the disconnection from reality

This newspaper article seems to say pretty much the same thing I've been saying here.

If you live in the city and haven't ventured to the country yet, there's a one-in-five chance you never will

industry self regulation

Just like mobile phone charging scams schemes it seems that industry self regulation here is a pathetic joke when compared to (say) European regulation standards. For example the "egg industry" wishes to have a standard of free range production standard enshrined in law to allow 2 chickens per square meter and call that free range (as discussed here)

The Australian Egg Corporation, which represents most egg farmers, this week sent new draft standards to producers, which would allow a free-range egg farm to run as many as 20,000 chickens per hectare. The industry's current model code, which is not legally enforceable, allows 1500 chickens per hectare.

With a hectare being 10,000 square meters - 20,000 chickens would be 2 chickens in a square meter (so a yard by a yard more or less) repeated over quite an amount of area. So this still represents quite tight storage for chickens.

So corporate nastiness is actually equal in treating both the human population and our stock animals as just a resource to rack and pack

populate or perish: how its destroying Australia

abstract

Australia is a unique and delicate environment. This is often hidden by the harsh conditions which will kill you if you don't know what your doing. Gradually Australians have come to understand this and come to know and love their country. However this is turning around and I have seen quite significant reversals of comprehension and understanding of Australia and its environment in the last 20 years. At the same time the levels of / and nature of environmental destruction have not really abated.

The preservation of our natural beauty, our native flora and fauna and the proper management of our key natural resources (not just plain exploitation) depends not only on the government, but on the understanding of and engagement with this by the public. We are a democracy so the government is steered by the public.

In this article I try to present one aspect of the reversal of positive trends in this area and put forward what I see as being core factors.

Since settlement of this country the purpose of government here has been the exploitation of resources to make (in the first instance) a self sustaining penal colony, making a profit for England and eventually (after federation) it remained in that mode of shovel it out the door to the 'stakeholders'.

Untold areas of land were altered by land clearing, deforestation, farming, irrigation and other practices.

During the about the fifties we began a paradigm shift of mentality from Australia being "a strange place we find ourselves in" to "my homeland which I know and love". In that period a generation of people were born who's parents did not regard somewhere else as being where they come from, but that Australia was where they come from. People like Len Webb became interested in observing what we were doing wrong with the management of our land and became interested in saving it. This became known as the environmental movement.

I encourage you to take a moment to examine some of his photographic documentation works at Griffith University's collection here. It could be argued that from the early Governors of the colony of NSW sought to protect this land, but the movement to protect the environment among the people only really took hold in the generatoin born after the 50's.

Recently the movement of environmental protection has been derailed and become an agenda of social reforms and conflicting ideology which seems to fail to engage the public as once did the bid to save the Franklin River campaign. Indeed the slogan of no dams has morphed subtly to remove the idea of it being within world heritage areas in South West Tasmania.

Since the 70's and 80's the importance of the environment to Australians has passed its peak. We see now in the 21st Century that interest in Environmental issues, people are now no longer worried about the Australian environment, its degradation and losses of land.

I feel there is substantial evidence to support that part of the reason for this is that more and more the public know less and less about Australia in large part because less and less of the Australian public are from Australia.

discussion

A quick read of Australian history reveals we've changed substantially as a nation. Starting with the settlement we were at first just a colony of immigrants.

While the contribution of immigration to what represents Australian culture and our society, there comes a point where if we bring people in fast enough it creates a level of social turmoil (apart from the normal growth dynamic of any society) and "turning the cement forever will just result in stuff which will never set". In this discussion I will attempt to demonstrate that after starting out as an infant nation sometime during the building of it we have made wrong choices which I feel are detrimental to the ongoing strength of Australia.

After the cessation of Convict labour in the 1840's, our immigration levels slowed and we started to take on the character of an infant nation. People like Henry Parkes began pushing for the unification of the colonies and the formation of a nation and by 1901 we had become a federated nation and started down the path of becoming a country in our own right.

Clearly we were a migrant based nation at that time, but its important to observe that we were growing in population AND importantly growing in population of people who were born here. It is this point which I consider of greatest significance, as the longer you are here the more you are likely to feel that this place is your home and not look at it as simply a place to screw over to take your money home with you.

