Green group calls for one child policy

[Ryan Thunder]

Gee, that doesn't look anything like a desert to me. In fact, it's been pouring down rain for a large part of the past three days, and will continue to do so for the next two. Perhaps you should review basic geography.

For one thing, you fail to specify exactly where you are. For another, if you'll be so kind as to direct your attention to the bottom left area of this image, south of Canada;



Does that look like good farmland to you?

[Posner]

How would Australia go about enforcing a one child policy?

[Beowulf]

Uh... That's only a small portion of the area normally labelled "Flyover country".

[Dark Flame]

Since when did local conditions in one place indicate the climate of a whole region?

Since when is everything between the eastern and western seaboards a fucking desert? It isn't. In fact, the vast majority of the land in question is nowhere close.

I said no such thing, but if you're going to prove something use facts. And like Ryan Thunder said, I have no idea where you're even at.

[mr friendly guy]

We have been trying to encourage people to have more kids with that retarded baby bonus. As Stark will point out, why are we encouraging people who can't afford kids to have kids, and if you can afford, why do you need a government hand out to encourage you to do it.

Personally if we want to maintain our present level, we should get it from migration with skilled migrants who will earn more money than bogan welfare trash and hence contribute more taxes. On the plus side this might help push the bogans into an even smaller minority.

Ditto to what others have said about our other environmental policies. I should point out, I believe we are still a net exporter of food (ask Japan), so in the short term restricting population growth isn't so urgent, compared to say China.

[Broomstick]

Australia's birth rate is around 1.7 or 1.8 if I remember correctly. We need to lift our birth rate to keep our population stable. While I can see the value of the one child policy, Australia doesn't have a population issue.

No, I'm sorry, you do. You currently have more people than your continent can support without either imports or destroying your resources or both. While your current lifestyle can be maintained for awhile it can not be long-term without those imports. What does Australia produce that would enable it to buy from overseas a significant portion of its food? Aside from things like wool and wine, which further deplete your agricultural resources? (And I say that despite my favorite wines and wool being from Australia)

[Broomstick]

Gee, that doesn't look anything like a desert to me. In fact, it's been pouring down rain for a large part of the past three days, and will continue to do so for the next two. Perhaps you should review basic geography.

For one thing, you fail to specify exactly where you are. For another, if you'll be so kind as to direct your attention to the bottom left area of this image, south of Canada;

Does that look like good farmland to you?

Ryan, you retard, "flyover country" is everything between New York City and Los Angeles (or at least between the Appalachians and the Rockies). That includes some of the worlds best and most fertile farmland (I believe the Ukrainian steppes are the only ones giving us serious competition).

[Rogue 9]

Gee, that doesn't look anything like a desert to me. In fact, it's been pouring down rain for a large part of the past three days, and will continue to do so for the next two. Perhaps you should review basic geography.

For one thing, you fail to specify exactly where you are.

"Flyover country." Right smack in the middle of it. For the purpose of this thread, that's all that's relevant.

For another, if you'll be so kind as to direct your attention to the bottom left area of this image, south of Canada;

[img]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... te.jpg[img]

Does that look like good farmland to you?

No. However, everything east of it does, or would if the angle of the picture didn't cut out most of the Plains and Midwest, not to mention the entire South. And in fact, it is. And furthermore, said area comprises by far the largest part of the region known as "flyover country," which is everything between the cities of the Eastern Seaboard and those of coastal California. Face it, you came out and said everything between the narrow belts adjoining the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans was a desert; a claim that is ludicrous on its face.

[tim31]

Ryan, you retard, "flyover country" is everything between New York City and Los Angeles (or at least between the Appalachians and the Rockies). That includes some of the worlds best and most fertile farmland (I believe the Ukrainian steppes are the only ones giving us serious competition).

lol I hear you guys have a giant geology bomb sitting underneath the middle of your country that revitalizes the soil every half a million years

[weemadando]

We have been trying to encourage people to have more kids with that retarded baby bonus. As Stark will point out, why are we encouraging people who can't afford kids to have kids, and if you can afford, why do you need a government hand out to encourage you to do it.

Personally if we want to maintain our present level, we should get it from migration with skilled migrants who will earn more money than bogan welfare trash and hence contribute more taxes. On the plus side this might help push the bogans into an even smaller minority.

Ditto to what others have said about our other environmental policies. I should point out, I believe we are still a net exporter of food (ask Japan), so in the short term restricting population growth isn't so urgent, compared to say China.

It's all about altering crops - not growing water intensive crops where they can't possibly be supported. I'm not sure what replacements we can look at for the Murray Darling, but I'm sure that there are plenty of native or arid region crops from around the world that we can adapt for usage. In reality though, we could make life a lot easier if we used desal/recyc for urban water, allowing the rural water tables to be unaffected by urban demand. It's not entirely fixing the problem but it would alleviate it greatly.

