1. GENERAL FALLACIES ABOUT POPULATION.

**The Singapore Fallacy:
We have fewer people per square (desert) kilometre than Hong Kong or Singapore. Therefore we are underpopulated !
Yet Singapore and Hong Kong are not self-sufficient. Their ecological footprints are enormous. What would happen if they lost their present strategic positions on trade routes and could not import food or clothing or raw materials? (Margaret Thatcher recently admitted that the reason Britain gave up Hong Kong was that it would have been uninhabitable if the mainland Chinese had turned off its water supply).

**The Shoe-Box Fallacy:
What do you mean this isn't an empty country ? I drove from Bourke to Broken Hill the other day and hardly saw a soul. We've got room for millions more people.
Yes, and the whole population of the world could fit comfortably into Iceland or the Sinai desert --but could it be fed or clothed or housed from what Iceland or the Sinai produces? A country is not just a shoe-box into which human items have to be fitted. The speaker has confused space with carrying capacity. Even the world's most populous countries, like India and China, possess large deserts and thinly populated sub-arid lands. Similarly, urban congestion is not caused by a lack of "space" in the countryside, but by cities having outgrown their human scale.

**The We-should-feed-millions Fallacy:
If Europe or the USA can feed hundred of millions, so should Australia.
Not so. Australia is mainly desert. It's total arable land is less than that of just two states of the USA (Iowa and Illinois). Its main crop is wheat, yet it produces less wheat than France, and in a bad year less than Britain. The parts of Australia that enjoy both rich soils and reliable rain are small indeed. Nor is there any reason why any additional millions that Australia can feed should be resident inside the country. Both our economy and the desperate famines that threaten other continents require that Australia should retain a food-surplus to export. Note too that the argument is entirely human-centred, as if the world's bioregions had been created just to feed the maximum human population --and as if humans lived "by bread alone".

**The "We" Fallacy:
Water's not a problem. (Or Energy's not the problem.) We'll all just agree to consume less.
--Who (and how many?) do you mean by "we"? And do you personally intend to act in the way you describe?

**The Technology Fallacy:
The world could have even more people than now without any further environmental damage provided our technology/behavior improves steeply. So why can't we demand more people?
Answer: You can, just as soon as this miracle has occurred, and the environmental damage has ceased.

**All the Damage was Done Long Ago:
Population size is irrelevant. Immigrants/People with large families are being "scapegoated" for environmental damage. All/Most of Australia's environmental destruction occurred many years ago when our population was much lower.
This is often asserted with passion by lobbyists, and as plain fact; but it is either wishful thinking or worse. The Department of Environment's recent report Native Vegetation Clearance, Habitat Loss and Biodiversity Decline
(Paper no. 6, Biodiversity Series, Biodiversity Unit, Department of Environment, Sports and Territories, 1995, ISBN 0642225989) shows that in Australia "In the last 50 years as much land was cleared as in the 150 years before 1945." By 1990 the area being cleared "equates to two rugby football fields being cleared every minute." Population growth drives clearance of native vegetation (the prime cause of biodiversity loss) in two principal ways: (1) Directly, through urban expansion. (2) Indirectly, through the need to expand industries and agriculture (e.g. rice, cotton, logging) either for domestic use or for export earnings to offset the growing imports purchased by the expanding population.

NOTE: that even in cases where it is true that most of the damage was done long ago, the preservation of whatever survives is all the more important. For instance, the fact that three- quarters of our rainforest was destroyed before we learned to value it means we should be much more careful, not much less careful that population-pressure (e.g. in S.E. Queensland) does not destroy the priceless quarter that remains.

