While I generally eschew citing media reports, I will make this one exception as it details comprehensively and accurately what is happening to world population. The anti-population parties are sowing the seeds of dissention and enmity amongst community groups, right at the time population growth is slowing.

http://www.theglobalmail.org/feature/what-happens-when-half-the-world-stops-making-babies/573/

The Alliance has been infiltrated by agents provocateurs from the Stop Population Growth Now and the Stable Population Party who are peddling fear. They want to meddle in women's reproductive rights, slash the immigrant intake, boot out international students, evict the Kiwis while returning Australia to trade protectionism. It is bizarre that Community Alliance SA has aligned itself with economic illiterates who want to reduce the number of people in the community. It takes the community out of Community Alliance SA.

There was a meeting organized recently by the Alliance at the Norwood Town Hall in the leafy eastern suburbs of Adelaide. About 300 people attended, most in their late 50s, 60s and early 70s. It was a regulation bun fight with the audience yelling they wanted more consultation on developments, more transparency of process, more accountability, less population growth and of course more sustainability.

For a few, this is democracy at work. For others, it's a post retirement crusade with the blind fanaticism of people who believe (in some cases, rightly), that they have not been listened to. Hell hath no fury like as Adelaide eastern suburbs rate-payer whose opinions have been ignored or in the parlance 'not actioned'.

One would like to think the Alliance represents a backlash against the more rapacious effects of globalism and they are hell bent on fostering grass roots businesses, farmer's markets, advocating small plot communal farming, closing the gap on Indigenous health, petitioning for more local doctors and midwives or new methods to harvest rainwater.

But no. They are worried about their own property prices and are using environmental slogans to camouflage their real motives.

It's a bitter medicine for older folk, who in the main, have gotten everything they wanted handed to them on a plate. They can't understand why the state government hasn't gotten down on its knees and begged forgiveness for actually governing (more or less) in the name of the people – all of the people, not just those protecting property values.

Malcolm King works in generational change. He was an associated director in DEEWR in Labour Market Strategy.