But in terms of grazing there's a lot that can be done. Alter our eating habits to have kangaroo and wallaby instead of beef where possible. You can have a far greater numbers per acre, less impact on the environment and they require substantially less water per head. Sheep replacement is difficult, but I'm sure that there's probably some goat or llama/alpaca species that may thrive and be less destructive, but still provide the meat/fleece requirement.

[Master of Ossus]

Does that look like good farmland to you?

Absolutely! The Great Plains are frequently referred to as the "breadbasket of America" (that's the part of America you seem to be referring to with that satellite image of yours). Indeed, with the amount of grain, meat, and poultry that they export they could be considered the bread basket of the world. Places like Iowa and the rest of the Midwest are renowned for the fertility of their top soils, and that doesn't even count areas like Texas and the agrarian South.

If you include the California Central Valley as "fly-over" country, then that's probably two of the four most fertile regions in the entire world.

[erik_t]

I assume he was referring to Nevada, which produces something like a billion dollars of (plant) agricultural production a year (PDF warning), about 1.3% of the total value of US crop production. Note that, therefore, their ag production is about twice that of the overall US per-capita.

[mr friendly guy]

Australia's birth rate is around 1.7 or 1.8 if I remember correctly. We need to lift our birth rate to keep our population stable. While I can see the value of the one child policy, Australia doesn't have a population issue.

No, I'm sorry, you do. You currently have more people than your continent can support without either imports or destroying your resources or both. While your current lifestyle can be maintained for awhile it can not be long-term without those imports. What does Australia produce that would enable it to buy from overseas a significant portion of its food? Aside from things like wool and wine, which further deplete your agricultural resources? (And I say that despite my favorite wines and wool being from Australia)

We have huge reserves of iron ore, which we sell to the Asian steel mills (the biggies form China, Japan and South Korea). I believe our miners are the second biggest iron ore producer (company wise) behind Brazil's Vale.

Before the GFC the Chinese were buying lots of our minerals. If we ever get out of this nuclear is bad mentality, we could also export more uranium compared to the limited amounts we do now. We have plans to sell more uranium to China, but so far not to India as they haven't signed the non proliferation treaty.

So in terms of natural resources, while we might not have that much agricultural stuff, we have plenty of raw minerals which growing economies like China and India need and will allow us to fund our lifestyle as long as we don't let the population get too big.

In terms of agricultural products, I am pretty sure even then, we are still a net exporter, with excess products sold to Japan.

Edit - I should point out the stronger Chinese steel mills are still buying lots of iron ore, just less amounts, and the smaller steel mills (those that haven't gone bust) are most probably buying less as well. Its just that we can't get the prices we had from yester year with the collapse in demand. I am sure someone in Beijing is smiling. Considering how we tried to strong arm Asian steel mills (but giving European steel mills better deals), payback is most probably a bitch.

[Guardsman Bass]

Australia's birth rate is around 1.7 or 1.8 if I remember correctly. We need to lift our birth rate to keep our population stable. While I can see the value of the one child policy, Australia doesn't have a population issue.

No, I'm sorry, you do. You currently have more people than your continent can support without either imports or destroying your resources or both. While your current lifestyle can be maintained for awhile it can not be long-term without those imports. What does Australia produce that would enable it to buy from overseas a significant portion of its food? Aside from things like wool and wine, which further deplete your agricultural resources? (And I say that despite my favorite wines and wool being from Australia)

Wool and wine are hardly non-sustainable - and Australia has done quite fine buying what it needs for, say, the past century or so.

In any case, the fact that the population can't survive without imports is really a non-issue - that conditions applies to pretty much every major city and multiple countries (such as the UK). Before some says, "Peak Oil", remember that food can be transported by ship via other means that oil-powered craft.

[Ryan Thunder]

Ryan, you retard <snip>

Oh. Well, guilty as charged.

I thought--oh, there's no use explaining it. Never mind.

[Lusankya]

Just so I know what to say when I pitch this to my local member, what are some possibilities to replace the cotton and rice growing industries so as to maintain that slice of the economy they represent?

They could choose to grow practically any other crop, just like they do now when there's less rain than usual. I remember some Queensland farmers were complaining last year because they had to grow sorghum instead of rice, the poor diddums. I showed the article to my family and we all laughed at their pain and hoped they would all jump in a lake.

One other thing that could help the Murray Darling is upgrading to modern irrigation methods (I'm looking at YOU Victoria). There's a stupid situation where South Australia leads the world in irrigation technology, and Victoria still uses the same techniques that they used in ancient Egypt (open channels - in an area that regularly gets temperatures in excess of 40 degrees). The Victorian State government is also the one that's blocking any attempt to nationalise the river system. South Australians hate Victorians so much.

