To be unemployed is to not have a job.
In the traditional sense, a real job is a permanent full-time job.

But government measures of unemployment have been watered down so much so that the unemployment rate excludes so many people in order to make the statistic portray the economy better than it really is. Governments get savagely criticised in the media for high unemployment rates because government is regarded by the people as an outcome of how the government is running the economy. So if the published unemployment rate is low, government economic performance looks good.

Churches are part of politics and usually back the establishment, as much through investment in property assets as through political policy. It is therefore inspiring to see this honorable departure from the mainstream church and mass-media-led arguments for population growth in this Anglican Church discussion paper, which we are republishing here with only minor changes to format.

Click on picture to view video This is a good film about how government and capitalism deprives people of freedom and gets them to coerce each other. It attributes increases in wealth since the second world war to increases in financial freedom, apparently not understanding the importance of the vast store of fossil fuels we have exploited since the 18th century. Nonetheless it makes good and valid points on a classic them.

In this article: Kelvin Thomson talks about Global Population Speak-out, full employment and asks why the economists are not concerned about rising prices for food and power due to Australia's overpopulation, whilst expressing great concern about the cost of supporting an 'aging population'. Amazing to find that there is a sane and compassionate voice in Federal Parliament, Australia. Kelvin's You-tube channel is at http://www.youtube.com/KelvinThomsonMP

Michael Danby, chairman of Federal Parliament's joint committee on migration, in recent newspaper articles, expresses support for Australia having a population of 35 million by 2050.

See also: "It's better for us to sustain skilled migration" by Michael Danby in The Australian of 8 Feb 10, "Refugee lobby's 10 commandments" by Paul Sheehan in The Age of 16 Oct 09, "More people does not equal trashing our environment" by Michael Danby in The Age of 14 Jan 10, "Rudd's policies make us a soft target" by Paul Sheehan in The Age of 14 Oct 09, "Greens want immigration cut" by Cathy Alexander in The Age of 1 Feb 10.

The Queensland Government's $15 billion asset fire sale is but the latest salvo in a long undeclared war that it has been waging on trade unionists together with the rest of the Queensland public for years. With the strike by 1,300 Queensland Rail workshop employees against the fire sale, it is finally getting a taste of its own medicine.

Update, 11 Dec 09: A Brisbane Times poll question "Do you support rail workers decision to strike against the Queensland Government asset sell-off?" had 68% of respondents voting 'yes'.

Clinics in the USA are now running lotteries for free treatment because so many people cannot afford medical treatment there as unemployment rates rise. The 'most powerful nation in the world' does not have a decent health-care system.

The Murdoch press promotion of Paul Kelly's misnamed book The March of Patriots, chronicling the Prime Ministerships of Paul Keating and the early years of John Howard's, has been supplemented, at taxpayers' expense, by Brisbane ABC local radio stations Conversations program.

See also: "Review of Naomi Klein's 'The Shock Doctrine'" of 21 Nov 07

Lindsay Tanner knocks the Greens for disagreeing with Labor and failing to “build coalitions with others who have different views”. Lindsay says this helps prevent any action occurring. But if you know Labor, ‘action’ means more of the same: more population growth, more debt and more deals with the big polluters – property development and infrastructure expansion.

Pornography is not just about getting naked, or having sex, or even recording, depicting or describing it. It requires an element of commerce. Lots of people think they can get rich from it, and some very big household-name corporations have diversified into this area, including GMH and the Murdoch Press. Perhaps they hope to have a pornography-led recovery from the global financial crisis? Anyway, it seems like just about everyone is involved, whether they like it or not...

"There is no reasonable prospect that Australia will reduce its total level of greenhouse emissions, while our population grows by 1 million every four years, as is presently the case. Population stabilisation must be part of the plan to contain greenhouse emissions, not merely for Australia, but for the rest of the world as well." See also: more by Kelvin Thomson Interview at 10.30 ACT time Radio 2UE.

Most people would probably doubt that we could organize satisfactory communities without vast state bureaucracies and corporations. The achievements of the Spanish Anarchist workers collectives in the 1930s show what miracles ordinary people can do. We are entering severe scarcity where centralised and globalised systems will fail to provide for us and we will have to develop highly localized economies.

After the elephant tusk (ivory) trade had decimated the African Elephant population from 1.3 million to 625,000, finally in 1989 the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) imposed a ban on this international elephant tusk (ivory) trade, mainly on Japan and China.
Ten years later, Zimbabwean dictator, Robert Mugabe, lifted the ban along with Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa and legalised the sale of elephant tusks from elephants they claimed (a) had died naturally or (b) been shot because they were violently aggressive or for 'problem-animal' control.

This article further explores the plight of this magnificent animal following the disturbing news article on 28-Jul-09 posted on CanDoBetter by Vivienne Ortega Robert Borsak - Australia's Sarah Palin? Do you want him in your Parliament?

Unions will stage a protest against privatisation outside the office of Rachel Nolan, the Queensland Minister for Transport.

Where: Booval Professional Centre, 125 Brisbane St Ipswich
When: From 2PM, Friday 31 July.