**The Economists' Nature-is-Waste Fallacy
A river that is allowed to flow into the ocean is just good fresh-water going to waste. We should dam all our Northern rivers and place a score of settlements on them, each the size of Adelaide, to realise Australia's economic potential.
This is typical of the thinking of those who confuse a larger economy with a better one. Damming the rivers would be an environmental disaster. It would also destroy the prawn, barramundi and in- shore-waters fishing industry that produces export earnings that help make possible our present First-World standard of living. The wild Top End's present appeal to international tourists would plummet. The new cities would consume imports (including sea- foods), and produce few exports. The extra population would not add to our mineral exports and would actually decrease our food exports, and it would make Australia much more dangerously de- pendent on overseas imports of oil/petrol. Not good for the economy at all --unless you are the kind of naive economist who thinks that more money being exchanged (because there are more people) means a bigger (=better) economy !

**The No-Necessary-Connection Fallacy:
There is no necessary connection between the size of our population and damage to our environment. Therefore we need not worry about the environmental effects of immigration or population.
Similarly, there is no necessary connection between driving at twice the speed-limit and having accidents. (Indeed much does depend on the skill of the driver, the quality of the car, the road conditions, etc. etc). Therefore planners should not impose speed limits? Common sense would reply: "There may be no necessary connection, but there is a highly practical and probable connection". This No-Neccessary-Connection fallacy is really a trick of phrasing, and could scarcely be translated into other words. Yet it is a favorite ploy of some economists and politicians who want to wash their hands of the effects of their policies on the environment.

A related myth is that It's not the number of people; it's the way they behave. This is a false either-or. It is rather like saying It isn't the number of weeks I find work per year that determines my annual income; it's the amount I earn per working week. (Or vice versa). When two factors have to be multiplied together, only a mathematic illiterate would argue that only one of them "matters".

Thus it is quite impossible to fulfill even our present disgracefully minimal promises on greenhouse gases without capping our population. As Dr Coulter pointed out on a Late Night Live debate on immigration in November 1996, between 1979 and 1990 Sydney's population went up 30%. At the same time, almost every type of per capita consumption also went up by 10% to 30%, with obvious adverse effects on greenhouse gases. It is a myth that we are overcoming the results of rising population by reducing our per capita consumption. (Don't be misled by programs like Towards 2000 and Quantum, which exist to gratify a public appetite for good news about technology.)

2. FALLACIES ABOUT BIRTH-RATE

**The You-Can't-Stop-People-Having-Babies Fallacy:
Well something seems to be stopping them ! Within living memory we have gone from a country where families of up to a dozen children were socially acceptable to one where two children is the norm. Indeed a fifth of all couple nowadays don't have children at all. Despite this, because of our youngish population we have about twice as many births as deaths per year. Indeed, far too many unwanted babies are still being born, often into disastrous circumstances. In May 1996 the NZ government made contraceptives virtually free. Its Minister of Health, Jenny Shipley cited research suggesting that any reduction in unplanned births and thus in social security and health costs would cover the costs of this policy ten times over. So far the Australian government has failed to show similar initiative.

**The Replacement Rate Fallacy:
This is the opposite of the previous fallacy. It holds that our population is about to fall because our birthrate is "now below replacement".
In fact our births per year have for several years been almost exactly twice our deaths per year.* What happens is that debaters confuse the break-even birth- rate (at which births would currently equal deaths --about half our present birth rate) with the demographers' concept of the theoretical long-term replacement rate of a stabilised society. The ABC Science unit's Ockham's Razor program offered a 15 minute talk dissecting the Replacement Rate Fallacy in December 1995, and the text is available from them or from AESP. The UN pointed out with concern, in its statement for World Population Day (1995), that Australia's population is likely to rise to at least 25 million --the equivalent of duplicating many of our capital cities --in the next 30 years, and that our population growth outstrips that of most European and many Asian nations. Overpopulation is not simply "over there". Our recent percentage rates of population growth have been about four times that of Western Europe.

(* NOTE --CURRENT FIGURES: ABS figures released on 13th December 1996 for the year ended June 30th 1996 effectively rebuke those speakers who had perpetrated the Repalacement Rate fallacy at the recent FECCA conference. Population growth was 240,100 or 1.3% (up from 1.2%). (Projected time for our population to double if that rate were to remain constant is 54 years). The 240,100 increase was made up of net migration of 114,200 and net natural increase of 126,000. This last figure was the difference between births (252,400) and deaths (126,500). (Figures are rounded to the nearest hundred).

