Courier Mail

This is an article based on a complaint from the National Dingo Preservation and Recovery Program to the Australian Press Council about an Opinion article, “Marauding wild dog packs wreak havoc in outback Queensland pushing drought-plagued graziers to the wall” (Courier Mail (Queensland), December 06, 2014. Statements in the article are made which, by omission of key facts, and encouragement of prejudice, misrepresent the reasons for the decline in the sheep industry in Queensland. This misrepresentation by omission is used to manufacture an exaggerated account of the role of the dingo in the demise of the sheep grazing industry in that state.

Such misleading statements include:

‘Dingo kills were the main reason landholders had switched to cattle.’

‘...wild dogs were largely responsible for the rapid decline in wool industry over two decades.’

Being an opinion piece, and as there is no attempt to balance these statements with any alternative perspective, the statements may be taken by any reasonable reader to also represent the views of the authoring journalist.

Further cursory investigation of the issue would have shown the statements to be either inaccurate or open to reasonable contestation. A recent authoritative account of the structural reasons behind the demise of the sheep grazing industry in Australia, and indeed the demise of sheep grazing globally, was published in the Australian Veterinary Journal, Volume 97 No. 12, 2014, pp. 461-462, entitled: ‘A comment on the influence of dingoes on the Australian sheep flock’, by Forsyth et al.

The authors state:

’The similar rate of decline in the sheep flocks of Australia and other sheep-producing nations suggests broader commodity issues influence the industry in Australia rather than just dingo predation. The five detailed reviews published on Australia’s sheep industry since 19905?9 all attribute Australia’s declining sheep flock to a long term decline in the real price paid for wool compared with other textiles, and to the high cost of growing and processing wool, reducing the profitability of wool growing relative to other agricultural products. A similar conclusion was reached for the cause of declining sheep flocks in New Zealand10 and the USA.2,4 Global demand for wool has been in long-term decline because it cannot compete on price or volume with synthetics and cotton.7 Hence, wool prices paid to farmers have declined substantially in real terms since 19502,5,7,11,12 and particularly after its reserve price scheme was phased out in the late 1980s.5,7 One review noted the importance of dingo predation on sheep in Australia during the 1800s,7 but none of the reviews mentioned dingo predation as a cause of the post-1990 decline in Australia’s sheep flock.’ (Forsyth et al. (2014)

As they stand, the above statements from The Courier Mail opinion piece are a violation of principle 3 under the criteria relating to Fairness and Balance within the Australian Press Council Statement of Principles, which states that factual material must be presented with ‘fairness and balance’, ‘and that writers’ expressions of opinion are not based on significantly inaccurate factual material or omission of key facts.’

The article is also remiss in perpetuating gross factual claims for which there is no sound evidence and which may indeed be empirically unverifiable. The claim of Mr Tully is cited without any serious scrutiny or suggestion that its accuracy may be in doubt: “On my reckoning dogs would have eaten more than seven million sheep”, over the past 20 years (presumably in Queensland). Although the figure of seven million is referred to as a ‘reckoning’ of Mr Tully’s, there is no suggestion by the journalist that it may be seriously in error, or implausible. Again, principle 3 is relevant.

The opinion piece includes a number of extraordinarily emotive statements which, together with inaccuracies of omission and fact, result in a piece of writing that is biased in the extreme, and which encourages the maintenance of a prejudicial attitude towards a native animal which a mounting body of evidence shows is essential for ecological balance within Australian ecosystems. No difficulty would be had in compiling an extensive list of authoritative, peer reviewed articles on the importance of dingoes within Australian ecosystems. Here, principle 6 is relevant, which advocates the need to’ Avoid causing or contributing materially to substantial offence, distress or prejudice...’ (my emphasis). Statements likely to encourage prejudice within the opinion piece include:

“Wild dog packs are on the march, and are organised in a kind of animal kingdom military formation.”

“The dogs are taking the life out of the west. They come in wave after wave ...”

Referring to the alleged experience of Mr Tully and his neighbours, the following statement is made:

“One 35kg killing machine brought down 30 sheep in a single night last week at Barcaldine in Queensland’s parched central west.”

Presumably the “35 kg killing machine” is shown in an accompanying photograph, which refers to a dingo which allegedly brought down 30 sheep in one night.

The caption of this photograph reads: “Gavin Durie with a wild dog which brought down 30 sheep in a single night.”

From some years experience in owning and breeding dingoes, the dingo depicted in this photograph is a mature, healthy male, which would weigh no more than approximately 25 kilograms – an average weight for a healthy adult wild male. The claim relating to a 35 kilogram ‘killing machine’ is inaccurate, misleading and likely to encourage prejudice against an environmentally significant native animal (principles 3 and 6).

The lack of balance, omission of key facts, and unsubstantiated claims of the article undermine informed efforts towards conservation of the dingo as a keystone species within Australian ecosystems – an activity which the National dingo Preservation and Recovery Program is closely involved with. A large part of the difficulty in advocating dingo conservation is overcoming entrenched prejudice and ill-informed attitudes towards the dingo in some rural areas.

On 18 December 2009, Queenslander's were greeted with yet more bad news by Brisbane's Courier-Mail newspaper in the story "Monster power price hike" (in 19 December printed edition):

The Queensland Competition Authority (QCA) has just announced a draft decision that would see prices rise by 13.83 per cent between 2009-10 and 2010-11.

The decision would add an additional $276 to the average annual household bill of $2000.

It is the fourth successive jump in electricity costs since the State Government claimed deregulation of the industry would put downward pressure on prices.

The heavy price, already paid Queenslanders for former Premier Peter Beattie's decision, made without their consent or any electoral mandate, to privatise the retail arm of the state owned electricity utility, continues to climb.

The Courier-Mail's editorial of 18 Dec 09 attempted to rationalise this. It's title "Using less power is key to beat price rise" gave a clue as to what its tack would be.

It began by appearing to empathise with, but at the same time diminishing the grounds for outrage against this decision.

PRICE rises, particularly when the hand of government is involved in some way, are always going to be politically contentious.

As such, yesterday's draft decision by the Queensland Competition Authority ... sparked the predictable howls of protest from consumers and the Opposition, and grumblings from the Government.

Then it immediately proceeded to provide its own wholely predictable justification for the increases.

With the massive investment required to maintain and expand Queensland's electricity network to cater for a growing and increasingly power-hungry population, rises such as this were always inevitable -- ...

If price rises were 'inevitable' as a result of population growth actively pursued by both the Queensland and Federal Governments, then why weren't the people who are now being made to pay the costs, first asked?

As we have shown in other earlier articles, the Courier-Mail newspaper like the state Government has been playing a double game with the Queensland public on this issue.

For years both have been shifting between the outright encouragement of population growth and then, when the detrimental consequences have become too obvious to deny, a pretence that it is beyond our own contol. This has been described elsewhere in the articles "Exposing Queensland Government population growth duplicity" of 1 Apr 09 and "How Government and the Murdoch press deceive Australian public on immigration" of 27 Oct 09.

Whilst, in more recent years, Courier-Mail avoids explicitly stating its support for population growth, the same is not true of the national daily newspaper the Australian also owned by Rupert Murdoch. Examples of promotion of population growth and high immigration are listed in the abovementioned article. Another is the editorial with the lofty and pretentious title "Population is destiny" of 19 Sep 09 which enthusiastically endorsed Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's stated goal of increasing Australia's population to 35 million by 2050.

The editorial makes sweeping claims about how such population increases will be of enormous indisputable benefit to all, but, of course, no-where does it mention the environmental, social and economic costs that Queenslanders are now being made to pay for population growth. No-where does it warn that charges for services such as electricity, gas and water will rise as a consequence.

For their part, the Courier-Mail's reporters and editors write of the effects of population growth as if unaware of the role played by the Australian in bringing it about.

If it chose the Courier-Mail could use, very effectively, its voice towards stopping population growth and the consequent harm, only one example of which that this editorial addresses. I have demonstrated that it has shown that it is able to on other political questions in the article "Courier Mail spins news of 79% opposition to fire sale to reveal its privatisation colours" of 11 Dec 09, but in regard to population growth, it chooses not to.

It lets off the hook the politicians whose undemocratic unpopular decisions have so harmed the public interest and continue to do so. In regard to former Queensland Premier Beattie, the editorial Courier-Mail's editorial contines:

... and former premier Peter Beattie was foolhardy at the time of the Energex retail sell-off to talk up the prospect of cheaper power.

The possibility that Beattie's long since discredited promise of cheaper power, rather than having been 'foolhardy' may have been judged necessary to achieve his goal of bludgeoning public opinion into accepting the deregulation and privatisation of the retail arm of the state's electricity utilities sector, is not considered.

Beattie's claim is only one of many examples of similarly baseless claims of the benefits of privatisation made by politicians. The possibility that claims made by Premier Anna Bligh and Andrew Fraser today in support of their current bid to flog off $15 billion worth of public assets may be similarly groundless is, of course, never raised by the Courier-Mail with its readership.

The editorial argues against aginst any direct Government intervention to reject or curtail the price risese approved by the QCA:

Not only would this undermine the authority of the QCA itself, it would also be a recipe for disaster for commercial entities in Queensland's power sector, many of whom are operating on very thin and competitive margins as it is.

In fact, such a move would likely drive away participants from the sector, resulting in less competition and ultimately even higher prices.

So, the fabulous competitive energy market is apparently economically unviable, that is unless it is allowed to charge massively more than what the previous Government owned electricity retail arm charged for the same service!

Instead, the editorial argues that the Government act to modify consumer behaviour:

As was demonstrated during the water crisis, a concerted public information campaign can result in an enduring behavioural shift when it comes to consumption patterns.

Our love affair with airconditioners and other power-hungry appliances has resulted in average household consumption rising from about 6400 kilowatt hours to 11,000kWh in the past decade. And in the past five years the network has been expanded to cater for an extra 4200 megawatts of electricity at times of peak demand -- enough to power South Australia and Tasmania combined.
This additional capacity does not come cheap, and the costs must ultimately be passed on to the end user – and these are consumers who, on average, have increased their electricity consumption by 70 per cent in only 10 years.

Of course, the Courier-Mail now conveniently forgets its own past role in encouraging ever greater per capita consumption of energy and other resources.

One of the principle reasons for "our love affair with airconditioners" as the editorial puts it, is the shoddy designs of housing crammed together on sprawling suburban developments with little tree cover in between the concrete, the often black-coloured tiled rooves, guaranteed to absorb the maximum possible amount of heat and bitumen roads. Whilst the Courier-Mail clamoured to expand the housing development industry and the importation of customers for it, the Courier-Mail showed little leadership of which I am aware, towards at least ensuring that what was built would not be so energy inefficient.

Now people who paid so dearly to buy these dwellings may have be forced to swelter without air-conditioning in the summer heat or pay probibitively for it.

Before the Global Financial crisis, the Courier-Mail fed to Queenslanders expectations that the economic boom would last forever and, not that long ago it was considerably less circumspect in its support for population growth. It openly clamoured for ever greater numbers of people to move to Queensland to fill what it insisted were critical labor shortages as I described in the article "The Courier Mail beats the drum for more Queensland population growth" of  Jan 07.

Now we have discovered, to our cost, that this state never had the unlimited capacity to cater for new arrivals and ever higher per-capita levels of consumption that the Courier-Mail insisted that we did have, the Courier-Mail's own past consumerist propaganda, at least in some respects, is turned around 180 degrees.

The editorial concludes:

Without altering our behaviour, the only way to keep a lid on electricity prices is via government subsidies. And then we all end up paying more -- no matter what our individual usage -- through higher taxes.

Of course, we know better than to expect of the Courier-Mail to argue to end reckless Government policies of population growth and privatisation that created the shambles that the electricity secore has been turned into.

Instead, we are expected to fix the mess by reducing our consumption whether through smart means or by brutal means which will reduce our livng standards.

But even if we achieve this, it can only provided a temporary reprieve until we achieve population stability.

What you can do: Queensland citizens can sign the e-petition calling for the resignation of the Queensland Government and new elections. See "Anti-privatisation e-petition calls on Queensland government to resign" for further information.

Originally published: 8 Dec 09. Updated twice since then.

Many Queenslanders, appalled at their state Government's blatant disregard for their wishes not to sell AU$15billion of worth of publicly owned assets, actually look to Rupert Murdoch's Courier-Mail newspaper to stand up to what has to be amongst the most inept and despotic of state governments in Australia's history. However, the dishonest spin encompassed in the title of the story "Asset Sale Anger on the wane"_#main-fn1">1, together with the sub-heading "Christmas boost for Bligh", reveals that newspaper's true colours on that issue.

To at least 79% of Queenslanders reported by the story as remaining opposed to the fire sale, surely the most pertinent fact was that the Queensland Government was so brazenly ignoring their will.

However, for Steven Wardill, the Courier-Mail's state political editor the apparent drop by 5% in public opposition to the sale, giving a total of all of 17% of Queenslanders in favour of privatisation as opposed to 79% against was of far greater significance.

December 2008: Courier-Mail openly calls for elected dictatorship

The Courier-Mail newspaper has been playing a double game over the fire sale at least since 4 December 2008 when state political reporter Craig Johnstone wrote an opinion piece_#main-fn2">2 calling for Premier Anna Bligh to break an earlier promise and to call an early election_#main-fn3">3. The arguments in Johnstone's article were echoed in an edtorial_#main-fn4">4 on 28 December 2008.

These articles complained of Premier Anna Bligh, backing away from unpopular, but, in the Courier-Mail's view, necessary decisions. The backdowns complained of were the abandonment of plans to impose recycled water on South East Queensland, a seeming backdown on plans to build the Traveston Dam in the Mary River Valley_#main-fn5">5, banning the shale oil mining in the Whitsundays and the scrapping of plans to entomb half the Brisbane River adjoining the CBD at the North Bank beneath high-rise concrete residential blocks.

The Courier-Mail perceived that this to be the result of the Government paying too much heed to the wishes of fickle public opinion. The cure it prescribed was an early election so that Queensland could once again have, with elections behind it, the "firm leadership to steer it through uncertain economic times".

March 2009: Courier-Mail gets its wish

On 23 February 2009 the Courier-Mail got its wish when Bligh announced an early election to be held less than four weeks away on Saturday 21 March. Together with the ABC and the rest of the corporate newsmedia, the Courier-Mail ensured that during the ensuing weeks that Bligh's government escaped any real scrutiny for its monumental mismanagement of the Queensland since 1998, particularly it's sell-off of public assets, and that electors remained ignorant of Independent candidates such as myself or the Greens, who were prepared to offer any real alternative to the Bligh Government.

May 2009: Bligh shows "firm leadership to steer [Qld] through uncertain economic times" ...

Anna Bligh was re-elected and barely 2 months later on Saturday 23 May, citing the cost of the floods as the apparent straw that broke the camel's back, announced a fire sale in order to make ends meet. As reported in the Courier-Mail:

The repair bill from the fifth natural disaster in a year is likely to wipe hundreds of millions of dollars from the June 16 State Budget.

It has forced the Government into unprecedented action, with Ms Bligh declaring yesterday that "nothing is sacred" as she looks to recover over $14 billion in lost revenue._#main-fn6">6

In the following weeks and months that excuse was dropped_#main-fn7">7 and the Global Financial Crisis became the principle justification for the fire sale.

... but Queensland public doesn't buy Bligh's and Fraser's arguments

The public didn't buy any of these excuses. Letters to the editor, talkback shows and online forums were overwhelmed by expressions of anger by people who felt that they had been deliberately deceived by the Queensland Government. The Galaxy Opinion polls in June and Sept both showed 84% opposition to the sale and only 13% and 12% respectively in favour. One Courier-Mail online poll showed 91% opposition. One poll showed that 66% of Queenslanders believed that Anna Bligh had deliberately lied to them about her privatisation intentions.

Courier-Mail hypocritically postures against "the way" Qld Government went about privatisation

During that time, the Courier-Mail has succeeded in giving many Queenslanders an impression that it was opposed to privatisation. It certainly made some telling points about the conduct of Bligh and Fraser in that time. One occasion an editorial_#main-fn8">8 rightly took Treasurer Andrew Fraser to task for his claim that his ambiguous vague answer to a question put to him by ABC presenter and Courier-Mail journalist Madonna King on privatisation amounted to him being frank with the Queensland public.

However, the Courier-Mail never opposed privatisation per se. A careful reading of the Courier-Mail articles on privatisation would reveal only its objection to "the way" the Queensland Government had gone about it.

Why Courier-Mail could have stopped privatisation if it had wanted to

Clearly, with such overwhelming opposition to privatisation, the Courier-Mail could have easily forced the Queensland Government to abandon privatisation if it had the will to do so.

One example is its own campaign in which it enlisted its readership to force Swire Shipping to eventually pay $25 million, rather than its initial offer of $14.5 million out of the total cost of $34 million towards the costs of cleaning up the mess created by the spillage of dangerous chemicals during Cyclone Hamish in May 2008_#main-fn9">9. Another was its campaign in 2008 to force the Rudd Labor Government to honour its commitment to fully fund the Ipswich Bypass_{#main-fn1">10}.

But, of course, the Courier-Mail clearly had no wish to stand in the way of privatisation. It was stridently in favour of the deeply unpopular full privatisation of Telstra by the Federal Howard Government and largely turned a blind eye towards the more recent privatisations carried out by the Beattie and Bligh Governments_{#main-fn10">10} since 1998.

Given the Courier-Mail's own role in bringing about the needlessly early state elections of 2009, as described above, its objection to "the way" it went about it would seem to have been disingenuous.

How the Murdoch press hedges its bets with discredited political leaders

Reading between the lines of various articles_{#main-fn11">11}, it is clear that, in time, the Courier-Mail's intention, if the economy 'improves', to eventually 'forgive' Anna Bligh and Andrew Fraser for the harsh, but necessary means employed by them to bring about 'reforms' they deemed to be in everyone's best interest.

In the months and weeks of the 2004 Federal elections the Murdoch press was full of stories about Howard Government scandals. As a result of public servant Michael Scrafton's revelations about the "Children Overboard" scandal, Prime Minister John Howard was pronounced a liar in an editorial of Australian newspaper, also owned by Rupert Murdoch. This was even republished on the johnhowardlies.com web site. However, in the final days of the elections, the Howard Government scandals were deemed by the Murdoch press to be unimportant in contrast to his supposedly monumental economic achievements and the public seemed to largely swallow that.

So, whatever damning pronouncements the Courier-Mail may make against the Bligh Government, the example of the Murdoch Government's treatment of the Howard Government, and its subsequent about face, illustrates that there may be plenty of scope for the Courier-Mail to rehabilitate the reputation of the Bligh Government in future should it judge it still to be useful to it.

Pro-privatisation weasel arguments beneath the veneer of apparent moral indignation

Although the Courier-Mail has rarely, if at all, put the argument in favour of privatisation outright, it has pushed subtle and not-so-subtle pro-privatisation propaganda. The most common is to simply uncritically report the repetitive rationales put by Fraser and Bligh in favour of privatisation. Another is apparent efforts to deflect anger against Premier Bligh by promoting, for example, Bligh's participation in the program Celebrity Chef. Another is to simply treat privatisation as inevitable and convince the public that they are powerless to stop it.

