Tanveer Ahmed on Dick Smith's
Population Puzzle documentary:
... on the documentary, my own feelings was that it sort of felt like a piece of nostalgic nationalism ... I mean, eminent as Dick Smith is, I mean this is the man who gave us Helicopter Jelly and Australian made Tim Tams and it sort of came in with that sort of theme and it was almost like he was sort of retreating from a world that had transformed and was trying to hide from it. That's the impression I got from the documentary. You know, even though we're trying to talk of global solutions, from the documentary I wasn't sure that there was a world beyond Australia and you sort of...
Now, more fundamentally, recent - I think the mobility of people, capital, ideas, is a central plank in human progress and some of the things we're talking about today is almost an idea to try and wall us off from that, to an extent. Now, that may make us wealthy. It may make a whole manner of things. In the past I remember even two or three decades ago, Australia had this reputation around the world of being sort of wealthy but something of a stagnant backwater and the debate I'm hearing here, I think risks placing us back into that sort of reputation...
Well, for one, I'm very pleased that my father here was able to migrate to Australia. I think it gave me a host of other opportunities. You see Bangladesh. This is a country where almost a third of the GDP is from remittance payments. So my father sustains the health and education of an entire extended family and we're talking tens of people: 30, 40 people, and in today's world it's not a simple - there'll be a set of people that will decide to migrate. Some of them will return back. Some of them will go back more skilled, with extra skills. Some people will go back and forth. Now, a point I'll make, one of the key successes - say in India, their IT industry, the city of Bangalore - much of that depended on this to and fro between Silicon Valley in San Francisco and Bangalore. They weren't just living in India, nor did they just migrate to the US and it was fundamental to their development and the whole world is better for it. So there's a lot of complexity in this and I think, increasingly, people don't live just in one country...
Suvendrini Perera on Dick Smith:
It seemed to me that the real elephant in the film and perhaps in this room is consumption because we talk about population but we don't talk about the need for us in the rich world to reduce consumption and I didn't hear that in the film, as well... I mean the quarter acre block, for example, that you talk about, is that really a sustainable way to think about living ...
Pino Migliorino, We need to stand up for multiculturalism:
Multiculturalism is a global phenomenon, perhaps this is why it is not popular in the current election debates, which have been focused (in the words of the Nobel prize winning Indian poet, Rabindranath Tagore) within the "narrow, domestic walls" of Australian politics.
None of these people identify with Anglo Australians. They identify with their brothers and sisters back home and are intent on reshaping Australia to benefit their own people. They want open-borders to destroy the dominant Anglo demographic. They have no respect for Anglo Australians who wish to preserve their environment and racial/cultural homogeneity. They mock our culture, and smear us with charges of xenophobia and backwardness. They talk of progress, inevitability, and lifting up the third-world, but they are alien and hostile to our way of life. They are destructive nation wreckers. They hide behind the "moral" ideology of diversity and globalisation, but they are as ethnocentric and self-serving as anybody else.
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