archive : s0metim3s

The Australian Conservation Foundation recently endorsed Federal MP Kelvin Thomson’s calls to reduce migration to Australian to “to more sensible levels.” There was (perhaps still is) some very nice graffiti in Melbourne - our way of life IS the problem

Sana Bau’s open letter to ACF and Thomson rightly notes “the carbon-dependency that characterises the Australian way of life,” among other things. Though I more than wince at the implicit human capital argument of statements like “Denying this nation of the unmeasurable value of diversity that comes from immigration …” - when does anyone’s existence have to be justified in terms of value-adding, let alone value-adding to the nation?!!

There’s a slightly better response from Solidarity here. Though, it would be better if they too didn’t slide into their own ideological (Leninist) nonsense by invoking “government neglect,” as if the problem is a lack of government. As James Woudhuysen remarked: “Everywhere in energy innovation there is minimal impact and maximum regulation.” In other words, the inclination is toward greater control, most notably of (and through) households (but not of capital).

Everyone, including the ACF, knows that there is no correlation between population numbers and environment. There is simply no evidence that would sustain this proposition. The only way this proposition can function, can seem to have some logic and consequence, is if all the other presumptions remain intact and unchallenged: those of national borders, those of production methods, those of carbon-based energy, and so on. Population control arguments are at best a depoliticising move, at worst a reactionary politics.

The latest round of Malthusian exuberance began with the publication of O’Connor and Lines’ Overloading Australia. The ACF’s Strategic Director reviewed that book in February. There, he stoops to reminiscing about his benevolence (”it is possible to argue for a sustainable population policy that includes some limits on migration without being anti-migrant. When I was in law school in the US, I spent many late hours volunteering at a legal clinic that represented refugees making application for asylum. I feel deeply that one of the true measures of a society’s ethics is how it treats refugees and others on the wrong end of the modern global economy”) - and proceeds to reassure the reader that limits to migration can (instead) be directed toward the ostensibly richer migrant of the skilled migration programme. Presumably, someone much like himself. Hilarious.

Maybe the ACF is not interested in changing greenhouse emissions, or anything much else along those lines. Maybe they’ve given up. But what is clear is that now, perhaps as its name always implied, the ACF is interested in conserving the Australian Way of Life.

If I might:

… ways of life, in the twentieth century like no other, are thought in national terms, as the Australian Way of Life, and so on. And so, if, as Maarten Hajer put it (2005:4), “whether or not environmental problems appear as anomalies to existing institutional arrangements depends first of all on the way they are framed and defined,” it is also the case that these are enframed within the nation-state superintending households. In the discourses of conservation and protection, given both the composition of the problem and their framing, there is the predictable appeal to a normal state to which things might be returned or, at the very least, a call to preservation in the guise of the merely technical or neutral; or, what is much the same thing, as an appeal to civic virtue and the ostensibly empty figure of citizenship. […] the very idea of a finite ecology is an artefact of claims about the scarcity of the means of a specific Way of Life, and not life as such. [the rest]