The editorial "Under the influence: Anna Bligh dances to union tune" of 20 Aug 09, as the title implies, tried to argue that the privatisation saga as well as the forced local government amalgamations of 2008 was an example of the state Government dancing to the tune of the union movement tune in spite of the fact that the union movement sought neither. Both were imposed undemocratically upon Queensland by the state Government.

How could the Courier-Mail editorial writer have so inverted reality?

In regard to the Council amalgamations, all the problems are apparently the result of unions having obtained guarantees of protection of jobs and working conditions for 3 years prior to the forced amalgamations.

The editorial made much of Bligh's agreement not to privatise the non-coal freight arm of Queensland Rail, including rural livestock and grain transport services upon which much of rural Queensland is dependent. The editorial continued:

Even the surviving items on the Government's privatisation shopping list will have conditions attached, courtesy of union influence._{#main-fn12">12}

By 'surviving items', the editorial writer meant everything else: the Abbot Point coal loader, the coal fright lines, the ports and the forests, not to mention, all else that had been privatised since Labor won office in 1998 without any popular mandate._{#main-fn13">13}

The editorial went on to complain:

In a similar deal to the one giving amalgamated councils so much grief, the 450 workers employed by Forestry Queensland Plantations have been guaranteed their jobs for three years after the sale of the government-owned company.

Earlier in the editorial, agreements to protect workers' jobs and entitlements in the process of the anti-democratic forced council amalgamations of 2008 that the Courier-Mail had supported to the hilt were held to be solely responsible for the problems caused by those amalgamations. For workers in the industries to be privatised to insist upon similar guarantees was presented as beyond the pale. The editorial continued:

The Australian Workers Union also wants the Government to help find a job for any worker sacked in the two years after the three-year no-job-loss deal expires.

How selfish is that! Instead of agreeing to be thrown onto the scrap heap, forestry workers have asked that they be given help seeking new employment. The editorial continued:

With conditions such as these attached to any contract of sale, the Government has doubtless pleased its union mates, but in the process it has devalued the private sector's attraction to these assets, thereby potentially lumping the taxpayer with a less-then-optimal price for their asset.

This ignores the opposition of 84% of the Queenslanders to the sale and that, therefore no price likely to be offered by a private investor would have been considered 'optimal'. The editorial continued:

In return, the unions say they will continue agitating against privatisation of public assets, an outcome that, to use the Premier's parlance, looks for all the world like a "loss, loss" for the Government.

As neither the workers nor the public were asked about the sale, then why shouldn't they?

How Trade Union inaction helps union enemies

The editorial appears to be an attempt to fan the flames of resentment of ordinary Queenslanders against the workers in the industries to be privatised. The editorial purports to be standing up for ordinary Queensland taxpayers against the supposedly unreasonable demands of the workforce, but takes no account of the fact that Queensland taxpayers overwhelming oppose the sale. If those wishes had been respected none of this would even be an issue.

To date, the union 'agitating' against the sale to which the Courier-Mail takes such apparent exception has been notably ineffectual and promises to be little better in future._{#main-fn18">18} Not one union, least of all the right wing Australian Workers' Union,_{#main-fn19">19} covering the plantation workers, has attempted to oppose privatisation with a coordinated campaign of industrial action. At best, only a few short-lived actions have been taken at the initiative of rank and file members. This is in spite of the demonstrated willingness of many members to support such a campaign as well as the support expressed by many members of the public, many not even normally sympathetic to the union movement, for such a campaign.

Yes, even the Queensland Trade Union movement has failed to stand up for the best interests of its own members, let alone those of the broader Queensland public. It has thereby thrown away the best opportunity it has had in years to win broad public sympathy for trade unionism. Moreover, as the Courier-Mail editorial demonstrates it has needlessly handed to the hostile newsmedia a propaganda advantage.

Censorship of news of protests against privatisation

One fact that stands in stark contrast with the Courier-Mail's ostensible moral indignation at "the way" privatisation is being brought about is the Courier-Mail's almost complete failure to report any of the protests against privatisation. The last protest that I remember which received any coverage in the Courier-Mail was the protest outside the Queen's Birthday weekend State Labor Conference on Sunday 7 June, which it could hardly have pretended not to have known about. Protests since that date, unreported in the Courier-Mail, include:

• The union sponsored protest and March through the Brisbane CBD of Friday 3 July that attracted approximately 2,000 supporters;
• A protest of 350 unionists against privatisation in Ipswich on 31 July;
• A protest of 100 people in West End outside Premier Anna Bligh's electorate office on 15 August.
• A protest of 200 people in Ipswich outside the state Government Community Cabinet meeting of Monday 30 November._{#main-fn14">14}

Another reporting omission was of Opposition leader John-Paul Langbroek's call for a referendum on privatisation on 10 Nov 09. This was reported once on the ABC news at 2.00PM and then dropped and not reported at all by the Courier-Mail.

Even if the participation in some of the protest events could have been construed as small -- and who could blame opponents of privatisation for not giving up more of their free to time to attend such rallies, given the lack of any coherent strategy by the unions to defeat privatisation? -- they are significant events involving groups of people expressing views shared by the overwhelming majority of Queenslanders and clearly of interest to the latter. Failure to report any of these events is a failure of the Courier-Mail to serve the Queensland public.

Courier-Mail's hollow pretence at being champion of the Queensland people

The Courier-Mail's failure to report grass roots protests undoubtedly helps it give its readers the impression that it will attempt to convey at every possible opportunity, that it, alone, is the cause of all things good that have occurred in Queensland in the last 20 years. The Courier-Mail makes a great deal of its campaigns for better Freedom of Information (FOI) laws, against some of the more blatantly corrupt practices of the Queensland Government, its pet stances on civil liberties such as its position against the uncontrolled use of tasers by the Queensland police, and brutality against aboriginals, etc.

However, if the Courier-Mail were objective it would acknowledge that, regardless of who can claim credit for these achievements, they are insignificant in comparison to the overall decline in the standards of governance, the quality of life the environmental health and financial security that has afflicted Queensland in the last 20 years.

Why Courier-Mail is culpable for what is rotten in the state of Queensland

At both the 2009 and 2006 state elections a majority of Queenslanders expressed dissatisfaction with both the major political parties. During the 2009 elections 2 successive Galaxy polls showed that 59% of Queenslanders supported neither of the major political parties. If the Courier-Mail was sincere in its stated desire to move Queensland well and truly beyond the corruption of the pre-Fitzgerald era, then it would have used the opportunity in both these elections to promote alternatives to the two major parties, which had brought Queensland to where it is today.

But it did not. Instead, most Queenslanders voted, not for what they truly wanted, but for the less unpalatable of the only two viable choices that they saw on offer in 2009, that is the Bligh Labor Government.

And since the elections, for all of its sanctimonious bluster against some of the excesses of the Bligh Labor Government, the Courier-Mail has appeared, at best, an ineffectual voice against this elected tyranny and, at worst, one of its puppeteers.

#update">Update: Murdoch's Australian openly endorses Bligh Government's disregard of the will of 79% of Queenslanders

Whilst Brisbane's Courier-Mail continues to tread somewhat warily through the minefield of Queensland public opinon in order to peddle its pro-privatisation propaganda, the national daily newspaper The Australian in its editorial "Anna Bligh's on the right track"_{#main-fn15">15} of 10 December is far less circumspect:

"Reform has always been tough in a state where the conservatives have long been happy to engage in agrarian socialism, and Labor has long been hostage to entrenched union power. In embarking on privatisation, Ms Bligh risks becoming Queensland's Jeff Kennett, the Liberal premier who, after a seven-year tsunami of privatisation, was unceremoniously dumped by Victorians in 1999."

This editorial echoes all the same contempt for the ordinary public that was evident of the Australian's coverage of the controversy over the Iemma Government's attempt to privatise New South Wales' electricity generators in 2008._{#main-fn16">16}

The Australian editorial writer treats the public, which it acknowledges 79% of whom are opposed to privatisation as being too stupid to understand what's in its own best interests. So it is up to supposedly more visionary politcal leaders like Bligh, Fraser, Kennett, Iemma and Costa to act heroically and selflessly bring about the 'reforms' they know to be necessary. in the face of and then incur the odium of the public for having done so. Like Kennett before her, Bligh risks facing a similar fate in two and a half years time from similarly ungrateful electors.

The first lie in these words is, of course, the familiar, but, nevertheless, Orwellian use of word 'reform' right at its start.

Privatisation is nothing of the sort. It is no more than the organised looting of publicly owned property by corporations, facilitated nearly always undemocratically by political leaders serving them rather than the broader public.

The Australian well knows that whether or not politicians like Bligh succeed in holding onto power, they can normally expect to be well looked after by their corporate benefactors for what they do, whilst the public, whose wishes they blatantly disregard today, will pay the cost for years to come. So, perhaps its depiction of Bligh as a martyr is a little wide of the mark.

Kennett was deservedly dumped in 1999, but the damage he inflicted has not been reversed by the succeeding 'Labor' government, even in the case of the privatised trams and railway, where the 'Labor' Government subsidises these services with hundreds of millions of dollars of public money instead of re-nationalising them.

The same newspaper that insists that Australia's past invasion of Iraq and continuing intervention in Afghanistan are necessary to defend democracy both there and here.

One can only hope that the democracy now practised in Iraq and Afghanistan is somewhat different to the kind of 'democracy' that the Australian would see prevail in this country.

#update2">Further Update: Courier-Mail also openly endorses Bligh Government's disregard of the will of 79% of Queenslanders

With the editorial "Premier must hold the line on asset sale"_{#main-fn17">17} of 11 Dec 09, the Courier-Mail has changed tack from its abovementioned weasel-argument peddling of privatisation to explicit overt support.

The third paragraph begins:

The Courier-Mail has supported the Premier in her privatisation program ...

In fact, this would be news to many readers who had not read each article on privatisation carefully and, at that, between the lines of each of those articles. The Courier-Mail had indeed supported privatisation, but up until now not so overtly.

Its pro-privatisation propagandahad largely avoided explicitly putting the case for privatisation. Instead, it peddled its propaganda in a more roundabout way as described above. And for much of the time this propaganda was shrouded in hypocritical denunciations of "the way" that the Government went about privatisations.

It should also be remembered that like Bligh and Fraser, the Courier-Mail avoided coming out so openly in favour of privatisation during the election even though it could hardly have been unaware that privatisation was at stake.

That it failed to do so then and only now, that the elections are so far behind, does it openly reveal its hand to the Queensland public, confirms that it has been playing a double game with them,

Of course, given that railway workers struck against privatisation and given that the public, in spite of the prevalence of anti-union propaganda appears to overwhelmingly support that action, the Courier-Mail is clearly playing with fire.

Perhaps the Courier Mail editors are gambling that as the workers are likely to be dissuaded before Christmas from taking further action, now is the time to go all out to push its pro-privatisation message,

It seems unlikely that such propaganda will succeed in convincing the public of the case for privatisation. Nevertheless, they are, no doubt, gambling that a less subtle propaganda campaign in the coming weeks may succeed in wearing down the resistance on the part of both the unions and the broader public to privatisation.

Footnotes

#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1. #main-fn1-txt">↑ The headline was "Queensland anger over Anna Bligh's asset sales on the wane" in the online version.

#main-fn2" id="main-fn2">2. #main-fn2-txt">↑ "Early election" by Craig Johnstone in the Courier-Mail of 4 Dec 08.

#main-fn3" id="main-fn3">3. #main-fn3-txt">↑ See also "Courier-Mail misreports water recycling to demand early election" of 25 Jan 09.

#main-fn4" id="main-fn4">4. #main-fn4-txt">↑ Courier-Mail editorial "Time to put an end to early poll speculation" of 28 Dec 08.

#main-fn5" id="main-fn5">5. #main-fn5-txt">↑ This perceied backdown was short-lived. The Bligh Government went all-out to build the dam, but was finally over-ruled by Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett in one of his very few decisions in favour of, rather than against the environment. See "Decision to block the Traveston Dam no more than what should have been expected of a Minister for the Environment" of   09

#main-fn6" id="main-fn6">6. #main-fn6-txt">↑ "Floods, storms spark State Government fire sale" by Darrell Giles and Daryl Passmore in the Courier-Mail of 23 May 08.

#main-fn7" id="main-fn7">7. #main-fn7-txt">↑ Perhaps the change in the story was because it may have been too reminiscent of the disaster capitalists' excuses for plundering New Orleans, Sri Lanka, Thailand, the Maldives etc in the wake of other natural disasters as chronicled in "The Shock Doctrine" (2007) by Naomi Klein.

#main-fn8" id="main-fn8">8. #main-fn8-txt">↑ My guess is that this editorial was written in August 09. I have the hard printed copy of it somewhere but no URL.

#main-fn9" id="main-fn9">9. #main-fn9-txt">↑ "Swire shipping boss wipes hands of oil spill bill" in the Courier-Mail of 9 Jul 09, "Swire Shipping cuts oil clean-up offer for Queensland spill" in the Courier-Mail of 16 Jul 09, "Pay up, Swire shipping! Online petition" in the Courier-Mail of 9 Jul 09, "Queensland oil spill sparks calls for tougher polluter penalties" in the Courier-Mail of 3 Dec 09.

#main-fn10" id="main-fn10">10. #main-fn10-txt">↑ "Labor denies it ever pledged to fix Ipswich Motorway" by Steven Wardill in the Courier-Mail of 13 Jun 08.

#main-fn11" id="main-fn11">11. #main-fn11-txt">↑ I am unable to provide citations for the articles I am referring to. However, I recall more than one article argued that Bligh's hasty actions to curtail the activities of lobbyists and reduce political donations in the wake of Tony Fitzgerald's damning speech about of the record of the Queensland Labor Government should go some way towards absolving her of her poor record thus far. Another argued that the public are likely to come around to the Government's view on privatisation once the claimed economic benefits had been realised. A good example of how the Courier-Mail attempts to rehabilitate the deservedly tattered reputations of the likes of Anna Bligh can be found in my article "Courier Mail praises Bligh Government's 'solving' of population-growth-driven water crisis of its own making" of 3 Feb 09

#main-fn12" id="main-fn12">12. #main-fn12-txt">↑ "Under the influence: Anna Bligh dances to union tune" of 20 Aug 09.

#main-fn13" id="main-fn13">13. #main-fn13-txt">↑ See "Open letter to Anna Bligh and Andrew Fraser asking that any planned privatisations be put to the public at forthcoming elections" of 17 Feb 09 for list of assets privatised prior to 2009 state elections.

#main-fn14" id="main-fn14">14. #main-fn14-txt">↑ The Queensland Times newspaper story "Ministers dodge QR protest" of 1 Dec 09 reported that "more than 100 QR workers protested", whilst the Ipswich News newspaper story "Call to come clean on rail privatisation" of 8 Dec 09 reported that 200 attended.

#main-fn15" id="main-fn15">15. #main-fn15-txt">↑ "Anna Bligh's on the right track", editorial in The Australian of 10 Dec 09.

#main-fn16" id="main-fn16">16. #main-fn16-txt">↑ See "Media contempt for facts in NSW electricity privatisation debate" of 28 Sep 08.

#main-fn17" id="main-fn17">17. #main-fn17-txt">↑ "Premier must hold the line on asset sale" in the Courier Mail editorial of 11 Dec 09.

#main-fn18" id="main-fn18">18. #main-fn18-txt">↑ On Wednesday 9 December 1300 workshop workers struck against privatisation. On the whole, notwithstanding some hostility and ambivalence towards unions that can be read in online discussions (see 119 comments as of 11 Dec 09 posted to Courier-Mail story "Rail workers walk off job" of 9 Dec 09), it appears that the industrial action has very strong public support. An online poll in Brisbane Times shows 68% support for the strike as of 11 Dec 09.

See also "Queensland Rail workers strike against theft of public assets" of 9 Dec 09.

#main-fn19" id="main-fn19">19. #main-fn18-txt">↑ The following comment posted to the article "Rail workers walk off job" of 9 Dec 09 is most revealing about the Australiand Workers Union (AWU):

QR workers, you are lucky with the union you have got, our union the AWU called a meeting straight after the sale of FPQ (Forestry Products Queensland) was announced . All they wanted was to do the three year deal and a membership drive, not opposing it ,this is what we pay $500 dollars a year for, but not for long. So stick it to Captain Bligh and her band of cut throats. Their day will come in 2011

Pro-population-growth dogma costs Australians dearly

Continuously increasing mass immigration leading to population of 35 million and beyond is now official Australian state dogma. In other words, 14 million people - more than the 12 million that was the population of this country when I was a child in the 1960's - are to be deliberately added. The evidence of harm already caused by past population growth to the existing population, exactly as our normal intuition and common sense would have predicted, is overwhelming:

Our roads are congested, our buses and trains are packed tight, often leaving many waiting at bus stops and stations. The costs of all basic services -- electricity, gas, water, council rates, vehicle registration, parking, etc. -- are climbing through the roof.

Our governments openly justify these cost imposts on the basis that they are necessary to pay for the replacement and/or expansion of existing infrastructure to meet the needs of additional people, but they don't admit that they are responsible for inviting those people.

Where our taxes once paid the full costs of roads and bridges, people are now forced to pay the order of well over a hundred dollars each week to commute to and from work through toll roads, toll bridges and tolled tunnels.

Bligh arguments chase their own tail

Premier Anna Bligh even defends her Government's deeply unpopular $15 billion government asset fire sale on the grounds that it is necessary to pay for population growth. In a letter to me dated 9 Jun 09, the Premier stated:

... a State with a rapidly growing population can't afford to ease off building the infrastructure that supports our economy and community._#main-fn1">1

Yet, the Queensland Government continues to advertise for people to move from interstate and from overseas to Brisbane and, last weekend Premier Anna Bligh actually welcomed the 'challenge' that further population growth would provide.

Absurdistan quality of life in Brisbane

The purchase or rental of secure, free-standing housing in areas close to work and amenities is completely beyond the means of most Australians, even in double-middle-class income households, where wealth has not been inherited.

Many renters have little choice but to share the same roof with possibly incompatible strangers._#main-fn2">2

In one case, during the 2008 Queensland state elections, I even met two Brisbane women who, had not known each other only months earlier but now shared the same bed in a boarding house. The reasons were completely unromantic: Neither could by herself afford to pay the full rental of the one-room furnished accommodation. It was an arrangement of urgent necessity.

Despite the constant mediatised government propaganda that tries to normalise overpopulation, many Queenslanders must have been shocked to read in the papers of as many as 37 foreign students sharing a single house in an outer southern suburb of Brisbane_#main-fn3">3. That story was a chilling reminder of what the government expects ordinary people to put up with in the government-driven competition for space on the rental market.

The cramming of ever more human beings closer together in high rise units in Australia, is even causing residents to complain of being exposed to passive smoking by neighbours smoking cigarettes on nearby balconies.

