Stable Population cuckoos invade Australia

She based herstatement on acitation of Lester Thurow's 1986 article Why the Ultimate Size of the World's Population Doesn't Matter in MIT's Technology Review. You won't find the title of the article publicized much by the SPP for obvious reasons. Thurow estimated that it required 12.5 per cent of GDP to expand capacity at 1 per cent per year.

Dr Sullivan said, "Australian estimates would suggest that figure is right in our ball-park too… So, if we're currently growing at two per cent per year, then 25 per cent of our GDP is currently being used to expand capacity to accommodate the people who are not yet here (or will have to be spent eventually to catch up). This means that the GDP available per capita to serve current residents is 25 per cent less than the advertised per capita GDP." There are a couple of logic and definitional errors there but I will let them pass.

What Lester actually said was:

"If the United States had a four percent population growth rate, one half of its entire GDP would have to be devoted to investing in those new Americans."

For the record, the United States recently registered its lowest population growth ratesince the Great Depression at 0.73 percent. Population growth has slowed dramatically across the developed world just as demographers predicted it would. Dr Sullivan's quote of four percent population growth is based on a Thurow hypothetical and has no relevance in the States or here. Neither will Australia have to 'catch up' in its infrastructure spend. I will include Thurow's concluding paragraph.

"If a given country desires economic development, then its population growth cannot increase by more than 2 percent-- half the rate of population growth now being experienced in most of the underdeveloped world," Professor Thurow concluded.

The article was primarily about underdeveloped nations, which is where the population debate belongs. Australia's population growth rate is 1.7 with the trend rate at 1.4. Australia's spend on infrastructure, as a percentage of GDP, was 10.5 per cent in 2012 as per:

http://www.bitre.gov.au/publications/2012/files/stats_002.pdf

John Tanton and the Social Contract

Back in 1997 the ACT SSP Senate candidate, Mark O'Connor wrote an article for the right wing Social Contract Press in America, run by John Tanton, a former president of Zero Population Growth in the US. Not every one loves the Social Contract Press. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HniEWfwV2ks

O'Connor said that Australia's stubborn 'politically correct' support for immigration comes from the decay of 1960s and 1970s radicalism in Australia. He wrote that "entire groups of the tertiary-educated, who once saw themselves as anti-establishment radicals in fierce opposition to the values of their parents, have now moved up the social system and are running bureaucracies and governments."

"Many such people were among those who 'saw the light' in the Sixties and Seventies but then in the Eighties, when they were getting a little complacent, were offered money instead – 'the money or the light?' - they eventually chose the money."