Stable Population cuckoos invade Australia

"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.