The latest fortnightly YouGov poll has Labor down a point on the primary vote to 32%, the Coalition steady on 34%, the Greens up two to 12% and One Nation down one to 9%, with the combined result for all others steady on an ample 13%. The respondent-allocated two-party result shifts a point in Labor’s favour to reach 50-50, with the Greens both increasing their primary vote and recorded a somewhat stronger flow of preferences to Labor. The results remain peculiar for the high overall level of minor party and independent voting.
Also featured are a comprehensive seat of leadership ratings: Malcolm Turnbull on 44% approval (down one on six weeks ago) and 48% disapproval (up one); Bill Shorten on 43% (up one) and 46% (down one); Pauline Hanson on 42% (up three) and 50% (down two); Richard Di Natale on 26% (up one) and 39% (up one); Nick Xenophon on 52% (up two) and 28% (up three); Bob Katter on 36% (up three) and 41% (down two); Tony Abbott on 34% (steady) and 57% (up one); and Christopher Pyne on 32% (up one) and 44% (steady). Other findings are that 66% are worried about North Korea, up 12% on eight weeks ago, with 29% not worried, down 11%. Fully 43% would support military action in response to the missile test, with an equal number opposed. Sixty-four per cent would support banning the niqab, with 26% opposed; for the burqa, 67% support and 24% opposition; but for the hijab, 29% support and 61% opposition.
The poll was conducted Thursday to Monday from a sample of 1032.
Boer
No, that bogan hates people taking jobs he thinks he is entitled to. Fifty years ago, he was yelling similar slogans at my father (and probably yours) despite their equal whiteness.
And no, I haven’t decided it’s just about race. I have decided it’s a global problem, and Australia ‘solving’ its share of it by letting the inhabitants of other countries starve isn’t really a palatable solution for me.
I haven’t named a figure, because it’s almost impossible to do so (and involve more number crunching and expertise than I have) – because, to some extent, there needs to be a global conversation about this.
Australia taking every huddled mass on the globe won’t solve the issue, but to argue it can’t take more people because sustainability ignores the complexity and extent of the problem.
Australia took immigrants after WWII because it recognised that if you don’t share what you have, sooner or later others with less take what you have from you.
Zoomster.
Let me rephrase then. Not everyone who wants a lower intake is racist. I do not think that BW’s point is built on racism. Thats an argument he has on sustainability and population carrying capacities.
While I accept your point on rich developed countries telling developing countries what they can and cant do, I do not think it is necessarily tied to migration on this point.
mb
It is clear that Australian unsustainability manifests itself in numerous metrics including horrific per capita CO2 emissions, a lack of housing, increasing numbers of homeless, increased time and effort simply to get around, around two million unemployed or under employed, a staggering national debt, a dying Great Barrier Reef, over use of fresh water, and an ever-increasing suite of endangered species.
Apropos of my last post, it is estimated that Australia will reach 25,000,000 around mid August next year: http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/0/1647509ef7e25faaca2568a900154b63?OpenDocument
Ides
And I’m not accusing anyone of being racist, but trying to explain why it LOOKS racist.
DandM, having just spent some time in outback WA, I can categorically say population density has little to do with sustainability. Whole mountains of iron ore are being shipped to north Asia and as is huge quantities of top soil is being blown into the Indian Ocean. I would guess that WA has the lowest population density in the world.
zoomster
‘Boer
No, that bogan hates people taking jobs he thinks he is entitled to.’
So, I am racist because I am like the Bogan, but the Bogan who yells out ‘Fuck off we’re full!’ is not racist because he can’t get a job?
Zoomster
I do not think you were calling anyone here racist. I understand you point on why it might be considered racist, but thats a failing of the debate to overcome simple name calling. Yes, some people asking for a lower intake will do it for racist reasons and some will do it for other non racist means.
Test
‘Z
‘But – whatever the intent – the result is racist, because we have a largely white population saying that they won’t take any more migrants – just as the complexion of migration is changing.’
