Brendan O'Neill, Gary Johns, and a few modest proposals for sustainable thinking ...

(Above: Colbert joining in with modest proposals by reading from Jonathan Swift).

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout. Jonathan Swift, "A Modest Proposal"

It says a lot about The Australian that it's embraced Brendan O'Neill as one its regular contributors, as if the desperate or the addled couldn't already trot off to Spiked and get their fill.

Here he is at his original home, scribbling There is no 'right to be a scholar', carrying out his duty to slag off anything and anyone, on the libertarian principle that someone has to be Marlon Brando on a motorbike. "What are you against?" an innocent might ask O'Neill, and "What have you got?" is always the answer.

Select any offering of his in Spiked, and you'll find him scribbling furiously, with standard perversity, and preferably with a lavish plate of straw men before him.

Thus you get an anguished plea for the fate of a man convicted of murder, in Individual liberty is in serious jeopardy, on the basis that the prosecution crossed the line by invoking and breaking double jeopardy, and his plea for the victim (the living one, not the dead one) to go free ends with a robust bout of paranoia and rhetoric:

Beyond the world of criminal justice, the dumping of the double jeopardy rule speaks to a worrying new political climate. A climate in which the individual is increasingly denuded of fundamental rights and where there is so little liberal fervour, so little firm commitment to protecting individual liberty, that people either don’t notice or don’t mind. Following Weston’s trial, a spokesman for the Crown Prosecution Service issued a warning to all those who have previously been found not guilty of crimes which, in his somehow magical eyes, they actually committed. ‘You have nowhere to hide’, he told them. Those words are really aimed at all of us, who can now potentially be stalked by the state in a way that would have been considered outrageous just a decade ago. We shouldn’t hide; we should fight back out in the open.

Oh dear, that sounds serious, government and crime busters on the march, and innocents with nowhere to hide.

Uh huh. Well then you can go off to the Oz and read O'Neill scribbling just as furiously Left bows down to false WikiLeaks prophet.

It is a bizarre, slightly embarrassing and certainly creepy piece about the Messianic crescendo of the cult of Julian Assange, which proffers an orotund comparison between Assange and Christ, WikiLeaks and Christmas, based on little more than the idea that since there are some on the Left who support Assange, O'Neill must be agin him, and it ...

All those whose critical faculties are still intact, and who care about real truth and real knowledge, should stand up and loudly blaspheme against the new secular religion of Assange and his apostles.

Yes, yes, real truth and real knowledge, until unreal truth and unreal knowledge. Go him governments of the world, stone him, and never you mind about double jeopardy or nuthink, guvnor. All because one blogger talked about the secular crucifixion of Assange, when all they had to do was rabbit on about the real threat to innocents by evil governments ... double jeopardy ...

But that was for a real murderer as opposed to a tosser like Assange ...

O'Neill exemplifies the weird world view of someone who started off a Marxist, and now probably can't believe he was such a fool, and so in a fierce effort to make up for it, continues to play the ideological fool and clown, attacking straw men wherever he finds them.

That's how you end up with today's comedy stylings in the lizard Oz, under the name Ethan Greenhart, in Christmas is turkey genocide day.

Yes, there's nothing like a joke about genocide in the header to set the tone, and the rest is a satirical meditation on the utter arrogance of the festive season, as perceived by Gaia loving hippies. I suppose it might have resonated more in Australia if it'd been about the deaths of crayfish and oysters ...

The trouble is, when comedy is harnessed to ideology, it generally ends up being not particularly funny. Yep, there are jokes about lentils and ethical carol-singing and red-nosed condoms, and it reminded me of nothing so much as conservatives making fun of hippies in the nineteen sixties. Same as it ever was ... how strange it must be to live in a time machine, and revisit the ghost of Richard Nixon on regular occasions.

O'Neill would do well to read a little Jonathan Swift - his Modest Proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland from being a burden on their parents or country and for making them beneficial to the publick remains a classic example of satire (available here at Project Gutenberg, while you can find plenty of other Swiftian fun here).

Swift had the advantage of a hearty disdain of humanity, whatever their ideologies and fevered beliefs, and so could take a swipe at anything he pleased, rather than Greenhart's feeble idea that kicking hippies is fun when all it gets you is free entry to a night of brawling in the Clockwork Orange club.

Never mind, it brings us to the comedy stylings of Gary Johns, also a favourite of the Oz, and his pre-Christmas cheer We do not need sustainable population policy.

It seems Australia is the only country in the world that even raises the question of what the population might be in 2050, which rather raises the question of why the Chinese embarked on a one child policy for fear of what the population of China might become in the twenty first century.

Johns, it almost goes without saying, is against anything to do with the notion of sustainability. The very word sends shivers down his spine, reminding him as it does of Stalin's desire to achieve a sustainable population in Siberia.

Johns is very much your go to 'unsustainability' man, and so he devises three tests to demonstrate just how unsustainable any notion of sustainability must be. We'll leave you to nut out the tests, but it turns out the first test is whether it might help politicians and keep voter anger under control. Now there's a key test ...

Of course it helps to be incredibly reductionist in argument to arrive at this level of sophistication:

In terms of environment and amenity, sustainability as a concept provides no ready answers to indicate whether restraint or technological innovation will be our saviour. Do we follow Thomas Malthus or Bill Gates? Does a sustainable population strategy help?

