FINALLY! SOMEONE LEADING IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION

Here's the antithesis to the filthy rich Gerry Harvey who made his fortune in Australian retail but couldn't give a rat's arse about Australia as long as he makes even more money:  the filthy rich Dick Smith who also made his fortune in Australian retail but obviously cares deeply about Australia. Moreover, he's prepared to put his money where his mouth is. Hence the Dick Smith Fair Go campaign he's running. The plan is to run advertisements like the one featured in most if not all of the major Australian dailies to raise awareness of the dangers of the overpopulation our political and financial overlords have planned for us. It of course won't be cheap so he's asking for help, pledging to to match contributions dollar for dollar with his own money. No doubt he could afford 100% of the bill, but there's a certain wisdom in allowing others some skin in the game rather than providing a completely free ride, or in other words, an opportunity for nationalists like himself to take a break from their keyboards and put their money where their mouths are.



210,000 per annum  is a figure that gets bandied around as if it is a mere bagatelle. This is the current annual  number of  immigrants into Australia decreed by the Federal Government's Permanent Migration Program. Curiously though, though the number predicted for the year 2017 is over one quarter of a million. Totals recorded in the two previous years both nudged that number. The Australian Department of Immigration and Border Protection should be a reliable source. Take a squiz:  https://www.border.gov.au/ReportsandPublications/Documents/statistics/regional-nom-2004-05-2017-18.pdf.

 But of course, there are lies, damned lies and then there are statistics. The discrepancy can no doubt be explained away by those adept at explaining away everything from the pathology of homosexuality to the reality of race to doubts about man-made global warming. But even using the original rubbery figure, its obvious that per capita we have the most overwhelming immigration program

in the world, perhaps in the history of the world.

When will this end? Well evidently it's not going to end - not if the the beneficiaries of the program so blatantly exemplified by the likes of Gerry Harvey have their say, not to mention a financial system predicated upon infinite growth when not even the universe can pull off that particular trick. Big Bang becomes Big Crunch. More people! That's the cry of Gerry and his ilk. Why? A bigger domestic market nucklehead! And of course more people (particularly from where we get them) means the extremely desperate forcing down the wages of the merely moderately desperate. It's a win-win. But what happens in this race to the bottom when wages end up where they're intended be, which is on a par with cooly wages in the darkest depths of Asian poverty? How will anybody be able to afford to buy anything from your packed and gleaming stores?

You worry too much nucklehead. Who cares? By then we barons of capitalism will be dead. The survivors will be able to muddle on somehow - perhaps a bill legalising cannibalism will help. After all, everything else we once found abhorrent is becoming legalised.

On the other hand, Dick Smith's succinctness cannot be improved upon: "OVERPOPULATION WILL DESTROY AUSTRALIA". His only fault is the tense he uses. It's already destroying Australia. Australia of course is a very big country, roughly the same size as mainland USA. We are in fact the only country in the world with its own continent. What is often overlooked though is that we huddle on the fringes of one of the largest deserts in the world. Deserts are uninhabitable. True, the Israelis have made a desert bloom with desalinated water but it is a very small desert, about the size of a Matzo wafer compared with really big deserts. If anyone were to make a really big desert bloom, it would be the the overcrowded Chinese who have huge tracts of these annoyingly useless lands. It has a desperate need for habitable land, deep coffers full of gold, hordes of brainy scientists, countless millions of willing hands and a totalitarian system with which to persuade the owners of not so willing hands. But still the cracked, baking plains lie as useless as ever.

As a mocking irony, Australia contains an extensive and complex inland river system which are really the traces of rivers because no water flows in them, or only rarely after being subjected to flooding rain. Water once ran constantly in them but no-one is quite sure how many millions of years ago that was. For more than a century an idea has been kicked around that would see the millions of tonnes of rainwater falling on the eastern side of the Great Barrier Range and then flowing out to sea redirected via tunnels through the mountains and into the ancient river system. Even with tunnelling machinery improving all the time, the gargantuan nature of such an undertaking however continues to paralyse decision makers. Who would be willing to  take such a chance (especially amongst the political pygmies our "democracy" repeatedly throws up)?  Better in this case not to try at all than to try and fail. Wanted: Visionaries.

The reason Australia is such an ancient land is that it largely escaped the ravaging ice ages which scraped the surfaces off most other lands. Much of the continent is as it would have been not long after the earth cooled. It is very old and  like other very old things, very delicate, the most delicate ecology on the face of the earth. Soil erosion is a massive problem and largely an unintended consequence or the mania of early settlers for land clearing. Much earlier, Aborigines had caused permanent damage by way of setting fire to large tracts of forest to flush out game. As well as contributing to erosion, the elimination of much of the original flora caused the little talked about but devastatingly serious problem of salination - salt from our great underground salt pans leaching into the soil. Whereas rainfall was once drawn up by the roots of thirsty plants and trees, it now continues penetrating the soil to where it it hits the salt, forms a solution that permeates upwards poisoning the land and rendering it useless for food growing.

This is the country that is seen by tycoons with avariciousness that can only be explained in terms of mental sickness as a potential home for upwards of fifty million people. This is the country that looks on a map when viewed by Asians knowing little of our geography to be huge, wide open and empty. Why isn't it being? filled?  How selfish these Australians are. Do they really have a right to be so selfish? Do they have a right to keep that land to themselves?

But selfishness would hardly explain why those living in those great open spaces are killing themselves at a far greater rate than city-dwellers. The reasons are complex but surely to be working yourself to death and still going broke and losing the farm to the bank after its being in the family for generations couldn't have too many people singing "it's a wonderful life". Get big or get out of the way is what our farmers have been told for years. And so the ones who haven't killed themselves get out of the way and largely foreign owned, giant "agribusinesses" fill the void. The ex-farmers, and the ex-workers in the support industries once kept afloat by traditional farming trek to the cities to form a stream additional to the ones coming from overseas.

Taking Sydney as an example where forty percent of immigrants settle, that means, with a national total of a conservative quarter million per year, not counting births (births to immigrants outstripping others) or refugees from the bush, the city's population expanding by almost two thousand souls every week. And people wonder why the traffic seems to be getting worse. It is getting worse. The vehicular nightmares of Manila and Bangkok are not far distant.

More and more are coming from China. Makes sense when it's remembered we are on our way to becoming a Chinese colony. If some secret deal hasn't been hammered out between the the Australian government and the government of the People's Republic of China whereby we siphon off a decent proportion of their surplus population in return for "considerations", I'll swim Bass Strait back-stroke.

Meanwhile, the distance between politicians and actors also diminishes. Almost weekly, honey-voiced politicians appear before the cameras with cronies nodding vigorously to every note of optimism expressed by the actor/politician in announcing yet another spectacular infrastructure building initiative. What's never mentioned is the Sisyphean  nature of every new money-hoovering venture. After years of inconvenience and upheaval, the latest piece of brave nation builiding will be all but obsolete and inadequate almost from the time of the ribbon-cutting. Every new "expressway" will rapidly come to resemble a car park.

But GROWTH is everything. We need more profit, more investment, more production, more people. Even when Australian cities have come to look like Hollywood renderings of failed, megaopolises enshrouded in toxic smog, the crazily cross-bred creatures gasping for breath within will be still hearing the demented calls for ever more growth, when, as every insatiable sports fan knows, too much is never enough.

Dick Smith may be a man in a barbed wire canoe paddling against a strong current in Shit Creek, but at least he's trying. His may be a voice in the wilderness, but it's sure to be heard by those who know he's speaking a truth that so many others would prefer we didn't hear. Please support him.