I just read "Populate or suck Australia" and thought that Ben Pobjie lampooned all the misinformation - down to the idea that we are being flooded by asylum seekers in excess of economic immigrants. I thought that the 'being a girl' thing was in the same vein, so I guess I don't agree with John Marlowe's assessment in his article above for this article.
Sheila N
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Father killed in front of children for defying 'Syrian' 'rebels'
The image below was posted to Twitter by Syrianonymous.
Thanks for update on Sydney fracking and water supply
Thank you for this important contribution, PGE.
Call for a halt to coal mining as contamination increases
NSW Resources Minister Chris Hartcher said the decision to halt coal seam gas exploration in the Sydney water catchment area was a response to community concern that these activities had affected the quality of water supplies for Sydney and the Illawarra.
There are five major drinking water catchments that are managed specially to provide clean drinking water to over 4 million people in Sydney, the Blue Mountains and the Illawarra. Large parts of the catchments have been gazetted as Special Areas designed to exclude public access and protect the quality and quantity of water to the city.
Dr Turner, the National Parks Association-nominated committee member, said the contamination of surface waters by underground mining was commonplace in Sydney's drinking water catchment. Coal extraction results in subsidence which cause cracks in the bedrock of rivers and streams. Water then passes through these fractures, leaching out minerals that end up in streams and reservoirs.
there are 8 underground coal mines currently operating within the Sydney drinking water catchments. Over the last 20 years, longwall mining in the catchments has led to major land subsidence which in turn has caused cracking and draining of rivers, creek beds and undergrounds aquifers, cliff falls, draining of swamps, fish kills, methane gas bubbling to the surface of creeks and rivers, and iron oxide pollution, as well as the discharge of polluted mine water into local creek systems.
Lock the Gate
Longwall mining involves giant machines that shear coal from the seam causing the rock above to collapse behind the machine as it moves forward.
SMH: Drinking water call for halt to coal mining as contamination levels increases
The oil and gas industry said fracking had been conducted for decades without incident and the development of the state's unconventional gas resources would create jobs, boost the economy and lower greenhouse emissions.
The O’Farrell government has time and again sided with industry over local communities. It is critical that they hear from people who oppose this irresponsible, unbalanced policy.
Take Action
The baseline of contamination has been moved, and reporting periods are longer, so that reporting is "consolidated" - or the goal-posts moved in favour of mining!
'Crime' of leaking documents gives evidence of greater crimes
Pardon Snowden!
Isn't it time to cut a deal with Snowden? Will Snowden get a fair trial in the US? What kind of national security reform do we need? And, what future leaks can we expect from Snowden?
CrossTalking with Mary Fan, Ray McGovern and Timothy Carr.
In the debate, fellow whistleblower and former CIA professional Ray McGovern shows that the criminality of United States government legislators and administrators, which has resulted in the illegal torture of prisoners and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in illegal wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, vastly exceeds the technical criminality of Snowden's actions which revealed information about these crimes to the world.
The views put by McGovern and Carr about Edward Snowden are quite different from those put by another whistleblower, former FBI agent Sibel Edmonds, and James Corbett.
Greens are nothing but a whistle in the wind
There's no proof or evidence that the use of renewable energies can be ramped up and scaled to meet the needs of "big Australia". All the Greens platitudes about renewable energy, ignoring population growth, make them nothing but a whistle in the wind.
Population growth has a multiplying effect on pollution, land clearing, GHG emissions, demands for fossil fuels, and living standards. Living in apartments and towers, as we are being forced to more and more, is a higher energy consuming lifestyle. There's no recycling, gardening, water harvesting, composting or evaporative cooling of trees and vegetation.
They have become a social justice party, more interested in an open door to asylum seekers and gay marriage.
If you scratch a little under the green facade, you find they are simply a mainstream party with little to contribute to politics except as an alternative to the duopoly of Libs and Labs.
Without a meaningful population policy, one devoid of political correctness and oxymorons, then the Greens have little to offer.
Mt Cotton koalas doomed by demand for building supplies
State Development, Infrastructure and Planning Minister Jeff Seeney said the expansion of the Mt Cotton quarry would ensure the state's building and construction industries were supplied with the material they needed, and would also create hundreds of jobs. Population growth, economic growth, and jobs are eating away at our country's natural foundations and displacing it's rightful indigenous inhabitants.
Local residents, however, say it will prove the death knell for koalas and their quality of life. About 30 koalas currently lived on the site and that number would decrease as a result of the expansion.
"The Mt Cotton quarry extension must abide by the South East Queensland Koala Conservation State Planning Regulatory provisions and the Offsets for Net Gain of Koala Habitat in SEQ Policy," Mr Seeney said.
The Queensland Government has still not released details of the declining numbers of koalas in south-east Queensland as it is required under legislation. 174ha would not be quarried.
In its application to council, Barro said it would cut down about 14,801 non-juvenile koala habitat trees.
More than 11,000 residents have protested against the expansion, which local resident Mr Bridge said had been rejected by Redland and Logan city councils and the Planning and Environment Court.
The demand for houses, land and materials will eventually require the paving of habitat as human population needs and economic growth will always be prioritised over the non-materialistic value of koalas, and bushland habitats. "Big Australia" will leave little room for the original inhabitants of Queensland's coasts.
UN criticises Prime Minister David Cameron on illegal migration
Antonio Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, said Prime Minister David Cameron's proposals to toughen rules on entry could stigmatise foreigners and create a "climate of ethnic profiling". (The Australian, 28th Dec - behind a Paywall - Ed)
Mr Cameron has used a new bill to set out provisions making it harder for illegal entrants to remain undetected. Landlords, NHS workers and banks will have to check the immigration status of tenants, patients and customers.
A UNHCR briefing note sent to MPs that Mr Guterres feared that legal asylum seekers and refugees would be penalised by the proposed restrictions as public sector employees and landlords struggle to work out their status.
The UN also called on the international community to offer not only humanitarian aid for refugees, but also resettlement opportunities outside the country, and Labour is urging the Government to accept 400-500 Syrians, including torture victims (the clams are almost certainly fabricated, see sana.sy/index_eng.html, syrianews.cc - Ed), women and girls at high risk and people with family links to the UK.
Economic overshoot and scarcity of jobs is a population problem, along with conflicts for limited resources. Spreading the displaced in developed countries is an open-border concept, one that means migrants will take advantage of welfare and economic developments paid for by residents. Genuine refugees should be the priority, not migrants wanting a "better life".
The English are already living in one of the most densely populated nations on Earth. Prime Minister David Cameron wants to get UK net migration below 100,000 before the 2015 election.
United Nations should focus on key issues such as Syrian refugees rather than "interfering" in British policy, senior MPs warn.
A Bill has been brought in following concerns about a surge in economic migrants from Romania and Bulgaria when transitional controls over their movement are lifted on January 1.
British civil rights don't exist
Thank you for this article.
In countries with Napoleonic codes, your government owes you the opportunity to work or must pay you unemployment benefits. It also owes you housing. In Britain, Australia and the United States, citizens do not have these rights and we see how corporations take advantage of them.
It is obvious that the ruling elites in Britain are simply replacing the existing population for their own purposes. They show no care or loyalty for the people to whom they owe their own positions.
And the British are too disorganised to revolt successfully.
Not a good outlook.
nice
The public policy mandate of multiculturalism means that even Osama Bin Laden could apply for Australian citizenship in full turban and Kalashnikov -denial of Australian traditional values government public servants have been brainwashed.
New Zealand Migration soars 40% - and a back door to Australia
New Zealand migration to Australia has soared 40 per cent during the global financial crisis, as tens of thousands of South Pacific and Asian migrants use New Zealand as a back door to duck Australia's tough migration controls.
Thanks to open borders and lack of any population plan for Australia except unfettered growth, migrants can go to NZ as a back-door route to immigration to Australia.
Jobless Kiwi migrants to sardine into share houses with friends and extended family on the fringes of major cities. Our living standards are being compromised by increasing poverty and unaffordable housing. Why should foreigners be paid welfare when it's not their country?
Already unemployment is increasing in Australia, and the numbers would be higher but many have given up looking for work.
Salome Swan, of Anglicare Southern Queensland, said jobless families were surviving on meagre Family Tax Benefit payments. Instead of stemming the flow, Anglicare are endorsing welfare payments for these people! New Zealand has now lost 12 per cent of its population to Australia, as Kiwis search for work and higher pay across the Tasman. We are becoming a dumping ground for their impoverished, and we are supposed to financially support them?
They "pay taxes" in Australia, but if they are unemployed, this doesn't mean they are entitled to what residents get!
Immigration data reveals that 648,200 New Zealand citizens are living in Australia - up from 470,000 in 2007, before the start of the global financial crisis.
Globally, human population is not only in ecological overshoot, but the new phenomenon is economic overshoot. There just aren't enough jobs being produced by our economy to provide for the swelling numbers of people.
PM David Cameron has recently reduced welfare for foreigners in the UK, and Australia should do the same.
Australia's migrant population has exceeded six million people.
Assistant director of demography at the ABS, Neil Scott, says the last time migration levels were this high was before World War Two.
"So over recent years probably about 60 per cent of our population growth, roughly, is now coming from overseas, where as about 40 per cent is from the birth of young Australians."
This is evidence of Australia, a global or international territory as opposed to a sovereignty.
Dr Bob Birrell from the Centre for Population and Urban Research at Monash University says that "British migrants are predominantly coming in the skilled category and they're going to where the most jobs are available, which in recent years have been in Western Australia and Queensland. They, for quite some time, have tended to bypass Victoria and New South Wales." Now, Victoria, without mining and a State losing manufacturing jobs, is the hot spot for migrants!
The ABS says many people migrating to Australia now do so on temporary visas, like student or 457 visas. Dr Bob Birrell says a proportion of these go on to live longer-term in Australia. It shows that there's little that's "temporary" about temporary visas! They are residency visas by stealth.
Angela Chan from the Migration Institute of Australia says it makes sense that migrant numbers continue to grow in Australia. She says skilled workers overseas who are willing to move country for work will move to where the jobs are. This is at a time when our official unemployment rate has reached 5.8% - the highest rate in 4 years! If jobs aren't being created, then it means residents must face harsher competition from more applicants - thanks to our excessively generous welcome-mat to Australia!
SBS: Australia's migrant population exceeds six million
Cancerous spread of neoliberalism stopped in Ukraine
For one thing. People are unpleased with the current state of affairs:
Rear entrance to revolution in Ukraine. of 19 Dec 2013 by Frank Enria
Thank you for the comment. We should have posted information about the Ukrainian conflict before now. In some ways, it mirrors the conflict in Syria, although the Syrian government seems to be handling the conflict more ably than the those resisting the cancerous spread of the New World Order in the Ukraine. (In the Syrian Arab Republic the death toll has reached an appalling 120,000, but, at least, they have so far defeated the "regime-change" efforts of the United States, its terrorist proxies and other regional allies.)
For more information about the Ukraine, see Putin Scores a New Victory in the Ukraine of 24 Dec 2013 and US Sponsored "Democracy": A Tale of Two Protests. Ukraine and Thailand of 21 Dec 2013 on Global Research. Other useful resources are Russia Today and the Iranian Press TV from Iran. - Ed
Disappointment over multicultural policy in 2013
This article gives vent to expressions of angst at the perception that immigrant lobby groups may lose out with Primeminister Abbott.
"Mr Abbott scrapped the position of Multicultural Affairs Minister. He announced that multicultural affairs and settlement services would no longer be managed by the Department of Immigration.Instead, it would fall under the control of a newly created Department of Social Services with Kevin Andrews the Minister, who would also be responsible for aged care services. Labor's former Multicultural Affairs Minister under the Rudd Government, Senator Kate Lundy, believes the Coalition's decision to scrap the ministerial position shows it won't put a high priority on multicultural policy." See "Disappointment over multicultural policy in 2013" [1]
This is interesting because, as we know, Abbott admired Howard and Howard downplayed multiculturalism and talked about stopping 'boat people' to allay peoples' anxiety about immigration numbers, whilst hugely increasing economic migration. I predict that this is what Abbott is going to do. Note that he is, like every prime minister since Hawke (who started it) a member of the Multicultural Foundation of Australia. It seems that that foundation has some mysterious and possibly malignant power over our land - judging by the fact that every prime minister and opposition leader joins it for no clear reason.
Federation of Ethnic Communities (FECCA) Chaiman, Mr Caputo, has expressed concern about Abbott attitudes and that migrants who came here in the 1950s and 1960s are getting older and need more services."
"It is indeed an inconvenience that migrants actually age and don't keep our nation young!" someone quipped on reading these remarks, then added, "A foundation of a building is its basis, and not it's entirety. Our foundation may have been high immigration and multiculturalism, but it's time to move on and ensure we hold together now in unity for the long term."
[1] http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2013/12/26/disappointment-over-multicultural-policy-2013
Praise from web publisher
Subject was: "Reply to comment | (We) can do better".
Highly energetic post, I liked that a lot. Will there be a part 2?
Visit my web-site madeinslovenia.net,
gait
We had no plans to write a part 2 of this article written two and a half years ago, but please feel most welcome, gait, to add more to the discussion here or elsewhere on candobetter. If you do, we could adapt it to make it into part 2. - Ed
South Sudan carnage and conflict
The UN says 10 days of violent fighting in the area has left thousands of people dead and forced another 80,000 to leave their homes. The Australian military is to send two aircraft to help the UN respond to the crisis.
Recent fighting in the world's newest nation erupted after president Salva Kiir accused his former deputy Riek Machar, who was fired from the government in July, of attempting a coup. The latter denied the claim and accused Kiir of carrying out a vicious purge of his rivals.
Thousands of South Sudanese have been killed in over a week of violence with reports of bodies piled in mass graves, the UN says, due to the civil war.
The United Nations estimates the population of South Sudan to be over 11 million, saying that over 1.9 million people have returned to the country since the 2008 census that put the population at 8.3 million.
