Population groups attack people to save world

If it was not for the skilled immigration program, Australia's population would go backwards and productivity would trend down as witnessed in Russia, Japan and most of Eastern Europe. In the next ten years the populations of Greece, Spain, Cuba, Uruguay Denmark, Finland and Portugal, will fall.

The most famous voice of the global population control movement is the American academic Paul Ehrlich. His book, the Population Bomb (1968), warned that by the end of the 20^th century, it was 'game over' for the human race. It is the 45 years since Elrich's book opened with the words: "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate."

He predicted four billion deaths. While the world's population has doubled since the 1960s, according to the UN, the percentage of the population that is "undernourished" has fallen from 33 per cent to 16 per cent since 1968. The rate of population growth has been slowing since the 1960s, and has fallen below replacement levels in the developed world. How did he get it so wrong?

The first reason is that humans are not like bacteria growing exponentially in a petri dish. Humans create schools, plant crops on terraces, make their own fertilizer and grow food to ensure survival. Humans have memory, technics and planning skills to maximize crop productivity. Elrich underestimated human ingenuity.

In Europe and the United States, fertility has dropped to 1.53 births per and 1.88 per female respectively. Biology and the scriptures urged us to be fruitful and to multiply. Now, quite suddenly in relative terms, half the people of the world have decided not to multiply.Elrich did not foresee the radical global drop in fertility in the west.

Much of the doom and gloom produced by the media is about population momentum in Africa. Here is where 90 per cent of the world's population growth lies yet carbon emissions are extraordinarily low in Africa. Even though fertility levels are falling, population is still growing relative to the size of the adult population and will do for the next 50 years.

Unlike the Greens, the SPA and SPGN have no policies for carbon mitigation in high emitting nations such as Australia, nor do they understand that domestic consumption of food and energy is less than 30 per cent of net production.

One of the reasons why population growth is not high on the economic or social agenda is not because governments don't want to talk about it. It's because it is a minor partner in the economic triumvirate of productivity and participation. Australia has fair workforce participation but it could be better. National productivity has slipped over the last ten years but there is a raft of reasons why and none of them have to do with population.

I won't go in to detail about the ageing population except to say that the anti-populationists call it a furphy. I must have missed that memo when I worked in DEEWR in Labour Market Strategy, working specifically on older worker initiatives. Needless to say, the anti-populationists have nothing to say about increasing workforce participation for people 45 and over to defray significant revenue outlays from now until about 2050.

The population control movement is attacking people rather than corporations. This is something new in Australian politics. It is a radical and hardline anti-people movement that doesn't care a fig for liberty and freedom. That's why the Stable Population Party polled less than 9000 votes nationally at the last Federal election.

Back in 2009, Sandra Kanck, the former head of the Sustainable Population Australia and an SPGN supporter, said slashing population by limiting families to one child was the only way to avoid "environmental suicide", as quoted in The Advertiser (22 April 2009). Ms Kanck proposed a national population target of seven million people. Dropping the population that low involves some serious socio-technical engineering that would make Pol Pot look like Walt Disney.

The population control movement invokes the concept of lebensraum. Nations must accommodate biological processes of growth. It is fixated on boundaries, systems and limits to growth rather than on human potential. It aims to fulfill its 'no growth' mantra by winding back capitalism and personal liberty to achieve zero population growth.

For a nation, the ultimate economic goal is to have rising output per head, produced on a sustainable basis, distributed fairly, with jobs for everyone who wants to work. Productivity and workplace participation and population growth are the main means to that end.