Stable Population cuckoos invade Australia

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[Note: This claim about Madeleine Weld has been withdrawn by the author.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.