Henry ... in recent times we have had some discussion about population and Australia's future. Public failures like the former Premier of NSW Bob Carr have written the usual twaddle about overpopulation and how Australia already has too many people.

This article from 'Spiked' magazine is a useful corrective to the drones who think that people are a problem. People are the solution.

Henry, the key point for Australians to keep in mind is that we are here in the South East Asian part of the World without the great enthusiasm of the lovely people to our North. It is common sense for us to know that we need to have some significant amount of heft and oomph with which to back up our desire to stay here.

The 'Aladdin's Cave' treasure trove that this continent now is should help sensible people in Australia to realize that other people to our North may not be enthusiastic for a few Australians to have all this wealth. They outnumber us 25 to 1.

Readers should think about that figure. A country's best defence is its own people.

A sensible policy in this country would be to turn the Kimberley region (home to trillions of dollars of Aussie resources) into a major development area ... pour in people and development projects and aim to get 10 million people who stand between South East Asia and all these trillions of dollars worth of resources.

The arguments of the 'no more people' crowd are risible and unscientific. We don't need to take them seriously because they have been DEAD WRONG every time since the silly Thomas Malthus put his pen to paper.

The main whinge is water: answer ... population growth in Australia must be North of the Tropic of Capricorn, not in Kew or Bondi Beach. As the monsoons have not yet failed and won't, Northern Australia will continue to have rain dropped on it for several hundred days per year. Problem solved.

The article makes the key point that people are the source of thinking, problem solving, ingenuity and all progress. The anti-people crowd always think(sic) that mankind cannot/will not solve emerging problems.

History shows that this is completely false. All the problems of the past have been solved by human action and the problems of today will also be solved by people thinking and developing ideas and processes which lead us forward.

Henry, none of this is resonating with the dullards in Canberra. Their confusion surrounding the boat-people is proof of their inability to deal sensibly with people who make themselves available to us.

The problem will not go away. Readers are invited to think sensibly and logically about this matter and look to our national future ... Lord knows the Rudd Goverment isn't.

Sir Wellington Boote

Writing in response to........

Too many people? No, too many Malthusians by Brendan O'Neill

In the year 200AD, there were approximately 180 million human beings on the planet Earth. And at that time a Christian philosopher called Tertullian argued: ‘We are burdensome to the world, the resources are scarcely adequate for us… already nature does not sustain us.’

In other words, there were too many people for the planet Earth to cope with and we were bleeding Mother Nature dry.

Well, today, nearly 180 million people live in the Eastern Half of the United States alone, in the 26 States that lie to the east of the Mississippi River. And far from facing hunger or destitution, many of these people – especially the 1.7 million who live on the tiny island of Manhattan – have quite nice lives.

In the early 1800s, there were approximately 980 million human beings on the planet Earth. One of them was the population scaremonger Thomas Malthus, who argued that if too many more people were born then ‘premature death would visit mankind’ – there would be food shortages, ‘epidemics, pestilence and plagues,’ which would ‘sweep off tens of thousands [of people].'

Well today, more than the entire World population of Malthus’ era now lives in China alone: there are 1.3 billion human beings in China. And far from facing pestilence, plagues and starvation, the living standards of many Chinese have improved immensely over the past few decades.

In 1949 life expectancy in China was 36.5 years; today it is 73.4 years. In 1978 China had 193 cities; today it has 655 cities. Over the past 30 years, China has raised a further 235 million of its citizens out of absolute poverty – a remarkable historic leap forward for humanity.

Source: spiked-online.com