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3. FALLACIES ABOUT IMMIGRATION

**The "Immigration is only Natural" Fallacy:
What we think of as "normal" immigration in Australia is actually high immigration. Over the past 20 years we have had probably the world's highest per capita voluntary immigration. In 1996-97 for instance our intake is to be some 3 times the US's per capita rate. (Indeed the USA's current (1997) total of 320,000 legal immigrants a year would be the rough equivalent of Australia taking in just 30,000). The fact that we have long had high immigration does not prove we have to go on having it, any more than the fact that you once had braces on your teeth means you have to go on having them. Nations grow up.

**The Antarctica Fallacy:
This is the assumption that Australia is not a real nation with a right to control who comes in, just some sort of international treaty area like Antarctica that belongs to whoever wants to come here.

The counter-view is that immigration is a privilege not a right. No one who is not an Australian citizen has any automatic right to settle in Australia. Australians do have the right to ensure that they are in control of their immigration policy.

**The Cart-Before-the-Horse Fallacy on Discrimination:
We must retain (or increase) our present immigration intake, regardless of the economic or environmental effects, so as avoid "discriminating" against those ethnic minorities which have only recently begun to enter Australia in large numbers, and therefore are not yet as numerous as they have a right to be ... or at least as they would otherwise become.

This argument involves a confusion of priorities. The first question to resolve is whether we wish to have such an extremely high per capita immigration intake, and for what reason. Only then can we determine what types of immigrants we wish to select. (e.g. Are we looking for the most highly skilled workers, or the most truly needful refugees?) Having established both the quota and the selection-criteria, it is then important that our officials do not discriminate for or against particular races, ethnic groups, minorities, etc on grounds that have nothing to do with the legitimate selection-criteria. (Note that the forming of quotas and selection-criteria is not simply a matter for expert opinion. Inasmuch as inviting in immigrants is a little like inviting people into a house, one of the prime questions is "Does the owner of the house consent?" In this case the owner of the "house" is the Australian electorate.)

A logician would note a further error in this argument. The obligation upon Australian officials to apply the criteria honestly and accurately does not automatically convert into a right of persons who fit the criteria to be admitted. National sovereignty remains a legal and practical reality; and immigration is a privilege, not a right.

When Australia tightens (or simply maintains) its eligibility criteria a confused claim is sometimes heard that we are "denying the rights of migrants". In fact (as implied in the New Testament parable of the labourers in the vinyard who came late or early) acts of charity are not subject to claims of equity. For example, the fact that we once took in very large numbers of Italian migrants does not mean that we are now obliged to take in a corresponding number of, say, Ruritanian ones. Nor does the fact that we have been taking migrants from a particular region create an ongoing obligation to do so.

When Australians resist the Cart-before-the-horse fallacy, polemicists sometimes create further confusion by mixing ethical and economic arguments. e.g. If our leaders won't concede that it is "racist" to lower the immigration intake, we'll bring forward foreign leaders to say that it is, and to hint that trade may suffer. This attempt to bolster doubtful ethics with financial blackmail should be firmly rejected. See also below, under the Yellow Peril Fallacy: commercial variant.

**The "Imagine" or Open Borders Fallacy:
'Imagine there's no countries ...and the world will be as one.' Borders are obsolete. Those who think Australians own Australia and have the right to keep out non-Australians are "racists" defying progress and the UN's plans for world citizenship.

World citizenship may well come, but the UN has no such current plans. Indeed the UN is based utterly on the recognition of national sovereignty. Anyone who imagines nationalism and national sovereignty are things of the past should tune in to the nightly News. Those who believe Australia has no right to borders but that other countries do (including their own country of origin) can fairly be considered hypocrites. (Note that the few persons who do genuinely believe in free flow of peoples across all borders cannot at the same time be advocates of cultural diversity, since their policy would effectively homogenise most human cultures within a hundred years. It can also be wondered whether those who advocate massive immigration in order to multiculturalise Australia are very different from colonialists in their attitude to Aboriginal landrights).