And there are over 4.4 million Internally Displaced Persons in Sudan / South Sudan.
Population growth rate is about 2.5%, and despite oil wealth, it's one of the most underdeveloped countries in the world. Annual food consumption in South Sudan is between 1.1 million and 1.3 million tonnes. In the past five years, there has been an increase in production but it has been outpaced by an increase in population driven by natural growth, returnees and displaced people.
Overpopulation drives hunger, hunger drives conflicts, and conflicts are caused when limited resources are being sourced in a time of ecological overshoot.
See also: "Proxy Warfare" in South Sudan of 24 Dec 2013, New Dawn For “America's Africa”: Obama Deploys First Contingent of US Ground Troops to South Sudan of 21 Dec 2013 on Global Research.
Merry Christmas from a people who truly want peace
Below is a video of Syrians playing in snow on 12 December 2013. Sadly, the terrorist war Syrians are facing has not ended. This includes the destruction of the Al-Kindi hospital in Aleppo1 9 days later on 21 December in an attack by suicide car bombers.
Footnote[s]
1 ↑ Fortunately, it seems that no loyal Syrians were killed in the attack, whilst even the jihadists' video acknowledges that 35 terrorists were killed. SyriaNews reports: "The cost of the damage caused to the hospital is estimated at 1.5 billion Syrian Liras (approximately US$30 million by the prices of pre-crisis)."
Possible "peak" food
A study by scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln argues that there have been abrupt declines or plateaus in the rate of production of major crops. This is despite optimistic projections of constantly increasing crop yields. As much as "31% of total global rice, wheat and maize production" has experienced "yield plateaus or abrupt decreases in yield gain, including rice in eastern Asia and wheat in northwest Europe."
They are challenging the cornucopian myth of endless goodness and benefits of Nature.
"... we found widespread deceleration in the relative rate of increase of average yields of the major cereal crops during the 1990–2010 period in countries with greatest production of these crops, and strong evidence of yield plateaus or an abrupt drop in rate of yield gain in 44% of the cases, which, together, account for 31% of total global rice, wheat and maize production."
We have Thomas Malthus, Dr Norman Borlaug and Dr Paul Erlich already warning of limits to food production and that human populations can exceed the rate of food increases - despite human manipulations of crops and landscapes.
Factors contributing to the declines or plateaus in food production rates include land and soil degradation, climate change and cyclical weather patterns, use of fertilisers and pesticides, and inadequate or inappropriate investment.
70% of US grain production is fed to livestock. As much as 85% of rangeland in the western US is being degraded by overgrazing. Between 19 and 22% of all threatened and endangered species are harmed by livestock grazing. Cattle ranching has destroyed more Central American rainforest than any other activity. 70% of cleared forests in Panama and Costa Rica are now in pasture.
It makes sense that a combination of a lowering humanity's diet further down the food chain, and incentives for small family sizes, avoid a "Malthusian crisis" of human overshoot and starvation.
Dramatic decline in industrial agriculture could herald 'peak food' at http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/dec/19/industrial-agriculture-limits-peak-food .
UK legislation restriction EU migrants from handouts
The UK government has rushed through legislation restricting EU migrants from claiming unemployment handouts. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants have made their home since the European Union expanded to eastern Europe in 2004. Open borders have attracted migration, and the biggest group came from Poland. Around 640,000 Poles live in Britain, but residents say it could be one million.
The anti-immigration party UKIP is gaining popularity, and the government has hastily ushered in legislation preventing all EU migrants from claiming unemployment benefit payments in their first three months in the country.
Cameron has also said he wants to see limits on the free movement in the EU, provoking anger in Brussels. Nearly 39,000 people from the two countries, Romania and Bulgaria, are receiving unemployment payments in Germany this year, a figure that has doubled in two years.
Over the last two years, around 11,000 people from Syria, Afghanistan, Algeria, Mali and Morocco, among others, have come to Bulgaria, many through a porous border with Turkey. The country's unemployment rate doubled from about 5% of the labour force in 2008 to more than 11% this year. In the same five-year period the country's GDP contracted by 5.5%.
The population of Britain could more than double in the next century unless immigration is tightly controlled, according to official estimates showing it could grow 40 per cent faster than previously thought. The population of Britain could rise from its current record level of 63.7 million to just under 78 million by 2037. The result could wreak havoc with the NHS, schools and the housing crisis.
Despite UK unemployment running at 2.49million, work was the most common reason for people heading to the UK.
Migration Watch UK believes that significant inward flows of people can detrimentally affect the chances of the native born in the labour market. In particular large flows from Eastern Europe, where wages are far lower and for whom there are no employment restrictions, are particularly detrimental to those native born workers who possess lower skills levels and especially younger workers in London. Moreover, the system of social security in the UK and the effective tax rates for the low paid distort the labour market by disincentivising work for the native born. This evidence note is confined to a discussion of low skilled migrant labour from East Europe since there has not been a direct route for non-EU workers to come to fill low skilled routes for many years.
A business model to adequately remunerate contributors?
A visitor tells us she/he is building a web-site with the free open-source WordPress Content Management System (CMS). She/he asked if we were also using WordPress. In fact, candobetter.net is built using the free open-source drupal CMS. Other open-source CMSs are listed here (Search terms used: open source content-management systems).
Drupal is written with the open-source php programming language. Most of the components which make up any web page served from a Drupal web-site are stored in tables of the free open-source Mysql Database Management System (DBMS). (Drupal can also be built on another open-source DBMS PostgreSQL.
Other open-source software necessary to run a Drupal web-site include the Apache web-server and the Linux operating system. (The Free BSD operating system can also be used.)
Clearly Internet users have gained immensely from free open-source software. The World-wide Web (www) could not possibly have become nearly as ubiquitous as it has if we had been forced to rely upon proprietary copyright software such as the Microsoft operating system and the Microsoft Word word processing package.
However, one problem with open source software is that there is no business model which allows a large proportion of the many who create open source Intellectual Property (IP) (of which open-source software forms only one component) to be adequately remunerated. Whilst subscriptions and various on-line payment mechanisms such as Mastercard or Visa theoretically could go some way towards solving this problem they are not flexible enough to allow visitors to easily pay an amount which is affordable and which matches what he/she considers the value obtained by him/her of the information obtained from a given article or from the use of a given piece of software.
To illustrate I will give examples of articles I have read on candobetter recently and the estimated values of the knowledge I have obtained by reading them. The values given are only rough guesses. If on a given day I were to have read, say 20 articles, then I would more likely want to pay less per article than for each of 5 articles I had read on another day:
Fox vs Owl in possum predation, tree dieoff - Victorian Studies of 20 Dec 2013 by Hans Brunner — 40 cents; Animal Justice Party: Less hooves = more food of 20 Dec 2013 by Vivienne Ortega — 35 cents; Urban Taskforce pretends surprise at Australia's explosive population growth of 20 Dec 2013 by PostGrowthEra — 40 cents; Support your local activists if you don't want Australia to be girt by concrete! of 20 Dec 2013 by admin — 20 cents; Two winners for Antarctic environmental competition of 20 Dec 2013 by admin — 35 cents; Deep Sea Mining is not the answer to poverty alleviation for the Pacific of 17 Dec 2013 by Sheila Newman — 30 cents; If Environment Victoria continues to duck its population charter, then it should step down as a 'peak' body of 20 Dec 2013 by — 20 cents;
One Social micropayments system designed to enable this is flattr.com. Steve Keen, the creator of Steve Keen's Debtwatch, wrote an article which enthusiastically promoted flattr back on 22 March 2011. He then placed a number of flattr buttons on his web-site in an effort to kick start this busies model. Over two and a half year later, it seems that his initiative, unfortunately hasn't caught on.
Nonetheless, a social micropayments system with the characteristics of flattr is still badly needed on the web, so the flattr and other similar initiatives should not be dismissed, yet.
Diseases of animal origins surges - FOA report
Food and Agriculture Organisation (FOA) says more holistic approach to managing disease threats at the animal-human-environment interface.
It said population growth, agricultural expansion and the rise of globe-spanning food supply chains had dramatically altered how diseases emerge, jump species boundaries and spread.
“The ongoing expansion of agricultural lands into wild areas, coupled with a worldwide boom in livestock production, means that "livestock and wildlife are more in contact with each other, and we ourselves are more in contact with animals than ever before," said Ren Wang, FAO Assistant Director-General for Agriculture and Consumer Protection.
Developing countries are being overwhelmed by zoonotic diseases, human and livestock diseases. Globalisation is spreading pathogens of animal origin.
Ongoing population growth and poverty - coupled with inadequate health systems and sanitation infrastructure - remain major drivers in disease dynamics.
Read more: FOA report
It's not surprising that the FOA predicts that the problems of diseases in humans and animals are likely to worsen as both human and livestock populations increase and as our appetite for meat grows. Factory farms can also cause respiratory ailments among animals and humans alike, and because of the overuse and misuse of antibiotics at these facilities, they are a major culprit in the spread of antibiotic resistance.
Half of the world’s population now lives in urban areas, and cities are fast becoming destinations for factory farms, particularly in the developing world. In 2006, meat production increased 2.5 percent to an estimated 276 million tons, and output is expected to rise another 3 percent in 2007 to 285 million tons. (See Worldwatch's Vital Signs 2007–2008 report.)
A more holistic approach would be to curb humanity's addiction to meat and livestock products, and only consume amounts that can be produced organically, without monocultures, factory farms, mass production, antibiotics, and global exports of animals and produce. Each nation should be potentially self-supporting in sustainable food supplies, and population overshoot should be addressed with sensible family planning and rewards for small families.
Rethink on koala conservation - and address population growth!
There was a Landcare conference in Noosa on how to protect koala habitats and the animals from disappearing.
Australian Koala Foundation CEO Deborah Tabart said that the idea that we could replace koala habitat with offsets was idiotic. "We should not be cutting down koala-preferred trees in the first place," she said.
Counting trees, koalas and more surveys were being used to give the assurance that something was being done, but in reality it does nothing! It's like counting the horses bolting after the gate has been left open!
Koalas in the south east of the state are fighting what seems to be a losing battle with the three major dangers - disease, dog attacks, and being hit by vehicles. These three increasing threats are directly related to unrelenting population growth!
There are about 80 koalas at a time in care at Australia Zoo at any one time. The laws say they must be released within 5 km of where they were found. It means they are put back into the same danger zone!
Land clearing for urban development, reduced habitat is placing stress on koalas. This leads to increased disease problems such as chlamydia.
What conservation groups need to be doing is to campaign is a rethink and not avoid the obvious! It should be to limit our overseas immigration rates, and not be blinded by political correctness - that our fragile and stress-prone endemic wildlife are no match for the economic power of property developers and the pro-growth lobby.
See also: Major rethink required in the Fraser Coast Chronicle of 22 Dec 2013.
Battle to save the southern brown bandicoot
The bandicoot is endangered nationally. Its future in Melbourne is mixed up in a battle between conservationists and property developers, with the state government in the middle. It's not hard to guess which proponent will "win" in this contest!
Bandicoots and other native species in Victoria, especially around Melbourne, are losing ground to habitat loss, degradation, and human population growth. If they do hang onto and survive the urban onslaught, like some possums and kangaroos, they are then considered "pests" to "cull" or manage!
In his travels between Melbourne and Arthurs Seat in the 1850s, naturalist Horace Wheelwright recorded the area as teeming with ''bandicotes''.
Ecologist Malcolm Legg said the bandicoots were mostly prevalent throughout the sand belt and south-eastern suburbs such as Braeside, Oakleigh, Clayton, Springvale and Frankston. But 1970s subdivisions saw the infiltration of predators such as foxes and cats and isolation of habitat leading to local extinctions.
Environment groups from across Melbourne’s growth areas called on previous federal environment minister Tony Burke to apply the full force of national environmental laws to ensure threatened species are protected from urban sprawl. However, too often these conservation, planning and environmental groups become mute when it comes to pruning our record rates of population growth, driven by immigration.
"In the northern growth area, we will see almost all of the Merri Creek Catchment under concrete. Our group has planned for Melbourne's growth with corridors for wildlife, but that has all been ignored," said David Redfearn of the Friends of Merri Creek. "Furthermore we are now likely to see the local extinction of one of the healthiest populations of Growling Grass Frog purely due to bad planning."
There's a community of Southern Brown Bandicoots in the Botanic Gardens at Cranbourne. However, their survival can't be assured because the land nearby is earmarked for urban expansion.
Wildlife corridors should be part of our urban planning, but developers, land owners and planners can't comprehend the costs and thus they are considered in hindsight when another species disappears down the extinction trail.
The Age: Melbourne Conservationists battling to save the Southern Brown Bandicoot
Charters Towers mass cruelty to flying foxes and their babies
Charters Towers Council are “moving” 80,000 flying foxes, predominately blacks, from the town. They are using water cannons, helicopters, smoke machines, paint ball guns and fireworks. It started yesterday and is set to continue for 2 weeks.
The locals are standing around cheering as the poor bats circle in confusion and crash into the ground. The babies are too big to be carried away by their mothers, but not yet old enough to escape on their own, so they are being left screaming in the trees and on the ground to die of starvation.
Some mothers have returned to get their babies, only to fall from the sky themselves due to the weight.
Rescuers are being abused and threatened by locals.
I am following the situation on Facebook and there is a call for as many people as possible to contact the Charters Towers council to voice their concerns.
The council was begged to at least wait a few weeks to give the babies a fighting chance yet they refused. I am furious and heartbroken by the whole thing. To me, they should be prosecuted for cruelty and also for harming a protected native species. It is truly very very sad.
Charters Towers council contact email is [email protected]
Abbott government strips environmental legal centres of funding
Australia’s environmental legal centres have lost their federal funding in a move that could see the closure of some of the nine offices around the country.
The government cut $10 million in funding to Environmental Defenders Offices (EDO) in the budget measures outlined in the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO).
It means the EDOs will not receive any federal funding after July 1 next year.