High immigration pushes wages down and costs up

Instead of business and government sharing the responsibility of training and retraining new workers, the Australian government is making it easier for Australian businesses to import newly skilled immigrants. The cost of self-education is rising like other costs that were previously provided through our taxes. Now mature Australian-born workers, many with degrees, who once enjoyed well-paid occupations, earn marginal incomes in low-skilled jobs, replaced in their old positions by waves of recently skilled young immigrants. Some go into hock to try to keep up, or cash-in their superannuation to retrain, with no guarantee of any job-security.

In an increasingly casualised workforce, the breaking down of Australian conciliation and arbitration law and the state award system, the mass-import of ever more workers from overseas, many studying bogus courses, inevitably pushes wages downwards.

All this population growth makes the cost of living (land for housing, housing prices, rent, water, electricity, petrol) outpace any wage rises.

In Queensland, I know of how one cleaning contract company that paid its workers decent wages to clean a hotel a few months ago, lost the contract to another company which employed foreign students at bare minimum wage rates. I have been told that the security at the August Brisbane Royal National Show (aka the 'Ekka') was handled by a contract company that employed students, again at bare minimum wages.

Not surprisingly, as pay is reduced to the basic wage and sometimes even lower in casualised private industry, competition is high for the diminishing number of jobs where the requirement to provide relatively decent pay and conditions remains. In my own experience, even entry-level clerical positions in the Queensland public service now attract large numbers of applicants. Perhaps only those prepared to spend days or weeks arguing on paper their suitability for the job in the arcane jargon of the advertised selection criteria, exhaustively targeting their letter of application, stand a chance. Many who don't have the temperament to repeatedly devote hours of their days to this demeaning and, to my mind, socially pointless activity simply don't bother and miss their small chance in this employment variation of lottery.

Wildlife, green spaces and farmland destroyed for infrastructure and expansion in less-than-zero-sum game

Natural habitat is being cleared to such an extent that the koala, among Australia's most iconic species, is expected to be extinct in SouthEast Queensland in as little as two to seven years. Many other species are also threatened. Farm land is daily sacrificed to more housing. But not only farmland - entire rural communities such as in Queensland's Mary Valley - are threatened with complete destruction through inundation to provide water for our involuntarily growing population. And even then, for all the obliteration of good land, loved wild places, social histories and memorials, the water in the resulting dam - if it even accumulates - still won't do for Queensland's growing population if the government is not stopped from continuing to aggressively invite more people to come and live here.

Where have the people given Governments their consent for massive population increases?

In a democracy the people affected should expect to have the final say in whether or not to continue with such clearly harmful policies. So corrupted have our political institutions become, however, that our official political rulers show no more sign of understanding their obligation to the electorate than their friends in the corporate elites and the newsmedia. The government's obligation is to get the clear consent of the affected taxpayers at every stage of planning massive new developments and if it intends to engineer changes in population growth. Government should not go ahead without clearly informed consent. It is not enough to 'consult' if this only means telling the affected population what you have already contracted to go ahead with.

Instead of accepting the will of the people, however, Australian governments, state and federal, blithely pretend, despite our overwhelming experience to the contrary, that population growth is self-evidently and unquestioningly of great benefit to us all. Not content with dragooning the taxpayer into paying for ever more vast infrastructure and population expansion debt, they also expect us to pay for the coercive spin. An example is the taxpayer funded full page advertisement of 8 December 2005, signed by then Queensland Premier Queensland Peter Beattie, also reproduced here.

This advertisement, "Four million Queenslanders tomorrow," marketed the dangerous ballooning of Queensland's population to 4 million the next day as an unquestionable and incontestably positive achievement, as if it would be welcomed by all. Four million represented the doubling of Queensland's population since 1974.

The advertisement concluded with the words:

To all Queenslanders, I encourage you to warmly welcome our new arrivals.

Who, you ask, other than a life-hating, stick-in-the-mud, could possibly not have been moved by these cheerful words from Queensland's obviously life-loving, well-intentioned leader?

The role of the news-media in packaging and delivering Australian population policy

The implicit unstated lie contained in that advertisement was that the Queensland Government has carefully thought through how they would prepare Queensland to cope with the influx they encouraged. In subsequent years, Queenslanders were to learn to their enormous cost that it had not.

Now, in 2009, many of those same Queenslanders who, heeding their Premier's advice, may have extended welcoming arms to new arrivals from interstate and overseas, find themselves homeless, living in precarity, or on a grind of wage-slavery and debt, even if they are professionals, to pay rising rents and purchase costs. Ruthless landlords have taken advantage of the outrageously increased demand for shelter to regularly jack up the rent and the rhetoric of finance and real-estate media jocks - replacing real opinion - shamelessly inflates the already ballooning cost of housing.

Yes, Australia's newsmedia overwhelms us with propaganda dressed up as news in support of high immigration and population growth. The leading population growth pusher is Rupert Murdoch's newspaper group.

Every Murdoch newspaper doesn't peddle population growth in exactly the same way though.

Whilst the national daily newspaper, the Australian openly proclaims that population growth is inherently good for Australia, its Brisbane counterpart the Courier Mail treats the issue more ambiguously.

Perhaps this is partly because Courier Mail readers tend more to be working class than the Australian's readers, and therefore less likely to celebrate notional investments in the unaffordability of the national private estate. The Courier Mail is also a state paper, concerned with state legislative responsibilities, and these include land-use planning. It therefore is more obligated to report news of the consequences of population growth, which most obviously affect land-use and costs. A few years ago the Courier Mail did stridently beat the drum for population growth. Pretending there was a labour-shortage crisis, it called for more people to move here to work in the mines, orchards and hospitality industry, so that the state could grow faster and faster._#main-fn4">4

The Courier-Mail's implied pretence that Queenslanders cannot question population growth, let alone stop it

The Courier Mail has since changed tack to simply reporting population growth as if it is inevitable.

So, these days, rather than overtly proclaiming massive population growth is inherently good, along with much of the Australian media, the Courier Mail implies that massive and inconvenient population growth is inevitable.

Again and again the Courier Mail's reports include statements that population will grow, exactly as if it were stating that we will all pay taxes and will all grow old and die. In doing so, it dishonestly implies to its readers that population growth is not a result of a decision consciously made by the Australian Federal Government through its high immigration program, with the full encouragement of the Queensland and other state governments, along with Rupert Murdoch himself, to whose tune Governments in Australia seem to have been dancing for years. The Courier Mail avoids pointing out the simple fact that in a democracy, people have every right to expect the Government to change course, should they decide that population growth is not in their best interests.

In "Workers welcome", (15 May 2008), the Australian enthusiastically endorsed Immigration Minister Chris Evan's announced increase in immigration.

"The Government's decision to increase the skilled migration program by 31,000 places a year from 2008-09 is a move to help ease the critical labour shortage in many parts of Australia. Together with a big influx of temporary workers under the 457 visa program, the increased migrant intake should also help to lessen the threat of a wages breakout and inflationary spiral."_#main-fn5">5

A brief pretence at concern for the adverse consequences for housing affordability was made:

More migrants will inevitably cause pressures in other areas of the economy, including the tight housing sector where a shortage of stock is leading to rapidly rising rents.

But that minor concern was immediately swept aside in the next sentence.

But the economic case for more skilled migrants is clear. ...

So the trusting reader is led to believe that the editorial writer has weighed up the pros and cons and worked out that on balance we will be better off. However, as we have seen above, the "pressures in the ... tight housing sector" have since almost literally enslaved significant sections of Australian society. On top of that, the economic analysis that purported to show the benefits of immigration clearly failed to predict subsequent hikes in all kinds of Government charges to pay for the cost of immigration, in addition to the decline in our queality of life all as mentioned above.

Minister Evans's also announced plans to import workers from Pacific islands.

"Next month cabinet is expected to endorse a pilot program based on the New Zealand model for guest workers from Pacific nations. The Prime Minister wants this for foreign policy and economic reasons.

Evans says: 'The debate about temporary migration, quite frankly, is over.' His threshold point is that the immigration debate is no longer just about skills, though skills are vital, but has become a debate about labour. There is an unspoken agenda: aware that the abolition of Work Choices risks higher wage pressures, Rudd and Swan are using higher migration as a device to boost labour supply and limit wage inflation." _#main-fn6">6

The Australian reported a furor of protest against the Pacific Worker plans, but little against the sheer numbers and the uncontrollability of the impacts, on wages and housing costs.

(One can see another angle here. If a paper only reports protests against immigration if they relate to ethnicity or 'race' then this will serve the spin that Australians are racist in their attitudes to immigration but not concerned about any other impacts. This impression should serve to put people off protesting against high immigration from anywhere, for fear of being labelled racist.)

At the time I also posted an e-mail #UnpublishedLetter" id="UnpublishedLetter">included as an Appendix to the Queensland Courier Mail in response to its reporting of that issue. The letter was not published and it breathed no word of any of this furor about immigration policy, presumably subscribing to the illusion that State governments have no responsibility or power in ramping up or stabilising population numbers, which, if you have read this article, or others, such as this one about the Victorian Government, "Melbourne 2008: Life in a destruction zone", you will now realise is not true.

In October 2009 as the Australian stridently once again beats the drum for boosting our population all the way up to at least 35 million, the Courier Mail, this time, has given the issue some coverage, instead of imposing the almost complete blackout that it did in May last year. However the coverage is still relatively low key. One article by Dr. Paul Williams_#main-fn7">7 on Monday 19 Oct 09 was critical of population growth, but by Saturday it had all been forgotten. Oblivious to that and oblivious to reports of chaos, rocketing costs and declining living standards, reported in its pages virtually every day of the week Saturday's Courier Mail editorialised:

While Commonwealth Treasury secretary Ken Henry's pessimism at the thought of a 60 per cent increase in population in less than 40 years (and more than 100 per cent for southeast Queensland) is understandable, we should not shy away from the challenges and opportunities this brings.

If authorities at all levels of government can work together, planning for the required increases in services, infrastructure and facilities, there's no reason the community should not be able to cope with the inevitable demands. ..._#main-fn8">8

'No reason', except for the woeful failure of the Queensland Government to cope with the 'inevitable demands' brought about by the recent population growth it has already imposed on Queenslanders. As Greater Sunshine Coast Council Mayor Bob Abbott commented last week, "You can't go on doing the same thing and expect a different result."_#main-fn9">9

We can only conclude that somehow the 'same result' is fine by the Murdoch Press, Bligh, Rudd and the ALP investments in property and finance, such as Labor Resources P/L and Labor Holdings P/L), not to mention the government's and the Labor Party's corporate friends.

The editorial continued:

... Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is right to say this is good news for the country. Let's work together and make it happen.

Perhaps, instead, it is time we all "work[ed] together" and and let Rudd, Bligh and the Murdoch Press know that they are not acting on our behalf and that they continue to act with such high-handed disregard for our welfare at their own peril.

Footnotes

#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1. #main-fn1-txt">↑ See Appendix 3 of "Privatisation - let the owners decide : an open letter to Anna Bligh" of 3 Jun 09.

#main-fn2" id="main-fn2">2. #main-fn2-txt">↑ See "Shared accommodation a necessity and no longer a choice for many in Brisbane" of 30 Apr 08 for a somewhat out-of-date picture of the problem.

#main-fn3" id="main-fn3">3. #main-fn3-txt">↑ Newspaper stories include: "37 students found living in one house at Sunnybank Hills" in the Courier-Mail of "Raid finds 37 people living in single Brisbane house" in the Age of 16 Sep 09. A story about a pretence by the population-growth-pushing Brisbane City Council of attempting to fix the problem is "Brisbane City Council crackdown on over-crowded housing" in the Courier-Mail of 16 Sep 09.

#main-fn4" id="main-fn4">4. #main-fn4-txt">↑ "The Courier Mail beats the drum for more Queensland population growth" of 30 Apr 08

#main-fn5" id="main-fn5">5. #main-fn5-txt">↑ "Workers Welcome" in the Australian of 16 May 08.

#main-fn6" id="main-fn6">6. #main-fn6-txt">↑ Source: "Open Door" in the Australian of 16 May 08.

#main-fn7" id="main-fn7">7. #main-fn7-txt">↑ "When is too many enough?" by Dr. Paul Williams in the Courier Mail of 19 Oct 09.

#main-fn8" id="main-fn8">8. #main-fn101010-txt">↑ "Challenges of growth" in the Courier Mail of 23 Oct 09.

#main-fn9" id="main-fn9">9. #main-fn9-txt">↑ I couldn't find the story on line, but I read these words from Bob Abbott in a story in the Courier Mail of aroun Thursday or Frday last week. I will endeavour to add taht detail to this story.

#UnpublishedLetter" id="UnpublishedLetter">Appendix: Unpublished letter sent to Courier Mail regarding Pacific guest workers

Emailed: 16 May 08.

If the Pacific Island guest worker scheme works, as Steve Lewis ("Guest workers a foreign policy challenge", 16 May) claims it will, it will, in effect, be an apartheid labour scheme. If it breaks down as many fear, it will result in a further permanent increase to our population and make worse all the resultant problems which fill the pages of the Courier Mail almost every day of the week - traffic congestion, housing unaffordability, the water, health and eduction crisis and the ever growing financial costs of fixing them.

If we accept claims about there being a labour shortage, then why don't, we instead of further degrading our quality of life, change our priorities as a society. For example, must we dig up all of our mineral wealth now, when it is clearly making global warming worse? Indeed reducing our mineral exports and generous foreign aid programs, including aid for birth control, would be far better ways to help Pacific islanders.

Whilst Brisbane's Courier Mail rightly recently exposed the ecological vandalism of Consolidated Rutile on North Stradbroke Island, it and the rest of the Queensland newsmedia, have largely ignored a proposed extension of sand and gravel mining on the nearby mainland, which may prove to be even more harmful for the Moreton Bay region.

The compelling case against the expansion of Neilsen's sand and gravel mine

In the Bald Hills region immediately to the North of Brisbane, in the Greater Moreton Shire, the health and peace of 600 students of Bald Hills Primary School, one of the first 10 to be established in Queensland, is threatened by the proposed extension of an existing sand and gravel mine across the Pine River into the adjoining flood plains as close as 150 metres metres from the school oval.

As well as the health of school students, the extension of the sand mine, owned by Neilsen's mining company, threatens the whole surrounding flood plain and even Moreton Bay. A six minute YouTube broadcast "Bald Hills Flats under threat" published on 9 August has put the compelling and overwhelming case against the expansion of sand mining. Much of the following is paraphrased from that excellent video.

Bald Hills flats, which is bordered by the Pine River, contains a delicate diverse eco-system that serves as a large cartchment area which feeds into Moreton Bay.

Studies in the US show that the ecological costs of sand and gravel mining include:

• increased stream acidity;
• soil nutrient depletion; and
• loss of bio-diversity, including in the Bald Hills region aquatic birds, rare fish and koalas.

Health effects caused by silicate, and other forms of dust, include:

• respiratory problems;
• aggravation of asthma; and
• increased risk of lung cancer.

Pine River has flooded many times in the last 20 years. During a recent flood earlier this year, everything in the flood plain was washed out into Moreton Bay -- toxic wastes, algae from stagnant swamps caused by sand mining and sludge.

Such natural events are well beyond what Nielsen's are capable of preventing or constraining in any way.

Already the Pine River is under great stress from numerous inappropriate developments upstream. A number of public works have been destroyed or damaged because of the inability of planners to predict what course the water of the Pine River will follow.

The narrator of "Bald Hills Flats under threat" makes the emphatic point:

"The Bald Hills Community is not seeking a few token conditions which will be applied upon application approval. We do not want this application approved at all. Not now. Not ever.

"Surely we have learnt from past mistakes that you simply just can't go ahead and decimate a valley within the Brisbane Metropolitan area because of a need for resources. The problems outlined here are not problems that can simply be addressed. The problems here are problems that simply can't be overcome."

Why do our governments seek population growth if it necessitates ecological destruction?

This point confronts the nub of the conflict at the heart of the fight of the Bald Hills Community.

The Pine Rivers Press of 20 August reported that Neilsen's CEO Mario Panuccio said the company had exhausted its supplies at its Brendale site. Panuccio continued:

"To ensure the secure supply of sand and gravel to support the growing community's infrastructure needs, we need to put in place a plan to source sand and gravel from our eastern landholdings."

So, in order to provide for a "growing community's infrastructure needs" a "traditional, historic, well-loved, green pasture within Brisbane turned into a dusty, ugly open-cut mine." as the narrator points out.

The threatened destruction of the Bald Hills flats is only one of almost countless costs the Australian community is being made to bear in order to pay for population growth needlessly imposed by Federal, state and local governments.

This population growth is utimately driven by the Federal Government's record high immigration program for apparently no better purpose than to line the pockets of the property developers and land speculators who so generously contribute to the coffers of the governing political parties. Just some of ecological costs include the threartened damming of the Mary Valley containing the endangered lung fish, the Mary Valley cod and the Mary Valley turtle, the damming of Wyaralong said to be necessary to provide the necessary additional water, the threatened total extinction of the Koala, not only in the Bald Hills region, but throughout the rest of South East
Queensland, the destruction of Minnippi Parklands containing rare sugar gliders. Social costs include the destruction of rural communities, ever increasing trafic congestion, escalating housing costs and homelessness, escalating council rates and charges for electricity, water, road use and other government services.

Surely, then, it is time that we questioned altogther the need for population growth? Surely, instead of causing incessant population growth, our governments at the Federal, state and local level, should instead, be working out exactly what numbeers of humans South East Queensland and the rest of this country can support and accordingly plan to stabilise our population at those levels?

How our governments no longer serve the interests of local communities they claim to represent

A number of courageous people from the Bald Hills are determined to stand up for their community and environment.

They are led by parents of children attending the Bald Hills Primary School. However, they face formidable barriers in the form of the Moreton Bay Regional Council and the Queensland State Labor government. The Moreton Bay Regional council is the product of the dictatorial amalgamations imposed in 2007 by then Premier Peter Beattie and then Local Government Minister Andrew Fraser at the behest of the Property Council of Australia. Whilst in some councils this backfired badly on Beattie and the Property Council, when popular anti-development mayors won in Cairns, the Sunshine Coast and Redlands Shire, the Moreton Bay Regional Council appears to be dominated by councillors unresponsive to the needs of constituents such as those in the Bald Hills region.

Further, the Queensland state Government is doing its best thwart the wishes of the Bald Hills community. According to a Bald Hills community activist, teachers from the Bald Hills Primary School were threatened with the sack if they were to participate in any community protests against sand mining.

However, the Bald Hills community are resolved to fight and need your support. If they succeed in saving their valley, then so can you next time the preservation of your lifestyle and your environment stands in the way of corporate profits.

See also: "Bald Hills Flats under threat", an excellent six minute YouTube broadcast published on 9 Aug 09 (also embedded in this article), "Residents launch campaign to fight quarry plan" by Joel Gould and Miranda Forster in the Pine Rivers Press of 20 Aug 09, "Parents blast plan to mine sand and gravel near school" by Tanya Chilcott in the Courier Mail of 20 Aug 09 (almost identical copy to be found here), "North Stradbroke Island eaten away by sand mininig" by Greg Stolz in the Courier Mail of 15 Aug , "North Stradbroke Island mine rort alleged" by Greg Stolz in the Courier Mail of 20 Aug 09.
Recent articles describing other threats to biodiversity in South East Queensland: "Rescuers fear for koalas" by Alyce Valentine in the Pine Rivers Press of 27 Aug 09, "Traffic noise makes it hard for frogs to find a mate" by Brian Williams in the Courier Mail of 27 Aug&nbsp, "Rezoning anger at Bald Hills" by Miranda Forster in the Pine Rivers Press of 13 May 10, Bald Hills Against Mining FaceBook page.

