(We) can do better

The callous and evil slaughter and rape of ethnic Tamils last May by the Sinhalese armed forces in Sri Lanka compares with the Indonesian mass murder of East Timorese in the Indonesian Invasion of 1975 and again in the 1991 Dili Massacre.

WHITLAM'S WILLFUL BLINDNESS TO EAST TIMOR GENOCIDE

In September 1974, in central Java, Australia's Prime Minister Gough Whitlam told Indonesia's President Suharto that East Timor was “too small to be independent”. EAST TIMOR: The Indonesian-Australian invasion

"On 7 December 1975, Indonesia invaded East Timor involving a naval bombardment of Dili, seaborne troops, paratroopers. On December 10, a second invasion resulted in the capture the town off Baucau followed shortly after by up to 15,000 troops landing at Liquisa and Maubara. By April 1976 Indonesia had some 35,000 soldiers in East Timor. Indonesian Foreign Minister Adam Malik later on suggested that the number of East Timorese killed in the first two years of the occupation was "50,000 people or perhaps 80,000".

At the start of the occupation, FRETILIN radio sent the following broadcast: "The Indonesian forces are killing indiscriminately. Women and children are being shot in the streets. We are all going to be killed.... This is an appeal for international help. Please do something to stop this invasion." One Timorese refugee told later of "rape [and] cold-blooded assassinations of women and children and Chinese shop owners".[15] Dili's bishop at the time, Martinho da Costa Lopes, said later: "The soldiers who landed started killing everyone they could find. There were many dead bodies in the streets — all we could see were the soldiers killing, killing, killing."

SOURCE: #doc4">George Washington Univerity

All Australian governments, Liberal and Labor, have been and remain complicit in their willful blindness of East Timor.

RUDD'S WILLFUL BLINDNESS TO TAMIL GENOCIDE

A generation later, Prime Minister Rudd betrayed the Tamils when in October 2008 Rudd sided with the Sinhalese regime and formally declared Sri lanka's separatist Tamil Tigers a terrorist group, and so sat back while the dogs of war were unleashed on the Tamils.

Since coming to power in November 2007, Rudd has had a chance to review Australia' s foreign policy created under the previous Howard Government. Instead, Rudd has blindly followed Howard's support for the US supporting the Sri Lankan Sinhalese civil conflict against the Tamils, dismissed and illegitimised as terrorists. Rudd has stood by human rights abuses against Tamils in Sri Lanka despite Australia being a regional neighbour of Sri Lanka and an influential joint member nation of the Commonwealth. The Sri Lankan government has for the past four years been slaughtering ethnic Tamils as part of a deliberate strategy of genocide.

Back in October 2008, Dr John Whitehall a Queensland-based pediatrician with recent direct experience in Sri Lanka reported of the "great human tragedy" unfolding in Sri Lanka.

"The silence of Western media and government has emboldened the majority Sinhalese to embark on a renewed campaign to dispossess and kill the Tamil people.

The Tamil-controlled north-east of Sri Lanka thunders "day and night" under bombardment from the forces of the Sinhalese government in Sri Lanka's capital Colombo as they attempt to destroy Tamil autonomy.

Against this backdrop, "a great human tragedy" is also "exploding", according to Fr James Pathinathan of St Theresa's Church in Kilinochchi, the administrative capital of the de facto government of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

From the eye of the storm, Fr Pathinathan, who is also president of the local Justice and Peace Commission, reports that "deaths, injuries, displacements and attendant misery pervade the lives of innocent Tamil civilians... and the draconian economic embargo imposed slyly... has become a monstrous obstacle in giving relief and solace to the 170,000 persons recently displaced".

The Sri Lankan Government's economic embargo, involving the closure of roads and ports of access for food, medicines, and fuel for an already destitute population, has conventional arsenal, cluster bombs and white phosphorus bombs.

End Western complicity in war crimes
The foreign ministers of Britain, France and Sweden tried to get into Colombo to discuss the humanitarian disaster with the GoSL. The Swedish foreign minister could not even get a visa to enter the country. The other two got there and returned saying that they had “tried very hard” but achieved nothing.

In the face of increasing international concern at the civilian casualties, the Tamil Tigers declared a unilateral cease-fire. The GoSL refused to reciprocate saying that the offer was a "joke".