And
‘And I’m not accusing anyone of being racist, but trying to explain why it LOOKS racist.’
OK, in your words, the result is racist but the behaviour leading to a racist result is not racist but it still LOOKs racist?
How on earth does all that work?
I have yet to see Zoomster explain why we should make Australia more unsustainable than it is now.
How will Australia look when it’s no longer being sustained?
Will there be, like, nothing here at all?
Boerwar
Worth while to remember that back in the genisis of the ‘White Australia” policy days that the Oi Oi Oi opponents were the Blue Team as they wanted cheap labour, something migrants excel at. The motivation of the Blue Team for lotta migrants I dare say has not changed. The environment and amenity of life ? Meh, who care when my profits are up.
Steve777 @ #950 Thursday, September 7th, 2017 – 7:49 pm
So how many Australians do we need to be perceived as big and strong, presumably for defence reasons?
Consider the population of potential invaders:
China 1.3 billion
India 1.3 billion
Indonesia 260 million
Pakistan 190 million
Russia 140 million
Getting a picture of how absurd this line of argument is? Rudd wanted a BIG Australia. Was it 50 million? All very sad when the threats to our native wildlife was being recognised today as a result of overdevelopment beyond a sustainable level.
Zoomster, ‘I haven’t named a figure, because it’s almost impossible to do so (and involve more number crunching and expertise than I have).’
I think I have found the reason I find your reasoning hard to follow.
Let’s take just one scenario and have a quick look at possible consequences.
We take enough migrants to end up with, say, 250 million people by the end of the Century. Easy as, BTW. There are around 50 million refugees right now who would be willing to flown into Australia tomorrow. And, with global warming, there will easily be the numbers to get us up to 250 million people.
Where is the fresh water coming from? We are running out of the stuff with 25 million people.
Where are we going to import the food from, because we will go from net food exporters to massive food importers.
Where are people going to live?
In monstrous towers or will we multiply the current urban spread by ten?
Is multiplying our extinctions by an order of ten OK with everyone? Because the number of species at risk is climbing steadily with just 25 million people. How many extinctions is OK?
Given that our current production is eating up our soils, what are we going to do when they are all stuffed?
Given that we have phosphorous poor soils and that our current levels of food production are totally dependent on added phosphorous, what should we do when the world’s phosphorous supplies run out sometime about the middle of the century?
And what are we going to do with our CO2 emissions with all those extra emitters?
Are we OK with multiplying our homeless by ten? Not going to happen?
Are we OK with multiplying our unemployed and underemployed by 10? Not going to happen?
We are running out of landfill just when we need ten times as much landfill space? Just dump it in the oceans?
And so on and so forth. On ALL these metrics we have reached or passed our sustainable limits.
Those who want to multiply it all by ten should be putting on the table just how they reckon it will all happen.
Not starting slurs about racism.
William Bowe @ #962 Thursday, September 7th, 2017 – 8:06 pm
It’s natural environment will be degraded beyond recovery, demonstrated by high extinction rates and reduced biodiversity. Agricultural and horticultural production will plateau then decline as current productive areas will decline in output and we rely more on using lower productive land. Water availabilty and quality will decrease.
Hint: you can’t eat coal or iron ore or drink natural gas.
‘poroti
Boerwar
Worth while to remember that back in the genisis of the ‘White Australia” policy days that the Oi Oi Oi opponents were the Blue Team as they wanted cheap labour, something migrants excel at. The motivation of the Blue Team for lotta migrants I dare say has not changed. The environment and amenity of life ? Meh, who care when my profits are up.’
Yep. Migrants are housing fodder for the mother of all Ponzi schemes: the Australian construction industry.
We have that tiger by the tail and not a single economist and not a single pollie has the faintest idea of how to let go of the tiger without the whole deck of cards collapsing around our ears.
why is this poll included on site? does it have credentials?
William Bowe
How will Australia look when it’s no longer being sustained?
William Bowe
Will there be, like, nothing here at all?