The federal government has immediately cut an estimated $10 million boost over four years quietly given to Environmental Defender’s Offices in the dying days of the former Labor government.
Brendan Sydes, chief executive of the Victorian office, said the cuts would mean about a 45 to 50 per cent reduction in his organisation’s funding.
Already Queensland's EDO has been hacked. The withdrawal of funding guts the ability to help landholders, individuals and community groups understand and act on their legal rights to protect the environment. Without our office there is no legal support available for those that want to protect the environment in the public interest.
NSW too has been chopped. Both the Australian Coal Association and NSW Minerals Council have phenomenal resources with which to advance their interests in pursuing major projects with huge implications. They are uncomfortable with a small amount of funding being provided to a community organisation which responds to the approaches of community members with immeasurably less capacity to respond to these proposals.
Cutting the funding for environmental groups is part of the "streamlining" process of giving the green light to mining permits and other businesses who want to impact on the environment.
What will stop them?
What will stop these operations ultimatley? The high cost of oil making mining in these conditions uneconomical or, in the case of oil exploration and drilling that the energy returned is less than the energy invested as the degree of difficulty increases? By this time will the environment be cactus?
Woman unashamedly admitted to drowning a possum
Wildlife are protected species, and their management must be done with permits. That means they cannot be "culled" or killed without being prosecuted under the Wildlife Act 1975.
Blatantly, and callously, a woman on the Possum Wars program openly admitted that she filled a wheely bin with water and deliberately drowned a possum that was accessing her property! Their protection status is flagrantly ignored, and she openly admitted this crime, freely without fear of breaking the law. Instead of learning to live with possums, they are being vilified as a "pest". They have the audacity to survive spreading urbanisation!
Such is the thin veneer of wildlife protection! The RSPCA brushed it off as being a DEPI problem. Someone must know who this easily recognisable woman is, someone who must live in the Carlton area.
This woman must face up to the $5000 fine and a precedent set for the rest of the community.
Warning on carbon saturation point
A four degrees celsius rise in global temperature, predicted by 2100, marks the threshold point after which terrestrial trees and plants will be unable to soak up any more carbon from the atmosphere. A saturated amount of carbon in the atmosphere could accelerate global warning.
The Amazon rain forest and the vast belt of coniferous Boreal forest that rings the northern hemisphere both act as powerful carbon sinks.
Unfortunately, rainforests are fast disappearing on our planet. Humans are stupidly incapable of any effective levels of stewardship of our planet.
Initially, higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will stimulate more plant growth. But the impact of a warmer world will gradually counterbalance this trend until saturation point is reached, say the scientists.
Lead scientist Dr Andrew Friend, from Cambridge University, said: "Global vegetation contains large carbon reserves that are vulnerable to climate change, and so will determine future atmospheric carbon dioxide..."
Since 2005, the amount of atmospheric CO2 absorbed by the continent's trees has been slowing, researchers reported. Carbon sinks play a key role in the global carbon cycle and are promoted as a way to offset rising emissions.
"The impacts of climate on vegetation will affect biodiversity and ecosystem status around the world." The study used seven different computer models to simulate the effects of global warming on plant life.
Herald Sun: Warning on carbon saturation point
Despite the increased rates of reforestation and forest growth in Europe since the 1950s, managed forests in Europe appear to be closer to maximum stocking than was previously thought.
Land-use change - such as urbanisation and deforestation - has reduced the size of the biosphere, which removes carbon from the atmosphere through photosynthesis.
In 1788 Australia had 70 million hectares of forest. Today 25 percent of these forests remain relatively intact and the rest have either been removed or affected by logging (Pittock and Wratt, 2001). Nationally, methane emissions from livestock contribute about two thirds of the total greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural land use.
Any momentum to save Ghia, a holistic model of our planetary living ecological system that sustains us, is overwhelmed by industries, population growth and its demands, and land-clearing for logging and plantations.
Human land grabs extinguishing native species
The 1500-hectare former Australian Defence Industries site is now partially owned by Lend Lease, which is building three suburbs there, including Ropes Crossing. They say the emus must go because vandals are breaking fences, and the emus are a threat to themselves (?!) and the public, on the roads. There haven't been any incidents of the emus being hurt or of any people being attacked by emus in the local area.
There are 27 emus and several hundred kangaroos living on the site.
There will be three new suburbs built on the land, by the property developer. The destruction caused by this industry of course is overlooked!
Human population growth, engineered by heavy immigration levels, is the underlying threat to wildlife, and habitat destruction in Australia. Emus and kangaroo are being pushed further out to more remote areas, outside their normal safety zones. No wonder, with money and urban development underlying our economy, we are the world's greatest species extinguishers.
The O'Farrell government is undertaking a version of "conservation triage" where limited funding will target 1000 threatened species with the best chance of survival. This means using a formula to rank spending priorities, based on a cost-effective analysis. Some species will be evaluated as being worthy of saving, and others allowed to die off.
The government says 59 per cent of all native mammal species in the state are threatened, as are 28 per cent of bird species, 18 per cent of reptiles and 13 per cent of plants. It's a death-row toll.
We have Tony Abbott signing a MOU for the Government's 'One Stop Shop' Policy for streamlining environmental assessment and approvals. NSW and Victoria are also in the processes of winding back native vegetation protection laws, and planning laws are also being "streamlined."
In a country famous for extinctions, recovery plans for threatened species need to outpace the threatening processes of habitat destruction, and loosening environmental laws.
1000s of kangaroos "culled" at Puckapunyal army base, Victoria
An animal rights group, ASK, has accused army personnel of inhumanely culling kangaroos at the Puckapunyal Army Base in central Victoria. They say that a cull of up to 18,000 kangaroos started on last Friday night.
Australia's attitude towards its native animals is abysmal. They are labelled as "pests", "plagues", environmental destroyers and are harassed and hounded as if they didn't belong here!
They accuse the Australian Defence Forces (ADF) of not following protocols, and are allowing joeys to stay in the pouches of dead mothers, and the kangaroos aren't being shot properly. A spokesman for the Department of Defence says it has engaged specialist contractors to conduct the cull in compliance with the national code of practice, and not their own personnel doing the job.
This carnage is a disgrace, and we expect our defence force to exhibit the highest moral and ethical standards - not descend to criminal killers of defenceless kangaroos.
See also : Humane kangaroo culling program at Puckapunyal begins — Australian Government Department of Defence media release of 20 May 2013, Army base blamed as kangaroo cull soars by Melissa Fyfe in the Age of 2 Nov 2012, Claims military base exceeded kangaroo cull quota in the McIvor Times of 29 Feb 2012, Population Dynamics and Animal Welfare: Issues Raised by the Culling of Kangaroos in Puckapunyal (behind paywall) in the Springer Link of Oct 2006, Protest Friday 25th July, 2003 — Puckapunyal Army Base-Plight Of Kangaroos on the Australian Wildlife Protection Council web-site of 9 Jul 2003, Kangaroos starving at Puckapunyal army base on ABC Radio's The World Today of 26 June 2003, $1.8m to shoot Army base kangaroos by Fia Cumming in the SMH of 6 Oct 2002, Army warning over kangaroo cull in the CNN of 20 May 2002, Shooters to cull 15,000 kangaroos in the News 24 archives of 17 May 2002.
Iran opposes the New World Order, Australia supports it.
Sheila Newman asks:
Does it follow from what, Geoffrey?
Which comment are you answering please?
My comment was a response to your comment immediately above it and not to your more measured and thoughtful comment that preceded that comment.
That the government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad funded family planning clinics, as your earlier comment notes, seems to indicate that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was defeated at the Presidential elections of 14 June 2013, was a more progressive and enlightened leader than the new president, Hassan Rouhani.
However, regardless of the merits or otherwise of its family planning policies, Iran, unlike Australia, remains opposed to the New World Order (NWO).
Through the waging of wars against countries in the Middle East and Central Asia since 1990 and the imposition of sanctions, the NWO has caused many hundreds of thousands of deaths and terrible material destruction. Citizens of many other countries around the globe, even where they have, so far, been spared the carnage of war, have been made to endure economic devastation through disaster capitalism at the hands of the NWO as described in The Shock Doctrine of 2007 by Naomi Klein.
Even if both Australia and Iran now both pursue harmful policies aimed at population growth, their mutually contrary policies towards the NWO remains an important distinction between the two.
More committed activists will counter phony supporters' presence
The real concern about the Socialist Alliance and all the other "far left" groups of which I am aware, is that, whilst seeming to support the objectives of the campaign, they will, as they have done time and time again, find ways to make the campaign ineffective and not able to attract the broader support that this campaign should be able to attract.
A better way for genuine independent activists to counteract this would be to attend the rally and try to get as many other like-minded people, who genuinely want public transport and want to save Royal Park, to attend, Such people should be able to link up and work more effectively regardless of the presence, or otherwise of members of the Socialist Alliance.
Public Meeting Save Sydney’s Last Wild Emu population 19 Dec 13
Media Release
14th December 2013
Save Sydney’s Last Wild Emu population
Public Meeting organised – Politicians invited to front upset locals
A public meeting has been organised due to widespread community anger at the news the NSW Government is allowing Sydney’s last wild Emu population to be removed. The fight is on to save Sydney’s Emus.
5.30pm Thursday the 19th Dec. Jim Anderson Park, Greenbank Drive, Werrington Downs.
Robyn Parker, Stuart Ayres, Bart Bassett, Penrith Councillors, NSW Opposition and Greens were invited
“We’ve organised this public meeting to give locals a chance to express their anger at the NSW Government about their treacherous decision to allow the removal of Sydney’s last wild Emu population said Geoff Brown”
“The NSW Government needs to unshackle itself from Lend Lease and reverse this appalling decision. The fight to save the 1535 ha ADI Site was also a fight to retain our Emus and Kangaroos. We may not have stopped the housing but we got a 900 ha reserve saved and were promised by government the Emus would be retained in that reserve. This decision by Robyn Parker on behalf of the O’Farrell Government is an act of treachery. They have betrayed the people of Western Sydney that put them in government.”
“Robyn Parker and Stuart Ayres the Minister assisting the Premier on Western Sydney, Bart Bassett the local member for Londonderry and all the Penrith Councillors have been invited to front the public. They need to answer why the Emus need to go due to Lend Leases mismanagement. Why is Lend Lease even managing the proposed 900 ha Regional Park when in 2001 we were promised it would be owned and managed by the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service? This whole blame the vandals and Emus line is just a smoke screen for a major stuff up by Robyn Parkers Department and Lend Lease.”
“If we are to save Sydney’s last wild Emus then the public needs to get very vocal and turn up in force to this public meeting. We must let the NSW Government know loud and clear that we love our Emus and we want them to stay.”
Ends
Comments Geoff Brown co – organiser, local resident, President Western Sydney Conservation Alliance and former convenor ADI Residents Action Group
0431 222602
Petition to Robyn Parker (which shows public comments) and more info see www.wsca.org.au
To the Sydney media: please contemplate the significance of this decision and report the loss of our last Emus. Western Sydney issues deserve a voice.
Backgrounder
The Emu population existing on the 1535 ha former Australian Defence Industries site at St Marys/Penrith may be removed over the Christmas period by developer Lend Lease which has been granted a licence to remove them by Robyn Parker the NSW Environment Minister. The Emu population has existed on the old munitions factory site since the 1950’s. It was common place for defence bases to place the Coat of Arms, Kangaroos and Emus, on their properties. The Emus are much loved icons of the Penrith region.
Lend Lease has written to local residents informing them of their intention to remove the Emus and this has upset and outraged them. Lend Lease are claiming vandalism of fence lines as the reason the Emus must go. That some Emus are getting out into public areas and are putting themselves and the public at risk of injury. Yet there are no reported cases of any public injury.
There was never an issue with fence vandalism and escaped Emus until Lend Lease commenced its development in the mid 2000’s. In 2001 Jackie Kelly the then Member for Lindsay famously declared 900 ha of the 1535 ha site would be set aside as a Regional Park to be run by the NSW Government. The NSW Government then promised that Emus and Kangaroos would be retained in the proposed reserve. Its now stated in their 2011 Wianamatta Regional Park Plan of Management. Yet in 2013 Lend Lease are still managing 836.5 ha of the zoned Regional Park and the NSW Government has only accepted ownership and management of 63.5 ha. A major factor in this dilemma is that the NSW Government is refusing to accept ownership of the entire Regional Park.
So we have a developer, whose expertise is housing development, in charge of the majority of the sites wildlife and threatened ecological communities. 828 ha of the site is listed in the Register of the National Estate due to its outstanding conservation value. The problem is Lend Leases unsuitability to manage a wildlife reserve not vandalism or the Emus. What is needed is for the NSW Government to finally take responsibility for the full 900 ha reserve. Surely 27 Emus can be managed with a 900 ha reserve.
Beware Socialist Alliance splitting rally protestors
Christmas is a time when the Socialist Alliance dress up as smiling father Christmases and give presents away to the kiddies. So do missionaries to newly discovered tribes, before they take over their land. Some protestors are like sheep and trust these wolves. Most experienced activists know that the SA always finishes up delivering to the power elites. So they are out to stop people talking about population growth and to disorganise overdevelopment protests, whilst pretending to participate. They threaten effective democratic protestors - sometimes with violence - and try to split them up. They talk the talk but they don't walk the walk. Their leaders are also known to scheme to take over any well-financed or politically well-positioned NGO in order to get at their funding or extend their power to scam. Beware any organisation with SA members on its management board. They will offer to help you then take advantage of you. So, stick together folk; don't follow the SA.
Do you get it?
I was declared schizophrenic because I refused to use a bicycle helmet. I looked at the Queensland child protection act s326:
CRIMINAL CODE - SECT 326 Endangering life of children by exposure
... and found out that a bicycle helmet with no adequate sun protection would expose a child to the likelihood of serious harm, serious because the death rate from melanoma has gone up more than 50% over the past decade.