What you can do

1. Contact the Mayor of the Moreton Bay Regional Council and the other 12 Councillors and let them know of your opposition to the expansion of sand and gravel mining. Please send us copies of any correspondences to and from these councillors so that we can publish them.

2. Contact you local member (MLA) of the Queensland Legislative Assembly (Parliament) and demand that the state Parliament act to save Moreton Bay as well as Bald Hills flats. Contact details of Queensland MLA's can be found here on the State Parliament web site.

3. Contact Geoffrey Wilson the Queensland State Minister for Education (ph 07 3237 1000, education[AT]ministerial.qld.gov.au) and ask that teachers be given categorical assurances that any participation by Bald Hills State School teachers in protest actions in support of their community and their environment will not result in their sacking or any other form of victimisation.

4. Attend protest actions against the expansion of sand and gravel mining on the Bald Hills flats. Also attend other protest actions in support of the environment such as the protest to Save the Koala, which is also threatened by the extension of the sand mine.

Details of the Save the Koala protest are:

Time/Date:11AM sign-in for a 12PM start, Friday, 25 Septemper
Place: Brisbane Square (in front of Treasury Casino)
Contact: saveourkoalas[AT]gmail.com, www.koalarescue.org.au

And not because of your clever advertisement:

Mumbrella reports:

Greenpeace is running a site takeover of the home pages of The Australian and Courier Mail websites today, featuring a protester walking out of the ad and spray painting a slogan on top of news stories.

The ad, masterminded by DraftFCB, as part of the group’s anti-coal lobbying, will run for one day only on the News Ltd sites.

Peter Novosel, interactive creative director at DraftFCB, said “The idea needed to be disruptive to capture the attention and imagination of millions of eyeballs all in the space of one day. We’re ecstatic about the work and the response.”

Chris Washington-Sare, head of fundraising for Greenpeace said: “This is the first time Greenpeace Australia Pacific has launched an integrated campaign of this nature.”
We'll keep saying it until we're blue in the face: Stop giving News Ltd. your supporters' money.

News Limited is a company that has done inestimable wilful damage to democracy, journalism and the environment in Australia in Australia and throughout the world.

If you absolutely insisted that you need to run your advertisement with News Ltd., they should pay you for lending them credibility they do not deserve.

Would it kill you to focus on any other medium (such as billboards, local television, independent publications - even APN or Fairfax press - at least they are Australian owned)?

Originally published on stopmurdoch.blogspot.com.

In response to the Queensland state Government's threat to conduct a "Shock Doctrine" style asset fire sale, James Sinnamon, who stood as an independent anti-privatisation candidate in the recent Queensland state elections wrote the following e-mail to the Murdoch-owned Courier Mail newspaper, which pointed out the Queensland Government had not gained any mandate to sell any publicly owned assets. Copies were sent to every state member of Parliament including Treasurer Andrew Fraser and Premier Anna Bligh.

Dear Editor,

In your editorial "Asset sales welcome but timing poor" (26 May) you wrote, "Predictably, (Premier Anna Bligh and Treasurer Andrew Fraser) made no mention of (their plans to sell off publicly owned assets) during the recent election campaign."

I stood as an independent candidate against my local member and State Treasurer precisely because I believed that the electors of Queensland were entitled to express their opposition to privatisation at the ballot box.

In fact, even before the elections were announced, I sent an e-mail on 17 February to both the Premier and Treasurer asking that any planned privatisations be put to the public at forthcoming elections. My letter was ignored.

My repeated challenges to Anna Bligh, Andrew Fraser as well as Opposition Leader Lawrence Springborg to defend privatisation in a public debate during the subsequent campaign were also ignored.

I consider this treatment of myself and the Queensland electorate, whom they know full well to be overwhelmingly opposed to privatisation, unacceptable.

They must either immediately abandon these plans, or else call new elections so that the issue can be properly decided by the Queensland public.

At the very least they must be forced to properly justify the case for asset sales in a comprehensive televised public debate.

James Sinnamon,

Independent pro-democracy candidate
Mount Coot-tha electorate
Queensland State elections, March 2009
candobetter.org/QldElections

Update: (27 May 09) A Courier Mail online poll, published on 27 May had 91% of respondents answer 'No' to the question, "Should the state Government sell public assets to help the Budget?", with only 9% in favour. However, if past experience is anything to go by, the expressed wishes of even its own readership will scarcely cause the Courier Mail editors to bat an eyelid in pushing their pro-privatisation ideological barrow.

#letters" id="letters">Update: (27 May 09) Although the Courier Mail published a number of letters concerning privatisation, all opposed, mine was not included. The letters are:

Air of panic in a cash-strapped state

THE discussion by Treasurer Andrew Fraser and Premier Anna Bligh about the possible sale of public assets illustrated that they are in panic mode about the state's finances.

Off-loading assets, through the short-sighted polices of the Government, would leave a financial hole to trouble future generations of Queenslanders.

My comment: A good letter, but it may be possible to draw the implication from the letter, as it has been published, that the writer would not mind so much if assets when the price is better. This is what Andrew Fraser is claiming that he intends to do.

WHY would anyone think that getting rid of our stockpile of resources in an economic crisis is a good idea?

Did we not learn anything from the privatisation of Telstra? Gee, know, let's sell all of our assets, even though they are profitable and some of the only bargaining power we have left, federally, so we can continue spending money on fruitless pursuits and living in debt. Be realistic. We are not going to have improved health, transport, or education systems because we sell public assets. It's another short-term solution to save face in the public's eye. The Government does not have our interests at heart.

My comment: The Courier Mail and all the Murdoch newsmedia fully supported the Telstra privatisation and virtually every other privatisation. It clearly cares little for the wishes of even its own readership, who overwhelming oppose privatisation. It's online poll, published on 27 May had 91% of respondents answer 'No' to the question "Should the state Government sell public assets to help the Budget?"

NOT long ago the State Government was talking about borrowing massive amounts of money for infrastructure. Now Bligh and Fraser are talking of selling off assets to fund infrastructure. Why the sudden change of strategy?

They both should be honest and tell the public of Queensland the reason is not because it is a better strategy but that they can no longer borrow the money because of the drop in the state's credit rating. This means that they now have to pay an additional 2 per cent interest and even then no-one wants to lend them the cash.

The people of Queensland have a right what is going to appear in the Budget when those running the state are getting so desperate.

My comment: Whilst this writer is clearly opposes privatisation, he/she seems to accept because of the financial crisis, that there is no alternative but to sell. In fact, if corporations invariable borrow to buy publicly owned assets, why should a state government be any less able to borrow in order to prevent the sale of assets? A still better solution would be for the government to create its own bank and use it to lend it the necessary money. This is what the US state of North Dakota does. As a consequence, that state has a budget surplus and an economy that is much healthier than the economies of most other states.

HOW dare Bligh and Fraser even talk of selling state assets without asking the people of Queensland.

They are merely the temporary custodians of assets which we, a taxpayers, have spent years paying for. If they want to leave the future of our essential services to the whim of some corporate profiteer, they should ask the people, the real owners of the assets if they agree to the sale. Let's have a referendum.

My comment: My letter called for new elections, but a referendum would not be a bad idea.

IF the State Budget deficit id funded by the sale of public assets such as power stations, highways, water supplies and ports, how does the Government propose to fund future budget deficits once these public assets are gone?

Surely the time has arrived for a bit of belt-tightening instead.

My comment: Belt-tightening is always preferable to selling off them farm, but let's make those profiteers who got us into this mess tighten their belts the hardest.

THAT Premier Anna Bligh would consider a sales of some of Queensland's assets shows that not only has she run out of money, but also ideas. The only certain outcome is that the cost of income will increase significantly.

See also: "Open letter to Anna Bligh and Andrew Fraser asking that any planned privatisations be put to the public at forthcoming elections" of 17 Feb 09, "Brisbane's local ABC radio fails to hold Anna Bligh to account over privatisation" of 28 May 09, "Brisbane ABC suppresses alternative candidates in state elections despite listener dismay with major parties" of 30 Apr 09.

On 25 March Madonna King, the morning presenter of Brisbane's local ABC radio station gave her listeners a small glimpse of how the Queensland Government's frenzy of road construction is destroying the lives of many ordinary citizens. However, the case of those standing up to the Government was undermined when she stated that 'you can't stop progress', a view which curiously echoes what was stated in the previous day's editorial in the Courier Mail, which her husband is editor of.

Appendices: Housing resumption resources, E-mail to Madonna King inviting a response to this article. See also: "Roads to hell: My home is my castle" in the Southern Star of 24 Feb 09, #comment-232727">Forum discussion on "Weekend Reflections" of 27 Mar 09 on johnquiggin.com.

Appendices: #resources">Housing resumption resources, #ResponseSought">E-mail to Madonna King inviting a response to this article. See also: "Roads to hell: My home is my castle" in the Southern Star of 24 Feb 09, #comment-232727">Forum discussion on "Weekend Reflections" of 27 Mar 09 on johnquiggin.com.

On Wednesday 25 March Brisbane ABC local radio's morning presenter Madonna King reported on the fight of Frank Sosso, a resident of Brisbane's outer south eastern suburb of Eight Miles Plains, against the resumption of his house by the Department of Main Roads.

Her treatment of the case appeared sympathetic at first, but there was a sting in the tail. She told her listeners:

"You can't stop progress."

Then she hastily added:

"I'm not commenting on this."

But, clearly she had.

Furthermore, her implication that Frank Sosso was standing in the way of 'progress' had been spelt out at greater length on her blog:

"Do you spend your mornings sitting in traffic, frustrated as you crawl along?

"Our governments can't seem to keep up with the need for bigger, faster transport links around the city.

"But would you stand by and watch your home bulldozed for the greater good of your fellow motorists?"_#main-fn1">1

So as much as Madonna King would wish to be seen as sympathetic to Frank Sosso's plight, she, nevertheless, clearly holds him to be standing in the way of 'progress' and 'the greater good'.

Why, indeed, had Madonna King fallen over herself to present the Queensland Government's rationale for it's treatment of Frank Sosso? Why couldn't she have left it to a DMR spokesperson to argue the DMR's case?

Only the previous day, an editorial_#main-fn2">2 in Brisbane's Courier Mail newspaper, owned by Rupert Murdoch of which Madonna King's husband, David Fagan, is the editor, also preached the necessity of the kind of road projects which are threatening Frank Sosso's home:

"Southeast Queensland needs these projects, not just for the solutions to traffic congestion that they present, but also for the boost to the economy that they provide during construction and afterwards."

Clearly Madonna King, working for the supposedly independent ABC, and her husband were as one on this question.

On the same day, I posted the following response:

"Dear Madonna King,

"A good many Queenslanders hotly dispute the premises of this brief article.

"The only reason there is any conceivable need to bulldoze Frank's house is because of population growth deliberately encouraged by the Queensland Government and the newspaper that your husband is editor of. That population growth, as we all know, is needlessly adding to the congestion that the demolition of Frank's house is supposed to solve. It is striking that your 'growth at all costs' message almost precisely echoes what was written in the editorial of yesterday's Courier Mail (by your husband?) at www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,25230270-13360,00.html.

"I stood as a candidate precisely to stop such resumptions and to stop the underlying cause, that being population growth, but was never allowed to tell your listeners even once on your program in spite of my having made repeated repeated approaches to you and other ABC staff.

"James Sinnamon
Pro-democracy independent
candidate for Mount Coot-tha
candobetter.org/james
candobetter.org/QldElections
candobetter.org/QldElections/MountCoot-tha"

However, my comment had not been approved. Indeed there were no comments posted to that blog entry, in spite of Madonna King's frequent exhortations to her audiences to have their say.

So, not only has Madonna King misused her authority in order to to undermine, with specious arguments, the courageous resistance of an elderly man and his family to Queensland Government tyranny, but those who wish to challenge her arguments face censorship.

What you can do:

• Email Craig Wallace, the Minister for Main Roads at Thuringowa [AT] parliament.qld.gov.au to let him know of your objection to his department's treatment of Frank Stosso
• Contact Brisbane's ABC 612 radio station to demand fair and objective reporting of this issue and that they hold the Department of Main Roads and the Queensland Govenment to account over this matter.
• Tell Madonna King on her blog site of your dissatisfaction with her treatment Frank Sosso's case (and be sure to send me a copy of your comments, also).

Footnotes

#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1. #main-fn1-txt">↑ "Frank's castle" of 25 Mar 09 on Madonna King's blog.

#main-fn2" id="main-fn2">2. #main-fn2-txt">↑ "Transported back to grim roads reality" in the Courier Mail of 24 Mar 09.

#resources" id="resources">Appendix 1: Housing resumption resources

Department of Main Roads Miles Platting, Padstow and Logan Roads intersection (MPPL) Planning Study page, including links to pdf documents Meeting minutes: Thursday, 12 February 2009 (PDF, 88 KB), Meeting minutes: Thursday, 14 November 2008 (PDF, 58 KB), Newsletter: February 2009 (PDF, 6.48 MB), Newsletter: July 2008 (PDF, 1.71 MB)

RACQ submission on MPPL project - ignored by DMR

I am also including an e-mail in response to this article. the e-mail includes links to useful resources concerning the seizure of private land. - JS

I am equally angry about government playing god with a person's right to their land.

Madonna King clearly has the arrogance of Mugabe.

I draw your attention to a recent appeal case in Sydney, in which the RTA has been ruled in court that "Leichhardt Council should be compensated $1.465 million, which is a far cry from the paltry $52,000 the RTA offered at the time they acquired the land."

www.smh.com.au/national/public-land-no-longer-resumed-on-the-cheap-20090316-8zyo.html

Perhaps you may wish to publicly compare Madonna King to the following:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allodial_title

1992 Qld Land Court Determination for compensation of NG Pavlis by Gold Coast Council:

www.landcourt.qld.gov.au/Decisions/PDF/A91-76.pdf

Victoria's Housing Commission policy in the 1960s which involved forced evictions of people from their homes to make way for high rise:

www.emelbourne.net.au/biogs/EM00294b.htm

ABC Radio National Hindsight programme 22 Mar 09 entitled 'Dirty Old Town' accounts of oral history on the forced eviction of residents of Fitzroy (Melbourne in the 1950s and the bulldozing of their homes to make way for Housing Commission high-rise development. Listen to MP3 audio or listen with Windows Media Player.

www.abc.net.au/rn/hindsight/stories/2009/2523179.htm

Israel's 1948 forced acquisition of Palestinian territory by military conquest, which was, and remains, a violation of international law:

www.geocities.com/savepalestinenow/internationallaw/studyguides/sgil3a.htm

#ResponseSought" id="ResponseSought">Appendix 2: E-mail to Madonna King inviting a response to this article

Subject: Complaint of unsatisfactory treatment of "Frank's Castle" housing resumption story

Sent: 2:22PM, Sunday, 29 May 2009

Dear Madonna King,

I have published an article which is critical of the way that you reported the
case of Frank Sosso. It is included below (in fact, above on this page) and published at
candobetter.org/node/1165 candobetter.org.

If you believe that you have not been treated fairly by my article, you are welcome to say why by posting directly to that article or by replying to this e-mail. You are also welcome to post any other comments about the article.

Also, I would appreciate it if you would post to that article the comment I posted on 25 March, which is included within the article, together with a link back to my article.

Yours sincerely,

James Sinnamon

candobetter.org/james
candobetter.org/QldElections

Rupert Murdoch never misses an opportunity to preach to his captive Australian audience that this country must continue rapid immigration-driven population growth.

He usually does so through his media outlets controlled by editors who apparently know instinctively what their master wants the Australian public to think. On other occasions he will do so in person, as he recently did on the occasion of a dinner in honor of immigrant Frank Lowy:

"'In my recent Boyer Lectures I spoke of the importance to Australia's future of a liberal immigration system,' Mr Murdoch said.

"'Few other Australians embody the breadth of achievement or the contribution to Australia's prosperity made by immigrants in this country than Frank Lowy.'"

One of Frank Lowy's more visible contributions to Australia has been the erection, by his Westfield Corporation, of massive sprawling shopping mall complexes in almost every substantial urban agglomeration in this country. Rupert Murdoch evidently fears that, if Australia's current record immigrant influx is not maintained, future generations of Australians will not be able to enjoy equivalent contributions from the potential Frank Lowy's that would be prevented from coming here.

In one of his Boyer Lectures referred to in his speech, Rupert Murdoch stated:

"In my view, Australians should not worry because other people want to come to our country. The day to worry is when immigrants are no longer attracted to our shores."

A possibility not acknowledged by Rupert Murdoch is that overcrowding this country may be precisely what will eventually make this country unattractive to immigrants, or, indeed, to people already living here. This was implicitly acknowledged in an editorial of 18 March 2008 "Queensland faces a tougher job on regional development", which stated_#main-fn1">1:

"... much of (Queensland's) growth comprises city refugees making a sea change ..."

If high immigration is as beneficial as Rupert Murdoch insists, why is it that so many of Australians need to flee from the cities into which most immigrants have settled?

The story "English expats make Moreton the only Bay in the village" in Rupert Murdoch's Courier Mail newspaper of 10 January 2009 states:

ESCAPING the overpopulated boroughs of the UK, British immigrants are moving to Brisbane's bayside suburbs, creating their own Little Britain by the Bay."

In the story one women stated, "I would never raise my kids back in England." Another stated " Back in the UK, five-year-olds ... don't know how to play any more."

The overcrowding of both England and the larger southern cities of Australia are precisely the consequence of governments having accepted similar such gratuitous advice in the past from the likes of Rupert Murdoch.

As a consequence, not only have living conditions become intolerable for many, but our very capacity to sustain any sizable population in the longer term, is under threat by runaway population growth brought about to satisfy the insatiable short-term greed of the property speculators and related concerns, whose interests Rupert Murdoch's media promotes.

This article originated from a post to an Online Opinion discussion in response to the article "What's wrong with 'Islamophobia'" of 23 Dec 08.

See also: "English expats make Moreton the only Bay in the village" in the Courier Mail of 10 Jan 09, "Rupert Murdoch urges Aust to open door to migrants" in the Courier Mail of 5 Feb 09, "Honour for Frank Lowy, king of the malls" in the Australian of 6 Feb 09, "How the growth lobby threatens Australia's future" of 24 Jan 09 (also published on Online Opinion with forum discussion).#CopyrightProblems" id="CopyrightProblems">Note: None of the Murdoch newspaper articles, linked to in this paragraph, were available online when I checked just now on 25 Mar 11. However, when I used the title "Rupert Murdoch urges Aust to open door to migrants" (omitting quotes) in a Google search, I found an article with the same title on a site which is openly touting immigration to Australia, www.liveinaustralia.com. Whether it was a straight copy or based on the original, now removed, article in the Courier-Mail it did not say. It seems that important historical documents that could well embarrass some powerful vested interests can no longer be directly cited on the Internet. Many, who would like to retain such records for future reference may not be able to legally do so legally, because of copyright laws. Perhaps it should be made a condition of granting copyright that the owners of the copyrighted work undertake to preserve the work and on-line access to it at least until such time as anyone, who had expressed to the copyright owner interest in having a copy of the work, had been given an opportunity to obtain his/her own copy. If the person seeking copyright is not prepared to give such an undertaking then copyright should be refused. The disappearance from the Internet of articles, cited by me in this article, has driven me to write another article, How copyright laws obstruct the preservation of historically important documents on 26 Mar 11.

