Baby blues: If you think population isn’t a dire issue, you’re living in cuckoo land

Bernice Shepherd writes: Re “Conservatives don’t love babies the most — I do!”, I am a woman past childbearing age who chose to be child-free because at 8 billion and counting (5 billion when I was in my 20s, only 30 years ago), I felt there were too many of us in the world by far. Australians don’t seem to perceive the urgency of reducing the global population. Instead, increasing the national population is seen as necessary and news of the falling birthrate is conveyed as a dire warning.

I grew up in West London where it is evident to anyone with a brain that reducing population is a good thing. In the UK there are 277 people for every square kilometre; in Australia that figure is approximately 3.4. Believe me, 277 people for every square kilometre is not much fun.

The reality is that our ecosystems are being annihilated because there are too many of us. We are in the middle of a mass extinction because there are too many of us. The oceans are full of plastic, are running out of fish and are acidifying because there are too many of us. There is a housing crisis because there are too many of us. Even if we halted climate change in its tracks, we would still be destroying everything else because of the global demand for resources.

People who claim that population is not the issue, that we could live sustainably if we would only try, are living in cloud cuckoo land. People do not want to change their lifestyle and will not do so unless forced. No politician is ever going to make policies that would increase our chances of living sustainably, and the powers that be — the mega-rich and powerful — have no interest in creating a society of healthy and sustainable communities. They don’t make any money out of that.

It is very simple: the more of us there are, the less of everything else. If we want to change the world, reduce our impact and start to live in a way that does not destroy our very means of existence, we have to stop having so many children.

Frank Dee writes: Gina Rushton’s is an accurate account of the conservative mindset regarding our birthrate. But I suspect what Greg Sheridan is diplomatically avoiding is any mention of the elephants in the room. 

Elephant No. 1 is the notion that a locally born baby, even one born to a renter, is preferable to an overseas-born baby. The parents of the locally born baby are, ideally, Anglo-Saxon or European. Even if they are not, the locally raised baby is more likely to be acclimatised to Australian culture, a little birth unit that will grow up respectful of capital, conservatism and Australian values as opposed to an exotic, puzzling and possibly dangerous overseas baby that could turn out to be… God knows what. (Oh, don’t they look so cute when they’re young!) 

Elephant No. 2 is that we need cannon fodder for the forthcoming war (*cough* China, Russia) and we’re not at a stage where drones, robots or even submarines will do the job. Sheridan doesn’t go there, but we all know that any conservative wants to see a big population inculcated with Australian values and patriotism to die on the battlefields so that Australian wealth can continue its righteous job of ridding the poor of their pittances and putting the dollars into the right hands. 

David Slatyer writes: I’m now old and the thing I am most content with in my life is not being a parent. I was one of the two of five people who suffer from depression. It is wrong to play roulette with someone else’s life. I would not drive a car or fly in a plane if they were the odds.

David Benatar wrote a learned book about it. It should be provided free to everyone on their 18th birthday and to every potential grandparent right now.

Faces in the crowds

Dominic Quigley writes: Re “Labor needs to heed the overseas warning signs and get control of immigration”, Labor and the left more generally are ignoring at their peril the fact that there has been a significant rise in Australia’s immigration numbers. It’s ill-informed and lazy thinking to treat anyone who questions our current immigration policy as racist or engaging in dog-whistling which will open the floodgates to racist xenophobia.

There are many of us on the left who have real concerns about the environmental and social impacts of the current level of immigration and particularly the recent spike in numbers that we are told is simply a catch-up from the low figures during the pandemic. The current figures are unsustainable and the arguments for a “big Australia” are looking increasingly dodgy.

Allowing our universities to import overseas students in super-charged numbers has turned them into greedy corporate businesses totally dependent on income from a growth model that has compromised their education standards. They have been encouraged to attract large numbers of international students without any obligation to contribute to the cost of housing them. Ask anyone out there competing in the hunger games of the rental market if these increases in foreign student numbers and others on temporary visas are having an impact on the availability and cost of rental accommodation, to say nothing of the diminution of wages and work conditions of the many migrants who are often exploited by employers using these new arrivals as a source of cheap labour with underpayment of wages rife and well documented.

There is absolutely nothing racist about seeking to slow down this policy. These are very reasonable grounds for a serious review of the level of immigration. Sadly the reluctance of the federal government or the left to even contemplate a discussion of this allows the right and the extremists to fill the space with the sorts of noises that will be far more racist and socially destructive. What an abrogation of responsibility.

Owen Pierce writes: There is a massive disconnect in what we are hearing from Labor and the media outlets I read, such as The Age and Guardian Australia, and the lived experience of those of us domiciled in Melbourne suburbs. Every connecting road is gridlocked from 6am until 9.30am and again from 3pm until 6pm. People are compelled to stay home between these hours and this is in areas well away from the CBD — the Yarra Valley, the Mornington Peninsula, Packenham, Romsey, Werribee — you name it. Forget launching a boat into Port Phillip on a sunny weekend or taking a drive down to Sorrento.

Selfish you say? What is the point of this wonderful country having Third World population densities? Each new person here creates more greenhouse emissions, more environmental destruction, more dysfunctional housing developments on farmland miles from services, and more suppressed wages, and housing has become a pipedream for today’s young people.

It’s as if the parties of the left are terrified of being called racist if they consider any limit on population growth. If Opposition Leader Peter Dutton makes any concrete proposal to cut population growth by limiting immigration, he will have many Labor supporters voting Liberal for the first time.

Richard Clements writes: Labor has brought in its mass immigration policy by stealth. If it had stated this at last year’s election I would not have voted for them. It is sheer madness to continue immigration at this level with our cities already choked to capacity.