number of homeland cultures, boosting Australian diversity, while simultaneously reducing overall population growth in the long term. As it is, we'll be bearing the impacts of the recent huge surges in immigration for decades to come, with little benefit to anyone except a few property developers and supermarket operators who'll make short term profit. In this day and age, there's simply no logic to deliberately engineering third-world population growth rates on our ecologically devastated landscape, and importing skilled labour as if we we're a developing country. It's plain stupid. By (a) equating "refugees" with "border security" and (b) "Big Australia" with "cultural diversity" greedy opportunists aim to (a) scapegoat refugees and (b) brow-beating people into silence about Big Australia ('If you oppose big population growth you must be a racist or saomething'). calyptorhynchus : 22 Dec 2010 4:32:21pm The refugee issue is a red herring. The population conversation we need to have begins with the observation that in a world of 7 billion people it is absurd to be paying people to have children. If anything we need to pay people in Australia not to have children. ateday : 22 Dec 2010 6:06:51pm This is but one thing we need to do. We need to first and foremost put the Environment FIRST!!!!! Without a healthy Environment there is no us. We must accept that we are but one animal species and we MUST share this planet with many other species of animals which we are not better than, but only