Then I discovered that due to what was uncovered by the IPA:
Australia's helmet law disaster
The behavior of the minister for child protection could be seen as serious, outside the confines of acceptable behavior and criminal in nature.
The bicycle helmet per se, may be good, but the compulsory wearing law is unenforceable. See also http://www.cyclehelmets.org/1193.html
Which comment are you responding to Geoffrey?
Does it follow from what, Geoffrey?
Which comment are you answering please?
sheila N
So, there's nothing to chose from between the sides in Syria?
Does it follow from this that because Australia supports one side in the Syrian conflict and Iran supports another, that there is nothing to choose from between the two sides?
Native Australian Awards - January 26th
AUSTRALIA FIRST PARTY-: Whatever will benefit Australia - that we are for;
whatever will harm Australia - that we are against. William Lane :-
PRESS RELEASE
Nominations for the Native Australian Award
THE ORDER OF
THE TOAD
are invited from Australian Citizens,
to be formally declared on
AUSTRALIA DAY
26th January 2014
GENERAL CRITERIA.
This award is derived from the vernacular heritage of Australia’s pioneering peoples, who applied the term to those who betrayed fairdinkum values, or undertook what were considered un-Australian activities. The graphic symbol of the award, Bufo Marinus, [Cane Toad] should exemplify the character of any nominee - a terminal despoiler, necessitating complete removal from any influence in our Australian civilisation.
Nominations are restricted to individuals who could be classed either as Native Australian, or as an assimilable post war immigrant.
Persons nominated should have excelled in the prevailing Traitor Class:- Globalists and internationalists working against the European derived identity of the Australian Nation, and the Great Cause of Independence for Australia; bourgeois liberals; media sycophants; quisling politicians; money changers who advance economics as the prime determinant in society; Australia-hating multicultists undermining our Aussie culture and heritage; Aborigine Race destroyers, proponents of over population through mass immigration, advocates for fake refugees, exploiters pillaging the environment and adding to the destruction of the eco-systems of our Native Land.
Please forward the name and address of the person to be nominated, with full particulars, including references to support the nomination, by 10th January 2014, to the address below. Include your own name and address.
AUSTRALIA FIRST PARTY
Identity - Freedom - Independence
P O Box 223 Croydon 3136. National Contact Line: 02 8587 0014www.australiafirst.net email: [email protected]
AUSTRALIA FIRST PARTY- RECLAIMING AUSTRALIA FOR AUSTRALIANS
What's the point of empty policies?
Kelly O'Shanassy replies that "In our Charter, we set a goal to reduce Victoria's ecological footprint by 25 percent by 2020 and to sustainable levels by 2050...". What's the point of focusing on per capita footprint size when any reduction in consumption levels, greenhouse gas emissions and environmental impacts will be offset by more and more people! While population continues to grow at third-world levels, and about 1500 new people arrive in our State each week, reducing Victoria's ecological footprint would be an academic and futile exercise.
Individual ecological footprints may be reduced by 25% by 2050, but at present rates of growth, Melbourne will be bursting with 8 million people, and 11 million people in Victoria? Population growth has a multiplying effect, and silly to skirt around the raging elephant in the room, with empty goals!
It's pointless supporting any environmental, climate change or planning organisations, ngo, unless they have a sustainable population policy.
Iran and Australia both have growth merchants in charge
I bet you most Iranian women and men don't want to grow their population either. It will be the growth and war merchants again, looking for slave labour and soldiers. Just like in Australia.
Public/State Trustees ripping off peoples' fortunes
Information to tell your relatives or friends.
You know how you hear on the radio & TV the public trustee advertising for estate management and Wills.
There sales pitch is that they prepare your Wills for free BUT the public trustee MUST be appointment executor & trustee of the Will. They arrange probate and distribute the estate on your death.
IF your total estate is worth $950,000.00 which is not difficult as that includes value of your home, shares, money in bank accounts etc etc.
What do you think they charge? On an estate worth $950,000 to $1 million. They take $17,800.00 on your death before the estate is distributed to the beneficiaries.
People complain that solicitors charge from $2,500 to $7,000.00 for probate depending on the size of the estate and amount of work involved. I cannot believe how many people use the public trustee. I think a lot of them take the free Wills and do not bother to even ask what it will cost them, I cant understand people being so stupid, apparently there are over a couple of hundred thousand registered with the Public Trustee.
Just because they got a free Will - big deal the cost of a Will varies from $200 to 400 yet they are losing nearly $20,000.00 from their estate.
Appoint an executor of your choice and prepare your Will. It is extremely important and ensures your estate passes to your beneficiaries not a Government Department.
Horrrifc cruelty to bull must not blind us to other injustice
Whilst the extreme and needless cruelty recorded in this video cannot be excused, it seems more likely that such cruelty will occur in dysfunctional societies such as that on the Gaza strip.
Occupying only 360 square kilometres, the Gaza strip has become the refuge for an estimated 1,763,387 Palestinians. The population density is 4,898 people per square kilometres. This gives each Gazan Palestinian only 204 square metres, or a square of land with a side of only 14.3 metres on which to subsist!
The Palestinians' land was stolen by Jewish settlers. This was the result of the establishment, on the land occupied by Palestine, the state of Israel in 1947 and is subsequent expansion in the Six Day War of 1967.
As well, Israel has launched a number of unprovoked wars against its neighbours including Lebanon, Syria and Egypt and has committed acts of terrorism and launched air and missile strikes against other countries, including Iran.
Israel, as well as its US ally, through the use of proxy Islamist extremist terrorists (many of whom profess hostility to Israel) which both support (although Israel does so less overtly), are acting to destroy the neighbouring secular Arab state of Syria and ultimately launch a war against Iran and other middle Eastern and Central Asian countries.
If this is not stopped, the magnitude of death and human and animal suffering will be much greater. Let's hope that other Palestinians in Gaza will act to prevent further cruelty such as that shown in the video before it does untold harm to their cause and others in the region.
More torture of Australian animals - in Gaza
Shocking footage of Australian cattle being abused in the Gaza Strip should re-ignite a national debate on the legitimacy of the live export trade. Footage emerged of Australian cattle being tortured in Gaza, with the most disturbing images showing a bound animal being stabbed in the eye and another knee-capped with bullets from an assault rifle.
With his legs bound and his body outstretched, a bull was helpless as a slaughterman clumsily cut at his throat with a blunt knife. The terrified animal was conscious throughout the prolonged and agonising ordeal, thrashing his head, blinking constantly and looking up at his tormentors as his throat was sawn open. It's unimaginable horror, and sadism!
Australian regulations failed to prevent the suffering of this animal, and others like him.
This trade is masquerading as a valid economic activity but it's really a sham, and shamefully spreading and endorsing horrific animal cruelty overseas.
Labor senators voted with the Coalition in the Senate on Thursday to overturn an Australian Greens motion calling for the cessation of exports until an investigation into previous welfare issues is complete. However, the motion was turned down!
Filmed by civilians during the Festival of Sacrifice in October, this footage shows cattle being terrorised by crowds and tortured in streets and makeshift slaughterhouses — all in breach of Australia's live export regulations. It's a victory parade of human dominance over the hapless animals that will be horrifically slaughtered, and made to suffer extreme pain and humiliation in the process.
Ban Live Exports: Take Action on Gaza
There're 76 million people in Iran,
There're 76 million people in Iran, the country of origin of Sam Dastyari. If he enjoys crowds, and a "big" population, he should return to his country!
There's nothing worse than migrants who come here and claim Australia is under-populated and we should ramp up immigration!
In late July, Iran’s government announced that it would no longer fund family planning programs, a dramatic reversal following 20 years of support. The change is especially abrupt for a country that has been lauded as a family planning success story, with thorough rural health services and an educated female population contributing to one of the swiftest demographic transitions in history.
After years of successful efforts to curb its population growth by offering free or very inexpensive family planning services and promoting the idea that “two children are enough” in their health centers, Iran is dramatically changing its population policy.
Sixty-five percent of entering classes at universities are women. How can you convince them to have a child every year? Government efforts to overpopulate may not work!
However, Australia's population growth is politically-engineered, without public debate. We don't need new-comers like this Dastyari to destroy the efforts of many Australians to be sustainable, care for the environment, and ensure that future generations inherit an intact country - not destroyed by overpopulation. This cheap publicity effort, and no-brainer way to increase the size of our GDP at great cost, should be ignored as a feeble effort to gain publicity.
Sam Dastyari promotes overpopulation for Australia
Labor Senator Sam Dastyari made a 'Big Australia' speech in parliament on December 11, 2013. Predictably, although the Senator only trotted out some very familiar cliches, unsubstantiated by any sense of democracy or science, the Press has fallen over itself to promote this lightweight speech. The fact that he comes from a migrant background is no excuse to subject Australia to a Phillippines fate. Talking up population is an easy way for the most non-descript politician to raise his/her profile, because the commercial and public press will immediately publicise his statements, since they are the mouthpiece of the growth lobby. The growth lobby, notably the property developers and the related industries upstream and downstream will throw money at him. Expect to hear more of Dastyari unless he somehow blots his copybook, or simply cannot come up with another speech. Dastiyari's empty words will also be in line with Bill Shorten's plans, because Shorten clearly signalled that he was prepared to ram big population down the rest of our throats if he became leader of the opposition. The majority vote by ordinary labor members for Albanese was perhaps a reaction to this. We can expect a lot more Sam Dastyari's barracking for growth over democracy in Parliament, unfortunately.
12 NOON TODAY Steps of Parliament - NO TUNNELS
REMINDER - NO TUNNEL Snap Protest at 12 noon for a 12:15 pm start TODAY Thursday next 12 December 2013 on the steps of Parliament!
"Plan Melbourne" is not about planning, but property development
The whole "planning" of Melbourne is corrupt, and ruled by vested interests and distorted priorities. Melbourne's vital arteries are clogged, and already our city is crawling almost to a stand-still in many areas due to traffic congestion.
Planning should be holistic, not just allowing property developers access our suburbs for their profits. Planning should be about building hospitals, schools, ambulances, public transport, not just about cramming more people into our city, up to 8 million by 2050!
How are the public meant to agree and accept 70% of housing growth be confined to existing areas? Once a city is mature, adding more people and housing will simply clog up our city even more, exacerbating our city's problems. Already our infrastructure is heavily overloaded, and the $8 billion EW Link will absorb and suck out essential funding.
The East West link is not for the people, the commuters of Melbourne, but for the business lobby. Ironically, it's assumed that people living in the high density and high rise apartments will not need private transport, but the EW Link assumes private car use!
The EW Link is primarily to create Melbourne as the biggest transport hub in Australia. It's to support the supply chains of all the increasing imported goods we will be importing from overseas, thanks to the decline of even iconic national brands such as Qantas and Holden! With more and more shipping containers arriving with goods, they will need the EW Link to deliver them around the country. The empty shipping containers will continue to accumulate, symbolic of our empty economy, and empty policies coming from our State government.
No wonder Melbourne's planning committee is in disarray! It's a rort, full of contradictions and oxymorons.
Assault on Port of Hastings begins
n Friday, 6 December 2013 4:10 PM, Mike Lean (Port of Hastings Development Authority) wrote:
Dear Stakeholder,
The Port of Hastings Development Authority would like to advise that marine surveys will shortly commence as part of early planning for the Port of Hastings container expansion project.
The marine surveys will collect information on the physical and chemical characteristics of existing port areas and surrounds, by mapping the physical features of the seabed and taking seabed samples of soil and rock. This will provide the critical baseline information needed to inform port design and detailed scientific studies over the next three to four years of detailed planning for an expanded container port at Hastings.
Geotechnical surveys will be undertaken by specialist contractors, Worley Parsons, using two stationary jack-up barges, collecting core samples from the seabed.
Geophysical surveys will be undertaken by specialist contractors, Aurecon, using sonar reflection and profiling survey techniques to complete detailed mapping of the seabed.
The Authority and specialist contractors are preparing to begin the marine surveys from the 9th December 2013 onwards. Surveys will cease for the Christmas period, from the 21st December 2013, and resume on the 6th January 2014. Details of the surveys progress including weekly notifications of expected survey locations will be available at www.portofhastings.com.
In the interests of personal safety, mariners, recreational users and visitors are advised to keep clear of the barges and survey vessels, with a distance of 100m recommended, and to observe the Harbour Masters directions at all times. All surveys will be carried out under strict environmental controls and approvals.
For further information please call 1300 149 478, email [email protected] or visit www.portofhastings.com.au.
Yours sincerely,
Mike Lean
Chief Executive Officer
Port of Hastings Development Authority
2/34 High St Hastings Victoria 3915 (PO Box 129 Hastings Victoria 3915)
P 1300 149 478| F 03 5979 5555 |
E [email protected] | W www.portofhastings.com
Green light given to Great Barrier Reef dredging
Comment has been adapted to become article Expansion of Abbot Point Coal loader will cover Barrier Reef with silt and add to global warming. - Ed
Palm-oil free Australian products on this site plus info
http://www.palmoilinvestigations.org/palm-oil-free
Preserve forests for orangutans and everything else.
Lost species cannot be replaced
Say all living creatures belonged to us (humanity) and were our treasures in our collection. We could consider them as such if it helps. To lose precious and rare parts of our "collection'"progressivley is like an art collector time and time again losing unique masterpieces by famous dead artists. What unique species and masterpieces by dead artists have in common is that neither can be replaced.
Alarm at falling cocky numbers
This comment has been adapted to become the article Human overdevelopment threatens Carnaby's Black Cockatoos with extinction. The artcle includes an embedded Youtube broadcast. - Ed
Car deliberately steered off road to murder four kangaroos
Today I witnessed the aftermath of deliberate cruelty. I was called out to two injured adult roos and a Joey. It was in fact three adults and an at foot Joey that had been mowed down and left to die. All three adults and Joey had to be euthanised by the police.