If we all do our bit and wear wide brown country camouflage gear – we will be invisible and perhaps the Aboriginal and TS population can take the country back. We could then be issued with transparent no cash cards and, from time to time, be shown the inside of a police lockup.
Seems perfectly reasonable to me and Brown Bear.
Good night all.
Ƹ̴Ӂ̴Ʒ Ƹ̴Ӂ̴Ʒ
Getting a picture of how absurd this line of argument is? Rudd wanted a BIG Australia.
I wasn’t arguing, more expressing a feeling of what I would ‘like’. A big strong Australia. Like Germany. Or like Britain after the Thatcherites are exiled to the wilderness for a decade. Certainly not what we seem to be heading for, a disused quarry surrounded by 40-60 million people mostly in five crowded coastal cities, rust belt suburbs, favellas, those who are employed doing a tiny wealthy elite’s laundry and minding their kids for a pittance. A larger version of Qatar after the oil runs out.
My main point is that we have no population policy.
its commonsense aust cannot be too large – however we have never decentralised enough. we need to get our act together including sydney and melbourne before racing ahead. the environment is not like europe or america – surely experts have set limits on growth. the greens have pop caps in their policy, due to environmental constraints (cuse gramma)
The population would be more sustainable if gay marriage was compulsory.
Can we have a population thread?
Ides of March @ #952 Thursday, September 7th, 2017 – 7:51 pm
The Bore just wants to cloak himself in his moral superiority.
He does sanctimony well.
“Can we have a population thread?”
The population wars can be the new energy wars.
Boerwar
“fodder for the mother of all Ponzi schemes: the Australian construction industry.”
.
Yep. I remember the surprise at finding out that despite The Rodent’s image as a bit of a “Boo Hiss to foreigners” ,tough on boat people type he oversaw record immigration numbers.
BK @ #975 Thursday, September 7th, 2017 – 8:23 pm
Just like an energy wars thread or a Rudd/Gillard thread? Or a Trump thread? That doesn’t seem to be the way BillBowe rolls.
‘William Bowe
How will Australia look when it’s no longer being sustained?’
Take a look around you, where ever you happen to be at the time.
Taking Australia as the sum of all its parts, it looks something like this now:
1. Fresh water use has gone past its sustainable limits. How does that look? Dying river red gums along the Murray. An MDB fish fauna that has largely disappeared including many near extinctions, and been replace with a carp biomass of around 80-90%. It looks like the waters of the MDB ultimately becoming unpotable for Adelaideans.
2. The Great Barrier Reef. Right now, most of the coral north of about Cooktown is dead. If you really want to know what that looks like, it looks white at first. Because that is the colour of dead coral. But not for long. Sea plants invade and the corals cannot re-establish. The trends are these: rising SSTs, more frequent bleaching events, more intense bleaching evens, longer last bleaching evens and bleaching events of greater spread. What that looks like is that the Great Barrier Reef is dying. What that looks like is that the related tourism and fishing jobs will die with it. What that looks like is an increase of around 60,000 jobless. What it also looks like is around $5 billion less in GDP.
3. What it looks like is an ever more simplified biodiversity as species go extinct and ecosystems collapse. You will eventually be able to look at as many different sorts of birds as you like as long as they are generalists, commensals and/or ferals.
4. What it looks like is public recreation spaces increasingly crowded, noisy and stifling.
5. What it looks like is traffic jams as far as the eye can see.
6. What it looks like is white salt in dryland salinity.
7. What it looks like is dust storms.
I could go on and on and on and on, but you get the picture.
Steve777 @ #972 Thursday, September 7th, 2017 – 8:21 pm
Urbanisation isn’t just an Australian phenomenon.
I’m with S777 on having a population policy that takes into account Zoomster’s valid concerns (other than those accusations of racism) and which addresses in a systematic way social, economic and ecological sustainability.
Makes more sense with text.
