Demographics and Abortion
Mark Steyn has weighed in on backbencher Danna Vale's comments on how abortion, amongst other things is dooming Australia due to the demogaphics of aging and shrinking populations being offset by muslim immigration and baby booming. Steyn is of course, at his best with some major points that are consistently ignored by our politicians (although not Ms Vale)

If a society chooses to outsource its breeding, who your suppliers are is not unimportant. "I've heard those very silly remarks made about immigrants to this country since I was a child," says Allison.

"If it wasn't the Greeks, it was the Italians or it was the Vietnamese."

Those are races or nationalities. But Islam is a religion, and an explicitly political one - unlike the birthplace of your grandfather it's not something you leave behind in the old country. Indeed, for its adherents in the West, it becomes their principal expression - a Pan-Islamic identity that transcends borders.

Indeed. There is marked difference between culture and religion. Our dear Senator Allision needs to wake up to the disaster around the corner.

In attempting to refute Vale's argument, this newspaper praised the nation's maidenhood for lying back and thinking of Australia and getting the national fertility rate up from 1.73 births per woman in 2001 to 1.77, "well above rates in developed nations such as Italy, Spain, Japan, Germany and South Korea".

Well, pop the champagne corks! That's like saying Mark Latham's political prospects are better than Harold Holt's. The countries cited are going out of business. Seventeen European nations are now at what demographers call "lowest-low" fertility - 1.3 births per woman, the point at which you're so far down the death spiral you can't pull out.

In theory, those countries will find their population halving every 40 years or so. In practice, it will be quicker than that, as the savvier youngsters figure there's no point sticking around a country that's turned into one big undertaker's waiting room: not every pimply burger flipper is going to want to work himself into the ground to pay for new shuffleboard courts at the old folks' home.

I find it amazing, the furor over Miss Vale's comments. It isn't like the CIA report and ther half dozen or so other reports that conclude the same things about demographics haven't been around for several years. It's like the cries of sexism that arise anytime anyone points out the self-evident truth that men and women are different.

The simple fact is that we need to address the demographic issue and we need to do it before it is too late. So to all my married friends out there....Have lots of babies!
- posted by Alan Grey @ Thursday, February 16, 2006