When I got there two adult females had been euthanised but the Joey was still alive with blood seeping through the ear, lying on his side unable to move. Soon after we discovered another adult female on her side unable to get up and clearly in a lot of pain.
All four were in the tyre tracks of a car that had deliberately left the road to run them down.
What upset me most is knowing no one is going to be held accountable for this abhorrent cruelty.
The disassociation by the general public about the pain and grief native animals suffer sickens me. Can you imagine if it were someone's pets lying by the side of the road still alive? The whole street and the emergency services there would be there with demands to catch the perpetrators.
I managed to get a photographer from the local paper, the police and the council to come out to the scene of carnage of a 100 metre stretch of a quiet suburban, residential road. But why an earth were the residents who live on that road more eager to get to work on time than help these poor innocent kangaroos?
Sorry to off load with yet another case of cruelty. When I talk about this to non wildlife carers I get the look of 'it isn't a big deal'. But it is a big deal and until these sickos are hunted down and made to pay, nothing is going to change. Just a slap on the wrist with a wet lettuce leaf.
Holly x (Mudgee Wildlife Carers Network)
Independence for Australia
AUSTRALIA FIRST PARTY
Mr Lino A. Saputo Jr 24th November 2013
Chief Executive Officer
Saputo Incorporated OPEN LETTER
6869 Métropolitain Blvd East
Saint -Léonard. Québec H1P 1X
Canada
Dear Sir, RE: WARRNAMBOOL CHEESE AND BUTTER FACTORY
I write on behalf of members and concerned citizens, in relation to reports of your company’s intention for economic exploitation in seeking to purchase this iconic Australian enterprise in Warrnambool, Victoria.
The concern is that the any such undertaking by foreign corporations is imperialistic, undermines Australia’s integrity and independence, and is not in the interests of, nor ever been requested by the Australian People. We consider this a very serious matter.
Your attention is drawn to understanding that imperialism in the economy of Australia in dispossessing Australians of the ownership and benefit of our own resources, is an intolerable compromise of the Commonwealth of our People.
Your corporation may have been misled by elements of our political caste that foreign investment/ economic exploitation in our Australian Society is welcome, however be under no illusions as this position emanates from money changer’s Quislings. It may also be that your intent has been influenced by the same in their parroting for an “Asian Century” for Australians, albeit without any authority from our citizens, aware that this dogma offers nothing for our European derived civilisation.
I therefore caution your corporation against ignoring this situation in continuing with this imperialistic assault on our Australian Commonwealth, and bring to your notice that our Australian Peoples Movement, under the full authority of our People, will enforce without redress or compensation, the eradication of such pillaging of Australia’s economic interests, as a necessity for our national self respect and independence.
I urge your corporation to add to the process of mutual respect between the Australian and Canadian People by refraining from such imperialistic activity as has been reported.
To this end I request a public announcement from your corporation rescinding any such intent, which will effectively close this very important matter.
Your immediate attention will be appreciated.
Yours faithfully,
Bob Beavers
Assistant State Convenor
Melbourne Branch P. O. Box 223 Croydon 3136
www.australiafirstparty.net [email protected]
National Contact Line – 02 8587 0014
Latest news about Schapelle's struggle for justice on Twitter
The following pages, also linked to from the top of the main article, have up-to-date news on Schapelle's fight for justice:
womenforschapelle.blogspot.com.au and associated Twitter page (twitter.com/Women4Schapell1) - Kim Bax's Twitter page (twitter.com/KimBax2)
- thebobcarrcover-up.blogspot.com.au and associated Twitter page (https://twitter.com/BobCarrU)
Dissenting comments welcome and interesting
Wow. Strong words, excellent evocation of our predicament.
Thank you for posting.
Sheila N
Another dissenting opinion about Nelson Mandela
Jonathon Cook writes in The Legacy of Nelson Mandela: A Dissenting Opinion on Global Research on 6 Dec 2013 :
There was a price to be paid for [Nelson Mandela's] long walk to freedom, and the end of South Africa’s system of racial apartheid. Mandela was rehabilitated into an “elder statesman” in return for South Africa being rapidly transformed into an outpost of neoliberalism, prioritising the kind of economic apartheid most of us in the west are getting a strong dose of now. In my view, Mandela suffered a double tragedy in his post-prison years. First, he was reinvented as a bloodless icon, one that other leaders could appropriate to legitimise their own claims, as the figureheads of the “democratic west”, to integrity and moral superiority. After finally being allowed to join the western “club”, he could be regularly paraded as proof of the club’s democratic credentials and its ethical sensibility.
...
... He was forced to become a kind of Princess Diana, someone we could be allowed to love because he rarely said anything too threatening to the interests of the corporate elite who run the planet. ...
...
Our willingness to suspend our anger this week, to listen respectfully to those watery-eyed leaders who forced Mandela to reform from a fighter into a notable, keeps us in our slumber.
Next week there will be another reason not to struggle for our rights and our grandchildren’s rights to a decent life and a sustainable planet. There will always be a reason to worship at the feet of those who have no real power but are there to distract us from what truly matters. No one, not even a Mandela, can change things by him or herself. There are no Messiahs on their way, but there are many false gods designed to keep us pacified, divided and weak.
... and China is now making our vaccines
... come on is this Australia or soon to be CHINA?
Editorial comment: Whilst I don't preclude that that Australia may have lost self-reliance in this critical regard as it already has in a number of others, I have not been able to find any evidence on the web. Could you supply some links?
The haloed Mandela imposed neoliberalism on his supporters
The Telegraph article Tony Blair asked me to 'help invade Zimbabwe', says Thabo Mbeki, linked to from a Twitter post of 7 Dec 2013, shows Thabo Mbeki, who succeeded Nelson Mandela to become President of South Africa from 1999 until 2008, in a far more favourable light than the odious then British 'Labour' Prime Minister Tony Blair :
When Zimbabwe began sinking into economic collapse and political repression in 2000 ... Mr Mbeki favoured a negotiated settlement; Mr Blair wanted Mr Mugabe to go, by force if necessary.
Tony Blair ... was saying to the chief of the British armed forces, 'you must work out a military plan so we that can physically remove Robert Mugabe'." ...
...
Mr Mbeki explained that the idea was rejected on principle because Britain had no right to decide who leads African countries. ... "So we said 'no, let Zimbabweans sit down, let them talk'."
The fact that Robert Mugabe has been re-elected President in the elections of 31 July 2013 shows that Zimbabweans themselves didn't accept Tony Blair's claim that Zimbabwe was facing economic crisis or if it was, that Robert Mugabe was the cause.
In contrast to the seemingly principled stand taken by President Thabo Mbeki against military interference in Zimbabwe, Naomi Klein has shown that, far from liberating black South Africans, he as well as the former President, Nelson Mandela (1918-2013), who, since his recent death, has been haloed by the international mainstream media1, in fact, betrayed their own black supporters by imposing economic neoliberal disaster capitalism similar to what is described in the rest of Klein's book:
So, rather than calling for the nationalisation of the mines, Mandela and Mbeki began meeting with Harry Oppenheimer, former chairman of the mining giants Anglo-American and De Beers, the economic symbols of apartheid rule. Shortly after the 1994 election, they even submitted the ANC's economic program to Oppenheimer for approval and made several key revisions to address his concerns as well as those of other top industrialists.28 Hoping to avoid getting another shock from the market, Mandela, in his first post-election interview as president, carefully distanced himself from his previous statements favouring nationalisation. "In our economic policies ... there is not a single reference to things like nationalisation, and this is not accidental," he said. "There is not a single slogan that will connect us with any Marxist ideology."29 The financial press offered steady encouragement for this conversion; "Though the ANC still has a powerful leftist wing," The Wall Street Journal observed, "Mr Mandela has in recent days sounded more like Margaret Thatcher than the socialist revolutionary he was once thought to be."30
...
In June 1996, Mbeki unveiled the results: it was a neoliberal shock therapy for South Africa, calling for more privatisation, cutbacks to government spending, labor "flexibility," freer trade and even looser controls on money flows. According to Gelb, its overriding aim "was to signal to potential investors the government's (and specifically the ANC's) commitment to the prevailing orthodoxy."34 To make sure the message was loud and clear to traders in New York and London, at the public launch of the plan, Mbeki quipped, "Just call me a Thatcherite."35
- - from The Shock Doctrine - The rise of Disaster Capitalism (Penguin, 2007) by Naomi Klein, pp208-210 (most emphasis added).
Footnote[s]
1 ↑ Even the otherwise invaluably informative Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA - English translation) promotes the myths about the late Nelson Mandela, for example in its article Mandela, South Africa's anti-apartheid icon dies in Johannesburg of 6 Dec 2013 :
...
Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela was born in July 1918. He was the icon of South Africa's anti-apartheid struggle. Mandela served as South Africa's president from 1994 until 1999. He was elected in multiracial elections in 1994 to become South Africa's first black president.
His government had focused on dismantling the apartheid system through confronting institutional racism, poverty, inequality and on promoting the ethnic reconciliation.
Mandela's government also worked on promoting agrarian reform, fighting poverty and expanding health care services.
...
Inquiry told of cruelties as greyhound slaughter continues
Thousands of healthy greyhound puppies are disappearing, presumed killed, every year, but their deaths are not reported or investigated by the $144 million greyhound racing industry.
Shocking details about puppy farming and the mass killing of the pups have emerged as a record number of people and organisations told a NSW parliamentary inquiry about the dark practices of the greyhound industry.
In 2011, up to 3440 puppies were born in registered litters but disappeared before they were named. Naming is a prerequisite for the dogs to race.
''The industry is characterised by routine killings of puppies and dogs, greed and profits,'' a submission by rescue group Amazing Greys says.
It's not just puppies that are disappearing. There were possibly thousands of others from litters that had never been registered and discarded if they were injured or too slow. He said only a tiny fraction of these ''surplus dogs'' were found homes
Self-regulation in industries doesn't work. When animals are involved, the same groups profiting from their breeding, usage and disposal are those who are supposed to be in charge of their welfare! It's doomed to fail, similarly to the live export and other livestock industries.
Inquiry told of cruelties as greyhound slaughter continues unchecked
Asylum applications proposed, not random arrivals to Europe
There has been a new surge of migrant arrivals in Italy in the past week or so, despite the fact that the number of such attempts to cross the Mediterranean by boat usually decreases with the onset of winter.
"Migrants" by definition are those who choose to leave their countries to seek better lives. They are not "asylum seekers" who, by definition, are not safe in their own land.
European officials now propose allowing people to apply for asylum in Europe from abroad, part of a package of measures intended to discourage dangerous, illegal journeys like the one that cost the lives of hundreds of immigrants off the coast of Italy in October. This would allow refugees to go through the asylum-application process from abroad. This option, if implemented, could help thousands of people who might otherwise pay smugglers—and risk their lives on the journey—to seek asylum in Northern European countries that have a good track record of accepting such refugees.
Critics like Amnesty International and the International Red Cross argue, however, that the EU still focuses too much on protecting its borders rather than protecting people and saving lives. They would like to dissolve sovereignties. Lives would be saved if economic migrants weren't rewarded by being accepted so readily for successfully surviving dangerous sea crossings! It fuels the migration.
The effort is to "save lives" rather than dealing with the source of the problem. Overpopulation drives scarcities and conflicts, and drives up the numbers of asylum seekers to present day record numbers, and migrants to get a "better life".
The emphasis should be on genuine asylum seekers, not migrants!
Reply to comment | (We) can do better
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Irresponsible lack of planning
It's like a large battling family, irresponsibly continuing to have babies! They can't supply the family's needs, such as food, clothing, so they end up getting welfare to provide it for them! Governments need to be answerable to the public, as their role. To keep bringing in population, when already there is a huge backlog of infrastructure and overloaded services and "shortages" of facilities, it irresponsible.
The public should not be forced to pay for this massive population growth, especially as it's detrimental to living standards and our State's finances.
Already population growth is overloading our hospitals, roads, schools, and prisons. Why continue with the growth madness?
The only group to be advantaged is property developers, bankers and big businesses - and they won't contribute to all the population's needs.
"Planning" should be about providing health care, schools, public housing, public transport, jobs etc, not just the growth in housing.
increasing corporate powers promote growth
Big populations create a large pool of consumers as a potential resource for growing corporations to profit from. People are being accumulated for their benefit. It's a brute-force way to increase the size of the GDP, and keep afloat the price of housing.
Governments are increasingly being hijacked by business interests, due to the size of their lobby groups. Global markets mean businesses can gain more power than governments, and hold them to ransom.
Trade agreements means they can have a huge grip of how we consume, what we pay and how spend.
The Fairfax press, The Age and SMH, promote themselves as being "Independent Always" but on the contrary, they are big traders in real estate. Their heavily censored newspapers distort the truth, and the concerns of the public, especially over population issues.
Democracy is becoming more expensive, with fines and penalties for protesting increasing. Policies are being "streamlined" to over-ride public debate and inputs into planning our cities.
"Wealth" though amassing humans is the alternative to smaller and productive communities. It's cruel as living standards and democracy must eventually decline. This is why "diversity" is being promoted - more people immigrating from third world nations means they will be submissive, and captive to lower standards of living. Fragmented societies are less organised, united and this division is an advantage as governments become more autocratic.
Avaaz - Australia vs Big Tobacco industries
Australia has the strongest anti-smoking laws in the world. They’re so successful that other countries want to do the same. But Big Tobacco isn’t happy about this -- and the Australian government is about to agree to a deal that lets them trample all over us whenever they want.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a US-driven trade pact that that could let companies sue us to get rid of whichever of our hard-fought protections they don’t like. The whole deal is being negotiated in secret, and this weekend Trade Minister Robb is set to agree to ru! les none of us had a say in.
But opposition is building in Australia and other countries. Just today the ALP and Greens teamed up to demand transparency. Abbott’s team is on the ropes from the Indonesian spying scandal, let’s use this crucial opportunity to stall the talks and stand up for our health -- send a message to Minister Robb now!
