Miscellaneous comments from 5 May 2012

Nearly 900 dolphins and at least 5,000 birds, mostly pelicans, have died off Peru's northern coast, the government has confirmed. One non-government conservation organisation, known as ORCA, has blamed the dolphin deaths on oil exploration activities in the area, which it claims produces noises which are having an acoustic impact on the mammals. One non-government conservation organisation, known as ORCA, has blamed the dolphin deaths on oil exploration activities in the area, which it claims produces noises which are having an acoustic impact on the mammals. The Peruvian environmental group Orca has said that sound waves from the seismic work appeared to be the likely cause. Peru’s government is blaming an alien infiltration for the unexplained killing of thousands of dolphins. Dr. John Malley, the leader of the Panel, met with the IPCE (Instituto Peruano de Contacto Extraterrestre) and told them that the aliens are clearly from Planet Gootan. ”The Gootans have been ramping up their attacks on mammals on the planet, and it’s only a matter of time before they attack humans,” Malley said. Sue Rocca, an American marine biologist with the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, the leading international environmental group dedicated to marine mammals, agreed with suspicions about seismic testing by US oil company BPZ. "There are all the tell-tale signs of seismic [testing]” she told GlobalPost, adding that US Navy divers had been known to have seizures after being exposed to seismic testing. “It is an extremely painful experience for dolphins. They are very acoustic animals and these are huge, frightening sounds. For years, we thought marine mammals couldn’t get the bends. Unfortunately, we now know that that is not true.”

Sustainable Population Australia is conducting a petition to be presented to the House of Representatives. The goal is to collect one hundred thousand signatures of people who agree with the need for parliament to take action on population. Population growth is on the rise again with a 30 per cent surge in net overseas migration over the seven months to the end of March. Australian Conservation Foundation also criticised the increase in the skilled migration program, resulting in an unsustainably large total migration program of 190,000. “Australia could easily reduce the total migration program without damaging our economy which would put us on track to stabilise our population, protect our quality of life and ease the pressure on our natural environment.” You can add you name to the electronic version of the petition to the right. PETITION

"Race is not an issue in concerns about our population growth"

Letters to The Canberra Times

Date: May 15 2012

Marcus Mannheim's opinion piece (''Racists wearing green clothes'', Forum, May 12, p3 [1]) shows the extremes to which promoters of rapid population growth are led. He begins with a straw-man ploy against those who write to him complaining that his Public Sector Informant fails to question Australia's annual rates of population growth. (The demographer Graeme Hugo says these rates are more than three times the average of advanced countries.) Mannheim claims his critics are extremists who plan to slash Australia's population by ''genocide''!

Not so, there is no practical or humane way to reduce population quickly. That is precisely why responsible policy makers must ensure that each country steers away from over-population, as both the Australian Academy of Science and the Royal Society have pointed out. Was [former Treasury secretary] Ken Henry a ''green racist'' when he suggested that Australia had passed its sustainable population, and expressed concern at the government's course, which would lead to 35 million Australians by 2050?

As for Mannheim's other main claim, that rapid population growth is fine because we're all going to reduce our consumption of resources, he cites two flimsy authorities. First, the politician Andrew Leigh who, it seems, believes that technology will sustain an ever-increasing population - but who is no expert on demography or technology.

Secondly, Mannheim cites an ACT Legislative Assembly committee which, he claims, found that growth was not a problem because ''populations sometimes significantly reduce their rates of consumption and, in turn, their ecological footprints''.

I challenge Mannheim to cite one Australian city where a growing population has genuinely reduced its overall consumption.

Mark O'Connor, Lyneham

Comment: Thank you for posting this. I somehow doubt that Mannheim will rise to meet Mark O'Connor's challenge, but please let us know should he do so. - Ed

See also: Population stabilization "immature"? of 21  May below - Ed

Footnote(s)

[1] Also in the SMH and Brisbane Times.

By William Bourke "Although some politicians and media commentators would have you believe otherwise, ‘big Australia’ population growth is not about boats or refugees. It really boils down to planes. Australia’s total annual intake of around 14,000 refugees makes up only four per cent of our recent annual population growth of around 350,000 people. More importantly, asylum seekers arriving by boat (around 5,000 per annum) make up less than two per cent. In any case, boat arrivals do not increase Australia's rate of population growth. This is because asylum seekers that are deemed to be genuine refugees are included within the total number of refugees we accept each year. The population issue is really about an excess of permanent immigrants over permanent emigrants, combined with a temporary excess of births over deaths. At present, including our open borders arrangement with New Zealand, our excess of permanent immigrants is nearly 200,000 per annum. Our excess of births is presently around 150,000 per annum. However, with the current fertility rate of around two children per woman, births and deaths will naturally find equilibrium over coming decades." The rest can be read and you can leave comments: Refugee boats: a plane distraction

This is a response to Where has it ever been disputed that Nazi Germany started WW2? - Ed