**The Population Socialism Fallacy ("Globalism"):
A variation of the above. No one should be richer than anyone else. Just as all citizens should be equal shareholders in the nation, all humans are equal owners of the globe's space and resources. If some people find themselves short of space and resource, they have the right to claim living-room by moving freely into nations that are richer or less crowded, whether those nations want them or not. Those who try to stop them are selfish, are national chauvinists, are believers in White Australia or Fortress Australia, are old-fashioned hankerers after the British Empire, are Royalists, Racists, Reactionaries etc etc.

Like economic socialism within a nation, population-socialism seems to claim the high moral ground by demanding that people should not suffer for what may be simply bad luck. Yet population socialism, like economic socialism, risks fatally destroying incentive. Many people would have irresponsibly large families if they knew the State would pay every cost and that those who had fewer children would simply pay through taxes for those who had more. In the same way, nations which know that their "burgeoning" populations can always emigrate and transfer the burden to more prudent nations would have no incentive to fulfill the agreements made at the Cairo conference on population.

For example China, despite having a strongly pro-natalist culture, has recognised in recent years that no other country could or would take in its surplus, and so has tried to curb its own population. By contrast, Mexico, confident that any excess of population could always get away to the rich USA next door, has done little or nothing about birth control. As a result it has grown from a nation with a negligible population problem at the turn of the century to one of the world's most out-of-control populations, despite having one of the world's richest nations next door (upon which it has unfairly laid an enormous burden of legal, illegal and semi-legal migrants).

As well, population socialism is a human-chauvinist creed --one in which the world's bio-regions and its other 10 million species are thought of as simply there to be "shared" out as possessions among human beings. It is partly because human beings are not equally spread across all the world's habitable regions that there is hope of preserving at least some large fragments of the world's natural heritage into the indefinite future.

**The Lets-Share-the-Booty Fallacy
We (non-Aboriginal) Australians don't really own Australia, because our ancestors stole it from the Aborigines. The only way to become respectable is to invite in the rest of the world to share it with us
--thus reducing the Aborigines to not just a minority in their own country, but a minority among the minorities! Instead we should consult them first. Both Sole Bellair and Lois O'Donaghue of ATSIC have called publicly for Aborigines to be consulted about immigration levels. Lois O'Donoghue, as then-Chair of ATSIC, in a submission to the Jones Enquiry in 1994 wrote:
"For Aboriginal people today, as in 1788, the land is not merely a resource to be exploited, a commodity to be traded; it is life itself... The Standing Committee's reference scenario for the year 2045 has only worse yet to come --a population almost doubled in size, taking over more and more of the best land for housing, suffering greater pollution and congestion, and natural resources under increased threat of depletion and degradation.

"Such a prospect must be alarming to all Australians. For indigenous Australians it is doubly so, because the damage that will inevitably be caused to the land threatens the heart of our culture and our very being." (p. 1227-8, Submission no. 260).

More to the point, a program as pro-active as our present high- immigration scheme requires the clear consent both of the electorate as a whole and of the Aboriginal community. At present it has neither.

European immigrants should be particularly careful of using this fallacy. If the likes of Arthur Calwell, Bob Menzies and Paul Keating didn't "own" Australia, then the immigrants' own invitation to enter it is clearly invalid.

**The Rogue Nation Fallacy. Australia has no right to enforce its borders against those who wish to enter, because the modern Australians got their land by violent force.
So did almost all existing nations! Yet now the UN and world opinion have largely ended the kind of dynastic and colonial wars that were once taken for granted. The basic presumption of international law today is that nations may keep the boundaries they currently have. Australia's claim to its present borders is better and freer of disputes than that of most nations. Further, those who demand the "right" to ignore our borders are rarely if ever related to those peoples who were displaced by force after 1788.

