Stable Population cuckoos invade Australia

George Orwell's great novel 1984 starts with the line, "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." Even time had been coopted by the state. Now the green shoots of Orwell's totalitarian future are emerging in Australia.

The Stable Population Party (SPP) is the bastard child of Big Brother's persuasive social engineering methods. It has been succored by the Optimum Population Trust (now called Population Matters UK) and had, through one of its Senate candidates, links to right wing anti-immigration figures such as John Tanton and the Social Contract Press in the US.

The SPP is using environmental and heritage groups - much as cuckoos lay their eggs in the nests of other birds - to hatch their anti-immigration message in the lead up to the September Federal election. The party has no environmental credentials.

The SPP wants to create a one in/one out immigrations system, stop building houses for first home buyers, stop the Kiwis arriving, reduce child support payments and especially parental leave, stop 457 visas and slashing our international student numbers. It aims fulfill its 'no growth' mantra by winding back capitalism to a level Pol Pot would have enjoyed.

Lets turn the clock back to 2006 and see how the population issue first arose. Back then the ABS introduced a new methodology that captured for the first time, most of our international student numbers. The 383,818 international full fee-paying students were rolled in to the resident numbers even though they were on temporary visas.

Our international student market was growing strongly in 2005/2006, so the forward base population projections added in the mid range (series B) another seven million people - from 28 million to 35 million by 2050. The 'shock horror' panic reaction got solid media coverage, even though it was just a projection and included temporary residents. A projection is not a fact but it was enough to fertilise the sociobiological spores of the SPP.

The Spectator had an amusing piece last year on the global anti-population push, which I have included here. http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/123471/malthuss-children/

It is also worth citing Stephen Emmott's article in The Guardian as balance as it is a prime example of the 'retroactive correction' which I will discuss later.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/jun/30/population-growth-wipe-out-life-earth

Let us examine a small but important point, which of oft quoted by the SPP and which underpins much of its 'economic theory' (such as it is).

SPP tangled up in infrastructure

A couple of years ago, Dr Jane O'Sullivan, a Queensland SPP Senate Candidate, wrote in in her submission to the 'Population Policy Inquiry for Local Government Association' in Queensland and in Opinion Online (The downward spiral of hasty population growth), that Australia's infrastructure spend is currently 25 per cent of GDP. She said this was due to high population growth.

She based herstatement on acitation of Lester Thurow's 1986 article Why the Ultimate Size of the World's Population Doesn't Matter in MIT's Technology Review. You won't find the title of the article publicized much by the SPP for obvious reasons. Thurow estimated that it required 12.5 per cent of GDP to expand capacity at 1 per cent per year.

Dr Sullivan said, "Australian estimates would suggest that figure is right in our ball-park too… So, if we're currently growing at two per cent per year, then 25 per cent of our GDP is currently being used to expand capacity to accommodate the people who are not yet here (or will have to be spent eventually to catch up). This means that the GDP available per capita to serve current residents is 25 per cent less than the advertised per capita GDP." There are a couple of logic and definitional errors there but I will let them pass.

What Lester actually said was:

"If the United States had a four percent population growth rate, one half of its entire GDP would have to be devoted to investing in those new Americans."

For the record, the United States recently registered its lowest population growth ratesince the Great Depression at 0.73 percent. Population growth has slowed dramatically across the developed world just as demographers predicted it would. Dr Sullivan's quote of four percent population growth is based on a Thurow hypothetical and has no relevance in the States or here. Neither will Australia have to 'catch up' in its infrastructure spend. I will include Thurow's concluding paragraph.

"If a given country desires economic development, then its population growth cannot increase by more than 2 percent-- half the rate of population growth now being experienced in most of the underdeveloped world," Professor Thurow concluded.

The article was primarily about underdeveloped nations, which is where the population debate belongs. Australia's population growth rate is 1.7 with the trend rate at 1.4. Australia's spend on infrastructure, as a percentage of GDP, was 10.5 per cent in 2012 as per:

http://www.bitre.gov.au/publications/2012/files/stats_002.pdf

John Tanton and the Social Contract

Back in 1997 the ACT SSP Senate candidate, Mark O'Connor wrote an article for the right wing Social Contract Press in America, run by John Tanton, a former president of Zero Population Growth in the US. Not every one loves the Social Contract Press. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HniEWfwV2ks

O'Connor said that Australia's stubborn 'politically correct' support for immigration comes from the decay of 1960s and 1970s radicalism in Australia. He wrote that "entire groups of the tertiary-educated, who once saw themselves as anti-establishment radicals in fierce opposition to the values of their parents, have now moved up the social system and are running bureaucracies and governments."

"Many such people were among those who 'saw the light' in the Sixties and Seventies but then in the Eighties, when they were getting a little complacent, were offered money instead – 'the money or the light?' - they eventually chose the money."

It sounds like Mark Davis' Gangland revamped to explain our generally positive acceptance of immigration in Australia. Professor Bob Birrell from Monash University also wrote for the Social Contract Press back in the 1990s and has been consistent in his anti-immigration message for 20 years.

In October 1993, O'Connor was guest at the annual conference of FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which was also started by John Tanton. According to the Anti-Defamation League in America, a civil rights group, FAIR acknowledged and defended having received grants back in 1977, reportedly totaling around $600,000 from the Pioneer Fund, which was described by The New York Times as promoting 'research into eugenics.'

