Monday, March 21, 2011

Committee for Melbourne Stooges ABC

Committee for Melbourne Stooges ABC

Last week the ABC News 24 Breakfast Program interviewed Andrew MacLeod about the Japanese earthquake and tsunami disaster, describing his as a disaster relief expert.

The Program didn’t know, or didn’t mention, that Mr MacLeod is the Executive Officer of the Committee for Melbourne, an organisation of large business and property developers which runs a high population/high migration agenda.

Mr MacLeod didn’t let the chance go by. He said the disaster was a reason to ramp up skilled migration. He said Japan would experience more hardship as a result of its ageing and shrinking population, and that it should have more skilled migrants to help with the recovery effort. He even managed to find a way to use the Japanese earthquake/tsunami disaster to attack my proposal to reduce Australia’s skilled migration to levels we used to have in the mid 1990s.

The Committee for Melbourne apparently thinks that Japan would now be better off if only it had brought in more people to augment its workforce from, for example, China and India.

I wonder how many Japanese people today, as they sit in makeshift relief shelters without enough food, water and electricity, as they wait in queues for the limited petrol that is being rationed out, unable to leave their suburbs, as they wait fearfully for the latest in radioactive fallout from the malfunctioning nuclear reactors that they live nearby, are thinking to themselves – if only there were more people here things would be so much easier! The proposition is farcical. If Japan had had a bigger population, it would be experiencing even more misery and hardship than it is now.

The fact is Japan has a very high population – Tokyo alone is 36 million- and is overcrowded. That is why it has had no choice but to use nuclear power and to have millions of people living in close proximity to nuclear reactors and earthquake zones. But it has managed its population pressures more successfully in recent times than many other Asian nations. That is a key reason why its living standards are higher than its Asian neighbours. If its population had gone the way of those Asian countries hit by the Boxing Day tsunami, then the damage done by the Japanese tsunami would have been all the greater.

Kelvin Thomson MP

1 comment:

  1. The Committee for Melbourne has suggested that we should consider building nuclear power stations and that water authorities may have to consider adding recycled sewage to water supplies to cope with the demands of a growing population (Age,19/10/2010). These are people committed to growth economics and their own enrichment. They are organised and influential. It is time for the vast majority of Australians, who are weary of the social consequences of population growth, to fall in behind Kelvin and let their politicians know that his views reflect theirs, and that if they do not stop immigration, we will stop their political careers.

    ReplyDelete