Maybe you should stop living in a propaganda cocoon and do some real research instead of rehashing wartime canards. To say the invasion of Poland was without provocation is an out and out lie. The German government tried negotiation with the Polish government for years before deciding on a military option. www.cwporter.com/letter13.htm Two objective books on the subject - The Forced War by David L.Hoggan and The War That Had Many Fathers by Gerd Schultze-Rhonhof. They also appealed to the League of Nations to help arbitrate the peaceful return of land which they lost due to the treaty of Versailles. The Polish government which consisted of a military junta took a belligerent attitude and refused to negotiate because of the British guarantee of aid in case of war with Germany. The Polish military welcomed war with Germany because they thought they would win having defeated the Red Army of the USSR in the 1920's when they invaded Poland. Behind the scenes the administration of US president Franklin Roosevelt was also fanning the flames of war by secretly promising the Poles assistance. www.ihr.org/jhr/v04/v04p135_Weber.html

There is also the fact that ethnic Germans in Poland were being massacred which was confirmed by observers from neutral countries and the Red Cross. www.jrbooksonline.com/polish_atrocities.htm The warmongers in Britain and France got their wish when those countries declared war on Germany. The fact that Britain and France didn't declare war on the Soviet Union when it invaded Poland is proof positive that the British and French governments did not care about Poland or it's people they simply used it as an excuse to go to war against Germany. This was made even more glaringly obvious in 1945 when Poland, the reason for going to war in the first place, was given to Stalin and turned into a communist dictatorship. So much for going to war for the independence of Poland! I might point out that Stalin was a lot worse than Hitler. He was busy killing millions of people before Hitler came to power, he was busy killing millions of people while Hitler was in power and he was busy killing millions of people after Hitler left power. For instance in 1933 when Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany Stalin was busy starving ten million Ukrainians to death in a man made famine called the www.holodomor.org And the slave labour camps of the gulag existed before there were nazi concentration camps. The fact that you support an alliance with such a blood drenched, mass murdering tyrant as Stalin shows that you are morally bankrupt. As for saying that Germany/Japan are responsible for all 60 million deaths of world war 2 this is rubbish. Where does personal responsibility start with you? Both sides are to blame for any deaths. Whoever pulled a trigger or dropped a bomb from whichever countries armed forces are to blame. How can you say Hitler is responsible for the soviet massacre of Polish officers at Katyn? That's just rubbish. How can you say the Japanese are responsible for the Anglo-American firebombing of Dresden? More rubbish. For your information Hitler made many peace feelers to Britain through neutral Sweden and Switzerland as he was an Anglophile and didn't want war with that country to begin with. Rudolf Hess risked his life flying to Scotland in an attempt at a peace mission. It was Roosevelt and Churchill who with their insistence on unconditional surrender that prolonged the war and caused many more millions of casualties on both sides. Instead of a negotiated peace through neutral channels they made it a fight to the death. World war 2 ended in 1945 - that's 67 years ago! It's about time people started looking at that conflict in a more even handed and objective manner instead of regurgitating anti nazi and anti japanese propaganda.

Editorial Comment: Whilst much that is contained in this post is true, I can't say if I can draw from that the same conclusions that Robert Brasillach does. At least the 'propaganda cocoon' Geoffrey Taylor is living in does not in include the lies of 9/11, 'incubator babies', 'Iraqi WMDs' which have been used in the last two decades to start wars in which over 2 mlliion have died. I would be interested to hear from Robert that he also rejects those lies.

Gina Rinehart, has won an historic deal from the Gillard Government to import more than 1700 foreign workers for a $9.5 billion mining project in the Pilbara. As the Prime Minister faces renewed rumblings about her leadership, some senior Labor MPs turned their anger on Immigration Minister Chris Bowen and vowed to fight to water down the deal. The Labor leaders have betrayed their grassroots - the workers of Australia. Unions say Australian workers should be the priority. Immigration Minister Chris Bowen on Friday announced that the nation's first enterprise migration agreement (EMA) had been reached with Gina Rinehart's $9.5 billion Roy Hill iron ore project in Western Australia's Pilbara region. There were not enough people in the local workforce to get the job done. Surely existing Australians looking for employment are more "local" than foreigners? It was revealed earlier that Ms Gillard, who had been in the United States, was not informed of the decision until she returned to Australia on Wednesday. It's obvious who is running our nation - the richest mining moguls and wealthy corporations. The announcement was made by the Immigration Minister, Chris Bowen, and the Minister for Resources, Martin Ferguson, and Ms Gillard was uneasy at the message the deal would send. Skills Minister Chris Evans says the deal is a necessary step to manage the workforce, saying the move is a "sensible economic solution". If Australia lacks skills it's because our tertiary education system is failing to provide them, and universities are too focused on the economic benefits of educating foreign students, they're too expensive and there's not enough jobs to train on and gain skills. Jobs are going off-shore. Ms Gillard went into damage-control mode, saying that a "jobs board'' would be created that would give Australian workers information about what jobs were available in the resources sector. What about supporting local manufacturing, limiting globalization, buying back some of our own infrastructure and utilities, and investing more in TAFE and tertiary education? Foreign workers are more amenable, cheaper, and their numbers are uncapped. Many of them end up being sponsored for permanent residency by their employers. This is only a short-term solution to skills shortages. Foreign workers could solve the immediate problem, leading to less investment in skill training. Also, once they have PR they are likely to sponsor their relatives under the family reunion scheme, bringing in more people who may not have skills. The "Asian Century" means that Australia is a sub-set of Asia's booming economy, and we must homogenize our work force and population accordingly. Phillip Ruthven, 1998, Chairman of IBIS Business Information said: "By 2025 Australia was likely to have ceded some sovereignty over population and some financial and legal matters to a grouping based on our closer neighbours in the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) countries".