This is hardly a stinging condemnation. Who hasn't written an article for a dodgy magazine or attended a meeting 20 years ago that they might regret today? In my youth I wrote articles for the music and street press aimed at overthrowing the Bjelke-Petersen Government. As the police reminded me frequently at 3.00 am in the Roma Street Watch House, I was hardly a threat to the status quo. The SPP has fought hard to distance itself from racist groups but this is not a good look.

[Note: This claim about Madeleine Weld has been withdrawn by the author. Please see the comments thread for more details, including a comment by Madeleine Weld.]Even Madeleine Weld, the President of the Population Institute in Canada wrote of John Tanton in the February 2013 Sustainable Population Australia (SPA) newsletter:

"In the 1990s, John Tanton founded the anti-immigration Zero Population Growth. Tanton is an anti-Semite and set up FAIR [Federation of American Immigration Reform], which wrote Arizona's anti-immigration law. Groups associated with him almost took over the Sierra Club. There is no point in arguing with racists using green arguments to forward a racist agenda."

Indeed SPP Founder William Bourke said in BRW recently that, "We are not concerned with immigration but with population – whether that's by natural increase or immigration." But the SPP's policies and Facebook page comments tell another story – the party exists solely to slash immigration, international student numbers and family welfare payments. What's going on?

The retroactive correction

While much of the anti-populationist rhetoric and 'policy' is little more than a dog's breakfast of news headlines and dodgy self-supporting references, they have hit on one propaganda technique, which works. This is the 'retroactive correction'. It consists of accumulating a staggering amount of horrifying news – much of it has nothing to do with population – and then tempering it with a slim ray of hope. First you break down all resistance – then you offer an escape route to your stunned and relieved audience. Stephen Emmott article in The Guardian doesn't even do that. According to him "we're *ucked'.

Dick Smith's Population Crisis is a case in point. It starts out bad and gets worse. I'll give you one example from page 72. Dick quotes Professor Garry Egger from the University of Southern Cross. "We've passed the sweet spot. Continuous prosperity is no longer improving our health." '(Dr Egger) believes human nature means we are more likely to maximize than optimize things until they begin to harm us. Diabetes (Egger says) is like climate change. The body can no longer absorb the extra sugar we are consuming, just as the planet can no longer comfortably absorb additional carbon.'

Is climate change like diabetes? Really? I mean, really?

Let me give you another example but this time with a nice sociobiological simile. In the same SPA newsletter, Dr Paul Willis, the Director of RiAus, created this 'thought experiment'.

"Imagine a glass seemingly empty apart from a scum on the bottom. That scum is yeast that doubles its size every day and you know that, after 60 days, the glass will be full to the brim with that yeasty scum. Question: on which day is the glass half full? Answer: day 59. Just one day before the glass is filled to capacity it's half full. That's the sneaky thing about exponential growth. The final spurt happens so rapidly," he said.

"Take the world's human population. We only made it to the first one billion people within the last 300 years. But then we really started packing them in. When I was born in 1963 there were 3.5 billion people. Now, just 47 years later, we're double that figure and still climbing rapidly," Dr Willis said.

Population growth is climbing in Africa but slowing across most of Europe and America and falling in Japan, Italy and Russia. Are people like scum in a glass? Really? We'd better get rid of that scum! In fact, the core demographic phenomenon of the future facing both developing and developed nations is not volume but the ageing of their populations. The SPP don't acknowledge this. I will now turn to the SPP's sociobiological roots.

Sociobiology – Animal Farm goes Ant Farm

The Stable Population Party (SPP) is a disciple of E.O. Wilson, the doyen of the sociobiology movement in the 1960s and 70s. I admired Wilson for his extraordinary work on the social behavior of ants. Wilson's definition of sociobiology is "The extension of population biology and evolutionary theory to social organization."

The core premise of sociobiology is that genes dictate the way we think and behave. The sociobiologists say humans have evolved over eons through natural selection and this gives human thinking and behavior a predicative quality. If you've ever sat a psychometric test, you're in the world of the sociobiologists.

The engineers, scientists and IT specialists in the SPP have picked up on this and agree with the sociobiologists that we are 'hard wired' as consumers. We not only lack free will, but are hell bent on destroying nature and therefore the world ("human nature means we are more likely to maximize than optimize things until they begin to harm us.")For them, the only solution is to reduce the planet's human population.

How about love and the need for redemption? According to the sociobilogists, these are simply complex animal experiences. Non-biological factors, such as social customsand culture, expectations and education, have little or no effect on behaviour. The SPP – who for the most part are economic illiterates - is only interested in how people behave as units of consumption not in the relations between people, corporations, governments and nations.

The SPP has returned to the tired old theories of Thomas Malthus, a British cleric who in the 18^th century said the poor would breed and breed until the earth was destroyed. The SPP married the theories of sociobiology (we're ravenous consuming animals lacking free will) with Malthus' notion that people – especially poor people (Africa), are the problem.

Instead of poor people just being the problem (which isn't very PC), they say that everyone is the problem. In the language of the SPP, population is 'the everything issue' but that's just code for you being the problem. They may wave the Australian flag but beneath their rented koala suits, they channel the spirit of Pauline Hanson and Orwell's Big Brother. Give them a wide berth.