Avaaz Petition: Selling out Australia's Democracy
Sea Shepherd accuses Coalition of backing away from pledge
The Coalition said it would send a Customs vessel to the Southern Ocean to monitor whaling activity by Japanese ships. Now, their promise is being diluted!
The Ocean Protector, an armed vessel designed to tackle illegal fishing in the Southern Ocean, is currently patrolling waters near Christmas Island as part of Operation Sovereign Borders.
A spokesman for the environment minister, Greg Hunt, said that the government hoped the International Court of Justice would rule in favour of Australia to prevent Japanese whaling in the coming season. Japan's defence at the court had more to do with their "cultural preferences", and they almost admitted that their "research" had little foundation!
Last week the New Zealand navy sent the HMNZS Otago to monitor fishing in the Antarctic region. Foreign Affairs Minister Murray McCully said it was important that New Zealand played its part in the region as a member country of the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources. However, the navy may not be able to monitor illegal fishing in the Southern Ocean because its ships are not up to the task.
New Zealand's navy patrol of the Antarctic fishery was cancelled because of concerns about its offshore patrol vessels' ability to operate in Antarctic waters. What sort of Antarctic patrol vessel is this, unable to operate in Antarctic waters? It will be back in NZ just as the Sea Shepherd crew arrive!
Too many successive governments have turned away from Japan's economic power, and abandoned Sea Shepherd. This government should stop turning a blind eye to whaling in our waters and should have a Customs vessel in the Southern Ocean. The Antarctic is a protected marine wildlife reserve, and its status needs to be protected from poachers.
Dredging set to swamp decades of Great Barrier Reef protection
Thanks to $200 million of taxpayers' money, and farmers efforts, the amount of dredge to be taken from the Great Barrier Reef has been reduced by 340,000 tonnes.
That's the good news!
The bad news is that 140 million tonnes of marine sediment are proposed to be dredged during port development in the Great Barrier Reef over the next decade, according to my calculations from port development plans.
That enormous amount of material in the water will have tremendous effect on marine creatures, such as dogongs, turtles, fish and seagrass. More developments are up for approval, including a decision by Environment Minister Tony Hunt, due by 13 December on whether Abbot Point can be expanded to become one of the world’s biggest coal ports, which would involve dumping 3 million cubic metres of dredged spoil into the reef.
This could do great damage to Australia too. Due to UNESCO listing, it could hurt Australia economically if it hit reef tourism, which brings in $6.4 billion a year in direct spending and employs more than 64,000 people.
Australia obviously can't look after the environment, either our unique biodiversity richness or our world class natural heritage. The Colonial mentality of slash, burn, cut, kill and dig still exists today, but with even bigger equipment! Despite all our understanding of environmental impacts and climate change, the destruction continues. It's profits and corporations against conservation and coal exports.
The problem of aiming for perpetual economic growth means continually loosening environmental controls, and losing control of what really values. We have such a rich natural heritage, being wrecked by incompetent governments and their slavery to corporate mega-dollars.
Brisbane Times: Dredging set to swamp decades of Great Barrier Reef protection
“Australia continues to give the go-ahead for the development of several new coal and natural gas ports within the Great Barrier Reef.” According to the presage of Blue Ocean Institute Founder, PBS’ Saving Oceans host, and award-winning author Carl Safina in National Geographic: “The continued destruction of the reef seems inevitable.”
Stop the palm oil industry’s assault on the Amazon
Palm oil companies in Peru are seeking permission to clear 100,000 hectares of rainforest.
Dear friends of the rainforests,
Environmentalists working in the Amazon rainforest in Peru have written to us to express their deep concern: palm oil companies and international speculators are buying vast tracts of rainforest from the government – even though clearing primary forest is illegal. Around 10,000 hectares of rainforest have already been felled illicitly to make room for oil palm monocultures.
Initially, the Peruvian government ignored protests by local residents. It was not until environmental activists informed the local press and put the illegal activities on the front pages that the authorities responded, sending the police and state prosecutor to investigate.
It has since come to light that plantation owners in Peru have requested permission to clear 100,000 hectares of Amazon rainforest for oil palms. And this appears to be just the beginning – millions of hectares are already being earmarked behind the scenes.
It’s not too late, however. Resistance is taking shape, but at great personal risk – environmental activists and the state prosecutor have received death threats. Yet the local residents want to preserve the Amazon rainforest and refuse to be intimidated.
Please help us support them and sign our petition to the Peruvian government to protest the destruction of this unique ecosystem for a sprawling oil palm monoculture.
TAKE ACTION
"Religion Report" refuses to substantiate war crime allegation
on 27 November ABC Radio National broadcast a provably false claim by the BBC1 that Syrian Government military forces had "dropped a 'napalm-like' bomb on a school playground nearby."
Susan Dirgham, National Coordinator of "Australians for Mussalaha (Reconciliation) in Syria" responded by posting the following to the program web page:
Dear Andrew,
For a number of reasons, I was greatly disturbed to hear this report on RN's 'Religion and Ethics Report'.
Firstly, there has been serious questioning about the authenticity of this report of a Syrian government attack on a school on 29 August. Even Craig Murray, a former UK ambassador, has suggested the original BBC report which featured Dr Ahsan's UK colleague was not reliable. Secondly, we are not informed by RN that Dr Ahsan was a captain in the UK army before she studied medicine and she has experience of war zones. Dr Ahsan is also very media savvy, having presented many programs on television; she even has an agent as she is a presenter for hire. Thirdly, we are not informed that Dr Ahsan must have crossed into Syria illegally to enter 'rebel' territory in the north and that the UK colleague she accompanied is purported to have family links to the militarized opposition. In crossing into Syria via the Turkish border, Dr Ahsan would have surely seen evidence of at least some of the thousands of foreign jihadists going into Syria to fight the regular army. Some go to fight for an Islamic caliphate, with Damascus as its capital, while others go because they hear dubious media reports such as this which make them believe Muslims are under attack and they need to be 'saved'.
In October, Rachel Kohn wrote on the 'Religion and Ethics Report' blog: "The assault on religious freedom is one of the most important trends in the world today, yet it remains under-reported and even ignored by most secular media outlets." This assault on religious freedom is occurring in Syria. In recent weeks, it has become even more evident that Christians have been particularly targeted by extremist fighters in Syria. Schools and school buses have been attacked, children and teachers killed. Ancient Christian towns, such as Maaloula where Aramaic is still spoken, have been attacked by 'rebels'. Many churches have been targeted, priests and bishops kidnapped and killed, yet instead of an accurate in-depth analysis of all this, "Religion and Ethics Report" presents what could be fairly described as very crude war propaganda.
Andrew West, presenter of the Religion and Ethics Report responded in an e-mail:
I have posted your comment but the interview quoted UN reports.
I'm simply not going to enter into a long debate about these matters, Susan.
On previous programs, we have pointed out the role of foreign jihadis and Saudi backed extremists.
But it is increasingly clear to me that you are unwilling to countenance any criticism of the Assad regime at all.2 There are no good guys3 in this fight.
Being a propagandist for Assad will have the same impact on me as being a propagandist for the jihadi "resistance". That is, none.
Please do not bombard me with material, as you did before or I will simply block your emails.
Footnote[s]
1. ↑ The BBC is known to have repeatedly lied to its audiences about the Syrian conflict. Evidence of this deceit about the Syrian conflict can be found in the following articles: BBC abandoning a pretense of journalism of 6 Oct 2013 on Voltaire Net, MEA CULPA: BBC world news editor: Houla massacre coverage based on opposition propaganda of 15 Jun 2012, The Criminal Voices of Media Propaganda. The Insidious Role of the BBC of 3 Sep 2013, The BBC: A Criminal Instrument in the War on Syria of 24 Aug 2013, Fake BBC Video: Irrefutable Evidence of a Stunning bit of Fakery by the BBC of 7 Oct 2013 and BBC Media Fabrications on Alleged Incendiary Bomb Attack in Aleppo, Syria of 5 Oct 2013 on Global Research and
The role of the BBC in the Syrian conflict of 3 Nov 2013 on Apophenia. The BBC was also found in a court case to have lied to protect the terrorists who committed the 9/11 false flag outrages.
The role of the BBC in the Syrian conflict of 3 Nov 2013 on Apophenia. The BBC was also found in a court case to have lied to protect the terrorists who committed the 9/11 false flag outrages.
2. ↑ In 2003, the fraudulent claim that the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein threatened its neighbours with Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) was used to justify the invasion which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Given that horrific death toll and that 120,00 Syrians have already died at the hands of the US-backed terrorists, why shouldn't Susan and others who wish to end the current war in Syria, be allowed to show that similar claims made against the government of the popular President Bashar al-Assad are equally fraudulent?
3. ↑ By use of terms like "good guys" and "bad guys" Andrew West is apparently attempting to trivialise this gravely serious conflict. If we must use such terminology, then surely the Syrian Government and the members of the Syrian armed forces, who, at a terrible price, have courageously defended their people against the sadistic terrorist invaders, are entitled to claim the label of the "good guys".
Senate demands end to secrecy on East West toll road
Originally published here on 2 Dec 2013 on Adam Bandt's web site. By Adam Bandt and Richard Di Natale. Re-posted to candobetter by Against Slavery.
A Greens motion to force the tabling of all documents that Infrastructure Australia has on the East-West toll road was passed on 2 December 2013 by the Senate.
Infrastructure Australia confirmed recently in Senate Estimates that the Victorian Government is yet to provide its full business case for the East West Link despite the Commonwealth Government planning to pour $1.5 billion into the toll road. It also confirmed that the new government had not asked it for advice on the East West link.
"The Senate today supported a Greens motion that will lift the veil of secrecy on the Coalition’s East West toll road," said Senator Di Natale, who moved the Order for the Production of Documents.v
"The Victorian and Federal Governments want to start paving the East West toll road without any proper public scrutiny. Tony Abbott promised to lead a transparent government but of course the Abbott Government has turned out to be about as transparent as a brick wall.
"On every issue, from climate change and education to infrastructure, Tony Abbott is determined to hide the evidence, deny the facts and ram through his reckless agenda. Today the Senate has said, 'enough is enough'."
Australian Greens Deputy Leader Adam Bandt said that the secrecy around the toll road was astounding.
"It is shocking that the government’s key infrastructure advisor has yet to see the full business case for the East-West toll road," said Mr Bandt.
"The government is trying to keep its business case secret because it knows the economics of the toll road don't add up.
"Well now we will know exactly what the Napthine government is saying to the key government adviser on Infrastructure."
Text of motion
The Senate orders that there be laid on the table by Infrastructure Australia or by the Infrastructure Coordinator by noon on Wednesday December 11 all documents in relation to the East West Link project provided to Infrastructure Australia by the Victorian Government, in particular but not restricted to the full business case.
UK independent MP George Galloway interviews Mother Agnes
The Interview with Mother Agnes Mariam features in the second half of the 26 minute episode of George Galloway's new Sputnik program, which is embedded below. The first half includes more material on the current Western-directed war against Syria.
Foreign property investors are driving up our population growth
Chinese interest in Australian residential property is booming, described as the biggest surge from an offshore market in his 30 years in real estate. Australia is undergoing a gold rush, with foreign investments in real estate. With the globalisation of our housing, it's not surprising that Australians new to the market are being squeezed out!
In some suburbs, 90% of the market is owned by Chinese investors.
Cashed-up buyers are snapping up everything from luxury harbour-side property in Sydney to apartments bought off the plan in Sydney, Melbourne the Gold Coast and Perth. It's assumed that Australia is still Terra Nullius, or an un-owned country, or international territory! The existing residents are being displaced and overwhelmed by increasingly rich Asians.
The Chinese owners can then decide to live here, for the lifestyle and the education opportunities. There's no reciprocal agreements for Australians to enjoy China's new prosperity.
The only limitation is that foreign buyers cannot buy existing or established homes in Australia. However, foreigners can buy new dwellings, off-the-plan houses or apartments under construction or yet to be built, or vacant land for development. Existing homes can be purchased by Australian property developers, and then they can transform them into multiple living spaces, to sell for big profits.
The whole predatory industry leaves little opportunity for Australians on average wages to compete in such big players!
The housing industry means we must grow our population to justify all the construction that's filling the hip pockets of investors. These apartment must have "fillers", and immigration rates must continue so that those building up equity in funds, and superannuation, are rewarded.
Victoria First will have heavy competition, and profits speak louder than logic, democratic concerns and grass-roots activities. There are some powerful allies in the pro-growth lobby!
The problem must first be acknowledged - over population.
Many migrants leave their home countries in order to diversify their livelihoods, increase their incomes and protect their families from risk. By having one or two family members working in Europe, households have a steady source of income.
Tens of thousands of African migrants who risk their lives to make the dangerous journey to Europe by boat each year. Others come hidden in the wheel hubs of tractor-trailers transported by ferry. Some even swim part of the way. Scores die en route.
The agricultural policies and farm subsidies are really making domestic production collapse in a lot of countries in Africa. Cheap food from the EU flooding the African market, and causing people to lose their jobs. There's extreme poverty across much of the African continent.
Due to Colonialism, the individualization of property led to the breakdown of traditional authority and community regulation over common resources.
Some scholars therefore believe that a return to the pre-colonial situation, when traditional institutions once prevailed, will empower communities to manage their resources more sustainably.
Colonialists used the colonies to provide raw materials and other resources for their own economic growth and development. The special attractions of Africa and Asia were, indeed, that they offered many of the raw materials needed by the multiplying factories of Europe: including cotton, silk, rubber, vegetable oils, and the rarer minerals.
Colonialism brought about exploitation of economies and resource primarily through conquest of markets for capital and commodities. Colonialism led to the transportation of many goods to the country which colonised it.
High birth rates contribute to overpopulation in many developing countries. Children are assets to many poor families because they provide labor, usually for farming.
What's needed is not mass exodus to Europe, where they are largely unwelcome, but family planning. The problem must be identified before it can be addressed. Accepting displacements and dangerous voyages, to countries with open borders, will not encourage domestic solutions to the problem of over population.
