Monday, the 21st of January was Martin Luther King Day, an American national holiday where Americans celebrated his towering contribution to his country, and the rest of the world paused to reflect on his legacy.
Commemorative events for the Martin Luther King Junior Day slid seamlessly into celebrations of the swearing-in Monday of the nation's first black president, Barack Obama, for his second term, with many Americans moved by the reminder of how far the country has come since the 1960s. At the ceremonial inauguration, Obama took the oath on a Bible once owned by King. He called it "a great privilege."
It is worth remembering that Martin Luther King Junior grasped with great clarity that one of the key driving causes of global poverty and misery is overpopulation.
In 1966 he said, “There is no human circumstance more tragic than the persisting existence of a harmful condition for which a remedy is readily available. Family planning, to relate population to world resources, is possible, practical and necessary. Unlike plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases we do not yet understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is solvable by means we have discovered and with resources we possess. What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the solution but universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and education of billions who are its victims.”
We need to heed Martin Luther King’s prescient view from 1966 and heading down a road by which more people will starve, not less, more people will die from water-borne diseases, and more people will die in wars caused by conflict over access to scarce resources.
Australian's need to stand up and prevent the rest of the world, and indeed elements within our own society, from treating this country and this continent as a sump for the the rest of the world's excess population.
ReplyDeleteWe can't force the rest of the world to curtail its fertility but we can prevent them from avoiding the difficult natonal decisions around the average fertility of their individual citizens by dumping their excess population in our territory.
We can set the example through a policy of zero net population growth, no baby bonuses or any other incentives to have more than two children per couple and limit all forms of welfare to the first two chldren per couple.
If anything is subsidized by government in Australia it should be contraception and family planning services. And indeed this should be the focus of any aid we provide to third world countries. Fortunately we have a federal foreign minister who recognizes the importance of this in Bob Carr.
The current asylum seeker debate is less about the precise numbers of uninvited alleged asylum seekers and more about the principal of action on over population more particularly in the coming decades as the number of uninvited asylum seekers grows along with over population pressures else where in the world.
Unfortunately ordinary Australians are sandwiched between deluded economists and big business, who are of the view that population growth and economic growth can continue on this continent indefinitely, and deluded Greens who are of the view that Australia can solve global poverty and injustice through immigration to Australia.
Both need to be stopped for us to have any hope of ensuring the this country remains politically stable and capable of supporting a resonable population level for future generations.
Once again Kelvin you show that you understand the imperatives at hand. Its a shame however that your leader seems to want to take the party in the wrong direction with immigration. You must stop most of the immigration now so that our population can stabilise at about 22 million. Keep up the good work and get it done.
ReplyDeleteWe don't necessarily need to stop immigration altogether Kent.
DeleteBut we do need a federal population target and plan that will guide our annual immigration intake.
We need a comprehensive federal enquiry to establish once and for all how many people this continent can sustain, particularly with respect to water, at current living standard long term.