Footnotes

#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1. #main-fn1-txt">↑ See "The Australian laments outcome of Queensland local government elections" of 30 Mar 08. URL of original editorial unknown.

Andrew Bolt of Murdoch's Herald Sun newspaper Melbourne in his article "Melbourne is wrecked and full" of 30 January 2009 pointed out to his readers how population growth deliberately encouraged by the Victorian Government in recent years had placed too great a strain on Melbourne's infrastructure, causing it to fail during the recent heat wave.

Yet, the Brisbane Courier Mail newspaper, also owned by Rupert Murdoch, adamantly refuses to question past and future planned population growth in spite of Bolt's pertinent observations and in spite of an implicit acknowledgement in its editorial "Labor crisis skills seen in water bill" of 3 February 2009, that the recent water crisis was a result of past population growth:

"This was a crisis that was inevitable given the booming population growth of southeast Queensland and the certainty that one day drought would strike."

So, if the Courier Mail acknowledges that the water crisis was 'inevitable', what then were its own reasons for stridently supporting population growth through all those years and why does it continue to do so?

Unsurprisingly this question is neither posed nor answered nor even is the Courier Mail's own support for population growth even acknowledged.

As the editorial points out:

"But for its first eight years in office, Labor virtually ignored the issue (of water)."

And during those first eight years, both 'Smart State' Premier Peter Beattie and his then Deputy Anna Bligh made the water crisis inevitable by deliberately encouraging runaway population growth to suit the Labor Party's land speculation and property developer benefactors.

Yet, in spite of all the damning evidence of their negligence and incompetence the editorial ends up endorsing the overall record of Bligh and Beattie.

To be sure editorial is harshly critical in many ways, but it seems unduly charitable given the overall circumstances:

"But, to give full credit, much of the water grid was delivered on time and on or under budget, despite such embarrassing hiccups as a two-month delay in switching on the $1.2 billion desalination plant because of corrosion problems.

"To summarise, yes, the Government did confront southeast Queensland's water crisis and found a solution, but it could barely have been more expensive or more rushed. Any spare funds and spare borrowing capacity the state might have been able to use to support our economy during the current economic crisis have now been largely used up."

In other words, they made mistakes, and Queenslanders paid dearly for those mistakes, but ultimately, both Beattie and Bligh have shown themselves equal to the task before them.

The editorial continues:

"Consumers, too, have been paying a premium, first by paying for their own water-saving solutions such as tanks, and later through the higher water bills needed to cover the cost of all the new, top-priced infrastructure. Power prices will also be higher because of the high cost of recycled water supplied to power stations."

However, consumers were never consulted by the Queensland Government as to whether they were happy to pay the increased charges made necessary by population growth that it chose to bring about.

Of course, the Courier Mail will continue take care to ensure that, as far as possible, its readers do not draw the link between population growth, on the one hand, and its consequences on the other - higher electricity and water charges, higher council rates, traffic congestion, infrastructure failure, longer hospital waiting lists, housing unaffordability, destruction of natural habitats, further extinction of wildlife, declining quality of life, etc..

And where the cause and effect become too obvious to deny, the Courier Mail will pretend to its readers that population growth is something that is somehow inevitable and not a conscious choice made by governments in the service of land speculators, property developers and others who gain from population growth at the expense of the rest of the community, the natural environment and future generations.

See also: "How the growth lobby threatens Australia's future" of 24 Jan 09, "Courier Mail manipulates reporting of water recycling to demand early election" of 5 Jan 09, "Andrew Bolt: Why add 1.5 million when Victorian infrastructure can't cope with current population?" of 31 Jan 09.

In "Council amalgamation costs blow out another $100 million" in the Courier Mail of 29 Jan 09 Hannah Davies, reported:

"THE cost of Queensland's controversial local council amalgamations is spiralling, with ratepayers set to fork out a further $100 million to foot the bill.

"Despite State Government claims that merging councils would save money, many are struggling to offset the costs of amalgamation and are asking for extra funding.

...

"Council lobby group the Local Government Association of Queensland said amalgamation costs had been severely underestimated.

...

"(Acting director Greg Hoffman said,) "We are estimating the government will need to spend $100 million over the next 10 years to enable councils to implement the changes.

...

"As reported in The Courier-Mail this week, Moreton Bay Regional Council - formed from merging Redcliffe, Caboolture and Pine Rivers - will have to spend almost $1 million on new uniforms for staff."

This is on top of $3.5 million to equalise staff wages and $1.9 million to align computer systems.

...

On 30 Jan 09, Johanne Wright responded in a letter entitled "Merger cost predictable":

"As president of a residents' association which supported genuine local government reform, but was appalled at the seriously flawed and undemocratic, forced amalgamations, it comes as no surprise that the costs of this process were seriously underestimated by the Sate Government.

"It should come clean and spell out what savings will accrue and when we will see these. Our research shows that there will be negligible to no savings. Any that might occur will take five to 10 years to accumulate."

In the meantime, both Queensland taxpayers and local ratepayers will continue to pay for the anti-democratic amalgamations of 2007 rammed through by then Labor Premier Peter Beattie and then Local Government Minister Andrew Fraser (now Qld state Treasurer) made at the behest of the Property Council of Australia. This is on top of the ever-escalating increases in charges of water, electricity, transport, housing, etc. caused by the Queensland Government's policies of privatisation and enforced popoulation growth.

The Property Council demanded amalgamations because it regarded smaller councils, such as the now abolished Noosa and Douglas Shire Councils, which were more responsive to the wishes of local residents, as impediments to their plans to impose urban development and population growth.

However, the forced amalgamations were opposed by a massive grassroots opposition in all of the local government areas to be abolished. In every local government area in which residents were consulted, amalgamation was rejected overwhelmingly.

Of course, the Courier Mail is now silent on its own support for amalgamation which flew in the face of Queensland public opinion and the hard evidence. At one point, during the heigh ot the controversy, pro-John Howard Courier Mail even seemed to cynically welcome the prospect that then Federal Opposition leader Kevin Rudd would pay a political price at the 2007 elections for the conduct of his Queensland state Labor counterparts. This was in spite of the fact that Rudd, unlike the Courier Mail, had at least gone on the public record as being opposed to the council amalgamations.

If ever Queenslanders are ever able to fix up the shambles created by the Beattie and Bligh governments, it won't be any thanks to the Courier Mail.

The title of this article was originally "Courier Mail manipulates reporting of water recycling to demand early election" - JS, 12 mar 08

Murdoch cartoon source - http://peoplesgeography.com/2006/11/

Contents: #Why">Why the sudden need for an early election in Queensland?, #Misreporting">Courier Mail's misreporting of water recycling issue, #Disagrees">Even the Australian sides with the 'uninformed agitators' against the Courier Mail, #NoAberration">Courier Mail's misreporting of water recycling no aberration, #Putsch">Courier Mail seeks electoral putsch in Queensland, #NSW">The Australian's attempt to manipulate the NSW Parliament, #What">What can be done?.

#Why" id="Why">Why the sudden need for an early election in Queensland?

The Courier Mail's editorial "Time to put an end to early poll speculation" of 29 December 2008 stepped up its campaign to pressure Queensland_#main-fn1">1 Premier Anna Bligh into calling an early election date in either February or March against earlier commitments to serve her full term. She made this promise on 20 March this year_#main-fn2">2. The editorial essentially re-states what was written by assistant editor Craig Johnstone on 4 December in the "Viewpoint" article "Early election".

So, what's changed since 20 March? Why the sudden urgent need for both the Courier Mail and Premier Anna Bligh to suddenly reverse their previous stances against early elections?

As the editorial argued "... the Government's behaviour, particularly in the latter half of the year, showed that its political horizon was growing closer and closer."

Anyone expecting that the Courier Mail was objecting to Anna Bligh's goals, announced earlier this year, to triple the already massive level of Queensland's coal exports by 2030 or that it would demand that she take effective measures to protect Queensland's natural environment, were to be soon disappointed. The editorial continued:

"Moves such as the ban slapped on shale oil mining in the Whitsundays and the scrapping of North Bank were early signs that the Government was finessing its policy stances to put itself into the best position to attract Greens preferences."

If, indeed, that was Premier Bligh's motivation, then one would have at least expected the Courier Mail to concede that that was a good thing in regard to the North Bank project, a self-evidently mad plan by Anna Bligh to extend an ugly concrete pontoon half-way across the busy and scenic Brisbane River to allow massive high-rise apartment blocks above the northern half of the Brisbane River adjacent to the Central Business District,. After many months of public outcry and a total lack of public support from any credible architect or town planning professional, the plans were scrapped late in 2008.

#Misreporting" id="Misreporting">Courier Mail's misreporting of water recycling issue

Whilst the editorial writer seemed prepared to grudgingly tolerate those decisions, more recent policy reversals by Bligh went beyond the pale:

"But the decision to indefinitely hold off adding purified recycled water into southeast Queensland's drinking supplies, thereby ensuring the $2.5 billion Western Corridor Recycled Water Scheme would not be used for the purpose for which it was built, gave the game away as far as the Government's thinking was concerned.

"That Ms Bligh would back down to a few uninformed agitators on the fringe of political debate in Queensland showed that the Government was more concerned about the next opinion poll than the next policy challenge."

Craig Johnstone's article also complained of Anna Bligh's "sudden conversion to the environmental well-being of the Mary River Valley". Most probably that example was omitted from the editorial because it would have been judged too difficult to also portray the entire Mary Valley community and other opponents of the Queensland Government's planned environmentally reckless Traveston dam as "uninformed agitators".

In fact, the 'uninformed agitators' opposed to water recycling won the overwhelming support of the Toowoomba Community at a referendum held in September 2006. Initially Toowoomba Mayor Di Thorley attempted to impose water recycling without any community consultation, but agreed to the referendum when put on the spot at a public meeting. After that referendum was defeated, the then Premier Peter Beattie promised to hold a poll throughout all of South East Queensland, in early 2007. He intended that the outcome of this poll be used to over-rule the expressed wishes of the Toowoomba community, but subsequently abandoned the promised poll claiming that the then severe water crisis had tied the Government's hands.

Snow Manners, one of the Courier Mail's 'uninformed agitators', at a public meeting attended by 250 people on Saturday 15 November, put the case against recycling and described the campaign he helped to lead against water recycling in 2006.

Contrary to what Peter Beattie claimed at the time, no other community in the world uses recycled water in the way that it was proposed to be used in Toowoomba. In Singapore, recycled water must be fed into houses through separate pipes and in Britain only the shire of Essex has recycled water, and that is intended to be used only in times of drought_#main-fn3">3. A document released under Freedom of Information laws revealed that when talking amongst themselves, water recycling proponents referred to Toowoomba as a "living laboratory" contrary to Beattie's assertions.

Mr. Manners also pointed out that water recycling was ready to be introduced by 1996, but the proponents of recycling delayed the introduction, judging that they could only succeed in overcoming community objections during a perceived severe water crisis.

Other 'uninformed agitators', although not specifically targeted on this occasion, included anti-water-fluoridation campaigners Merilyn Haines, Dr. Doug Everingham, former Health Minister in the Whitlam Government and Dr. Andrew Harms, past President of the South Australian Branch of the Australian Dental Association. Both Doug Everingham and Andrew Harms were previously active proponents for fluoridation.

Merilyn Haine's sister suffered inexplicably from dermatitis when she moved to Townsville, a North Queensland city which has fluoridated water and inexplicably recovered whenever she left Townsville for any length of time. Merilyn Haines, who describes herself as normally pro-Labor, will be standing against Premier Anna Bligh as an independent campaigner as a result of Bligh's decision to impose fluoridated water on Queensland.

#Disagrees" id="Disagrees">Even the Australian sides with the 'uninformed agitators' against the Courier Mail

Many of the Courier Mail's readers may be surprised to learn that the national daily newspaper the Australian also owned by Rupert Murdoch, in fact sided with the 'uninformed agitators', if equivocally. The editorial "Far from Armageddon" cited warnings from two senior Australian National University academics that the Australian had reported in previous days (see below) about the dangers that recycled water posed to public health that the Bligh Government had not taken account of. This, together with the fact that the dams of South East Queensland had filled again meant that there was no longer an urgent need for recycling. Whilst the editorial saw a role for recycled water in industry and did not rule out the drinking of recycled water in future, the editorial concluded "The Bligh Government would be wise to hasten slowly."

This otherwise reasoned and balanced editorial was marred by its support for the environmentally reckless Traveston Dam. Nevertheless, it would appear that even the Australian disagrees, on this occasion, with the Courier Mail's view that Queenslanders have been poorly served by a Government which has too much regard for the views of Queenslanders.

Some of the reporting upon which the Australian's editorial was based was:

"Recycled sewage 'will have bugs', Queensland Government warned"

"(Australian National University emeritus) Professor Troy said the safety of recycled water had not been proved in any long-term epidemiological studies.

"It will not be possible to remove all biologically active waste molecules from the system," Professor Troy said.

"The probability is that something like 8 per cent of these impurities will get through, and that is assuming the system is working properly."

"Professor Troy said residents with allergies would be particularly at risk of infection. 'What's happening here is that the authorities are playing Russian roulette with the health of the population,' he said.

"It is a scandal that former premier Peter Beattie promised the people of southeast Queensland a say in a plebiscite and then backed away from that promise.

...

"Professor Troy said the 'hugely expensive' recycled water project was unnecessary and a waste of public money.

" 'This is all being driven by a technological obsession that big engineering projects offer the only solutions to water shortages,' he said." (the Australian, 29 Oct 08)

"Disease expert warns on recycled sewage"

"ONE of Australia's leading infectious disease experts has claimed technology does not exist to prevent recycled sewage from contaminating the water supply of 2.6 million residents in southeast Queensland.

...

"Professor Collignon said viruses that could contaminate the water supply ranged from bugs that caused gastroenteritis to potentially fatal infections leading to encephalitis and heart disease.

"Test results for hazardous bacteria such as E.coli would not be available to authorities for at least a day, he said. "By the time the results come back, the water is already in the reservoir." (the Australian - 30 Oct 08)

"Health chief out of loop on recycling""

"THE bureaucrat charged with safeguarding the health of Queenslanders was not called on to approve the adding of recycled sewage to the drinking water of the state's southeast.

"The Bligh Government left Queensland Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young out of the approval loop on the Western Corridor Recycled Water Project.

"Instead, the scheme was given a health clearance by the Office of the Water Supply Regulator, an arm of the state Department of Natural Resources and Water.

"The revelation came as Dr Young's department admitted it did not know how much hospital waste would be recycled.

"Queensland Health said yesterday it was now helping to conduct research to find out how much hospital waste would be in the 60 megalitres of treated sewage a day pumped into Brisbane's main storage, the Wivenhoe Dam, from February. ..." (the Australian, 4 Nov 08)

Other stories of concerns about water recycling published in the Australian included: "Queensland Premier Anna Bligh tells water plan critics she will drink recycled sewage", 31 Oct 08; "Support wavers for use of recycled sewage water", 1 Nov 08

None of this reporting reached the pages of the Courier Mail_#main-fn4">4, even though the issue would have been even more relevant to its readers than to the readership of the Australian. Only on 20 November, when the Queensland Government had decided to defer recycling did it make it to the pages of the Courier Mail in the story "Recycled water plan may be postponed, says John Bradley" by Patrick Lion. Interestingly only two out of the seven readers' comments to that article were in support of recycling. Four opposed it outright, whilst one other said that the question should be put to a referendum.

#NoAberration" id="NoAberration">Courier Mail's misreporting of water recycling no aberration

The Courier Mail's treatment of objections to water recycling is far from an aberration. On virtually every major
controversy in recent years in which powerful vested interests stood to gain in the face of strong community objections regarding costs to ordinary citizens, the environment or democracy, the Courier Mail has come down on the side of the former:

• The Suncorp Stadium, which has scarred the skyline of the inner north of Brisbane and forced locals to endure parking restrictions and be periodically overwhelmed by crowds attending large sporting and entertainment events, was built at the cost of tens of millions of dollars at a time when former Premier Peter Beattie complained that he didn't have sufficient funds to act against tree clearing in outback Queensland.
• The planned cruise ship terminal on Southport's Spit, fortunately defeated by a concerted community campaign
• Road, tunnel and bridge building projects which are criss-crossing Brisbane. These are necessitating the requisition of hundreds of dwellings and destruction of open spaces. They include: the North South Bypass Tunnel, the Hale Street Bridge, the Northern Link, the Airport Link and various other major roads;
• Former Premier Peter Beattie's forced local amalgamations enacted at the behest of the Property Council of Australia against overwhelming opposition from those whose councils were to be forcibly amalgamated;
• The privatisation of Telstra opposed by 70% of the Australian public when the Senate past the legislation in September 2005;
• The Howard Government's "Work Choices" which stripped workers of many of their entitlements and protection from unfair dismissal. This was never put to the electorate in the 2004 election and was roundly rejected in the 2007 election.

#Putsch" id="Putsch">The Courier Mail seeks electoral putsch in Queensland

The Courier Mail editorial continued:

"After more than a decade of Labor in power, this is not where the Bligh Government should be. Certainly, it is an uncomfortable place from which to forge hard policy decisions. At the start of a year likely to contain some of the toughest economic challenges that governments have had to deal with for decades, Queenslanders need the state in sure, confident hands. During her time as treasurer and infrastructure minister, Ms Bligh cultivated a reputation for putting policy ahead of short-term politics.

...

"But the overall impression is of a tired, timid government feeling its way, not a good look when the state needs firm leadership to steer it through uncertain economic times.

"All of this suggests Queensland will be well served if, when Ms Bligh returns from leave next month, she calls an election for either February or March. With a grim outlook on jobs and investment staring it in the face, the state does not need a government flitting from one decision to the next as it constantly calculates its electoral chances."

However, judging from the well-founded backdown of the "tired, timid (state) government" on the issue of water recycling (if not water fluoridation), Queensland appears to have been far better served by that government, for all of its serious flaws, than it is likely to be if it ends up in what the Courier Mail considers "sure, confident hands."

#NSW" id="NSW">The Australian's attempt to manipulate the NSW Parliament

To add weight to its case for an earlier election Craig Johnstone's earlier article the editorial cited the example of the Rees Labor Government in NSW:

"The idea that governments should always run their full term has been blown out of the water by the performance of the Rees Government in New South Wales."

This opinion appears to derived from the Australian newspaper, which extensively covered and, indeed, stridently attempted to influence the political developments in NSW under Premier Nathan Rees and his predecessor Morris Iemma.