Not that SA isn't doing stupid stuff either. We have permanent plantings (which have to be watered all year round) in an area that would be a desert if it weren't for the river, though in SA's defence, that's because the constitution guarantees us a fixed amount of Murray flow every year, which shows that some people, at least, were thinking about the water problem over a century ago. Most of SA's water allocation actually goes into keeping the Lower Murray Lakes fresh water, though, so that a few farmers near the Coorong can get water. That's in the process of changing, however, because the water level in the lakes has receded to below the level of the pump. That means that the government can cut them off and say "see? not our fault - nature did it."

As for urban use, we don't even have to recycle waste water in order to provide for everyone. In a normal year, enough rain falls on Adelaide, the driest capital, to support 2 million people. We know we can collect it, because we already do collect some and use it in Salisbury (a suburb). We also know that Salisbury water tastes better than regular Adelaide water. We also know from Salisbury that collecting the rainwater would be a lot cheaper than a desalinisation plant. I have no idea why the state government isn't pushing the idea of stormwater reclamation more, except for desal being the word that all the cool kids use at the moment.

[Stuart Mackey]

Australia's birth rate is around 1.7 or 1.8 if I remember correctly. We need to lift our birth rate to keep our population stable. While I can see the value of the one child policy, Australia doesn't have a population issue.

No, I'm sorry, you do. You currently have more people than your continent can support without either imports or destroying your resources or both. While your current lifestyle can be maintained for awhile it can not be long-term without those imports.

Evidence?

What does Australia produce that would enable it to buy from overseas a significant portion of its food? Aside from things like wool and wine, which further deplete your agricultural resources? (And I say that despite my favorite wines and wool being from Australia)

If memory serves Australia is a net food exporter, including to my country as it happens, and its not like NZ of all countries, actually needs to import food. And in any case, even if Aussie was net food importer, that's what NZ is for.

[weemadando]

As for urban use, we don't even have to recycle waste water in order to provide for everyone. In a normal year, enough rain falls on Adelaide, the driest capital, to support 2 million people. We know we can collect it, because we already do collect some and use it in Salisbury (a suburb). We also know that Salisbury water tastes better than regular Adelaide water. We also know from Salisbury that collecting the rainwater would be a lot cheaper than a desalinisation plant. I have no idea why the state government isn't pushing the idea of stormwater reclamation more, except for desal being the word that all the cool kids use at the moment.

[idiot]BUT THAT'S DIRTY WATER! It's been on the street! Through gutters! I want clean water! You know, the kind from a tap![/idiot]

That's what we are up against here. If I had my way this is what would happen in urban areas:
1) ceasing development of outer areas and a focus on development of dense inner city, possibly trashing some of hte expansion suburbs to allow a return of that excellent farmland down the road.
2) no watering of gardens. NONE. ZERO. Unless you are doing it from grey-water.
3) EVERY SINGLE HOUSE must have grey-water catchment/recycling and rainwater catchment. I'd like to see an introduction of split system plumbing in homes where "clean water" is used for drinking, bathing and *maybe* laundry while grey water is used for flushing toilets, gardening and other miscellaneous stuff.
4) Every house/building must be fully insulated to cut down on power requirements summer and winter.
5) Every house/building must be able to generate x% of it's own electricity requirements (through solar or wind) and where X becomes a larger figure as tech advances.

There's more in all likelihood, but that's the glaring stuff right now.

[bobalot]

Australia's birth rate is around 1.7 or 1.8 if I remember correctly. We need to lift our birth rate to keep our population stable. While I can see the value of the one child policy, Australia doesn't have a population issue.

No, I'm sorry, you do. You currently have more people than your continent can support without either imports or destroying your resources or both. While your current lifestyle can be maintained for awhile it can not be long-term without those imports. What does Australia produce that would enable it to buy from overseas a significant portion of its food? Aside from things like wool and wine, which further deplete your agricultural resources? (And I say that despite my favorite wines and wool being from Australia)

We got gigantic mineral reserves to trade with. Our agricultural production can easily feed our population as well export gigantic amounts of food. Even if we cut back our production to more sustainable levels our population can easily be fed. Water is the primary concern, but that problem can easily be fixed with water recycling if we can get the past the problem of NIMBY morons.

Our population can easily be maintained.

[Lusankya]

[idiot]BUT THAT'S DIRTY WATER! It's been on the street! Through gutters! I want clean water! You know, the kind from a tap![/idiot]

Actually, there's less of that in Adelaide than you might think. After all, not only do we actually drink Adelaide water as a regular occurrence, but we have also been known to defend it as being superior to regular water. After all, it has calcium for strong, healthy bones, fluoride for shiny white communist teeth and eleven extra added vitamins and minerals for all-over bodily health! We are also currently drinking out of the Murray, which is grosser than anything.

