Australia

 Saturday 14 June - 10.30am to 12.30pm. The future of Planning Democracy. Majorca Room, City Library (not the State Library!), 253 Flinders Lane Melbourne. Click on the image to read Report No. 46. 

A few weeks ago, cross-benchers got together with the Liberals to conduct an inquiry into the legitimacy of State Labor Government Victoria's new planning laws that underpin the authoritarian creation of massive new 'activity centres,' infilling, hyper-densification, and removal of residents' rights to affect and discuss and dispute what happens where they live.  The Inquiry found

I was not the only one sitting up late last night, writing to various members of the Victorian Legislative Council.  There are about 55 neighborhood groups, many councils and other bodies, all trying to stop what is going ahead. They have been involved in this battle for a long time.  In the absence of any reasonable information and consultation, neighborhood groups have been writing and distributing their own information about what Planning is about to do.

This report came out today in the Legislative Council, Victoria.  Non-Labor members of the Committee criticised the amendments for failing to consult the community as they are required to by law, and found that they contain little or nothing that would provide the much-claimed affordable housing, and failed on environmental counts.  The full report is here: https://www.parliament.vic.gov.au/49a10f/globalassets/tabled-paper-documents/tabled-paper-9164/

Gerard Renick of the People First Party Thank all those who supported his campaign. Currently, the Australian electoral Commission tally room shows that he now has 35.26% of the quota necessary for him to win one of the 6 Senate seats being contested in this half-Senate election. To be returned as Senator, he needs to gain another 64.74% of the total of Queensland Senate votes through the allocation of preferences from candidates with fewer votes than him.

All Australian mainstream media outlets push the idea that we must have rapid population growth in Australia and that this must be sourced by increasing rates of immigration. Whilst the mass media never shuts up about this, they are very repressive about any contrary opinion, although people are really angry about the increasingly obvious costs in all this, and they seek ways to express themselves.

Click on the image to read Report No. 46. 

Australia’s top spy wrote to the CIA asking to keep secret details of an investigation into phone calls made to the US Embassy in Canberra about an assassination plot before President John F. Kennedy was killed, newly declassified files have revealed. Australia’s top spy wrote to the CIA asking to keep secret details of an investigation into phone calls made to the US Embassy in Canberra about an assassination plot before President John F. Kennedy was killed, newly declassified files have revealed.

The NSW Environment Protection Authority (EPA) is calling for the public’s help in its investigation into the suspected mass poisoning of hundreds of native Corella birds across multiple Newcastle suburbs, including Hamilton, Carrington, Waratah, Broadmeadow, Lambton, and near Newcastle University. The EPA received initial reports on Monday 17 March 2025 of 14 sick and dead birds in Hamilton but by midday reports had escalated to hundreds of affected birds in Carrington and surrounding areas.

Non è solo in Victoria, o nel NSW, o in Australia Meridionale, o in Australia Occidentale, o nel Territorio del Nord. I Centri di Attività e la densificazione vengono spinti in ogni parte dell'Australia. E la decentralizzazione non è la risposta; anche le città di campagna sono costrette ad accogliere nuovi insediamenti densi. E non siamo solo noi umani a essere colpiti.

It is not just in Victoria, or NSW, or South Australia, or West Australia, or the Northern Territory. Activity Centres and densification are being pushed in every part of Australia.  And decentralisation is not the answer either; country towns are being forced to accommodate dense new settlements too. And it's not just we humans who are impacted.  Dogs are flooding animal shelters because their owners can no longer afford space or food to keep them.  Horses cannot find paddocks.

As I understand it, fundamentally, all coups and all revolutions - left and right - are based on changes to land-tenure systems.  It seems to me, based on my observation and experience in Victoria, not on what anyone says, that the State here is trying to make massive changes to the land-tenure system.  It is engineering those changes by removing power at local level and refusing to represent people at any level.

Click on the image to read Report No. 46. 

Former immigration department bureaucrat turned influencer, Abul Rizvi, was interviewed this month by Joseph Walker. In the interview, Rizvi said the quiet part out loud and explicitly admitted that slowing population ageing comprised about “80%” of the motivation for the 2001 changes, which massively increased Australia’s intake of migrants, especially international students. (Article republished from https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2025/02/abul-rizvi-admits-immigration-is-a-ponzi-scheme/ onWednesday 26 February 2025)

Victoria, Australia: The DESIST FROM HIGH-RISE HIGH-DENSITY ZONE PLANNING petition is to be debated for 30 minutes in the Legislative Council on Wednesday 5 March.

Paul Edbrook, State Labor MP for Frankston, has repeatedly failed to respond usefully to complaints from constituents regarding the forced accommodation of a Metropolitan Activity Centre under the increasingly authoritarian regime of Premier Jacinta Allan's Victorian Government. Inside this article, we have published two complaint letters, along with the negligent and empty responses from Mr. Edbrook or his staff, despite the great importance of the matter.

Venue: Camberwell Historical Society Meeting 25 February 2025 7.30pm. Speaker Michael Buxton, "Camberwell: Urban Planning and Heritage Protection." 25 Inglesby Road, Camberwell 3124. RSVP by Monday 24 February 2025.  [email protected] or George Fernando 0448296258. Camberwell is one of the State Government’s proposed Activity Centres. The suburb of Camberwell developed in the 1880s.

On Wednesday 5 February, Queensland Senator Gerard Rennick asked of The Foreign Minister Senator Penny Wong, why, given her government's treatment of the former Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad, she had said nothing about the large number of crimes committed against the people of Syria by the new regime of Mohammad al–Julani.

Click on the image to read Report No. 46. 

A Prohibition Act passed 20 years ago stands as NT parliament's legal opposition to plans to dump nuclear waste in the NT. It simply prohibits handling, transport and storage of long-lived intermediate-level and high-level nuclear wastes (materials which are only found in the form of spent reactor fuel).

We are republishing the broad headlines of the International Peaceful Australia Network Newsletter here because it represents Australia's only effective peace and anti-war network.  Links will take you to their site, which is external and independent from ours.

An estimated one to three species of insects and other native invertebrates are becoming extinct in Australia every week, according to a new study revealing the immense scale of the nation’s biodiversity loss. 

Don Owers humorously points out the not-so-funny posturing in the Climate Council's loud criticism of Sky News and News Corp regarding disinformation on climate change, in the face of its own strange silence - dare we say collusion? - about the principal drivers of carbon emission growth in Australia, namely government and lobby-group-engineered population and intensive development growth.

Short simple video gives a good overview.

Unfortunately the 'Online Safety Amendment (Protecting Australian Children from Online Harm) Bill 2023 passed the Australian Senate last night, with an amendment to be inserted after section 63D.  I attach both the bill and the Senate amendment to the bill. 

Under the "Online Safety Amendment (Protecting Australian Children from Online Harm) Bill 2023, we really will all face overwhelming risks of personal and commercial data breaches.