Over the years that I have been nursing I have heard nothing but criticism about nursing courses being taken from hospitals to Universities. Now that Universities are demanding nurses pay $10,000 to do a 3 month refresher course the anti-nurse lobby is happy. I am a University trained nurse and 3 years into my career I was forced out of the industry due to a work injury. After being out of nursing for 10 years I did a refresher course within a hospital setting and met all the requirements of AHPRA within 6 weeks, thus I was re-registered and able to resume normal nursing duties again. I then commenced work and rapidly moved into senior roles. The point I am making is that the fundamental skills in nursing never change, thus there is absolutely no reason why nurses should be forced to pay $10,000 to do a refresher course or (worse) retrain from scratch. If you ask me they could do a one month online refresher course followed by a two month supervised clinical placement to bring their skills up to date. This would save a lot of time and it would be very cost efficient. As it is PCAs do a 3 week government funded course and they are allowed to administer drugs in nursing homes even though they have had no formal training in pharmacology or drug calculations. If the government was really concerned about the welfare of Australians, they would fund the refresher course for nurses instead of replacing them with unskilled labourers. Source of above comment More of NurseUncut

Across the vast Pacific, the mighty bluefin tuna carried radioactive contamination that leaked from Japan's crippled nuclear plant to the shores of the United States 6,000 miles away — the first time a huge migrating fish has been shown to carry radioactivity such a distance. Scientists believe the caesium-134 found in tuna off California, therefore, had to come from Fukushima. The levels of radioactive cesium were 10 times higher than the amount measured in tuna off the California coast in previous years. One of the largest and speediest fish, Pacific bluefin tuna can grow to 10 feet and weigh more than 1,000 pounds. Bluefin tuna absorbed radioactive cesium from swimming in contaminated waters and feeding on contaminated prey such as krill and squid, scientists say. Pacific bluefin tuna are prized in Japan where a thin slice of the tender red meat prepared as sushi can fetch NZ$32 per piece at top Tokyo restaurants. Japanese consume 80 percent of the world's Pacific and Atlantic bluefin tuna. Scientists do not expect the nuclear fallout to linger in huge fish that sail the world because such fish can metabolize and shed radioactive substances. Now that scientists know that bluefin tuna can transport radiation, they also want to track the movements of other migratory species including sea turtles, sharks and seabirds. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration notes in a bulletin that radioactive iodine, which has a short half-life, would be gone by the time migratory fish arrive in U.S. waters, and that radioactive cesium hasn’t been detected in any tuna imported from Japan. Many fisheries have been even more dismissive about the chances of contamination. The mystery surrounding the deaths of at least 877 dolphins in Peru deepened on Wednesday as the government said "human activity was not to blame". But it did leave open the possibility that abnormally warm surface water temperatures and high levels of algae may have played a role, saying further analysis would be needed to determine if any red and brown plankton species in the sea were toxic. High levels of algae could easily be a symptom of over-fishing and ecological ill-health of the oceans as predatory fish are being eliminated by fishing, and toxic flows. This month, warmer surface waters sent anchovies lower down into cooler waters where pelicans could not dive deep enough to reach them. Some 5,000 birds starved to death as a result. Our dying oceans are the result of mining, over-fishing, pollution - "human activity was not to blame" does not hold any substance!!

Prime Minister is in the firing line, accused of fueling "racist innuendo" in the debate over enterprise migration agreements (EMA). Industry chiefs have likened the backlash against foreign mine workers to the White Australia policy. Pauline Hanson said mining jobs should be reserved for Australians. It's not about "race" or ethnic origins, and we don't know which "race" the foreign workers will even come from! Pauline Hanson is right - mining jobs should be reserved for Australians. We are still a sovereign nation? Who are "Australians" now? On the contrary, the enterprise migration agreements are more like "reverse racism" as we in Australia - a multicultural country - are being disadvantaged and singled out at a time of high youth unemployment, lack of opportunities to gain skills, and high educational and training costs. What other nation would allow corporations to give employment to foreigners over the local, national, people? http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/capital-circle/racism-c... It's an absurd accusation and assumes those protesting are the "white" Anglo elements on our community. Bring back Pauline Hanson - for all her mistakes and failures, she was brave enough to speak some home-truths. We are being socially engineered by "white guilt" so that we are ready to cave in and allow ourselves to be manipulated to our own detriment.