Unlike its reporting of the issue of water recycling, the Australian's coverage of NSW politics was most unbalanced.

In August 2008 NSW Parliament was recalled at a cost of $500,000 because Treasurer Michael Costa and Premier Morris Iemma saw an opportunity to rush through their privatisation legislation, a cause the Australian newspaper had stridently championed since November 2007. However, when the Liberal/National Opposition announced its intention to join with the Greens, Independents and a minority of the Labor caucus in voting against the legislation, Michael Costa failed to put the bill.

Whilst this was not what was expected of the Liberal and National Parties who on most occasions in recent years have supported privatisation, it was in accord with the principles of democracy and accountability. As many as 86% of the NSW public opposed privatisation at the time. Iemma and Costa had undertaken not to privatise before the 2007 elections, privatisation had been roundly rejected by the NSW electors when the Liberal Party had campaigned on the policy in 1999 and the NSW Labor Party Conference in May 2007 voted 702 to 104 against privatisation. In short, the NSW Government had no mandate, by any stretch of the imagination, to privatise.

For the crime of voting in accord with the will of the people of NSW, the state Opposition were damned by the Australian on that day and at every possible opportunity since.

As a consequence of their failed privatisation bid, Iemma and Costa were, unsurprisingly, deposed from their respective ministerial posts by the NSW state Labor Caucus. For the Australian, the failure of the NSW Labor Parliamentary caucus to stand by leaders, which in the Australian's view had exhibited such strength of character for having defied the will of the people of NSW, the Labor Party and the trade union movement, was also unforgivable. This was bizarrely held by the Australian as reason why the NSW Labor Government did not deserve to serve a full term. In the Australian's view only a Government that is truly prepared to ride roughshod overall public opposition is worthy of retaining power.

#Prognosis" id="Prognosis">The prognosis for Queensland if the Courier Mail gets its way

The treatment of the NSW public by the Australian as well as the past treatment of the Queensland public by the Courier Mail should warn Queenslanders about what to expect if Anna Bligh accedes to its demands to call an early election.

With the election out of the way and the expected deepening of the financial and economic crisis, we can expect the Courier Mail to similarly demand of whatever Government is in office, whether Labor or Coalition, the implementation of its pro-corporate agenda: the resumption of plans to introduce water recycling as well as the construction of the Traveston and other dams, the slashing of state government services and the further raising charges, freezes on public sector recruitment or even outright retrenchments. Above all, we can expect the Courier Mail to push for further privatisation.

In recent years, the Queensland Labor Government has privatised the retail arms of its publicly owned gas and electricity suppliers, the Golden Casket lottery, the Dalrymple Bay coal loader, the State Government Insurance Office (SGIO - now known as SunCorp Brisbane Airport, the Mackay Airport). The Government never obtained any popular mandate for any of these privatisations. The full privatisation of the already partially privatised SGIO was directly against a 1998 election commitment of former Queensland Premier Peter Beattie. On top of that the practice of building ever greater numbers of bridges, roads and tunnels through Public Private Partnerships is effectively no different to privatisation.

Queensland Rail, which has already been split up and corporatised and water infrastructure are two of the most obvious candidates for privatisation.

What the Courier Mail is calling for is effectively an electoral putsch. An early election would make it harder for supporters of minor parties such as the Greens and community grass roots independents to raise their concerns before the wider Queensland. This will make it harder for them to win seats of even to gain significant electoral support. For its part, judging by its coverage of previous elections the Courier Mail will not be making any effort to put such policies before the public.

Of course, this won't prevent the Courier Mail from subsequently claiming that the Government had a mandate to enact these policies, just as it absurdly did in regard to the forced Council amalgamations of 2007 as one example. With the next elections three years away, it would take an extremely determined mass movement to stop these policies from becoming reality.

#What" id="What">What can be done?

Expose Courier Mail's blatant manipulation of democratic processes

The first thing to be done is to show up the Courier Mail's push for an early election for what it is -- a blatant attempt to manipulate Queensland's democratic processes to serve what appears to be its own narrow sectional corporate agenda at our expense. We must demand of our elected leaders to not hold early elections at the whim of the Courier Mail, nor for that matter, for their own electoral advantage.

The first thing to be done is to show up the Courier Mail's push for an early election for what it is -- a blatant attempt to manipulate Queensland's democratic processes to serve what appear to be its own narrow sectional corporate agenda at our expense. We must demand of our elected leaders to not hold early elections at the whim of the Courier Mail, nor for that matter, for their own electoral advantage.

One way or another the ability of newspapers such as the Courier Mail, beholden to a single overseas proprietor to manipulate our political processes must be ended.

Laws which strictly limit the number of media outlets that any one individual or corporation can control must be reintroduced and those with excessive ownership of Australian newsmedia such as Rupert Murdoch must be made to divest much of their ownership.

Furthermore, genuine alternatives to newsmedia which only pushes corporate interests must be established. A good start would be to re-establish the ABC as a truly independant broadcaster. As such it should be required to report objectively, to effectively and fearlessly scrutinise our business and political leaders and to report all sides of the debates on matter of public importance such as water recycling, water fluoridation, population growth, immigration, housing unaffordability, the environment, etc. As it is, the ABC differs little from the Murdoch newsmedia on most of these issues.

Government sponsored independent daily newspaper alternatives to the corporate newsmedias could be established along the same lines as an independant ABC.

Community groups or anyone with a different perspective to offer should be given access to the these government-sponsored media or they should be assisted to set up their own.

If this were done, we would stand a much greater chance of being able to elect political representatives who will properly represent us.

Demand that politicians put all their major policies to the electorate

Contact all candidates in your electorate and ask them where they stand on these issues, particularly privatisation. Demand that they either put these policies to their electors during the course of the forthcoming elections or undertake not to enact those policies until they have obtained a mandate through a referendum.

Demand direct democracy

Too many policies, harmful to our interests, have been enacted in recent years, because the public opposition to those policies has not been reflected in the vote in Parliament. Ordinary citizens must have the right to both put forward legislative proposals or oppose legislation emanating from their elected representatives as referendum questions.

Oppose four year Parliamentary terms!

The Courier Mail is correct, even if for the wrong reasons, in its new-found opposition to four year state parliamentary terms. When there are no other checks and balances to prevent our elected politicians doing whatever they like regardless of what they said at election time, even three years is too long. If any proposal to extend the term of the Queensland Parliament is put, it must be voted down.

Stand for Parliament

Either seek pre-selection from a minor party which supports democratic pro-environmental anti-corporate policies or stand as an independent. If another candidate with similar policies stands make sure you recommend that those voting for you give him/her your preferences or even consider standing aside in order to help that candidate.

Support democratic pro-environmental anti-corporate candidates

Actively support any candidate who stands on a democratic pro-environmental anti-corporate platform. One such candidate, is Merilyn Haines, who, as mentioned above, will be standing against Premier Anna Bligh. You can consider distributing leaflets, handing out how-to-vote cards, writing letters to the paper, calling talk-back radio, posting comments to online forums including this site, writing articles and publishing them on the web, including here, or even establishing your own blog.

Whatever profile is gained from such a campaign can only better position the campaigner against the likely anti-democratic agenda that will follow the elections even if the candidates don't succeed in winning office.

See also: "Reclaim Our Democracy: Boycott Murdoch" (after) 6 June 08 in the Spring Hill Voice, the Spring Hill Voice's Media Page (including a promotion of this article), "Media contempt for facts in NSW electricity privatisation debate" of 18 Sep 08.

#Footnotes" id="Footnotes">Footnotes

#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1. #main-fn1-txt">↑ . Queensland is a State of Australia located in the North East.

#main-fn2" id="main-fn2">2. #main-fn2-txt">↑ . On 20 October she made another commitment, but only not to go to the polls until 2009. The headline of the ABC story was "No early election: Bligh", whilst the headline of the Brisbane News story of 23 October was.

#main-fn3" id="main-fn3">3. #main-fn3-txt">↑ To that brief list should be added Windhoek capital of the arid African nation of Namibia. The Australian article "Disease expert warns on recycled sewage" of 30 Oct 08 reported:

"(Australian National University microbiologist) Professor (Peter) Collignon rejected claims by the Queensland Government that the project was comparable with recycled water schemes overseas.

"Singapore, one of the examples often cited by Queensland, had a "very different" system, he said. Waste water was pumped through a pipeline separate from Singapore's reticulated system - unlike in southeast Queensland - and accounted for less than 1 per cent of the city state's dam capacity.

"Professor Collignon said the Namibian capital of Windhoek, located in a desert, had the only comparable system.

"'Brisbane has many times the rainfall of Windhoek,' he said. 'There's no need for Brisbane to be putting sewage into drinking water. There is nowhere else in the world where a large population is being forced to accept a situation where 10 or 25per cent of their drinking water is recycled sewage.'"

#main-fn4" id="main-fn4">4. #main-fn4-txt">↑ I can't rule out the possibility that there may have been other reports, but I can't definitely recall having noticed them, even though I scan through the Courier Mail looking for such stories almost very day. A google news search with term "recycled water site:news.com.au" (omit quotes) won't show up any other articles from the period 29 Oct-4 Nov either.

On Monday 1 December a readers' letter which was dismissive of of the movie "Quantum of Solace" was prominently placed on in the middle of the first of the two of Courier Mail's letters pages with a photograph included. "Quantum of Solace" is the latest instalment of the saga of British MI6 agent 007 James Bond consisting of 22 movies going back to "Dr No" made in 1962. Whilst I have mislaid that letter, it, in essence, dismissed the James Bond character played by Daniel Craig as a clone of Jason Bourne played by Matt Damon. Having, by now, seen both movies in which Craig played Bond and having seen "The Bourne Supremacy" I failed to understand his point. The differences between the two seemed quite pronounced.

Two days later a further brief letter also appeared in the pages of the Courier Mail. This letter unfavourably compared "Quantum of Solace" with Baz Luhrman's epic "Australia" starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman. The latter correspondent wrote that the audience to "Australia" broke out in spontaneous applause whist the audience to the latter left in silence. That was, in fact true.

Whilst the audience to the Tuesday screening of "Quantum of Solace" also left in silence, that has occurred with a good number of other movies that I have thoroughly enjoyed. Indeed, I never remember ever having been in an audience which has spontaneously applauded at the end of any James Bond movie, so it would be wrong to judge the audience's appreciation of a movie from that alone.

The correspondent, of course, should be applauded for trying to persuade Brisbane audiences to see native grown Australian productions in preference to British productions. Indeed, on the Tuesday this week when our theatre party saw "Quantum of Solace", it was only because we were too late to see "Australia".

Nevertheless, I don't believe either of the correspondents were fair to "Quantum of Solace". I had thoroughly enjoyed the movie and, moreover, greatly appreciated the way the script writers had woven into the script current geo-political themes. This has also been noticed by New Statesman journalist Emma Felber in the article "007 Bolivian socialist?" of 14 Nov 2008.

After reading the second critical letter I was moved to send the letter, included as an #LetterToCM">appendix to the Courier Mail in plenty of time for today's edition of the paper:

My letter was not published in Thursday's paper, nor was any other favourable to "Quantum of Solace". None had been published on Tuesday or Wednesday, either, so the Courier Mail letters' editor's treatment of that movie appears to have been one-sided and unfair to date.

For me it is a vexed issue when films like "Quantum of Solace" take on board progressive pro-environmental themes. Objectively, over the longer term, the massive budgets for films such as these represent a huge waste of our endowment of finite non-renewable natural resources. On top of that, the encouragement of many in the movie audiences to emulate the profligate consumption by the movie's central character of fast cars, lavish hotel accommodation, electronic gizmos, expensive clothes, alcohol, gourmet food, etc, etc, would further compound the problem.

The plot of "Quantam of Solace" implies that MI6 can be expected to act to prevent evil corporations seizing the natural assets of countries like Bolivia and trashing their environments, albeit only after internal political struggles between cynical pragmatists on the one hand and those upholding principles of accountability and respect for the self-determination on the other. In reality, it is almost certain that in such circumstances, MI6 will work as one precisely to serve the interests of such corporations against the interests of the people. Nevertheless, in spite of this over-riding unreality, the plot includes insightful discussion of the meddling of countries like the US (if not the UK) in the affairs of Latin America, the way corporations manipulate Governments to get heir agreement to plunder the natural resources of those countries and how fake environmental organisations only act to make the ecological crisis worse. No doubt those in control of the Courier Mail would not feel comfortable about Brisbane audiences being exposed to these sorts of ideas.

Notwithstanding the progressive an pro-environment political themes in "Quantum of Solace", if we, in Queensland, are to similarly prevent evil corporations, aided by their local henchmen and henchwomen - like Queensland's Premier, Anna Bligh, from gaining control of our natural resources and continuing to trash our natural environment, then we will need to do it ourselves with large-scale grass roots political action and not expect some outside knight in shining armour to do it for us.

#LetterToCM" id="LetterToCM">Appendix: unpublished letter sent to the Courier Mail on 3 December

I beg to differ with the verdicts on the latest James Bond movie "Quantum of Solace" printed in you paper on Monday and Wednesday.

Having arrived too late to see "Australia" on Tuesday, our party, instead, saw "Quantum of Solace" and I thoroughly recommend it. I would concede that the movie was not as good as "Casino Royale", but it had a very hard act to follow.

The film producers should be commended for having woven into the script current geo-political themes, such as the looming global shortage of petroleum, how fake environmental organisations act to make the current ecological crisis worse, the meddling by the US in the affairs of Latin America, and attempts by private corporations to seize control of those countries' natural assets, including water.

As some with inside knowledge, including former Labor Queensland state MP Cate Molloy, believe that the Bligh Government intends to privatise our water infrastructure, this movie may be more directly relevant to Brisbane audiences than many would realise.

The letter below appeared in Brisbane's Courier Mail of Saturday 18 October.

As the rental crisis continues to push people and families into more difficult circumstances, I am not hearing any debate or talk about implementing a system in Australia similar to that in Europe to provide people on average incomes with long-term rental accommodation security.

I have friends in Europe who have rented their abodes for more than 10 years. They can plan ahead and raise their children knowing they will be able to go to the same school, have the same friends and live in the same neighbourhood.

This stability contributes to balanced, successful, adults and better communities in the longer term.

In Australia, we are subjected to six or twelve-monthly leases, two weeks' notice (without grounds, under a fixed term agreement), indeterminable increases each time a lease ends and lack of affordable and quality property.

There are many decent people who rent, yet we are treated as second-class citizens who can't be trusted; and children are raised in these environments.

I am an employed professional. I work part-time and raise a child on my own. Our rent recently increased by almost $100 a week (last year the increase was $50 a week). We have two weeks to decide what to do. Surely, as a society, we can do better than this.

Brisbane's Courier Mail of Thursday 31 July reported that house values had dropped by 1.3% in the June quarter whilst the value of units had dropped by 3% over the same period.

As this fall has been largely brought on by higher interest rates and the lack of consumer confidence it is unlikely to provide any practical relief to ordinary Brisbanites who have seen housing prices rocket completely beyond their reach in recent years.

True to form the Courier Mail, an ardent promoter of the property 'industry', reported this threatened momentary pause in the upward movement of the cost of a basic human necessity as bad news:

And the worst was still to come, Australian Property Monitors' (APM) general manager Michael McNamara_#main-fn1">1 said.

Nationally, the market was at its weakest in four years.

...

He expects values will drop 10 per cent over the year, cutting almost $44,000 in value from the average priced home.

He said high borrowing rates, finance being harder to get and a big drop in consumer confidence were hitting hard.

And Mr McNamara warned that if banks continued to increase mortgage rates and the Reserve Bank lifted cash rates then price drops would be even more severe.

However, Mr MacNamara's pessimism was not shared by RPdata residential research director Tim Lawless, who predicted that Brisbane will have a 'softer landing'.

"Ten per cent sounds a bit pessimistic to me and ignores the strong population growth (my emphasis) and limited supply_#main-fn2">2 in Brisbane," Mr Lawless said.

He predicted price declines will be forgotten by this time next year with prices increasing late in the year and early in 2009.

Notwithstanding this Mr MacNamara maintained that strong migration patterns were not enough to attract either first home buyers or investors.

In other parts of Australia, the effects of the credit shortages and lack of consumer confidence have, so far, manifested themselves differently. The Sydney Morning Herald of reported that house prices had slumped by 2% in the past year whilst the ABC on 24 July reported that Perth rental prices have risen 17 per cent, while rents for units have increased 25 per cent. The Canberra Times of 25 July reported that "median weekly asking rents for houses and units up by 5 and 10 per cent respectively in the past year."

Whether Michael MacNamara or Tim Lawless are correct in their predictions of the property market, this story further confirms what critics of immigration have been arguing for years. The principle motivation behind immigration is not as a charitable act towards other people or even to serve any vital economic need, rather, it is nothing more than a crude device to drive up the demand for housing to facilitate the transfer of wealth from the broader Australian community and from other countries into the pockets of land speculators and property developers and related industries such as financial institutions and manufacturers of building products_#main-fn3">3.

#CourierMailCensorship" id="CourierMailCensorship">Postscript: Censorship by Courier Mail?

On Saturday 2 August, I posted a comment to the comments section attached to the abovementioned story in the Courier Mail and it has not, as of now, been published. As I did not keep a copy, I will reproduce it from memory as best as I can:

I agree with Lionel Theunissen of Brisbane (Comment 87 of 103)

Why does the Courier Mail always regard it as good when the price of house go up and bad when the price of houses go down?

As one for whom the cost of housing has gone completely out of my reach, I find it personally offensive when others rejoice in the price of housing going up.

Lionel Theunissen's comment referred to above follows:

Great news, but house prices in Brisbane could halve and they still wouldn't be cheap.

A 10 per cent drop is just the beginning. With the tightening of credit property will return to its intrinsic value, where potential rent can pay the interest on a 100 per cent mortgage. That means a property that might rent for 400 dollars a week is worth around 220,000 dollars, with prevailing interest rates at 9.5 per cent, not the 440,000 or so that might have been the market value up until recently.

For those saying "demand is still high, supply is low" in the hopes that somehow we will avoid the global trend, that is a naive, at best, interpretation of the laws of supply and demand: All demand can do is push buyers willingness to pay towards their capacity to pay, which is directly linked to their capacity to borrow. Willingness to pay has been maxed out for some time. With the tightening of credit and increases in interest rates the capacity to borrow has been greatly reduced and the market must come down to meet this.

The days of easy credit will not be returning any time soon, and the property market will not show any significant recovery until it does. The party is over folks!

My comment upon further reflection: Lionel Theunissen may not be taking into account the factor of high immigration referred to in the article above. Whether or not immigration will fulfil all the hopes of property speculators, if not dramatically reduced, will certainly serve to keep housing prices beyond the reach of most of us.

Footnotes

#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1. #main-fn1-txt">↑ Whilst, we at candobetter.org do not have a high regard for the property sector, we believer that credit should be given to those who, in a manner out of character with most in the industry, demonstrate compassion and decency. This appears to be the case recently with Michael McNamara. In Don't abuse rates excuse, landlords told of 25 July 2008, Sydney Morning Herald Sunanda Creagh Urban Affairs Reporter reported:

AS MANY as half of all landlords have paid off their mortgages and should not be using interest rates as an excuse to push up rents, one of Sydney's top property analysts says.