Also published on saveourpublicassets.org.

Cyrius01 has made another great comic video about Australia's national economic policy choices in the face of recession and climate change. Click on the link inside to see the video.

Economist, Ross Gittens, discusses the state of the recession in Australia in the Business Age, 13-7-09. He made a comment about China needing lots of steel and energy - the very commodities that Australia supplies. This common use of misleading terminology fosters misunderstanding of what is really happening.

If "Australia was a big country well able to absorb a bigger population" [Ed Miliband], then we would have full employment, public infrastructure and services would have excess capacity ready to cope, federal and state governments would be in surplus and there would be no undue pressures on our economy, society or ecology.
But this is clearly not the case.

"Russia has just announced a ban on all kangaroo products from the 1st August, citing consistent contamination." Lately our politicians have been "trying to convince the Chinese to buy the rejected Russian export kangaroo slush. " (Pat O'Brien, ex-butcher and current President of Wildlife Protection Association of Australia - Patron Steve Irwin).

Not so long ago, a giant thermal rain-bearing wind carried moisture inland from giant forests on the eastern coast of Australia. The giant thermal has disappeared along with the rain. Read why.
See also, "Deforestation drys continents - new theory explains how" Also see, at end of article, a short report about DSE from defenders of the forest at Brown Mountain.

Five weeks after I made my complaint, the ABC has responded. The reponse defends the ABC Brisbane local Radio journalists' failure to hold to account the Queensland Government over these issues: privatisation, encouragement of runaway population growth, housing unaffordabilty, plans to triple our coal exports as the polar ice caps melt, and the devastation of agricultural and wilderness areas by open cut coal mining, etc. The ABC deems these issues not to be newsworthy.

See also: "Brisbane ABC suppresses alternative candidates in state elections despite listener dismay with major parties" of 30 Apr 09, "Brisbane's local ABC radio fails to hold Anna Bligh to account over privatisation" of 28 May 09.

To achieve this bootstrap economy, this Australian sideshow of perpetual motion, or the revival of dead spirits, the PM has invented something called the Australian Business Investment Partnership (ABIP). It's a public-private partnership between the Federal government and the commercial property sector. The Developers and the big four banks think it's just great - so that's okay ... isn't it?

Communities in many different parts of Australia have been fighting marinas on ecological, social and economic grounds, predicting they had no financial future. Lisa Allen's article, in "Developers come clean as tide goes out at marinas" (Fin Review) bears out this financial forecast. Marinas are on the nose, like the proverbial dead fish."
See also: Frankston citizens fight massive marina push by Madden

Mark O'Connor, author of Overloading Australia looks at Bjorn Lomborg's views on humans' ecological footprint.

As the G20 summit of world leaders tries to resolve the economic crisis, where are we really heading? Many key issues are being ignored in the rush to "restore growth" at any price.

Also published on Online Opinion on 21 Apr 09.

The Rudd government April 7th 2009 announcement of a plan to finance and construct a massive 'fibre-to-the-node' broadband network -- supplying service to 90% of Australian homes is a remarkable sea change in public policy. This article discusses the financing and timing of this proposal - and the PM's remark that it would ultimately be privatised. (Article by Tristan Ewins, originally published on leftfocus.blogspot.com on 7 Apr 09.)

"The case for re-nationalising Telstra" of 13 Jan 09 also by Tristan Ewins (also on Online Opinion), forum discussions "The broadband revolution" and "Monday Message Board" on johnquiggin.com, "Other projects will pay for hare-brained scheme" by Kenneth Davidson in the Age of 9 Apr 09, citizensagainstsellingtelstra.com.

Rudd and the banks' 'solution' to poverty, debt and homelessness is no solution at all. It drives up the mortgage burden in the long-run and relies on business as usual returning in an increasingly uncertain future. Forget debt, let's dump the banks.

The French are standing up to the globalising and financial despots who have shaped industrial relations now since 1973.

It would be much harder to condemn the New Iberia Research Center (NIRC) in Louisiana if the institution had obviously made a great effort to compensate its experimental chimpanzees by giving them trees and a lovely environment between 'sessions'. But they have confined these forest creatures to an environment as friendly as a toilet block for life. A nine-month-long undercover investigation by The HSUS has exposed the mistreatment of nearly 300 chimpanzees and other primates. These chimps, living lives of deprivation and misery, are among the more than 1,000 chimps languishing in laboratories across the United States. Video available here. I describe the video contents in the article, if you need to fortify yourself first. It is a thoughtful video; I could cope. Please act, whatever you do.

The Treasurer, Wayne Swann, says that "the Government is doing everything in its power to cushion Australians from the worst impacts of the global recession," but the figures show that growing the population is the worst thing the Rudd Government can do. Using per capita GDP as a measure of well-being in Australia, Tasmanians fared best in the downturn.

"If you purchase two copies of The Age this Saturday, soak one in the bath overnight and read the other. Think of the copy coming out of the bath, as the landscape prior [to the impact of repeated fires] and the dry paper, as the landscape is today." (Article by Duane Norris for Natural Sequence Farming)