**The Yellow Peril Fallacy (coward's variant):
The populous nations to our North (and/or "world opinion") will not allow us to go on holding such resources and enjoying our present first-world life style. We should surrender gracefully to mass immigration before it is forced upon us.

This is either wishful thinking by immigration lobbyists, or else is outdated military thinking. The Defence Department has long abandoned the myth that higher population is needed to defend Australia; and the Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett received only ridicule when he attempted to revive it in late 1996. Recent history suggests that first-world nations suffer less risk of invasion than poorer ones, and few nations have so few border problems as Australia. Richer nations are admired and imitated today rather than invaded. Further, the basic agreement of the Cairo Conference on World Population was that each country must undertake the task of controlling its own population growth. Mass migration was not even considered as a solution. So far from world opinion blaming us for not being as overpopulated as much of the world, we will be considered an admirable example.

Note: More populous nations like Indonesia would have little interest in invading Australia as a way to settle their excess population. Australia's carrying capacity is trivial besides that of nations like India, Indonesia, China. (That's one reason they got to have such huge populations in the first place). China's annual population increase is roughly as large as Australia's total population. The tiny percentage of a nation like Indonesia's population that could be resettled into Australia, especially in the aftermath of a war, would not solve that nation's problems --and would not justify the expense, much less the risks of devastation it would incur by going to war with a first world country like Australia.

**The Yellow Peril Fallacy (commercial or ABC variant)
Maybe we could defend Australia. But if we reduce immigration other nations will call us "racist" and refuse to trade with us, causing unimaginable economic loss. Other nations will only tolerate us if we abandon the outdated notion that we have an ethnic or national identity of our own to protect, and continue evolving towards a UN-style near-equal mix of all ethnicities.
Not so! All our neighbouring nations have far tighter (and more nationalistic) immigration policies than ours. Some of these nations might be hypocritical enough to run the above line of rhetoric as a ploy in negotiations once they see that we can be paralysed by it; but if so, we would have only ourselves to blame. The real support for this kind of defeatism or national cringe comes not from other nations but from vested interests and ideologies within Australia.

An alternative argument is that Australia should want to be "peacefully invaded" because we are having it too good. "Democratic socialists" of the Green Left Weekly type sometimes demand we should deliberately increase population to lower our standard of living --because this means we would do less environmental damage. In reality, the only result could be to increase environmental damage. They are thinking of the world as a sort of moral gymnasium rather than thinking practically about how to conserve the planet's imperilled bio-regions. They also forget that Australia is a democracy, and that the electorate is unlikely ever to give a mandate for deliberate self-impoverishment. Those who argue as above are often fuelled by a kind of class-envy: they see themselves as doing their fellow Australians down, rather than as damaging themselves. Any government official acting on this principle (which clearly does not have the assent of the taxpayers who pay his or her salary) would be imitating the Unjust Steward in the Bible --the one who gave away his master's goods while taking the moral credit to himself.

**The Japanese Immigration Fallacy.
One can't expect to trade with other countries unless we have a large (one-directional?) immigration flow from them.
So how does Japan succeed? And how did we succeed in making Japan our major trading partner?

**The Maltese Restaurant Fallacy.
You have to import immigrants en masse to get their special skills.
That's why there are far more Maltese restaurants here than French-style ones. (Or are there?!)

This fallacy is often linked with the frivolous (and self-explanatory) Culture-equals-Cuisine fallacy.

**The Yuppy Multiculturalism Fallacy
Cultures are just consumer goods (they don't involve values or priorities or convictions) so the more of them we have available on the shelf the better off we shall be. Lets give ourselves a perpetual tourist holiday by inviting in the peoples of the world to contribute their cultures and cuisines. Otherwise we'll just be a backwater, won't we?

**The "Elite" Fallacy.
Some people are unable to argue rationally about the effects of immigration because to them supporting high immigration is an emblem of their membership of a privileged group. When Bob Hawke boasted in 1990 that he had enforced "elite" as opposed to "popular" views on immigration he was talking not so much about expert advice (which he was ignoring from Treasury and EPAC) as about a social or political elite of bureaucrats and politicians among whom support for high immigration had become a kind of fashionable badge of belonging. Hawke's "elite" is largely a "left-wing" phenomenon, though it has its links to the business- growth lobbies, and former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser has become an incongruous convert to its immigration-ideology.