Map showing urban areas with at least one million inhabitants in 2006. Only 3% of the world’s population lived in cities in 1800; this proportion had risen to 47% by 2000, and reached 50.5% by 2010.[52] By 2050, the proportion may reach 70%.[53]
Back to elections, I have one this week. My local council. I’m not that au fait with local politics, I’m mostly happy with the state of things in my part of Sydney on the North Shore – solid “Liberal” territory – I’m the only Labor voter (slight exaggeration). But those things I’m not happy with are beyond local control, mostly in the State or Federal sphere, or beyond their control too.
So I have a choice of 12 candidates for 3 council positions in my ward. All independents. I looked up the candidates. Three are members of the “Liberal” Party, so I’ll cross them off without further consideration. That they would be a member of a party that includes the likes of Abbott and Dutton, that created the energy mess, that obstructs climate action and dogwhistles to racists is more than enough to disqualify them. Three are members of the ALP and the rest seem genuinely independent. No Greens though. I will check the non-Liberals further.
The Mayor is more problematical. Two candidates, both “Independent” and both members of the “Liberal” party. The incumbent Mayor was close to Joe Hockey, who typifies everything I hate about the Big Business aspect of the “Liberal” party, but I’ve got nothing against her. I have no idea about the other. He might be a ‘liberal’ “Liberal” or a nutter. I don’t think voting informal or against the incumbent or tossing a coin is an intelligent choice. I’ll check out further and vote for the better of the two, or at least the least worst.
Can I put forward an engineer’s perspective on the population topic?
1. There isn’t a hard limit on population. But there will be a progressive trade off between population growth and quality of life and environmental values. What the shape of that graph looks like isn’t immediately obvious. I don’t think there is a reason to panic. But there are reasons to quantify/objectify.
2. We have two kinds of footprint. The first is housing/cities. This constitutes roughly one percent of our land mass so its a second order issue. The other is agriculture and the issue we really have to come to terms with is the gross wastefullness of a meat centered diet. Our taste for animal flesh multiplies many fold our footprint. And this is the single biggest factor in the ‘how much population’ equation. In any case our biggest ecological threat in a growing world is land clearing for agricultural export.
3. Technology matters. How we produce and transform energy. With enough cheap energy a lot of problems get a lot easier. I’m not saying technology will mean we can grow the planet to a trillion (Coruscant relied on imports) but I am saying that when the world population stabilises at 15-18B we will enter a phase wher technology helps us clean up our act and restore some damage.
4. The issue regarding immigration is not racism but selfisness. But until we have an objective basis the whole debate is rubbish.
Steve777
I have 27 candidates for three seats in my Council ward.
3 Libs,
3 Lab
3 Greens,
3 local team
rest independents
Gees, I thought Malthus was discredited a hundred years ago…………….seems he still has some fans.
‘we will enter a phase wher technology helps us clean up our act and restore some damage.’
I wonder if the Easter Islanders were predicting the same solution when they cut down their last remaining tree?
CC
‘We have two kinds of footprint. The first is housing/cities. This constitutes roughly one percent of our land mass so its a second order issue. ‘
Why are you leaving out the footprints involved in maintaining cities?
(a) collecting, holding and distributing fresh water. Huge extra-urban footprint impacts already.
(b) transport infrastructure between cities and other urbs. Australia has nearly one million km of roads, for example.
(c) waste discharge. This varies from landfill to CO2 to sewage to plastics in the oceans. Etc.
I could go on. My point is that the urbs footprint is not simply the physical places where people actually live and work and play.
Tricot
It is not Malthusian to note that Australia is being run on an unsustainable basis right now.
GWS is playing unsustainably ATM.
We’ll have nowhere to live when every square inch of the land is covered by solar panels.
Boer
Don’t be childish; I haven’t called you racist. In fact, I’ve bent over backwards to avoid anyone thinking I was accusing them of racism.
It says something about you that you are determined to be insulted, regardless.
Ides:
Local govt elections over here too, but not until October I believe. Someone mentioned to me today that they wondered whether the postal survey on ME would potentially interfere in Council elections seeing as voters often confuse things. I note the HC gave way for the postal survey to proceed.