Michael McNamara, the general manager of Australian Property Monitors, said the principle of supply and demand influenced rents more than interest rates did.

"Let's face it: investors have a profit motive in mind and they don't necessarily need a reason like interest rates to put up rents.

They do so because they can," he said. "The question becomes: are they simply trying to achieve market rents or are they profiteering from the current shortage of housing?"

#main-fn2" id="main-fn2">2. #main-fn2-txt">↑ This does raise the measures now being demanded by property developers as the 'solution' to housing unaffordability, that is, for more land to be released for subdivision. Whilst this measure could serve to partially negate the inflationary effet of furhter high immigration, it would be at a cost to the environment, food security and our quality of life that many consider unacceptable. For further discussion of this, see my article Brisbane's housing unaffordability crisis spun by ABC to promote property lobby interests of 23 June 2008.

#main-fn3" id="main-fn3">3. #main-fn3-txt">↑ This phenomenon was the subject of the 2002 Masters' thesis The Growth Lobby and its Absence : The Relationship between the Property Development and Housing Industries and Immigration Policy in Australia and Franceby population sociologist Sheila Newman It is available as a single 2.5MB PDF file here or as at Swinburne University.

See also: Brisbane's housing unaffordability crisis spun by ABC to promote property lobby interests of 23 June 2008.

In recent years, newspapers of the Murdoch-owned News Limited media empire haven't been in the least shy in counselling, indeed demanding of Governments to disregard the will of the public to implement policies it deemed to be in the public's best interest. One obvious example which springs to mind is the Australian's strident endorsement of the current attempts by the Iemma Government to privatise NSW's electricity assets, even though it's opposed by 85% of the public and even though when privatisation was last specifically put the the NSW public in the 1999 elections by the Liberal Opposition they were roundly trounced. Other past examples include the Murdoch press's campaigns for:

• The privatisation of Telstra;
• the (aborted) privatisation of the Snowy Mountains Electricity Corporation
• The forced amalgamations of local governments by the Queensland Beattie state government in 2007
• Calling on the Queensland Government to use dictatorial powers to over-ride local councils opposed to over-development who were elected in in the March 2008 elections.
• Rebuking of Anna Bligh for using powers to prevent the destruction of the historic Regent Theatre by developers

The editorial Protection in name of popularity of 26 Feb 08 in the Murdoch-owned Courier Mail concerning Bligh's decision to save the Regent Theatre, complained:

But is it possible that this whole exercise is less about protecting fond memories and more about good old-fashioned, politically motivated playing to the crowd?

However on other occasions, when it suits the Courier Mail editorial writers, “playing to the crowd” is precisely what they demand of our political leaders. Take for example the editorial Rising costs an expensive issue for PM of 23 June.

The editorial seems to be part of a growing pattern in the Murdoch Press which appears to be directed towards undermining the popularity of the Rudd Labor Government in the face of the growing global economic and resource shortage crises. Even though the current Federal Government cannot possibly be held responsible for these and even though the Federal Opposition is not proposing policies to deal with these which are likely to cope any better with these crises than those being implemented by the Federal Government, the Murdoch press appears to be attempting to engender the idea in the Australian public's consciousness that it is appropriate for them to automatically punish whatever Government in office when things turn sour. So stories and opinion pieces such as this editorial, which seek to imply that the Rudd Government's honeymoon with the Australian public is over are becoming more common.

The editorial begins by noting that more people now consider Labor (53%) to be better economic mangers than the Liberal opposition(37%).

However, astonishingly, it proceeds to argue that Labor, having finally convinced the public after many long years, that it is more economically responsible than the Coalition should immediately abandon economically responsible policies in one critical area:

But on other indicators Labor is found wanting. Almost 70 per cent, for example, feel Mr Rudd "should have done more" in his first Budget to alleviate cost of living pressures. And if increasing mortgage repayments, rents and groceries are biting hard into household budgets, the soaring cost of petrol must surely hurt the most.

Startlingly for Labor, three out of four Queenslanders are dissatisfied with the way Mr Rudd has handled petrol prices. More worrying for the Prime Minister will be the finding that two out of three Queenslanders support Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson's plan to reduce petrol prices by cutting fuel excise. …

As the editorial noted, Labor had dismissed the proposal as economically irresponsible. The editorial made no attempt to prove otherwise, but, nevertheless, proceeded to argue that Labor should adopt Nelson's proposals all the same.

Why?

Whilst it conceded that “Most Queenslanders don't blame Labor for rising fuel costs.“ it nevertheless maintained that Labor needed to be seen to be doing something, no matter how futile or counterproductive in the longer term. Here are its words:

… all Australians nonetheless expect their newly-elected government to do something tangible about inflation that sees real prices coming down, especially in - if nothing else - petrol.

Australians might also wonder what happened to the human sensitivity that Labor demonstrated last year in opposition. When Mr Rudd talked passionately during the campaign about the cost of petrol, housing and food, voters listened intently, with many switching their support to Labor on this message alone. But in the past six months the Prime Minister appears to have blunted his finely-attuned antennae. And, semantics aside as to what Mr Rudd actually promised on food and fuel, Australians now expect the Prime Minister to act decisively on bread-and-butter issues.

So the Courier Mail is apparently demanding of Rudd that he “act decisively” even though such ‘decisive’ action could well deny the Government millions in necessary revenue whilst having almost no significant effect in comparison to the price rises caused by the increasing scarcity of petroleum.

The editorial concludes:

… while a deteriorating economy is in itself unlikely to prise Labor from office after a single term, Mr Rudd should know he will be punished if voters believe that he failed to act on the cost of living when he at least had the chance.

The audacity in this is breathtaking. The editorial writer knows full well that it is within the power of his/her own newspaper to make the Queensland public understand why such band-aid measures as proposed by Brendan Nelson would be harmful to its interests. If the Courier Mail was truly serving the public interest, it would do its utmost to ensure that a Government that acted economically responsibly would not be punished by the public for having done so.

#LetterToEditor" id="LetterToEditor">Appendix: Letter to Editor concerning Coalition's proposal to lower fuel excise

25 May 08

Title: Coalition never governs again ?!?

MP Hockey proclaims: "Petrol will always be cheaper under the Coalition than it will be under the Labor Party."

Obviously, Hockey never expects the Coalition to lead Government again, with oil prices predicted to rise, and competition for existing oil supplies to increase substantially.

The Opposition would have to eliminate completely the 38-cent fuel excise tax once petrol hits AU$2.00/L for petrol to approximate its current price. Dropping GST entirely on petrol would save three times the five-cent fuel excise tax reduction. But the Opposition couldn't advocate that, as the Opposition gave us the GST in the first place!

What is Hockey smoking??? I hope he shares it with the rest of us "average Australians"!

Judy Bamberger,
O'Connor ACT

+61-2-6247-6220 (work and fax)
bamberg[AT]eaglet.rain.com

At the elections of 15 March pro-developer councils were trounced in Redland City and on the Sunshine Coast, but this popular rejection of over-development means little to the State Labor Government of Anna Bligh and the property developers she serves.

On Thursday 5 June the Bligh Government announced its intention to push aside objections from the Redland and Sunshine Coast Councils in order to fast track developments in 17 South East Queensland sites purportedly to “improve housing affordability”. Of course, the obvious measure of selling land directly to the public in order to spare them the cost of extravagant developers' margins, as suggested by at least one correspondent to the Courier Mail recently, has not been taken up.

On 9 June Anna Bligh announced further measures to clear impediments to housing development in South East Queensland. The Courier Mail article Green Space Land Grab reported:

The Bligh Government is set to take the brakes off urban sprawl by making it easier for developers to build on South East Queensland's precious open green space.

Just three years after the Beattie government put protections in place to control rampant development in the region, a review of those controls is now flagging big changes.

Among them is a proposed expansion of the so-called “urban footprint” in a move that would allow new housing and commercial developments to sprawl beyond the existing boundaries.

Against previous undertakings to allow local communities plenty of chances to have their say on future planning, it was announced that discussion of the expansion of SEQ's urban footprint into surrounding green spaces would be kept secret until the release of a draft plan in December, supposedly because this knowledge is “commercially sensitive”.

The office of Urban Management, which was set up with the stated goal of keeping rampant development in check, has been abolished. (The link to www.oum.qld.gov.au returned with the Google search term "Office of Urban Management" is now redirected to www.dip.qld.gov.au/seq.)

This accelerated development is proceeding well ahead of infrastructure upgrades necessary to accommodate the extra population. Earlier on 5 June it was reported in the Bayside Bulletin story Transport projects “too far away” that Redland City Council had raised concerns over the long wait for public transport and road upgrades which could be 10 to 20 years away. On 2 June the Bayside Bulletin story Call to upgrade roads reported growing traffic congestion in the Redlands area and increasingly long travel times along the major routes to Brisbane.

On 5 June, on hearing of the new state Government mandated developments in the Redlands area, a local taxi driver in a post to the Bayside Bulletin wrote:

Our state government has learnt absolutely nothing about infrastructure being in place before known growth - pushing for SE Thornlands development 11 years before an upgrade of the Cleveland-Redland Bay Road in 2019 is absolute stupidity. Redlands voters will have much to remember, none of it good, at the next state election.

Sunshine Coast Mayor Bob Abbot said it was “madness” to turn big areas of land into housing estates when proper transport links had not been established.

The expansion of the urban footprint was made in spite of assurances only two years ago that there was already enough land within the existing urban footprint to acommodate growth.

Bligh claimed that the fast tracking of the review was prompted by the new population forecasts showing that the region was likely to be home to an extra 1.5 million people within 18 years.

The ‘new population forecasts’ undoubtedly were the direct result of Federal Immigration Minister Chris Evans' announcement on 14 May of a massive increase of the annual immigration to 300,000. Both the Queensland Government and the pro-population-growth Courier Mail have been curiously silent on the increased immigration rates. As one example, for a whole week following from Friday 16 May, when a single opinion piece in favour of Pacific Island guest workers was published, there was a news blackout in the Courier Mail as its pages were full of stories about the chaos caused by existing population growth. This was in marked contrast to the reporting in The Australian (the national newspaper) which, like the Courier Mail, is owned by US citizen Rupert Murdoch. All along The Australian has stridently pushed the pro-immigration barrow.

It's as if both the Queensland Government and the Courier Mail don't want the Queensland public to draw the link between high international immigration into Australia and the resultant inter-state immigration which Bligh insists makes her trampling over the rights of Queensland communities necessary.

See also: More chickens of population growth come home to roost in Queensland of 14 May 08, How to end the Queensland economy's addiction to population growth? of 26 Apr 08, Courier-Mail beats up on public for complaining about cost of 'progress' of 14 Apr 08, The Australian laments outcome of Queensland local government elections of 30 Mar 08.

One of many reports about the ongoing and worsening rental crisis in Brisbane, is the article "Wanted: a Room to rent" on page 27 of Brisbane's Courier Mail newspaper of 29 April 2008. The article reports trends where both co-tenancy and room-by-room tenancy is increasing. In the latter case, the room is directly rented by each individual tenant from the landlord. This situation is predicted to grow here in the same way that it grew in the UK between 1996 and 2000.

It is hard to fathom whether the intention of the journalist Paddy Hintz is to objectively report this indicator of worsening quality of life for many Queenslanders or to promote acceptance of it. According to the article, "Rental experts are now predicting that &emdash; for good or for bad &emdash; room-by-room renting will continue its stellar rise," as if this trend could possibly be 'good' for anyone other than slumlords, real estate agents and property speculators.

Alex Poulsen, manager of the University of Queensland accommodation services, was quoted:

“I think what is really interesting is the number of professional people in their 20s and 30s who are now sharing.

“It’s that weird 10-year period where you can’t really afford to live in your own home but you don’t want to live at home either.

“People who live in share houses are getting older, people are getting married later and women are waiting longer to have babies.“

Alex Poulsen tried to portray shared accommodation in a somewhat positive light, when he pointed out that this kind of renting can be a great way to meet people, particularly if want to build a portfolio of contacts.

Of course, this is one of many reasons why people have chosen to live in shared accommodation in the past, but it was more a choice than a necessity, and those who did so could expect to save considerably on rental costs in return for having their personal space encroached upon by strangers with whom they may not necessarily have been compatible. These days it is no longer a choice for many, because of skyrocketing rents.

For those who do grasp the nettle of living with strangers under the same roof, the choices may still be limited. Between AU$155-AU$160 per week seems to be the average for shared accommodation which is proving to be a hurdle for many young people seeking shared accommodation in Brisbane according to Don Foster, accommodation manager of the Queensland University of Technology.

The high rents which are forcing many more than previously would have had to have lived together are the direct result of increased demand for rental properties, caused by population growth that has been directly lobbied for by land speculators. Indeed, in May 2004 whilst listening to an "Australia Talks Back" (now called "Australia Talks") talkback program on ABC's Radio National, I was astonished to hear an economist working for the Real Estate Institute of Australia (or possibly the Property Council of Australia) actually state that they were looking towards an increase in immigration to revive the slump in the property market. They have since got their wish of course, with the help of the Courier Mail newspaper, itself a relentless promoter of population growth_#main-fn1">1 and the rest of us are paying the price.

See also: "Rent gouging threatens Brisbane inner city retail community"

Footnotes:

#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1. See The Courier Mail beats the drum for more Queensland population growth. #main-txt1">[back]

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.

“Full story needed on big projects” began with some newspeak and then descended into arguments so crude that one suspected that lack of internal conviction was snarling up logical expression.

The editorialist started off by conflating ‘growth’ with ‘progress’, thus giving the concrete entombment of Brisbane a positive spin. Towards the end, in a kind of third-word medical metaphor for torture, s/he crudely compared undemocratic development with medicine and going to the doctor for an abdominal operation. We were not expected to like what we are told is going to happen, but it is clear that we must accept it. To object to being slashed open in order to …what?... would be unreasonable, apparently.

“Progress will sometimes hurt, but like an unpleasant visit to the doctor, it will hurt less if you are warned in advance of what to expect, rather than having a line drawn through your torso and told this is where the operation will happen.”

Shock treatment without a muscle relaxant would seem a little more congruent to the situation than abdominal surgery. Unless this is some kind of medieval operation to remove our persistent ‘bile’.

The writer (or the mad doctor) tells us that ‘We’ all want progress. It isn’t too clear what progress is, from the editorial, and the doctor seems to be hedging about the outcome of the operation, or its reason. Nonetheless, we must suffer for this abstract thing.

If, like most of us, you don’t want to suffer, and you aren’t sure what progress is anymore, you might feel that you are the only person in Brisbane who feels this way and you probably won’t dare raise your voice to protest.

The journalist-social psychiatrist hits potential protesters against the operation for progress with, not just NIMBYism, which isolates with the charge of selfish the person fighting to defend their territory, but with the dreaded “BANANA” acronym. (See 'Damn 'em all', 23 May Courier Mail, Brisbane, Australia.)

BANANA is even worse than ‘selfish’; it means Totally Unreasonable, maybe even certifyably insane; certainly indefensible. BANANA stands for, “Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.”

The charge is that Queenslanders are objecting to nearly every development that goes up.

Well, Mr Editor-doctor, the fact is that Queensland is very densely populated and developed, so it is pretty difficult to find a place to develop which isn’t close to something else. And, with all this development, why should ‘we’ need, let alone ‘want’ more? We don’t like it, so we are protesting.

Brisbane has far less green space left than Sydney and Melbourne. It is obviously overdeveloped and overpopulated:

“ o•ver•pop•u•la•tion (vr-ppy-lshn) n.
Excessive population of an area to the point of overcrowding, depletion of natural resources, or environmental deterioration.”

We are suffering all three of these symptoms in Brisbane. Why can't we admit we have a problem and stop the cause rather than just trying to manage the effects! (Jennie Epstein in Victoria, slightly paraphrased.)

The editorialist-doctor sympathetically admits: “No one wants a freeway, chemical plant or a new power station at their back door …“but,” (s/he concludes harshly informing us that we cannot escape the symptoms of the progressive disease, or curse) “… these things are a fact of life if we are to cater for the needs of a rapidly growing state.”

The dishonest implication, from the main newspaper, the Murdoch voice of authority in Brisbane, is that Queensland’s extreme population growth is some kind of irresistible Brisbanite fate, like Sysiphus’s was to push a stone up a hill every day, except that, in Queensland, that stone gets bigger every day, and so does the propaganda we have to swallow.

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 fate?

The editorialist tells us moreover that many of us may be economically inconvenienced or have airports expanded on our “comfortable backyards.” (This was only to be expected, apparently, and we should have moved somewhere else if we didn’t want our surroundings to degenerate into overpopulated slums. Quite a few of us should perhaps have enquired more carefully before being born here.)

Incredibly, the editorialist equates these sufferings with “our very comfortable 21st century lifestyle.”

And that is not the end of our sufferings: No, we must endure dispossession if we are to avoid dying of thirst in the short term. Nevermind the long term.

Our water security is threatened by population growth, which for some reason we cannot question. That population growth was brought upon us by the developer-serving Queensland Government, which advertised far and wide for it, interstate and overseas. Now we have to put up with the ‘solutions’ for water security which the government that made our water insecure tells us it must foist on us.

For stealing fire from the Gods and giving it to men, Prometheus was chained to a rock. Every day an eagle came and tore his liver out and ate it. During the night it would grow back, only to be torn out again.

Was that the operation?

How bad must it get? It could get a lot worse if our progress takes on the shape of India’s or Africa’s or Chile’s. But, as that dear old man, Augustus Pinochet once said, “Sometimes democracy must be bathed in blood.”

We can be sure that we will be told that it is good for us when that happens.

On 31 March Brisbane's Courier Mail Newspaper reported that the proponents of the proposal to build a high residential development on a concrete slab above the Northern half of the Brisbane River adjoining the Central Business District had declined to put their case at a public debate to be organised by the Brisbane Institute.

Peter Skinner a lecture in Architecture at the University of Queensland and an an outspoken critic of the proposal had issued the invitation to Queensland Premier Anna Bligh ,a principle backer of the proposal. When she refused claiming that it clashed with another commitment, an invitation was made to Deputy Premier Paul Lucas who also declined. Multiplex, the developer who is hoping to build the residential complex also declined an invitation.

As I wrote in a letter published in the Courier Mail of 1 April 2008:

... Given that at least the Premier and Deputy Premier must surely have satisfied themselves beyond any reasonable doubt that their plans to entomb much of the Brisbane River adjoining the CBD beneath a giant slab of concrete is in the best interests of the public they serve, what could they possibly have to fear from an open public debate?

Brisbane's Courier Mail newspaper recently posed the question "Have these been the most boring elections?". This triggered an exchange of e-mails which began when Independent Mayoral candidate James Sinnamon wrote an open letter to the Courier Mail's City Hall reporter. See further below for Emma Chalmers' #reply1">reply and James Sinnamon's further #reply2">response.