**The World State Fallacy
A common fallacy is to argue that Australia's balance of population to resources is irrelevant because we are only part of the world as a whole. What does it matter how many people there are in Australia, asked Pat O'Shane on Late Night Live.
The answer is that it matters a great deal to the survival of our many unique species, and environments. Australia is one of only 12 mega-diverse bio-regions in the world, and the only one in a first-world country. It is vital that it keeps its population within limits. Unless we win the population battle, in the long run all environmental battles will be lost.

**The Let's Save the World Fallacy
Conversely, we need to understand that migration is no answer to world population. Australia has neither the duty nor the capacity to take in the world's population increase. World population grows by over 80 million a year. Even if Australia could double its planned 1996-97 intake of 86,000 visaed permanent settlers, we would be no nearer to absorbing the world's annual increase. The funds required to transfer just one Third World family of four to Australia and to a first-world standard of living could solve the problems of their whole village or town back in the country of origin. Yet we are currently cutting our O/S aid to less than half the UN recommended figure of .7% of GNP.

**"How Can We Be Overpopulated if We're a Rich Country?"
Affluent countries have the greater obligation to restrict growth. Australia's 18 million people, each using the energy resources of about 30 people in poorer countries are the equivalent of some 540 million Indians --or roughly the 3rd World population of Africa. Overpopulation is not just "over there".

**The Refugee Fallacy
Most immigrants are not refugees. Less than 10,000 are, though fudging sometimes extends the "compassionate" quota towards larger figures. DIMA, the Department of Immigration, concedes that among the 1996-97 "humanitarian" intake of 12,000, only 3,335 (29.4%) are refugees by the UN's strict definition. (It is also possible of course that some of those who succeed in being so classified make fraudulent claims).

In short, refugees are a small proportion of immigration intakes that have ranged from 50,000 to 150,000. We are filling up the country's limited capacity with people who don't truly need to come, and thereby reducing our future capacity to help with serious refugee crises.

**The Unemployment Fallacy
High immigration can only benefit industry. And doesn't the Orani model show that levels of immigration make no difference to the percentage of the population in employment?
Indeed Orani does --provided the assumption you feed into it is that increasing the workforce will reduce the price of labor until it becomes economic to hire more workers. The answers a model like Orani produces depend on the assumptions fed in, and indeed the computer buff's jargon for this kind of implausible answer is GIGO --Garbage In, Garbage Out. For instance, the econometrician Matthew W. Peter has shown (see People and Place, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 27-35) that when more fact-based assumptions are fed in, for instance that wages are "sticky", the same Orani model gives the opposite (and commonsense) conclusions: that high immigration in a time of shrinking laborforce does cause unemployment, as well as problems with the nation's balance of payments, plus a string of other undersirable effects.

Of course even on the former assumption, immigration would be greatly reducing wages; so that it seems employees would have to lose either way. Economic fallacies like this one were put about during the 1980s by a unit of the Department of Immigration called the Bureau of Immigration Research (a.k.a. BIR, BIPR, and BIMPR).

This body was later described by its own Director of Internal Research, Hugh Poate, as a propaganda unit disguised as a think- tank. (See for instance "Migration Research Rigged", Brisbane Sunday Mail 18/9/94). Both the narrow circle of its consultancies and the partial and polemical nature of many of its public claims have often been criticised by senior academics. (See for instance, "Current Australian Immigration Policies: Policy Design and the Case for Reform" by Harry Clarke, p. 19, paper delivered at the Immigration and Australian Population in the 21st Century Conference, at ANU 20-24 May 1996, published by the ANU's Centre for Economic Policy Research). Yet this Bureau's views were widely publicised, whereas the persistently contrary advice of Treasury and EPAC was confidential and little noted by the media. For more details, see AESP's 1997 Submission to the Minister for Environment on Immigration Levels.

