On Friday 5 April 2019, as revealed by John Pilger on Twitter from a high level source within the Ecuadorian Government, Julian Assange would shortly be expelled from the London Ecuadorian Embassy. Once evicted, he stands to be arrested by the UK police, extradited to the United States where he faces a secret trial based on a secret indictment. He may face many years behind bars - even the death penalty can't be excluded - all for just publishing, through Wikleaks, facts about world events that the public would be entitled to know in a fair and just world.
It is still possible to make the Australian government act to prevent the illegal extradition of Julian Assange to the U.S. and, instead, bring him home to Australia. Should they fail to act, they must be held to account at the forthcoming federal elections.
See also: Be Ready To Act: WikiLeaks Source Says They’re Coming For Assange (5/4/19) by Caitlin Johnstone, The Gestapo Is Coming for Julian Assange (4/4/19) by Paul Craig Roberts.
Inside is the text of the public statement issued by the UN expert panel on Arbitrary Detention, which you will not find in most mainstream publications, which are seeking to obfuscate the UN opinion and its importance, with their own opinions. Julian Assange is a Victorian-born Australian citizen and asylum-seeker, recognised as a refugee by the UN. The Ecuadorian Embassy in London granted him refugee status, but the UK government stopped him from going to Ecuador by taking his passport and surrounding the embassy with police, day and night. What did Assange do? Assange famously published, on his Wikileaks, authentic film of US soldiers hunting down civilians with helicopters and machine guns as if they were in a video game.
The plain truth: 
I don’t have kids but I am disturbed about the Heart Foundation’s Active Healthy Kids very poor report card for Australian children last week. It said that Australian children are largely unfit because of a lack of exercise and that this deterioration has happened in the last couple of decades. Natasha Schranz author of the Foundation's inaugural report has graded Australian children at a disgraceful D minus. Contributing to this terrble score was a D for "active transport", meaning not nearly enough walking or bicycle riding to and from school.
The most powerful thing you can do to make your Member of Parliament work on your behalf is to ask them what they did to prevent harmful legislation being passed in Parliament, then publish this information. If they did nothing they stand accused. We reproduce here the speeches made against the Summary Offences and Sentencing Amendment Bill so that Victorians can see who tried to stop this. We include some pro-Bill speeches. It seems that no-one in the Liberal Party voted against it in the Legislative Assembly. The Bill is to be debated a final time, possibly tomorrow (11/3/2014), probably within the week. (Video of protests inside)
Video inside of nearly 4000 Victorians protesting re this legislation on March 6, 2014. "We believe that this harsh legislation is completely unnecessary in a society which is continually being undermined and is struggling to maintain work and environmental standards. This legislation is a further and heavy blow to democracy placing ordinary citizens in a position of increased likelihood of coming up against the force of the law for simply using one of the few weapons left, the right to congregate to demonstrate a point." - Jill Quirk, Sustainable Population Australia This article includes an annotated first and second reading of the Bill, with links to speeches against it and to Human Rights legislation in Victoria.
The Australian College of Mental Health Nurses (ACMHN) joins the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists’ (RANZCP) in condemning the recent announcement by Queensland Health to introduce ‘lock-up’ security measures to all adult mental health hospital inpatient facilities in Queensland, and the expansion of the use of ankle bracelets.
All over the world right wing 'think tanks' will be commemorating the work of economist Ronald Coase, who died on the second of September this year (2013) at the age of 102. Unfortunately his work has been used as an excuse to marginalise civil and human rights by making it legally acceptable for the interests of big business and the wealthy to over-rule everyone else’s financial, social and environmental interests. Coase's work is largely responsible for many of the problems of democracy, overpopulation and overdevelopment that are ruining more and more peoples' lives and freedom today. Many of its lesser supporters are naive followers of fashion and don't really understand what they are losing through their innocent embrace of 'efficiency' any more, perhaps, than did the followers of Chairman Mao's 'Great Leap Forward'. (This article is based on an extract from Sheila Newman's forthcoming book, Demography, Territory, Law 2: Land-tenure and the Origins of Capitalism in Britain, Countershock Press, probably early 2014.)
The author of the article suggests that the rule of law and federalism are no longer operating in Australia. As a result of three decades of Australian governments enthusiastically embracing neo-liberal capitalist policies, power is now concentrated at the central level. Government captured by the few: the two major parties in collusion with big business nationally and internationally. With no indication from the Australian people that they seek the radical systemic reforms required to reinstate federalism and reclaim a fairer and more just society, only small steps towards reform appear realistic. The revision of the Preamble to the Constitution as a precursor to further constitutional change and the reassertion of state powers supporting of local power are suggested as first steps. 