Ellen Brown:Public banking could fix failed global paper economy
The video embedded below was originally embedded in the article Public Banking: Taking Back Power from Finance Capitalists of 2 Oct 2013 by James Corbett and Ellen Brown on Global Research. In the video, Ellen Brown shows that if we were to replace the complex paper financial economy, based on private banking, with a public banking system in which the means (aka 'money') to facilitate the exchange of real wealth — artefacts, food, services, etc. — were simply issued by publicly owned banks, financial crises such as the global financial crises of 2007-2008 and all previous economic crises including Australian Treasurer Paul Keating's "recession we had to have" of 1992, the recession following the oil shock of 1973, the great depressions of 1929 and the 1890's, etc. could have been easily avoided.
Near the end of the interview, Ellen Brown explains how Australia's own (now misnamed) Commonwealth Bank (privatised, without any electoral mandate whatsoever, between 1992 and 1996 by the Federal 'Labor' governments of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating) made possible much of the prosperity and self-reliance Australia experienced until the late 20th century. Australia's participation in the First World War, unlike Great Britain's, was easily financed by the Commonwealth Bank (although Australia's participation in that war, which cost 60,000 Australian lives, was of questionable benefit to Australia and the rest of humanity).
Aung San Suu Kyi encourages Australians to be Australian
“I’d also like to remind you that you are unique and you do not have to go all Asian,” she said. "I understand that this is a trend of Australia today – to try to become ‘Asianised’ as it were.
“You are special because you are a unique combination of the east and the west.
“I hope and pray that Australia will … make an example of the possibility of genuine unity and diversity.”
Read more: "Aung San Suu Kyi awarded honorary doctorate from ANU
Read more: http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/aung-san-suu-kyi-awarded-honorary-doctorate-from-anu-20131129-2ygo7.html#ixzz2m1mFC0io
"
The above article makes a lot of 'diversity' and tones down Aung san suu Kyi's comment, however, what else could you expect of a woman who has been trying to save a tribe - the Burmese - from being lost to a mixed nation-state. She understands that you need local democracy and identification with a place and a people in order to survive and forge civil rights.
She is lauded for this by the very people who do not permit local solidarity in Australia and who want to atomize our society by imploding it with mass immigration.
How lame!
How lame! "Inghams does not tolerate the mistreatment of our livestock.... We condemn the animal abuse we have seen in the footage and will work to review, retrain and reinforce our animal welfare standards.."
It's sounds like pure political spin.
The hapless birds are doomed to be slaughtered anyway, so it's assumed by the executioners that seeing nobody is looking, they will have a little tortuous "fun" and watch the turkeys suffer!
With no job monitoring, in this macabre and sombre industry, how is slaughter to be "humane" anyway? This is more than "incidents". It's an ongoing mentality of closed-doors raising of birds and animals for industry. It's mass production, and factory-farming is the equivalent of the cruel days of exploiting children and adults in the British Industrial Revolution. It minimising living humans, and in this case birds, to mere throw-away commodities.
The industry would like to ban all monitoring of livestock production.
Every year in Australia between 3 and 5 million turkeys are killed for meat, the majority of which is consumed at Christmas time (though they suffer all year long!). It's to celebrate "peace on Earth" and "goodwill" at Christmas!
Big populations are a feeding ground for big corporate markets
While our economic model of perpetual and endless growth relishes on a growing population, it has little regard or ways of implementing the resultant huge domestic population! It's about enjoying the moment, ignoring the end result. Since parliamentary periods in government are short, they can simply celebrate the growth and leave the fall-outs to the next generation and next governments.
There are few politicians with any real vision. It's easy to concentrate of growth figures, GDP, and other objective and empirical data. There are many facets they should be considering, but they are under the wing of big businesses, drives to global markets and a huge number of consumers for profits.
Large numbers of Chinese investors are vying our real estate, and buying apartments off the plan. Chinese migrants are helping friends and family in China to skirt Australia's foreign investment rules by purchasing established homes on their behalf, agents have told News Corp newspapers. They're marketing them in Hong Kong, Singapore and China and Australians not even getting a look-in.
Globalisation and over-population are all about huge markets and buyers. It's a smorgasbord of opportunities for huge corporations, and nations with the buying power to overwhelm Australia - and our concerns. Government are increasingly being hijacked by big, international dollars.
Australia's population set to double to 46 million by 2075, ABS
The latest projections from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows Australia's population will double in the next 60 years, driven by strong increases in Victoria and New South Wales.
The bureau is projecting the population will soar from just under 23 million people to 46 million by 2075.
This growth is not a natural trend, due to confidence in our economy, healthy fertility levels and a bright future for humanity and the planet. This growth is socially-engineered by our open-border approach to economic growth - at all costs. The built-in growth that's evolved to be part of our economy is driving up our numbers, at a time people are worried about their futures and the welfare of our planet.
Australia has the highest rate of species extinctions, and this human growth will be the death-knell for many more, trying to hold out from deadly human impacts. Socially and environmentally, it will multiply our greenhouse gas emissions, and exacerbate the economic and social problems with have now. Jobs are failing to keep abreast with population growth, and housing is already unaffordable. More people will be permanently denied home ownership, and our infrastructure will bear double the load by 2075 that's already not able to cope. Where's the money coming from to provide for all these people, at a time when global resources are dwindling?
Australia is increasingly relying on overseas supplies of liquid fuel, and gas is plentiful, but it's an export market.
Our desert and semi-desert nation will be overloaded, at a time when climate change will have acted heavily on our ecosystems, and our "carrying capacity" will be reduced.
This growth madness has never been a more serious problem, especially on the background of global over-population.
We pay our politicians healthy salary packages to be our leaders, not make simplistic and naive one-dimensional decisions for "growth" at all costs! Policy-making should involve casting the net widely to gather information and data, and summarise trends, through consultation with government and non-government organisations, experts, scientists, and the public - the voters. There is no grounds for increasing our population to such dangerous levels - except to increase the size of our GDP - and force it up through brute-force!
Peninsula-Wide 13 October
Councils are beginning to react and object to the Plan Melbourne, and what's worshipped by our State government - "growth"!
As reported in Peninsula-Wide "As plans are being developed to guide metropolitan Melbourne’s growth from its current population of four million to six million by the early 2030s, the Shire’s challenge is to continue to be ‘near to but not part of Melbourne and its accelerating growth’.
Mornington Peninsula Shire Mayor Councillor Lynn Bowden said "the next
20 – 30 years will be one of the most challenging periods in the history of the
Mornington Peninsula.
“The Mornington Peninsula Shire is not – and does not want to be – a growth
municipality".
“Our community was talking to us about population growth, traffic and
transport, use of the coast and environmental protection, employment and
business, township character and green wedge and rural land use to name a few of the important issues".
Cr Bowden said “the Mornington Peninsula is critical in many ways to the
future sustainability, liveability and prosperity of the Melbourne region and
Council’s submissions have continued to emphasise the need for continuing
recognition and protection of the peninsula’s special roles and values”.
Planning should not be synonymous to GROWTH, but protecting and enhancing amenities, natural heritage, the environment, living standards and ambience. What's needed is a real and productive economy, not one that's entirely and mainly linked to housing and mortgages.
Petition - regarding an enquriy into Australia's population grow
After a strong start, signing has slowed. We know, based on polling, that 50% or more of people are concerned about population management. This means either the petition isn't reaching enough people or the message is not convincing them. Any thoughts?
Please sign the petition and forward to friends and colleagues.
Petition: Australia requires a public inquiry to determine a basis for the optimum rate of population growth
Vets claim live animals used as bait to train greyhounds
Revelations about the barbaric activity of using live "bait" for greyhound racing training have included details about the use of guinea pigs, rabbits, chickens, kittens and possums which have had their claws and teeth removed so they can't hurt the dogs, and being mauled to death in training sessions.
RSPCA NSW chief inspector David O'Shannessy said they had also received anonymous complaints but so far they had been unable to substantiate the claims.
Greyhound Racing NSW officials estimate that 3000 unwanted dogs a year are killed. But other estimates are as high as 6000. It is self regulated and because of that is an attractive target for corruption pressures. It's the case of "fox in charge of the chickens", and the honest ones lose out.
Rehoming greyhounds once they had finished their racing career was a problem because it's ''scandalously low'' the numbers who find new homes.
The inquiry has also heard that dogs have been mistreated, starved and dumped.
Vets claim live animals are used as bait to train greyhounds
Any use of animals for entertainment or industries is inherently flawed, and open to abuse and disposal of animals once they are not longer "useful" or valued commodities.
Public land hunting would remedy problem of wild dogs
Public land hunting would remedy this problem of wild dogs. Volunteer shooters are the way to go.
Editorial comment : I don't see how this 'solution' even relates to the problem or how it could be more effective than the proposal put in the article to properly fence the dogs into residential areas away from the dogs. The broader and more serious problem is that expansion of residential areas has greatly reduced the amount of land available to kangaroos and consequently their numbers. - Ed
Economy needs to deliver to us and future generations
Our economy must deliver to us and to future generations otherwise it is a failure or worse still a menace. It must provide a livelihood , a long term sense of material security and reasonable equality, within the limits of the environment in which it operates. The economy should be asking what it can do for us not what we can do for it! Right now it seems to be the boss and not to be pleased with us at all. It's a bit puzzling since most of us haven't done anything particularly wilful , at least not knowingly. Perhaps the intention or hope of living to a ripe old age is considered a bit uncooperative.
Indonesia's threat to end live exports!
This appalling industry has continued, despite public outcry of the extreme cruelty, and many exposures of the inability of the industry to self-regulate. The Indonesian government knows that our government is in the pockets of livestock exporters who desperately want this trade to continue.
What a perfect "revenge" for the spying allegations against our government?
Federal Agricultural minister Barnaby Joyce called off his trip to Indonesia, to talk about the live export trade.
Australia's live cattle exports which is estimated to be worth around $174 million a year. It used to be quoted as worth $1 billion!
Australia's reputation as an honest nation, with high standards of diplomacy, democracy, trade and animal welfare, is being torn apart by this atrocious trade. How can live animals be abandoned to Third World abattoirs, where workers have no standards, animals are hacked and sawed at without being stunned.
After the 2011 ban, Indonesia was embarrassed, and retaliated by claiming that they would strive to be "self-sufficient" in red meat!
This is not a "threat" but would be a victory for humane treatment of animals, and a sign that the live export industry is not economically, politically, environmentally or morally sustainable.
To add to the revenge, a senior Indonesian immigration official says he will no longer take measures to stop asylum seekers attempting to take boats to Australia as the spying fallout continues.
Indonesia can hardly take the high moral ground! Their atrocities and invasions of East Timor, West Papua and appalling human rights record hardly gives then this authority. Indonesia’s vibrant media routinely reports on crucial social and political issues including corruption, environmental destruction, and violence against religious minorities. But a rising climate of religious intolerance and an infrastructure of discriminatory national and local laws deny freedom of expression to Indonesia’s religious minorities.
Upon arrival in Indonesia, cattle are offloaded in a country with no enforceable animal welfare laws. They are held in feedlots for further fattening. Some cattle will be stunned prior to slaughter. Some will be slaughtered by having their throat cut, while fully conscious.
They may be killed in ways that would be illegal in Australia.
Exporting live animals for slaughter is cruel.
Our government just wants us dead
Fantastic Sheila! Put it out there as by the time we are all able to retire we will be just about o our death beds. That's what the government want so they do not have to fund us.
What's the real purpose of our economy?
It's a cruel and unrealistic assessment of the Productivity Commission to evaluate the value of older people in purely economic terms. Increasing the pension age does not mean that people will be working longer, and it's often hard to get jobs after 40! It could just prolong poverty and disadvantage.
In the past, people would work in the same job for most of their lives, with the same employer. Times have changed, and unemployment has increased and so have casual jobs.
This plan attacks people who have worked hard to own their own home. Eating up the house to pay for aged care will also deny descendants a chance to inherit a home, and for many people - thanks to the Ponzi housing based economic scheme - will be the only way they can afford one now!
This plan is about robbing older people of all governments can get, and vilify them as "unproductive". Most volunteer jobs are done by the retired, and also they support working families by providing childcare, care for the ill, and the wisdom and stability that comes with ageing and maturity.
People are not mere economic commodities, to be evaluated and assessed for their contribution towards economic growth! The economy is a system, a tool, to provide for human communities and the welfare of individuals in their youth, sickness, at times of vulnerability, and old age. If the economy becomes predatory, hostile, and each generation must suffer from a downgrade of living and working conditions, it needs to be reassessed as to it's real purpose.
Urban planning and population density
Nimby, you say "urban planning has lost any professional status". Some planners have a vested interest in growth; others have to abide by their political masters' directions. Also, town planning is such a multi-disciplinary profession that planners must rely on the input of a wide range of professions, such as economists, geographers, architects, sociologists, environmental scientists, transport planners and construction engineers. If they fail to do this they can come up with some bizarre ideas.
Consider, for example, the article in the Melbourne Age, 8/11/13 by planners Kim Dovey and David Yenkin, in which they claim
"Proponents of tall buildings see height and density as necessary for economic growth, urban vitality and variety in housing stock ; opponents see the damage they do to the urban character and street-life of the city." Is this a balanced and valid appraisal of the arguments for and against high density development? No. It is nonsense to say that high density is necessary for economic growth. It is a by-product of growth - an unpleasant by-product!
They go on to claim that concentrated populations will:
1. Generate wealth. To the contrary, wealth is destroyed when existing buildings are demolished to make way for taller buildings or road widening. Incidentally, this destruction is not included as a negative contribution to GDP, as with all the other environmental devastation caused by population growth.
2. Raise productivity by enabling closer personal and business contact.
True to some extent, but in large agglomerations, such as Melbourne, these benefits are far outweighed by worsening traffic congestion and all the other symptoms of overcrowding.