Yes indeed. I've always thought that the key test for a strategy is to juxtapose a choice between Malthus, scribbling in the eighteenth century about population growth, and Bill Gates in the twentieth century, chomping on pizza as he devised a computer operating system.

It provides such clarity and depth to the discussion, that kind of metaphor. Sure it's completely meaningless, but that's why we love to read Johns, since meaning is never a prerequisite for comedy.

You see, there were policies designed to produce unsustainable population growth - or so Johns seems to be saying - like the baby bonus, but for the love of humanity, it's simply impossible to work out ways to keep population growth under some kind of control. Unsustainable yes, sustainable? Sorry, it's simply not possible ...

Migrants will do their thing, and anyway we need four million plus workers in Australia during the next 15 years. I'm not sure why or what for - perhaps it's to cater for the growth in workers that we expect in the next 15 years, and so we come to a resounding conclusion:

Better to get on with the hard work of the demographer than appeal to vacuous concepts such as sustainability.

What on earth does that mean? Better to get on with the job of the statistical study of human populations than to worry about whether the resources of the country and its infrastructure will deliver the lifestyle many of its citizens expect? The hard work of the demographer as opposed to say making sure the Murray Darling basin doesn't collapse?

It seems that there are a myriad of actual problems associated with population growth, but simply no feasible fix for them:

Solving the myriad actual problems associated with population growth is not helped by immature advocates such as the Anglican Church of Australia, which has warned of catastrophic consequences of global overpopulation and unsustainable levels of consumption by the rich.

The church's General Synod has called on the Australian government to adopt a sustainable population policy and "avoid any reliance on continuing population growth to maintain economic growth". How does that help?

Yes, how on earth does that kind of special pleading help? Does it help to talk about the rich or overpopulation or conspicuous consumption, at least not while I'm sitting down to my Xmas crayfish and oysters ...

Does it help to think of the world overrun by cockroaches? Does it help to understand that the Roman Catholic requirement that the faithful breed like rabbits is no longer a good bill of sale in western countries? Does it help to think of a world where perhaps there might be a little balance, rather than simple-minded reliance on people being bred like so many chooks to sustain the quality of life of the rich (and in the United States, if you want an indication of how the rich live, try to get yourself into a gated, golf-mad community some time. Not that we're saying that it leads to happiness, but golly it sure is rich).

The synod wants a sustainable population policy that is "fair and just" and sustainable immigration. What does that mean?

Well I guess it means as much as the vacuous concept of the 'hard work of the demographer' or the simple minded juxtaposition of Malthus and Bill Gates. Or it could mean that the Jensenist heretics, after the pounding of their investments in the marketplace, have decided to return to Jesus Christ the socialist (oh how we yearn for the day that the Christians of the United States discover Christ was a commie).

But back to Johns' stylings, because it seems that in the heat of battle he might have come up with the perfect solution:

One of the key issues in managing an increased population is the movement of people.

One of the reasons the Victorian Labor government lost was its failure to keep up with suburban rail improvements.

Pouring money into a National Broadband Network, services the private sector would have supplied by other means, displays an appalling ignorance of the proper role of government. If Labor is going to spend money, spend it on urban rail in crowded cities.

Yep, it's totally obvious.

The way to deal with an increased population is to keep people on the move, always on the go, always travelling out and about, never coming to a halt, preferably on railways in the suburbs.

That's the way to manage an increased population. Herd them from the top paddock to the bottom paddock and back again, and everything will be alright. They'll never notice they're in a crowded city, they'll always be on the move, and the last thing they need is a means to communicate - a kind of high class almost in the flesh Skype, as you might get with a sophisticated NBN - when they can catch a train and do a face to face ...

Santa Claus will not deliver the sort of policy that Labor wants this Christmas; a sustainable population policy is the wrong package. Burke knows the best he can do is hide the true policies under the tree to be pulled out later when the children have gone to bed. Merry Christmas.

Indeed.

And what might those true policies be? Well if you read Johns' comedy stylings, it seems it's on we go, with population growth and migration all the go. Congestion pricing for a city like Sydney? Too hard. Relocation incentives? Ineffectual. Die country towns die.

Governments? Well hand wringing is permissible, and perhaps a brief chat with demographers doing the hard work, you know organising the trains for the Sydney suburbs spilling out to Maitland and the Hunter Valley, but that's about it.

There's simply nothing else to be done. We must sit on our hands and count the growth in population numbers and work out how we can move the engorged population around to keep them amused and distracted and not angry at the pollies ...

At the end of a Johns' piece, it never fails to astonish me to remember that he was once a minister in the Hawke government, since all he scribbles these days is how the government must never ever become involved in devising useful policies for the effective governing of the country.

Who'd have thought we'd be ever so grateful to Liberal party member Teresa Gambaro for tossing him out, so that he could tootle off happily, preferably by fast suburban train, to his fellow ideologues of the right ...

Speaking of modest proposals, apart from the modest proposal that we not read anymore O'Neill or Johns until the new year, our own modest proposal for future population growth and possible resource shortages, is already to hand. We like to think of as the Soylent Green policy ...

Well it'll take care of population growth, and Brendan O'Neill can write a satirical column about hippies unable to cope with the idea of cannibalism ... which is of course much funnier than jokes about genocide ...

(Below: and now another modest proposal, click to enlarge).