5) Every house/building must be able to generate x% of it's own electricity requirements (through solar or wind) and where X becomes a larger figure as tech advances.

This would be ridiculously easy, especially since peak energy use in Australian cities is on those hot windy days when electricity gained from solar or wind power is at its highest.

[weemadando]

[idiot]BUT THAT'S DIRTY WATER! It's been on the street! Through gutters! I want clean water! You know, the kind from a tap![/idiot]

Actually, there's less of that in Adelaide than you might think. After all, not only do we actually drink Adelaide water as a regular occurrence, but we have also been known to defend it as being superior to regular water. After all, it has calcium for strong, healthy bones, fluoride for shiny white communist teeth and eleven extra added vitamins and minerals for all-over bodily health! We are also currently drinking out of the Murray, which is grosser than anything.

It's mainly the East Coast that has a problem with the poo water concept. It's just sheer bloody-minded denial of the fact that we aren't living in Zimbabwe or 19th century England and don't have to worry about getting Cholera from our "dirty water", because the recyc plant produces water CLEANER than what already comes out of your tap.

5) Every house/building must be able to generate x% of it's own electricity requirements (through solar or wind) and where X becomes a larger figure as tech advances.

This would be ridiculously easy, especially since peak energy use in Australian cities is on those hot windy days when electricity gained from solar or wind power is at its highest.

It would become even more stupidly easy if more funding was made available to the CSIRO to get this stuff on the market ASAP:

Solar cells that are PRINTABLE at similar cost and using the base tech that we make our banknotes with.

[Lusankya]

On Broomstick's claim that Australia can't feed itself, Australia accounts for 8-15% of the world's grain trade and is in the top four wheat exporters, along with the US, Canada and the EU.

Australian wheat production over the last 20 years has varied from 9-25 million tonnes of wheat, with the average being 16 million tonnes. Domestic consumption has been stable at about 5.5 million tonnes. The average wheat exports over the last five years have been 17 million tonnes.

As far as domestic consumption goes, half of that is for home and industrial use, with the majority of the rest being stock feed. South Australia* alone produces half of the required grains for domestic consumption, and the majority of areas in which wheat is produced there are actually sustainable long-term. Land availability in the area has decreased in recent years, but that has been because of a decrease in rainfall due to global warming and not due to farming practices. Even then, the land will still be suitable for grazing. This article explains the significance of Goyder's line, which is basically the point where cropping becomes reliable, and is also a guideline that has been used for over a hundred years in regards to farming sustainability, and also discusses some of the new farming techniques that are used by farmers in the marginal areas, such as zero-tillage farming.

*I use SA here because I know lots about SA. Conditions in eastern Australia are generally more favourable.

[tim31]

Every house/building must be able to generate x% of it's own electricity requirements (through solar or wind) and where X becomes a larger figure as tech advances.
There's more in all likelihood, but that's the glaring stuff right now.

Where I live, in winter, we can get as little as six hours of direct sulight a day, and it only gets windy when it gets really windy(you know the sort I'm talking about, like this)

...though in SA's defence, that's because the constitution guarantees us a fixed amount of Murray flow every year, which shows that some people, at least, were thinking about the water problem over a century ago.

This I did not know. Interesting stuff, but as you explained, it fails to take into account the ingenuity of bureaucrats in shirking responsibility.

[Lusankya]

This I did not know. Interesting stuff, but as you explained, it fails to take into account the ingenuity of bureaucrats in shirking responsibility.

I think that part of the problem is that upstream, they don't have to deal quite as much with how crap the river gets if you over-irrigate. The river's in a pretty crap condition by the time it gets to SA. I went to one of the plants that pumps salt out of the river once. It was removing tonnes of the stuff. Very sobering.

The Lower Murray Lakes issue aside, SA is pretty good with water management. The permanent plantings are a bit dumb, but given the reliable supply of water (there has only been one year in which we didn't receive our 6000GL allocation), the constant adoption of modern irrigation techniques and the fact that the Lower Lakes could be fixed pretty quickly just by letting the ocean in, they're pretty low on the list of priorities.

[Starglider]

Surely it would be more sensible to start with a two-child policy. According to the latest data I could find (from the 1996 census), Australian family size breaks down like this;

No children : 12.8%
1 children : 11.3%
2 children : 38.2%
3 children : 24.6%
4+ children : 13.2%

Given that the population growth rate is already fairly low, eliminating most of the 3+ child families should be quite sufficient to produce population decline. This is also more politically feasible, as clearly a lot of parents would like to have two children.