Some time shortly after WW2 we began a serious intake of migrants, which (perhaps) was based on the belief that we needed to have a larger work force. One of the men in government at that time was Arthur Calwell, who believed strongly in the need to increase our population. He pioneered the "Populate or Perish" theme which became embedded in the machinery immigration policy.



I'm sure he was a well meaning fellow, but I believe that the mechanisms he put in place have ultimately provided for the destruction of what is Australia and what is important to us.

There is an old adage "divide and conquer" and perhaps the surest way to divide a people is to bring in new ones all the time. I believe that the Populate or Perish policy did exactly that.

As you can see from some data the results of this policy has been the increasing decline of the population of Australians who were born in Australia with a steady stream of migrants. Looking at this ABS document we can see quickly that from about the time of Federation we became increasingly a nation of migrants ...

Fig 4.2 Australia's population born overseas(a)(b)


with (at the time of Calwell) something like 10% of Australians being born overseas. This of course means that 90% of Australians were born here.

Australia became a federated nation (not just a bunch of colonies) on the first of Jan 1901 (the first day of the twentieth century) and marked a time when Australians were wanting to become Australian. At that point in time the population was still something like 20% migrant, but it was turning around with increasingly more and more people living here who were born here.

The results of the immigration policy was to begin adding quickly to the size of the population. Which was just as it was intended. This can be seen clearly in this population graph below.



However as seen above it also returned the trend away from Australians being people who are born here to increasingly people who have moved here within their lifetime. Perhaps this is the fastest growing national population in the developed world and perhaps also the fastest changing one too.

Change is a double edged sword, as it brings both good and bad.

As a country we have very high urbanization, and interestingly it seems that the migrants who come to Australia prefer to live in the cities with "eight out of ten people born overseas lived in a capital city. Just over half were in Sydney or Melbourne"(source abs).

Which in my view can only increase the distancing of Australians from really understanding Australia. People who live in big cities (and make no mistake, cities now are quite different from cities at the beginning of the 2oth Century) are more likely to have disconnected and partially formed grasps of reality.
Its not unusual for city people to

• not know where water comes from,
  
• not know where sewerage goes or how its treated
• not know where food comes from
• not understand much at all about food
• be filled with unreal contradictions For instance "I want to eat meat, but killing an animal to eat it is disgusting"
  

No wonder less and less we see anyone give a shit about the degradation of the Australian landscape and the effects of pollution. Instead everyone goes on about CO2 as if its the main issue while benzene and carcinogens are poured into the air and water.

Because increasingly they come from elsewhere, live in the big city and have no kinship with the country people don't look at the landscape and see degradation. To see that you would need to have understood what it was 15 years ago, which you can't if you don't live in the area long.

It becomes more interesting when you look at where migrants live. For example according to (slightly old) ABS data Queensland has the greatest amount of the population who were born in Australia and WA has the highest.
STATE POPULATION DISTRIBUTION - 2001


Which is interesting, as Queensland seems to be the area where people born in Australia from Sydney and Melbourne come to to retire. Often because they're sick of the rat race and in search of a nice place to live.

Australia it seems is decreasingly interested in preserving the environment or addressing issues such as the rates of land clearing. I'm certain this is linked with both urbanisation and the increasingly migrant itinerant population.

Back in the beginning of the 20th Century while many Australians lived in towns, they were smaller towns and (relatively) many more people lived in the regional areas or even had family who still did.

Now its totally different and the gap between the 'bush' and the 'city' is widening.

With changes in what is the nature of migrants (like why did they come here) altering from "a place to live" to "a place to improve our earnings" and the social background they come from (was UK and Europe is now more broadly Asia) I think its unlikely we'll ever have such a strong core of people who shared the values of those who founded the country.

I'm not sure if its possible to turn this around, but it will take years for us to get back that critical mass of people born here and who regard this as their homeland and have enough knowledge of it to know what they're talking about.

new Australian Anthem

Especially if you live in a fast developing area, you can see this more clearly

They paved paradise and put up a parkin' lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swingin' hot spot
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you got till it's gone
They paved paradise and put up a parkin' lot

They took all the trees, and put em in a tree museum
And they charged the people a dollar and a half to see them
No, no, no, don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got till it's gone
They paved paradise, and put up a parkin' lot

...

