Sheila Newman's blog

Victor on tvConfused by bureaucracy, conflicted by development, and disorganised by new residential enclaves, local Frankston citizens find their voice in sticking up for a man and his goat in the face of bullying by-laws.

What you can do: visit freevictor.com and sign the petition.

Evictions will put about two million people in the US on the streets this year, but finally Americans are fighting back. They are "meticulously vandalising" their houses before exiting, leaving the greedy banks with unsaleable properties.

In the first test case an interim tribunal has found that a woman has the right to demand better housing from the State within a certain amount of time, failing the provision of which, she will be entitled to sue the State.

Victorian Government’s Land and Biodiversity at a Time of Climate Change Green Paper accelerates damage in a land where human growth and development drive horrendous rate of extinctions, ignoring democratic protest ...

Raising the retirement age in France is impractical when people are being forcibly retired younger and younger.

US labour is beginning to fight back against years of repression and loss of workers' rights: Computer programmers ...

I don’t know about you, but ‘global scare’ strikes me as a bit of a frivolous way to describe widespread starvation and food riots, whilst ensuring national self-sufficiency sounds to me like the right way to go.

Industrialised fishing is not only no longer sustainable due to falling fish-stocks but now falling energy supply has priced it out of the free market.

If a farmer built a housing estate in his front paddock and chased all his stock out onto the road, would he count the pile of corpses and conclude that there had been more cows in his front paddock as a result? This is what the Kangaroo Industries Association of Victoria seems to be doing.

The Victorian Government, SEITA and Eastlink, are persevering in plans to bisect the Mornington Peninsula Biosphere and other crucial habitat for wildlife. If maintained, this route will ruin a proposed wildife corridor (.pdf) leading to and from the Peninsula Biosphere, of profound significance to the rest of Australia.

Maryland Wilson, President of the Australian Wildlife Protection Council, stated yesterday that the Southern and Eastern Integrated Transport Authority (SEITA) has failed to adequately address the concerns she raised on behalf of the Australian Wildlife Protection Council or the Coalition of Wildlife Corridors.

'One of the most remarkable features of the ‘conservative turn’ experienced in the UK since 1980 is the paradoxical emergence of extensive re-regulation of economic activity in a period supposedly typified by drastic deregulation.'

see also: Why Privatisation is wrong

When you take a public asset without permission and give it to private individuals, that is not 'reform' it is theft. Taking something without the owners' permission is stealing.

How could someone in charge of borrowing billions from banks, to deploy energy and resources for multi-million dollar developments, be so energy and resources naive that they did not see the energy-linked "debt bombshell" coming?

This really interesting exhibition testifies to the disappearance of accessible natural places for children, without consciously linking this to overpopulation and development.

ABC Breakfast Show host, Ross Solly, gives Property Council of Australia 20 minutes-plus free advertising at tax-payer expense to market industry hobby-horse.

Since when did our taxes go to fund the ABC as a national real-estate agent or an arm of the PCA?

Ross Solly

What organisation has only 24 members of which the first ten comprise the current Prime Minister and nine past and present Australian Prime Ministers or Prime Ministerial contenders? And why would they be so dedicated to an organisation with a focus so antithetical to democracy and Australians? Read on.

When they want to take it off you, they call it the 'back yard'. But what it really is is your ticket to survival in the 21st century.

Victorians need proper representation from their government and journalists need absolute freedom to report. Time to turn off the Corporate Machine. Time to stop Brumby's New Army of developers. Time to slow the monster down, Mr Brumby, Mr Paluka, Mr Pallas. Time to listen to your employers and the owners of the Bay, the Victorian people.

Demographer, Peter McDonald's extreme projections of population implosion and his advocacy for population growth need wide scrutiny. Sheila Newman

Murdoch's Queensland Courier Mail has long been in the business of marketing unacceptable development, but the April 9 2008 editorial read more like a medieval sermon on the benefits of floggings. What must Queenslanders have done to the Gods to provoke such punishment as

“freeways, chemical plants and new powerstations at their back door; transport corridors and dams which endanger the environment and destroy local communities”

... which the editorialist identifies as our inescapable and deserved fate?

A huge rise in serious mortgage 'delinquencies', and the food riots all round the world (coming soon to a place near you) in the context of oil depletion and the ridiculous market price pressure to grow grain for ethanol, just makes Mr Rudd's summit, Ms Bligh's proposal to concrete over the Brisbane River, and Mr Brumby's Housing uber al (following on in a line of terrible impositions on the public, from Kennett through Bracks) and WA Inc-revisited's excavate and desertify economy, look that much more dangerously insane.

The Brisbane mayoral election should have been anything but boring. Four candidates declared policies against population growth, but received next to no press coverage. These candidates for fundamental change ran right up against the major vested interests in the outcome of the Brisbane Council election. Those vested interests are the property development industry and its upstream and downstream dependents, which include the Courier Mail. Many group under the Australian Property Council umbrella. Choosing to structure themselves around continuously increasing population growth, naturally these industries prefer mayors who won't seriously challenge their objectives. Greg Rowell is employed by the Australian Property Council and “Can Do” Newman has been giving them what they want and telling Brisbanites that this is what Brisbane needs, for years now, in what the APC calls “the cooperative relationship between the State Government and Liberal Lord Mayor Campbell Newman."

See also "Courier Mail provides 'boring', yet unbalanced, coverage of Brisbane City Council elections"

Australians are enraged by the undemocratic transformation of every aspect of their landscape, government and society. Does the reader need reminding that a criteria of facism is the close association of governments with big business? We are coming out of the induced euphoria that this is all about multiculturalism to realise it is about exploiting all of us, with no heed to the destruction of our life-support system.