Dear Emma Chalmers,

On page 11 of the Courier Mail of election day Saturday 15 March, you asked:

"Have these been the most boring Council elections?"

Given that your newspaper has systematically excluded any views which clash too markedly with the orthodoxy of the Courier Mail's editorial writers, is it any wonder?

And given the striking similarities between the policies of both the Labor Party and the Liberal Party, I would have thought that the Courier Mail, if it had wanted to inject any excitement into the campaign, let alone be objective and balanced, would have given more coverage to alternative views about how our city should progress.

As far as I can tell, all that Brisbane residents were able to learn from the pages of Courier Mail newspaper of my policies was contained within one sentence at the end of your article "Newman wary on rates as Rowell dithers on costings" of Friday 14 March_#main-fn1">1 :

"... Mr Sinnamon ... wants a population cap."

Have I missed something?

It's not as if I had not provided you with material about me and it is not as if I didn't have something to say that was not relevant to the campaign or that was not different to what had been said by others. I sent you two media releases including links back to my web site (candobetter.wikispaces.com, candobetter.net _#main-fn2">2). You interviewed me at City Hall on Thursday 14 March and you would have heard my contribution to the debate amongst the candidates.

Why was it not possible for your articles not to have fleshed out my views a little more? As examples:

• Why couldn't you have reported my point, backed up by the views of the Local Government Association, that it would have been impossible for Greg Rowell to keep his promise to keep rates at less than the rate of inflation without sacrificing current service levels service if population growth continues_#main-fn1">3?
• Why couldn't the point I made during the debate on Friday, linking of Brisbane's current crisis of extreme housing unaffordability to Queensland's population growth, recklessly encouraged by Lord Mayor Campbell Newman, the BCC Labor Councillors, the Queensland State Government and, I would add, the Courier Mail, itself, have been reported in Saturday's Courier Mail_#main-fn4">4?
• Why couldn't the point raised by members of the audience, and taken up by me, about Campbell Newman's failure to honour his 2004 election promise to Cannon Hill residents to save Minnippi Parklands, have been reported?

I will concede that I have been far less prolific than I wanted to be, due to time constraints, but I still believe that what I did provide you with certainly warranted considerably more than less than half of one sentence of coverage.

I believe that Lord Mayor Campbell Newman's unprecedented personal triumph of yesterday owes much to the Courier Mail's unbalanced reporting of the campaign and its unbalanced reporting, in past years, of issues at stake in Saturday's election - the North South Bypass Tunnel, the Hale Street Bridge, population growth, clearing of bushland, the water crisis, housing unaffordability, the second airport runway, the proposal for a new passenger ship terminal to cater for luxury passenger cruise ships, the bizarre proposal to entomb one third of the Brisbane River adjacent to the North Bank under concrete, etc.

As a result, Lord Mayor Campbell Newman intends to take this result as a mandate to continue with his extravagant plans to construct an alternative transport network underground and many other plans which, if not stopped, will destroy what remaining quality of life Brisbane has left to offer and its long term sustainability. Mr Newman's road infrastructure plans, given their ever-escalating costs and the ongoing depletion of the world's stocks of petroleum, make as much sense as the construction of pyramids by the Mayan rulers in the midst of the growing ecological crisis which was to ultimately destroy their civilisation.

The Brisbane residents will learn, to their cost, of the mistake they made on Saturday, and, when they do, I think many will reflect upon what factors influenced them to vote the way they did on Saturday.

As one intending to stand for office in 2012, I will have a lot to say about this in coming years. Will the Courier Mail be prepared, from now on, to report more objectively on these issues than it has in the past?

Finally, I have posted this to my web site. If you don't believe I have been fair to you in this letter, you are welcome to state why. I will post any response from you immediately below this letter, if you wish me to. Also, please feel welcome to phone me about this.

yours sincerely,

James Sinnamon

Footnotes

#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1. See "Newman wary on rates as Rowell dithers on costings", Courier Mail, 14 March 2008. I would also like to point out that I don't think the photo of me does me justice. I did cooperate with the cameraman by looking down at him at an odd angle. I would have with appreciated either being advised to pose differently or having a better photo of me selected.

#main-fn2" id="main-fn2">2. The domain names begining with 'candobetter' predated any thoughts of my challenging 'Can Do' Campbell for election as Lord Mayor of Brisbane. I would have chosen 'wecandobetter.net', but that was taken. Nevertheless, I believe that Brisbane residents would have found the domain name to have been true of myself had I been elected.

#main-fn3" id="main-fn3">3. For further information, see, also, my response to the questionnaire from the Property Council of Australia.

#main-fn4" id="main-fn1">4. See "Newman's Liberals close on Brisbane majority", Courier Mail (online) of Friday 14 February. This story was at the URL www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,23376890-952,00.html, but is seems that the story at that location has been over-hastily removed and replaced with the story Landslide means Campbell Newman must deliver promises of Saturday 16 March.

#reply1">

Emma Chalmers response of Monday 17 March

Dear James,

Thank you for taking the time to put together a comprehensive email.

From what you have written it appears that you have already made up your mind about the reasons you feel that you didn't get adequate coverage during the election, so I don't feel that there is much I can say that will change your view.

As you would appreciate, we have many demands on space in our paper and, while a number of mayoral aspirants around Queensland would have liked greater coverage, we have an obligation to adequately scrutinise the promises being made by the major parties and major contenders. I note you secured 700 votes on Saturday.

As you would also appreciate, even if you were to be elected Lord Mayor, the agenda of one of the major parties would end up prevailing because you would not have the numbers on the council floor to push through your policies.

I will point out that you did manage to get your photo prominently in the paper on Thursday, a feat not managed by the bulk of the mayoral aspirants in Queensland, let alone in Brisbane.

Kind regards,

Emma Chalmers, City Hall Reporter

#reply2">

James Sinnamon's further response of 20 March to Emma Chalmers

Dear Emma Chalmers,

Firstly, thank you for having taken the time to read my e-mail and respond to it. I have posted it to my website, immediately below my original letter. Please let me know if that is not OK. You are, of course, welcome to respond further, as is anyone else who wishes to either defend or criticise the Courier Mail's recent coverage of the Brisbane City Council's elections.

You wrote: From what you have written it appears that you have already made up your mind about the reasons you feel that you didn't get adequate coverage during the election, so I don't feel that there is much I can say that will change your view.

I believe that, to the contrary, I can fairly state that I am always open to persuasion by the evidence. I try to live by Keynes' dictum:

"When the facts change, I change my mind."_{#reply-fn1">1}

At the moment, the overwhelming evidence is that, for the past four years at least, the Courier Mail has not provided balanced coverage of the issues at stake in last Saturday's elections. These include, as referred to in my earlier e-mail, the North South Bypass Tunnel and the Hale Street Bridge, in favour of which the Courier Mail has repeatedly published editorials, ignoring mountains of contrary evidence provided by experts, concerned citizens, and affected residents. I will pursue this further below.

You wrote: As you would appreciate, we have many demands on space in our paper and,while a number of mayoral aspirants around Queensland would have liked greater coverage ...

If you had only slightly reduced your newspaper's lavish, uncritical and fawning coverage of almost every word coming from Campbell Newman's campaign machine, I believe that you could easily have found the the space to give the independents more reasonable coverage.

Whilst I appreciate the Courier Mail's efforts to cover all of the local Government elections in Queensland, the Courier Mail is principally a Brisbane newspaper. So I would have thought it should have been able to manage, at one point over the past four weeks, to print a modest profile of each of the Mayoral candidates. If the local newspapers, B magazine, Qnews, with much more limited space, could have managed to do this then why not the Courier Mail? Certainly this could have been done with utmost ease on-line.

You wrote: ... we have an obligation to adequately scrutinise the promises being made by the major parties and major contenders. ...

But the fact is you did not. A case in point is the story of Thursday 13 March "It's plane to see, this Mayoral race has gone green" with a photo depicting Lord Mayor Campbell Newman accompanied by Virgin Blue flight attendants in front of a aeroplane pushing trolleys with seedlings . That planting a few trees around Brisbane can in any way offset the destruction of vegetation caused by land-clearing and infilling residential developments in the suburbs of Brisbane, let alone Mr Newman's efforts to make Brisbane more car-dependent than ever before, is hotly disputed by many. This is classic greenwashing. In case you wish to better understand how corporations and governments employ greenwashing in order to cover up their environmentally harmful activities, can I suggest you read the transcript_{#reply-fn2">2} of Radio National's Background Briefing documentary "Greenwashing" of 10 February 2008. The point made by Cannon Hill residents and myself during Friday's debate about Campbell Newman's failure to honour his 2004 election promise to protect the Minnippi Parklands was certainly relevant and, I believe should have been reported on those grounds alone.

In regard to the Hale Street toll bridge, far from scrutinising the case for the Hale Street Bridge, the Courier Mail has enthusiastically clamoured for the bridge to be built and has systematically censored from its pages nearly all views critical of the bridge.

The Courier Mail did not publish the media release_{#reply-fn3">3} of 24 February from the "Stop The Hale Street Bridge" group nor did it publish the informative and well-written feature article "What price for City Hall accountability?"_{#reply-fn4">4} submitted by Darren Godwell, President, West End Community Association on 5 March. Moreover, David Bratchford of the "Stop The Hale Street Group" tells me his letters are not published, including one in response to an editorial in favour of the Bridge.

Whilst the Courier Mail does, on occasions, carry stories about some of the more overt adverse consequences, including the traffic chaos anticipated in the Hale Street Bridge's construction and cost-blowouts, they seem to be quickly forgotten by your editorial writers or when pro-bridge propaganda from Mr Newman is reported.

The case for these extravagant white elephants in the face of looming world-wide depletion of petroleum supplies simply does not exist. I believe that if the Courier Mail had scrutinised Campbell Newman's case for these projects and his overall record, as you claim to have done, he could not have won last Saturday's election and those who had unambiguously stood against these polices would have received a much higher vote.

These examples are only the very tip of the iceberg of the Courier Mail's unbalanced reporting in favour of Campbell Newman.

You wrote: ... I note you secured 700 votes on Saturday.

As of now, it has reached exactly 800 votes_{#reply-fn5">5}. Still, at only 1.5 per thousand formal votes cast, I won't attempt to claim that that was a resounding vote for me. However ...

My point of contention still stands. I had views which differed substantially from those of the major candidates and I believe that the Courier Mail should have reported those views, especially as you, yourself, had correctly observed how boring your unbalanced focus upon the major candidates, with little tangible policy differences, had made your coverage of the campaign. Had this happened, I believe my vote would have easily been much higher.

You wrote: As you would also appreciate, even if you were to be elected Lord Mayor, the agenda of one of the major parties would end up prevailing because you would not have the numbers on the council floor to push through your policies.

Thanks. I greatly appreciate that you have taken the trouble to speculate on an outcome that may not have been likely last Saturday. Had I had been elected, I think it would have also been likely that City Council would have consisted of many councillors other than those from the major parties. If, to the country, the council were to have been dominated by the major parties, I would, nevertheless, have continued to argue within the council and publicly for policies I believe to be in the best interests of the people of Brisbane. In such an unlikely scenario, I would hope that my views would be reported by the Courier Mail. As I believe my reasons to be sound, I see no reason why I would not have gained broad public support, in which case there would be no reason to assume that the Councillors could not be convinced to support my policies.

In contrast, I believe that if Campbell Newman's polices of the past four years had been truly in the interests of the people of Brisbane, then he would have had little difficulty in overcoming what he has labelled as 'obstruction' on the part of Labor majority leader David Hinchliffe. In most cases the reasons for Hinchliffe's 'obstruction' was well-founded community opposition to his white elephant projects, which, as I repeat, was not fairly reported in your newspaper. I believe that Lord Mayor Campbell Newman can count himself lucky that, instead of standing up for the affected communities, Hinchliffe gave in to him. I don't believe Campbell Newman would be Lord Mayor today, had David Hinchliffe stood his ground.

You wrote: I will point out that you did manage to get your photo prominently in the paper on Thursday, a feat not managed by the bulk of the mayoral aspirants in Queensland, let alone in Brisbane.

Of course I am grateful, but I had expected some publicity in return for my effort to be at the City Hall for that event. However, I was, frankly, aghast when I saw how that photo_{#reply-fn6">6} turned out. I did not recognise myself until after I had read my name under the caption under the newspaper. Others, who knew me, tell me that they were barely able to recognise me either. Perhaps, I have to get used to the fact that my thinning hair doesn't always lend itself to the photographic portraiture I would wish for, However, the Quest Newspaper photographer took some effort to make sure the photo he took turned out well. If your photographer had let me know how looking down at such an odd angle but not at the camera in the way I did had affected my appearance, I would certainly have posed differently.

I also believe that words describing what I stood for would have been more helpful to me than even a photo which had turned out well.

Finally, I realise that you may not necessarily be personally responsible for all of the matters of which I complain. Nevertheless, I have to deal with these issues at face value.

I still greatly appreciate the time and effort you have taken and your courtesy.

Yours sincerely,

James Sinnamon

Footnotes

#reply-fn1" id="reply-fn1">1. See en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes

#reply-fn2" id="reply-fn2">2. See transcript of Radio National's Background Briefing documentary "Greenwashing" of 10 February 2008 at www.abc.net.au/rn/backgroundbriefing/stories/2008/2155943.htm.

#reply-fn3" id="reply-fn3">3. See "Hale Street record set straight in runup to Gabba ward election" of 24 Feb 08 at www.stopthehalestreetbridge.com/downloads/media releases/HSL_media_release_240208.pd, candobetter.net/node/336.

#reply-fn4" id="reply-fn4">4. See "What price for City Hall accountability?" of 5 Feb 08 at www.stopthehalestreetbridge.com/downloads/media releases/OpEdPieceFeb2008.pdf, candobetter.net/node/337

#reply-fn5" id="reply-fn5">5. See www.ecq.qld.gov.au/elections/local/lg2008/BrisbaneCity/results/Mayoral/summary.html

#reply-fn6" id="reply-fn6">6. See www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,23369923-3102,00.html

This article was also published on qlddecides.com as Saving the Regent - The Sinnamon plan. My response to the choice of that title was posted to that site and is included below.

In little more than a generation, Brisbane's skyline has been transformed into a ghastly inhuman wall of office blocks and high rise residential apartments. Today, much of Brisbane resembles a war zone as established business districts and neighourhoods are further trashed as this process is continued, along with a spate of more recent white elephant infrastructure projects, all at a horrific cost to our local and global environment.

A small, but welcome, pause from this breakneck pace of over-development occurred when Labor Premier Anna Bligh on 23 February, as reported in Brisbane's Courier Mail Newspaper, responded to a public outcry against the threatened destruction of Brisbane's Regent Theatre. The 80 year old Regent Theatre was to be effectively destroyed in order to make way for an AU$800 million 38-storey commercial high-rise at the back of the Regent Theatre. However, Premier Bligh used rarely enacted legislation to stop this. The legislation allows the Queensland Government to force the private developers, Multiplex and ISPT, to keep the Regent cinema operating regardless of whether or not they wanted to.

As welcome as Premier Bligh's stance is, it is sadly out of character with her overall record. Anna Bligh and her predecessor Beattie who have embraced a 'growth at all costs' mind-set which has no regard for the preservation of Brisbane's quality of life or the well-being of future generations. Both the Queensland Labor Government and Campbell Newman's Liberal Brisbane City Council administration have ridden rough-shod over community objections to many other inappropriate infrastructure and housing developments. These include the Suncorp Stadium, the Hale Street Bridge, the North South Bypass Tunnel, the Airport Link tunnel, Brisbane Airport's second runway, the conversion of the publicly-owned Yungaba migrant hostel into a private gated community, Minnippi Parklands, the Traveston Dam, the Wyaralong Dam, etc. In 2005 the residents of Maleny endured an invasion of 150 Queensland Police so that the Woolworths supermarket, opposed overwhelmingly by local residents could be built.

However, on this occasion, instead of ignoring the wishes of the Brisbane community, the Queensland Government has supported them and even the equally pro-development opposition leader Laurence Springborg has endorsed Anna Bligh's stance.

However, another force for relentless over-development, namely Brisbane's Courier Mail newspaper, owned by US citizen Rupert Murdoch, has chosen not to relax its stance and has harshly criticised the Premier in an editorial "Protection in name of popularity" of 26 February.

The Courier Mail editorialists believe that the right of the developers to profit from the further disfigurement of Brisbane's skyline is more important than the wishes of of Brisbane residents to retain what little is left of their heritage. It stated:

... but does that then give the State Government the right to dictate to a profit-driven private sector developer what sort of business it can or cannot operate on the site? Presumably, one reason for the proposed redevelopment is that a 30-year-old four-cinema complex is a less profitable use of the land than a 38-storey office tower.

From the point of view of society at large, few profits are to be had from these projects. Instead, they merely facilitate the transfer of wealth out of its pockets into the pockets of the likes of Multiplex and ISPT, whilst massive quantities of greenhouse gases are pumped into the atmosphere, particularly during their construction phases, and the earth's scarce and diminishing stocks of fossil fuel and metals are exhausted. In no more than a generation, these high rise structures will be inoperable as the necessary fossil fuels become ever more scarce and will stand just as much as monuments to to the folly of today's political and business leaders as do the pyramids built on Central America's Yucutan peninsula stand as monuments to the folly of the leaders of the failed Mayan civilisation.

The Courier Mail editorialist then argues that the taxpayers of Queensland to make up for the shortfall in profits:

Now it is quite possible that the developers might be able to rethink their proposal and decide they can make it work, with the Regent intact. However, if Ms Bligh feels so strongly about preserving the whole of the theatre complex, then perhaps she should be arguing the case for some sort of government underwriting – not something we would support – rather than simply sticking it to the private sector, as it were.

In reality, the evidence shows that it is today's taxpayers and ratepayers, as well as future generations, who subsidise the profits of developers, because they are forced to foot the bill for the infrastructure made necerssary to service such developments.

The editorialist also effectively accused Premier Anna Bligh of pandering to populism, when it asked:

But is it possible that this whole exercise is less about protecting fond memories and more about good old-fashioned, politically motivated playing to the crowd?

The Courier Mail editorialists no doubt prefer leaders who know better than 'the crowd' itself what is good for them, hence their past support for the North South Bypass Tunnel, the Hale Street Bridge, "Work Choices", the privatisation of Telstra and Queensland's Energex electricity company, high immigration, the Iraq war, the Traveston Dam, forced local government amalgamations, etc.

James Sinnamon
Independent candidate for Lord Mayor of Brisbane

Comment posted to qlddecides.com:

Thanks Jason for posting this. The original article is entitled "Saving the Regent Theatre earns Queensland Premier the wrath of the Courier Mail" and can be found at http://candobetter.org/node/342

However, the article is not actually a plan to save the Regent. That appears, thankfully, to have been done by Premier Anna Bligh. I meant to use the occasion to give due credit to a politician in whom I otherwise see very little of merit, also to comment on the anti-democratic pro-developer stance of Brisbane's Courier Mail newspaper.

Whilst normally supportive of Bligh, when she does the bidding of powerful vested interests, the Courier Mail was hostile to the Premier's out-of-character decision on this occasion.