I don't wanna give it
Why you wanna give it
Why you wanna givin it all away
Hey, hey, hey
Now you wanna give it
I should wanna give it
Cuz you're givin it all away, no no

the example of Adelaide

our politicians are complaining we don't listen to them when we fail to accept the message they are trying to sell.

Perhaps they should stop regarding us as kids who must eat what we're fed?

The Big Australia is an excellent bit of such garbage.

It was interesting to read that a recent study found that Adelaide was now ranked top of the most livable cities in Australia ... gosh that's a change. Perhaps quite a lot has to do with the crowding there.

Crowding is not just something which "happens" it comes from growth. Lets look at growth of the mainland state capitals since 1901



So, looking at ABS data shows the familiar kick in growth caused by changes in immigration in the 1950's and also that some time around 1970 Brisbane started to join Sydney and Melbourne in growth while Adelaide slowed in growth (resembling more the growth trends in major European cities). Brisbane was once a most livable place, but is now quite crowded and congested. Perhaps its time the Politicians started listening to us instead of saying we're not listening to them .

essential skills in short supply

In this mornings Australian, Jennifer Westacott of the Business Council of Australia argues that skills in Australia are in short supply.

I would argue that this is especially the case in the upper levels of Governance and Planning in Australia.

So unless the target of migrant intake is to get rid of politicians who sell off our assets, reduce our capacity and saddle us with ridiculous water infrastructure management (with little done about providing infrastructure itself) well I can't agree.

take for example this figure:

New job creation is running at about 30,000 a month

which is quite implausible as anyone looking for work knows. What this figure certainly included is jobs which are such as construction. This may create a job for 6 months and then it goes away.

So unless you're going to have migrants who come for 6 months and go away its blatantly false to argue this case.

she goes on to argue that

The rate of growth has fallen to 1.6 per cent, its lowest in four years.

thank God ... its been insane for years.

She momentarially pulls her head out of the sand with this:

three-pronged strategy is needed for a sustained increase in the skilled workforce: investment in education and training, commitment to a sizeable, permanent skilled migration program and greater use of temporary skilled migration visas.

which contains the single good point of investment in education and training but is likely to be subjugated to the skilled migration program and greater use of temporary skilled migration visas which will make more profit for business and leave more Australians underemployed.

She rightly points out that:

Well-managed population growth will require a commitment to effective long-term planning of our transport, energy and water infrastructure needs, fast-tracking of key infrastructure projects and policy settings that support private investment and efficient delivery of large projects.

but to date that is not what we've seen ... with the majority of spending on the infrastructure to dig it up faster and ship it out faster ... see this ABC article to support that.

A new report on infrastructure spending says investment in Queensland continues to be led by resources projects

So if you think that the multi billion dollar spending on stuff such as Allconnex has brought a single extra drop of water to your door then perhaps you'll think this is a good idea. To what I see it just appears to be good for providing more for those making money out of us and nothing better for us.

Police

The attitudes of colonialism where it was the rough wild land which needed to be tamed for the King (now Queen) are still pervasive in the Police. They still display the attitudes of bosses who enforce the will of the King rather than anyone how is protector for the people.

No better example of this can be found in the display of heartlessness and callous disregard to people in Toowoomba recently in their "freak" flood event.

I would encourage you to read the ABC news item here. Essentially the emergency phone operator berates victims of the horrific flood event and shows no compassion or displays the dispassionate non-judgmental attitudes which are needed in this circumstance.

The operator, Senior Constable Jason Wheeler in the communications centre of the Toowoomba police station, replies: "Why did you drive through floodwater?"

A distressed Ms Rice replies, "It wasn't this bad then," to which Senior Constable Wheeler replies, "Yeah, well".

Senior Constable Wheeler asks her the model of the car but her safety was not inquired after.

Well Constable Wheeler, perhaps your ill-informed opinion of the circumstances was wrong. Perhaps it was not a flooded creek which was driven though, but rather an event you could not comprehend? Perhaps you could and should be better trained to grasp that "you do not know all the facts" and "you should be professional"

Chilling and disturbing, but in light of this the police attitude is "its all ok"

But police have defended their handling of triple-0 calls made at the height of the city's flood crisis.