You may think that “austerity” is a hoax. A conspiracy of bankers and CEOs and neo-liberals to rob of us our rightful entitlements. But you obviously haven’t heard the news. This is not the 1930s. This austerity is not contrived. This austerity is for real. This austerity is geologically, not ideologically rooted. There is not enough real wealth to go around. 
This is a fascinating video of a huge protest in Sydney on 5 August 2012 and we have put up a video of it with a number of interesting interviews from marchers, with comments from what they think of the Bashar Assad Government to how they don't like the Australian Greens policy on this matter and believe that we are risking World War Three by backing intervention in Syria. There is also some background on how Syria has been the long-term host one of the largest refugee populations in the world, which makes you wonder why it doesn't receive more support from Greens and Refugee activists. It must seem ironic that some candobetter.net EcoMalthusians are more inclined to give Syria that recognition! Please let us know if you have views on the democratic status of the Syrian government; we find it hard to judge. All comments and greetings welcome.
It has become an unwritten rule of political correctness that in order to criticize people or their ideology one must share a biological characteristic of the people being criticized. The inherent racism or sexism of this assumption is lost on those who insist upon it. Nevertheless the rule, in all of its absurdity, persists. Good arguments are routinely dismissed not on their merits, but by the fact that they are waged by someone thought to be racially or sexually disqualified to comment on the issue. This cannot apply here, for Madeline Weld, President of the Population Institute of Canada, is a woman, and she reproaches the fem-left for its collusion in the crippling of the Program of Action as set out by the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo 16 years ago. Ms. Weld asserts that the feminist wing of the so-called "Environmental Justice" movement be held to account for their part in scuttling effective population stabilization programs in developing countries. Take this Betsy Hartmann!
Some argue that our survival depends on an extension or restoration of what we deem as human "rights". But what if the sum total of individuals exercising their "rights" results in the net loss of our collective rights? Or even the extinction of our species? In a world of nearly 7 billion people can there be any pro-create "right"? What Isasc Asimov said of democracy can be said of rights and freedoms. Inevitably, they will be the victims of overpopulation. As Wendy Kellett remarked, "The more crowded we become, the more governments will police our behaviour and restrict our movements and activities: this will be the end result of the laissez-faire ideology which dominates economic and social policy."
Australians have found it very hard to protest against high immigration because of constant subtle messages from government and media implying that they had no right to object. They have been given the idea that there was nothing special about them that gave them the right to object. They only lived here. Although only Australians might vote in governments, the importance of this was subsumed to a cult of plutocracy, where governments prioritised commercial and corporate demands over the wishes of the actual electorate. The mainstream press (the ABC, the Murdoch Press, the Fairfax Press) promoted a cult of elite authoritarianism and the official alternative press never really encouraged questioning of this process on issues of real dissent. And the elite authorities all endorsed 'multiculturalism'.
In September 2008 Ecuador became the first country in the world to declare constitutional rights to nature, thus codifying a new system of environmental protection. How about it, Australia?
The author responds to news of some so-called 'Green groups' preventing discussion of population numbers as a factor in carbon emissions. "Women should have the right not to have children. But they have no right, in the context of overshoot, to have as many children as they or their husbands want. The “right to choose” cannot be the right to abuse. Even the most jealously guarded right must be measured against equally fundamental rights, most especially the right of our species, and others, to live."
Rudd recently said that Australia "will continue to be a nation of immigrants into the future." This remark prompted discussion on environmental lists about the PM's brain-box or sincerity because people wonder if he seriously contemplates indefinite exponential immigration. In fact there has been a barrage of similar material on the media from various officially anointed 'authorities', coinciding with Kelvin Thomson's recent criticism of government engineered population growth. The growth lobby is also taking advantage of the situation to market nuclear power as an inevitable, with no more interest in whether we can afford it than they have shown in the other costs to the public of their high immigration fetish.See also: 
Michael Hocking of "Axe the Tax" writes "Brumby’s Labor Government is stealing our homes. If this tax doesn’t affect you yet, you need to ask 'What if they decide to do a similar thing to the homes in my area?'" The growth areas tax is to be imposed on land rezoned from rural to urban by a stroke of the government pen. Rates and charges for water and power as well as land will skyrocket with the rezoning, driving out any decent person attempting to preserve bushland or produce food or live out retirement on a fixed income. Hocking describes how farmers will not be able to afford to sell, because of the tax, but, when they die, their children will have to pay the tax - $95,000 per ha -. In a divorce settlement, the same thing will apply. What next? A tax on the head of each child?
We publish and answer here pro-rally comments from "Jack," accusing "Greenies" of violence. Perhaps this is a classical case of "People in glass houses should not throw stones" - only who is in the glass house here? It is hard to deal with behaviour which has rightly been accused of causing threat to human life when you know that the situation which probably caused it left any protesters few if any legal or safe alternatives. Did Repco's and the NSW Government's actions place citizens in an untenable position by suspending environmental protection and democratic rights? 
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