Such statements would have been accommodated in the Europe of the 1930s, whose obsession with matters of ethnic cleansing did lead to an experiment of mass murder as yet unequalled in the annals of human bestiality.

Such views as those expressed at the Third Demographic Summit in Budapest betray the understanding of men in retreat, desperate figures whose ideas are running out of steam and, in due course, a pulse. Let us hope that their end is not as calamitous as the conditions they are proposing.

Tony Abbott spruiks Western civilisation on the world stage