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4. ARGUMENTS ABOUT "RACISM".

1. **The Racism versus Democracy Fallacy
To reduce immigration would be to risk surrendering democratic principles to a small, unrepresentative but dangerous minority of "rednecks," "isolationists," etc.
The reality is the reverse. An AGB-McNair poll published in Sydney Morning Herald on 5/11/96 indicated that 62% of Australians would now support a moratorium on immigration, while a Newspoll, reported in the Australian on 4/10/96, indicated that the 71% who think the current immigration level too high outnumber the 2% who think it too low by about 35 to 1 --an electoral landslide! (A viewer who put faith in the ABC's TV news coverage might imagine that these proportions were reversed, but other surveys confirm these two.) Clearly even immigrants do not support higher immigration. It might be truer to say it is the advocates of high immigration who are a small well-organised minority that have found ways to defy the democratic will of the majority --and perhaps even to misinform us as to what our neighbours think. (Note that so far from being defenders of democracy, many "anti-racism" campaigners frankly attack free speech and majority-rule. "Anti-racism" makes a good cloak for elitism).

In all arguments about immigration the onus is surely on those who want to move large numbers of non-refugees into this country to prove that their motives are pure. That is, that they are motivated by public interest rather than by ethnic chauvinism (or, as the ordinary Aussie might put it, "just wanting to bring in more of their mates"). So far from opponents of high immigration having a "hidden agenda", it is usually its advocates who have a personal or institutional vested interest in it --for instance, "ethnic leaders" seeking to increase their "market share", or the Real Estate Institute of Australia which frankly admits that continued high immigration and population growth are essential "to the profitability of the industry".

Note that environmentalists need not involve themselves in debates as to whether our national identity benefits or suffers by a very large influx of people with different cultures or values. (It is important, though, that both sides of this debate be heard). The point for environmental organisations like AESP is that all groups coming to Australia aspire towards the same high-consuming material culture and life-style. In terms of environmental impact, then, their differences in language or ethnicity are irrelevant. It is numbers, not culture, that matters.

The ideal of building a kind of Bahai synthesis of all cultures in Australia may have a very strong appeal, but it must not be imposed on the Australians against their will nor at the cost of the environment. Nor should we fantasize that to achieve this would end ethnic violence elsewhere.

2. **The Racists Under the Bed Fallacy or "But-Aren't-You- Afraid?..."
I agree that high immigration is an economic and environmental mistake, and it surely isn't the best way to help the Third World. But aren't you afraid that you'll be mistaken for racists? \that your ideas will play into the hands of racists? \that your group will be infiltrated by racists? etc

This sort of query brings overtones of the McCarthyist period. Then, too, when environmentalists protested at the capitalist ethic of growth-at-all-costs they met interviewers who brushed aside their arguments in eagerness to ask such "in-depth" questions as "But surely you only say that because you're a Communist?" or"But aren't you afraid that some of your supporters might be Communists?" or "Don't you think you should suppress your argument in case it gets misused by Communists."

Note that the McCarthyist hysteria depended upon sliding unconsciously between two meanings of their bogey-word. A "Communist" in one sense was a murderous henchman of Stalin (vile enough to justify their concern, but rare in the West). In the other sense it simply meant anyone who could see the down-side of capitalism. (Hence McCarthy's famous claim that the US State Department was full of Communists.) Probably all witch-hunts depend on a similar mis-use or double-use of a bogey word. (Witchcraft itself once meant either (1) sorcery designed to cause death and injury (an intended crime that might deserve punishment) or (2) harmless but widespread non-Christian superstitions and good-luck rituals. By fudging between these two senses, inquisitors were able to torture and burn thousands of innocents).

The current obsession with "racism" depends on similarly loose usage. Indeed the word's connotations seem, if possible, to have become more sinister, even as its definition has become vaguer, until the word now means virtually whatever the speaker wishes it to mean --which means that no one is quite safe from having the word applied to them.