3. Enable greater use of spare capacity in the transport network. This may be true of the rail network to the extent that trains could run more frequently, but certainly not for our grossly over-crowded road system, which is being forced into costly expansion (underground tunnels, etc.) to increase capacity.
4. Reduce rents by spreading land costs over greater numbers. This is over-simplified economics. Supply and demand theory tells us that, as populations increase, demand outstrips supply resulting in higher land prices. Developers are willing to pay the higher prices because they know they can pass on the higher costs to renters by spreading the higher costs over a larger number of storeys. Rents are unlikely to be reduced, because of the higher cost of land in the first place, but certain to increase because of the much higher per unit cost of high-rise construction. And the significance for low-income earners is that, because of population growth, they can be priced out of the housing market and into a rent-dependency poverty trap.
5. Create jobs. Good grief! Have town planners developed a new theory of employment that has not yet found its way into economics text books?
Here is another example of convoluted town planning thinking - in the editorial of Urban Policy and Research, Vol. 18, No. 4, Dec. 2000. "It is not population growth that will do the (world environmental) damage, any more than it is population size that tells us how much damage is now being done or has been done in the past. It is economic growth on the unregulated, fossil fuelled, market based and neoliberal model multiplied by population size that will cause the disaster."
Make sense of that? Population growth has no bearing on population size? Could it be that town planners' careers are dependant on growth but not size "in this delightfully uncrowded country" (p.428)?
Australias abandonment of greenhouse gas emission targets
In September, the U.N. panel of climate scientists said that world temperature rises were headed to exceed 2.0C under most of its scenarios. It said that limiting warming would require "substantial and sustained" cuts in emissions.
Australia's new policies under the Coalition government, shifting from an emissions trading scheme, would marginally raise emissions, adding to a problem that many nations were failing to stick to curbs on emissions agreed in 2009.
What will raise emissions is our politically engineered population growth by 2020, estimated to be 25.2 million. The Climate Change Authority has described our the existing emissions reduction target of 5% by 2020 as “inadequate” and “not a credible option”.
In a report, Population growth and Australia's greenhouse gas emission commitments , Bob Birrell and Ernest Healy from Monash University's Centre for Population and Urban Research found "83 per cent of the forecast increase in carbon emissions from 2000 to 2020 is attributable to population growth".
Contradictorily, we are attempting to cut emissions by 5 per cent by 2020. This strategy means our target is actually more like a 25 per cent reduction in per capita terms, to achieve just 5 per cent in total. If 25 per cent is anywhere near achievable, imagine what we could do with a stable population!
No wonder the Australian government is in climate change denial. Our government is still in the big "growth" fixation, rather than willing to admit it's time to slow down and face reality.
No wonder Australia pulled a triple bad start of the UN climate change conference at Warsaw by being awarded Fossil of the Day on the summit’s first day. The award is given by the international Climate Action Network to the country which has done the most to block progress at the climate change negotiations on that day.
Questions and shows the downside
It questions the assertion in the letter it is responding to that Sydney is an "International city" therefore a destination for the whole world. That assertion was supposed to make us all re-think Sydney and in our minds throw it away as part of Australia. The first letter suited the SMH and this one negates the "don't care" attitude it was meant to engender. On top of that it spells out the economic downside of population growth and we can't have that.
SMH did not publish this letter - wonder why?
Since when did Sydney rescind from Australia's sovereignty and become an "international city", as assumed by Stephen Hegedus? (letters 18/11). This generation should not have to lower expectations of home ownership
and living standards, what was enjoyed by previous generations.
If Manhattan is an example of unaffordable housing, then this is what we need to avoid, not celebrate!
The problem is the Ponzi housing and economic growth scheme, supported and promoted by our governments. While it's easy to point the finger at the greed of investors, and the GFC, they all exacerbate the public's
slide down the Ponzi of endless population growth, and the privileges it gives to the investors and bankers at the pyramid's apex. Such pyramid schemes thrive on accumulating more and more victims, adding to homelessness, debt, unemployment, costs of living and intergenerational declines in life's expectations.
A stable population would level out the costs of housing, and ensure that future generations are not denied the well-being, living standards and opportunities enjoyed by past generations.
Kangaroos and wildlife have no protection
Kangaroos and other wildlife are being forced off their lands, and killed cruelly by on-going human occupation - and various forms of land use. They are hounded and mercilessly being forced out of living in their own country. The cost of feral animals, and livestock for agricultural use, is massive. Property developers are some of the worst land-grabbers, with their concrete and housing construction. People then bring in their pets, vehicles, and lethal baggage, to the detriment of kangaroos - and then accused of causing car crashes and being in "plague" proportions!
Mother Agnes excluded from [Don't] Stop the War conference
Mother Agnes and the ‘liberal’ hawks out to silence her
of 20 November 2013 by Neil Clark on Russia Today
Just when you thought the ‘liberal interventionists’ and neo-cons couldn’t stoop any lower, they just have.
The ‘pro-free speech’ but actually very anti-free speech bullies have got a new target. A 61-year old nun called Mother Agnes-Mariam who has been living in Syria for twenty years and who runs a campaign called Mussahala (Reconciliation).
For the West‘s ‘liberal hawks’ and serial interventionists, this elderly lady, who is working tirelessly for peace and an end to the bloodshed in Syria, has become Public Enemy Number One.
Mother Agnes has been subject to a vicious internet campaign of character assassination, smears and defamation. We’ve been told that she is an ‘Assad apologist,’ ‘Assad‘s favourite nun’- she has even been called ‘the Syrian equivalent of one of Hitler’s brown priests’.
When the liberal hawks and serial warmongers saw that Mother Agnes had been invited to speak at the forthcoming international conference of Stop the War, they had a collective hissy fit.
of 17 November 2013 by Neil Clark
‘Investigative Journalist’ Scahill Takes Swipe at Mother Agnes
of 17 November 2013 by Richard Edmondson
Jeremy Scahill, the “investigative journalist” who once publicly expressed his belief in the official 9/11 story, says he won’t take part in an international antiwar conference scheduled for later this month if he has to share the same platform with Syrian nun Mother Agnes.
Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Act of 2012
The scale of suffering in after the Philippines typhoon has been worsened by the fivefold increase in the population since 1950, from less than 19 million then to almost 100 million today - many of them living in vulnerable coastal zones.
One hectare of mangroves in the Philippines can yield 400 kilos of fish, shrimps, crabmeat, molluscs and sea cucumbers annually, and help feed a further 400 kilos of fish and 75 kilos of shrimps that mature elsewhere.
Mangroves of Bangladesh remain largely unaffected over the years. On the contrary, Pakistan, Thailand, Myanmar, and Philippines continued to suffer the loss of mangroves. With a disappearing rate of more than 2% per year, particularly mangroves in Pakistan and Myanmar remain critically threatened.
The unmet need for voluntary family planning among the Philippines' poor has been high, leading many women and adolescents to become pregnant earlier and more often than they intend. On average, the country's poorest women have two more children than they say they want. The fertility rates among the poor are nearly three times higher than among the country's rich, who have for years enjoyed access to family planning through private providers.
Philippine President Benigno Aquino late last year signed the Responsible Parenthood and Reproductive Health Act of 2012. To poor women in the Philippines, this means that government health centers will have to make reproductive health education, maternal health care and contraceptives available to everyone. It is a life-saving measure that will help end the cycle of poverty in this Southeast Asia island nation.
The good news is that more Filipino couples are now practicing family planning, therefore slowing the growth rate of the country's population, an official of the Commission on Population (PopCom) said. The PopCom support the implementation of the reproductive health (RH) law will further slow down the country's population growth rate.
overpopulation makes people vulnerable to extreme weather
The single biggest contributing factor to the increase in devastation brought by natural disasters in recent years is the rapid growth of the world’s population. Particularly in developing countries such as the Philippines, urban areas are hugely overpopulated meaning more people are naturally in the ‘firing zone’ when disasters strike.
Global population is set to rise to 8 or 9 billion by 2050, and more people will be living in crowded and cramped housing in more extreme places, vulnerable to climate change and weather extremes. Scientists largely agree that it appears that storms will become more powerful as the climate changes.
The problems of Philippines are poor urban planning, an exploding population, climate change and systemic poverty – all contributing factors to the death and destruction left in the super typhoon's wake. The population was very high where the storm made landfall so with those two facts alone would create a potential for a disaster. Not surprising is the little in the media about the role massive overpopulation, and that plays in this disaster--too many people in too small an area with limited resources is a huge reason contributing to the loss of life.
Mangrove regeneration in Northern Samar, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) north of the worst-hit Philippine city of Tacloban, helped minimise damage from the Nov. 8 storm, according to the Trowel Development Foundation, which oversaw the plantings.
According to the WWF, Mangrove forests are one of the world’s most threatened tropical ecosystems. More than 35% of the world’s mangroves are already gone. The figure is as high as 50% in countries such as India, the Philippines, and Vietnam, while in the Americas they are being cleared at a rate faster than tropical rainforests.
ForceChange - Stop the Abuse of Racing Greyhounds
Sign the PETITION: Forcechange
Dear Greyhound Racing NSW Chief Executive Brent Hogan,
A recent inquiry into Australia’s greyhound racing industry uncovered mass euthanasia, mistreatment, drugging, and neglect toward dogs. As the world’s largest dog racing industry, it is imperative that Australia’s standards for treatment are improved and enforced.
Over 3000 greyhounds per year are euthanized after being deemed unprofitable, while only 52 have been adopted into family homes. Reasons for this mass euthanasia span from injuries to simply being not fast enough to race. Some injured dogs are given pain-killing narcotics and forced to race anyway, which causes further detriment to an injury and could result in permanent disability.
Other dogs are given performance-enhancing drugs such as hormones, or conventional drugs such as cocaine, caffeine, or amphetamines which are unlikely to show up on a test of a dog’s blood. Like in humans, these drugs can have adverse effects on the cardiovascular and nervous systems.
Veterinarians report that many dogs surrendered by the racing industry arrive in poor condition. Female dogs grow feeble after birthing too many puppies, while others show signs of neglect and starvation. Some even require emergency treatment – one dog lost its eye after an angry owner hit it with a belt buckle.
I demand that tighter regulations be imposed to cut down on Australia’s dog racing cruelty. Fewer dogs should be bred per year to cut down on the rate of unwanted dogs, while more funds should be allotted to adoption programs and shelters that take in the industry’s unwanted dogs. Owners that neglect and force drugs upon their dogs should immediately lose their ability to race and breed greyhounds.
Sincerely,
[Your Name Here]
Russia Today remembers the 50th anniversary of JFK's murder
As the 50th anniversary of JFK's murder on 22 November approached, the mainstream media (msm) and phony alternate media, could no longer, with any credibility, continue to ignore the late President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. In 1991 Oliver Stone, for a while, awakened interest from the broader public in Kennedy with his epic movie JFK starring Kevin Costner. Costner played Jim Garrison (1921-1992) the District Attorney of Orleans Parish, who tried to bring the murderers of JFK to justice and, upon whose book, On the Trail of the Assassins, JFK is based.
Since then, the msm recommenced its disappearance of President Kennedy, who if nothing else, was handsome, glamorous, witty and charming. At 43 years of age upon his inauguration in January 1962, he was the youngest ever President of the United States. Any other former President with those qualities and nothing else, would have been written about extensively in the msm in past decades. Instead, his story was forgotten except for the occasional sensationalised reporting of alleged sexual indiscretions by Kennedy.
In recent weeks, a supposed 'commemoration' of the approaching 50th anniversary has begun by amongst others, Australia's SBS television, consisting mostly of 'documentaries' which conceal most of the important facts about him and his murder. Instead, they focus on his romance with Jacqueline and trivial controversies. One such 'controversy' is Australian detective Colin McLaren's theory that the fatal shot came from a car directly behind the President. His 192 page book, which addresses not one of the other controversies of the day nor anything else about President Kennedy, contains no section of other works on the assassination of Kennedy. Why the SBS considers credible any 'researcher' who has not referred to the many other published works on Kennedy's assassination is not clear.
To the contrary, Russia Today published in a country, which was three times saved from the devastation of nuclear war by President Kennedy's courage, have begun to make known the true significance of JFK and the conspiracy to murder him. The article is 50yrs after JFK assassination: Choose your side in war on freedom of 18 Nov 2013 by former BBC journalist Tony Gosling.
One other site on which credible reporting of the 50th anniversary is to be found is Global Research (GR) although I feel that the issue deserves more prominence by GR. The republished review of James Douglass's excellent JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters is most helpful.
Where does one start with stopping animal mistreatment?
I watched the program about greyhounds and the lasting image for me was that a dog could be wagging its tail one minute and a few minutes later it had been drained of blood, its dead body mere refuse. Apart from the exploitation and cruelty to the dogs, what is this doing to the psyches of the veterinary nurses who do this work?
The ABC ran a show last night the horrors of Surabaya Zoo. Images were the mixed species version of the Rake's Progress to Bedlam. Worse. It was appalling. I knew about it already from a friend who has lived in Indonesia, for many years. Animals in shocking condition crammed in to tiny, filthy cages, malnourished, poisoned even with food contaminated with formaldahide. Animals Australia has put in enormous efforts on behalf of exported live cattle but still it goes on. The horrors of human treatment of animals is overwhelmingly terrible and it is hard to know where to start in changing anything. Somewhere I guess is the answer.
East-West Link
Trains, trains and more ttrains...........
Trains run mainly on the plains
And nobody ever complains.
Trucks, cars too many to score
Polluting the air forever more.
Pollies, big business it is their aim
To give us, but, more of the same.
Wreck our houses and our parks
The car lobby, the loud dog barks.
Do it my way son or not at all -
Do it my way or you're sure to fall.
So like it or lump it, you out there
Coz in the end, we don't care!
We do care and in the end
Read the message that we'll send.
It'll be that you're out on your ear
Remember, that we live here!!!
John Bentley