Sergeant Bob Coleman, who was in charge of police communications on January 10, says the switchboard was swamped with life-threatening emergency calls.

He told the inquiry he is satisfied with the way they were handled under the circumstances.

clearly there is a rotten judgmental uncaring culture which needs to be weeded out.

We are supposed to trust these people?

---

PostScriptum

reading in the SMH later today I find the following reasonable sounding defense.

QPU president Ian Leavers said chaos in the Toowoomba emergency call centre on the afternoon of January 10 highlighted the dire working conditions of regional call centre operators.
"I have repeatedly said that under-resourcing and under-staffing of the police service by government is really affecting how police can do their job," he said.
"The call centre in Brisbane is brand new, but as soon as you go past Caboolture to the north, Logan to the south, and Goodna to the west, the police call centres are third world standard.

...

Senior Constable Wheeler, who took Ms Rice's call at 1.49pm, said he had no appreciation at the time that she was in major danger.
“There was no panic or distress in her voice, no,” he said.
Senior Sergeant Wheeler said minor flooding had occurred at the same intersection in the past, and her request to him to call a tow truck did not suggest a sense of urgency.
However he said he reported himself to a welfare officer a day or two after the call, expressing concern that he did not keep his frustration in check.
“You self-evaluate, 'how can I do the job better?',” he said.

but to me the general assumption by Police remains "you're guilty and or wrong"

migration pressure - knock on effects

Australia since the creation of a colony by the English has been as a bloody great place to come over to and see what you can rip up and take away. Some people started doing this back in the earliest days of the colonial period of Australia.

Recently I wrote about the effects on population created by changes in immigration



Its interesting to see that at the same spot where the population growth started to ramp up we see another trend observed by the researchers at Australian Bureau of Statistics ... that up until the 1940's Australia was increasingly populated by people born here. Then, after that point in time, ramping up the migration rate meant that less and less people who call themselves Australian are Australian born.

ABS has a very interesting page
click to read larger version

So at the moment around one in four Australians are born here ... and looking at the modern end of that curve, the trend seems to be continuing and perhaps increasing.

Now, its interesting to note that the real growth of interest in conserving and protecting (as opposed to chopping down digging up and outright exploiting) came from about the time when most Australians were born here. Its also interesting to note that there is a decrease in interest in environmental issues, and that the environmental party (the Greens) has become subverted away from the environment and become some sort of radical urban based party.

I put forward that this is caused by the increase in immigration. We have less and less people who really understand Australia and an increase in the changes to what Australia is.

By having an increasingly itinerant population is it any wonder that noone gives a rats arse that your home is being degraded?

interesting points in the paper

two interesting points raised here:

10,000 tonnes of Australian iron ore exported five years ago could buy 280 imported dishwashers. Today it buys 1400 dishwashers. "On any measure, we are living through a boom," she says.

...

First, with Australia's terms of trade at their highest level in at least 140 years, the budget should be well in the black by now, not limping into a small surplus in two or three years.

so why aren't we? I'd put forward the staggering cost of our staggering growth as the reason.

Do you have any other to suggest?

Queensland Environment Minister

I was just watching something on the ABC and noted some quite young blond girl fronting up a policy which is supposed to make a difference in land fill amounts (no idea how, but that's another story)

It seems that the Minister is Kate Jones ... I was stunned that someone so young who sounded so inexperienced. So I looked her up. When I accessed www.qld.alp.org.au I got the following information:

• At 29 Kate is the youngest member in the Bligh Cabinet


• Before running for State Parliament, Kate was a Senior Media Advisor to the Queensland Minister for Public Works, Housing and Racing, Robert Schwarten
  
• Kate is a member of a number of local community groups, including the Ashgrove Historical Society, The Gap Community Association, Ashgrove Meals on Wheels, Enoggera Respite Centre Management Committee and environmental group Save Our Waterways Now. She is also Patron of The Gap Little Athletics and the Ashgrove Rangers


• Kate firmly believes in education for all and has a strong interest in environmental policy


• Kate is also a member of Amnesty International and The Fred Hollows Foundation and supports World Vision

So why was she chosen as our environment minister?

I don't see anything in the least which gives any indication that she has any experience or qualifications in the role.

apart from perhaps having a strong interest in environmental policy ...

?