Some people nowadays reserve the term "ethnic" for those types of group-loyalty or group-chauvinism of which they approve, and apply the terms "racist" and "racism" to those they wish to disparage. *FOOTNOTE

*1FOOTNOTE: [In fact much of what is loosely called "racism" today would be better described as cultural or ethnic chauvinism. Note that the European immigrant-minorities who sometimes complain of suffering "racism" are in fact of the same Caucasian race as Anglo-Celts. A philosopher would note the irony that one of the marks of a true racist is to mistake cultural or ethnic differences for racial/genetic ones --as Hitler did with the Jews. (Only a Nazi-style racist could seriously believe that the much-mixed and intermarried populations of the various European nations represent genetically separate sub-species or races.) Indeed some ethnic chauvinists who accuse other Australians of "racism" may be in fact projecting upon them their own obsession with race, and/or their own potentially racist tendency to equate ethnicity and culture with race.]

It then becomes easy to whip up public concern by constantly equivocating between milder and the more sinister (e.g. Nazi) meanings of the word. As public obsession grows with such a bogey, people come to feel that anything to which the label can be (or is) applied is really a disguised form of its ugliest possible meaning. Much as in the McCarthy era, anyone who criticises this identification then risks being accused of "defending racism". Of course this is just as silly as believing that every kind of left-wing viewpoint should be called Stalinism, or that every kind of aggressiveness should be called murder, or that every kind of sexual abrasiveness should be called rape. It is the zealot's obsession with their bogey-word that causes them to simplify and categorise the world of people and ideas, seeking to arrange them on a simple scale or ladder of merit that leads only towards or away from the bogey.

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4. IDEOLOGIES UNDERLYING THE ABOVE FALLACIES

Sometimes it is an underlying ideology that keeps pushing up new fallacies in argument, like the mythical Hydra that grew new heads as fast as the old ones were chopped off.

The ideology in question is usually one of the following four:

1. Leave the problem to God:
God loves all human beings and wants there to be billions of them. He will solve any problems that result.
There is no converting someone who truly believes this, though you can ask them whether they think it's safe to build on the San Andreas fault provided you say your prayers. (Most Christians today believe that although God set up the world, he then left it to follow its own laws; and thus humans need to plan prudently).

2. The "Human Supremacy Paradigm":
Humans are the only thing that matters. If we treat our fellow humans generously there will be no serious problems. Gloom and doom merchants lack faith in human nature. They are the sort of people who would build death camps to get rid of 'unwanted' population. etc. etc. This is essentially a semi-secularized version of no. 1. It is commonest in people who have little grasp of logistical thinking or biological issues, though they may have had an overspecialised education in the humanities. Once again, one needs to confront them with their underlying ideology rather than waste time on the individual fallacies.

3. Radical egalitarianism: A more Marxist version of no. 2. The only thing that really matters is equity: that all humans are treated equally, regardless of what this does to society or to bio-regions. What does it matter if the last tree in the Amazon is chopped down, provided it is chopped by a member of some minority that has not yet had its share of landscape to exploit?
Despite the talk of "justice" or "equity," the real emotions behind this point of view may be envy and human chauvinism. This view leads towards Population Socialism as discussed above --the notion that populations which grow unpleasantly large have the right to claim lebensraum from those that have been more prudent. (Contrast Christ's parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins).

4. Fashionable "Elitism".
Some people, especially among those whose education or money gives them access to a trans-national world, have a strong need to see themselves as superior to the primitive "redneck", "racist", nationalistic or nation-bound working-class Australians. See The "Elite" Fallacy discussed above. The pro-immigration views of such people are often more a matter of snobbery (or a need to think well of themselves) than of logic.

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One can rarely win over a thorough-going "true-believer" in any of the above four ideologies; but in an average audience there will be many other people who are less committed. Many of these, once the implications of an ism emerge in debate, will distance themselves from it. In a public debate, to name and clarify the ideologies of some opponents can be essential to defusing their rhetoric.

END

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