Tricot @ #987 Thursday, September 7th, 2017 – 8:48 pm
Still works well with natural population crashes. Or are humans now masters of nature? Tell that to the flu.
Tricot @ #987 Thursday, September 7th, 2017 – 8:48 pm
Malthus didn’t take into account that technology allows us to stave off catastrophe by essentially “drawing down” resources from future generations. It is possible to do this for quite a long time. But not indefinitely. In the Australian context, I always think of the Great Artesian Basin. Australia has been drawing down on this resource for decades. But this resource is not infinite, and it is not replaceable.
‘Z
‘But – whatever the intent – the result is racist, because we have a largely white population saying that they won’t take any more migrants – just as the complexion of migration is changing.’
And
‘And I’m not accusing anyone of being racist, but trying to explain why it LOOKS racist.’
OK, in your words, the result is racist but the behaviour leading to a racist result is not racist but it still LOOKs racist?
How on earth does all that work?”
Zoomster replies
‘Don’t be childish; I haven’t called you racist. In fact, I’ve bent over backwards to avoid anyone thinking I was accusing them of racism.
It says something about you that you are determined to be insulted, regardless.’
I have several times faced being bashed up by people who thought that I was a quote, unquote a ‘N*gg*r lover.’ In those places and at those times I could quite easily have ended up a bloody mess on the ground.
I despise racism. I despise racists for the destruction they do.
And I also despise people such as Van Badham who shelter behind so-easy accusations of racism to make their points.
How do you think that someone achieves a racist result without behaving in a racist fashion while the behaviour also ‘Looks’ racist? What does behaviour that ‘looks’ racist but isn’t really racist look like, exactly?
Incidentally, your decision to add an additional insult of being ‘childish’ hardly helps, now, does it?
Oh, and BTW, I await with interest your estimate of the best population level for Australia. 50 million? 100 million? 200 million? Let’s get to non-racist policy tin tacks here. You won’t even have to mention the colour of their skin. Just give us a number.
Or do you propose to find that out by having very high migration levels and then waiting to see what happens in the end?
P1
Yep.
It isn’t just Australia that is using its groundwater resources unsustainably.
China and India in particular have built up huge and unsustainable irrigation drawdowns.
The consequence will eventually be a sort of Coyote look down moment for both countries – particularly China.
mimhoff
We’ll have nowhere to live when every square inch of the land is covered by solar panel
Garbage. Mine live on half of my roof, and don’t bother me at all. In summer they provide welcome shade on the attic space. In winter it is bloody cold in any case, no matter what you do. We grow all our own firewood, and it keeps us warm no matter what.
The economic equation is such that I only pay for access to the grid, the panels provide all my electricity, after the upload during the day pays for the download during the night. While the sun shines, at least – the equation also means that I still pay for most of the electricity I use when it rains during the day.
Rain is not a problem here in Armidale, unfortunately. I would forgo a lot of my ‘free’ electricity for 100 mm of soaking rain atm.
‘Where is the fresh water coming from? We are running out of the stuff with 25 million people.’
No, we’re not. We’re not even doing much of the stuff other countries take as normal, such as recycling. In most cases, we don’t even use recycled water for big water use areas such as golf courses and sporting grounds, where potable water isn’t needed. And our use of irrigation water – let alone the crops we use it to irrigate – is far from efficient.
‘Where are we going to import the food from, because we will go from net food exporters to massive food importers.’
You named the number – why not stop immigration at the point where we produce enough food to feed ourselves?
At present, with 25 million people, we export 66% of what we produce, which suggests we could at least double our population.
‘Where are people going to live?
In monstrous towers or will we multiply the current urban spread by ten?’
Our cities are amongst the least densely populated in the world. My TV is chockers with people who live in a two bedroom apartment in a high rise building and see that as not only normal but highly desirable (they seem to regard the suburbs with dread and the country as worse).
And, of course, we could decentralise.
…as I said, I don’t know what the figure ‘should’ be. But doubling the population, at least, would seem feasible – and we’re a long way from ‘full’.