On May 21, 2008 Sri Lanka was tossed out of the UN Human Rights Council on account of its outrageous human rights record.

However, little or none of this is mentioned in the Australian media. Australians have a right to ask why.

The Australian Government has failed to act in condemning a serious abuse of human rights by a country with which it shares an ocean.

Commercial and geo-political considerations are clearly more important than humanitarian ones, however serious. Indeed, in giving "aid" to the Rajapaksa government in the middle of its killing spree against the Tamils, the Rudd government has been in political solidarity with the Rajapaksa's military mission.

This is simply not acceptable, and damages the image of Australia by its failure to condemn a murderous regime that h

It is easy to see how Tamils believe that the Sinhalese are bent on wiping them out. In 1948, Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) gained independence from the British. Not long after, in 1956, the Sri Lankan parliament passed a Sinhala Only Act. This relegated Tamils to the status of second-class citizenry.

It also exposed them to the repeated violence that culminated in the disgraceful race riots in 1983 when Sinhala mobs guided by voting-lists set out to destroy Tamil homes and even antiquities such as the library in Jaffna.

Sinhalese forces themselves invaded Jaffna and subjected the local population to barbaric treatment.

They were even prepared to murder journalists in their bid to intimidate the Tamil press. Every day, Tamils in non-combat areas "disappeared", having been taken away in the backs of notorious white vans.

Underlying this conflict lies deep racist sentiment. I personally have been astonished by the number of educated Sinhalese who boast of an "Aryan" heritage, compared to the "Dravidian" origin of Tamils. The former implies some northern origin from lighter-skinned and educated forebears; the latter implies an origin in the jungles of India. This antagonism is fuelled by fundamentalist Buddhist proclamations that ancient texts identify "foreign devils" who should be expelled.

Military destruction

This racism is supported in practice by the Marxist-Leninists of the People's Liberation Front (JVP) which holds 40 of the 225 seats in parliament and is part of the government coalition. Proclaiming Lenin's doctrines of central dictatorship by the vanguard of the proletariat, it has vigorously urged military destruction of Tamil hopes for autonomy.

As bombs have begun to fall on the town of Kilinochchi, causing the population to flee, Fr Pathinathan has declared that "the call of the hour is urgent" and pleads for "the people of goodwill all over the world" to "protect the people of Wanni [north-east Sri Lanka] who are threatened with death and destruction and dehumanisation".

But few people seem interested. With the Tamil homelands cut off more effectively than Biafra in the Nigerian civil war, who wants to see pictures of starving children?"
[SOURCE: SRI LANKA: Plight of persecuted Tamils worsens, by Dr John Whitehall, News Weekly, 25-Oct-08]

International Pen on 10 Sep 2008 reported in an article ['SRI LANKA: Tamil journalists detained] the detention and alleged torture of Tamil journalists V. Jasikaran and J. S. Tissainayagam, whom by then had been held by the Sri Lankan government in Colombo for six months under terrorist legislation, apparently for their critical writings.

According to International PEN's information, on 6 March 2008 V. Jasikaran, a Tamil journalist, owner of the E-Kwality printing works and reporter for the news website Outreach Sri Lanka (http://outreachsl.com/en/), was arrested with his wife V. Valamathy, by the Terrorist Investigation Division (TID) in Colombo. The following day, on 7 March, Tamil journalist for the Sunday Times newspaper and editor of Outreach Sri Lanka, Jayaprakash Sittampalam Tissainayagam, was also arrested by the TID, following a visit he made to the offices of the TID requesting information about the detention of his colleague.

Initial reports suggested that V. Jasikaran and J. S. Tissanayagam were accused of receiving money from the Tamil Tiger rebel group; however it is widely believed that the two men are targeted for their reporting and analysis on the ongoing conflict between government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE) in the northern part of the country.

According to Amnesty International, ‘The Emergency Regulations, issued by the President, introduce broad-based and vaguely-defined "terrorism" offenses, which have been used to silence critical journalists and generally suppress freedom of expression in Sri Lanka.'

J.S. Tissainayagam was held under renewable 90-day detention orders for five months before being charged on 25 August 2008 as follows: 1) offences under the Prevention of Terrorism Act: in respect to printing, publishing, and distribution of the magazine North Eastern Monthly, between 1 June 2006 to 1 June 2007; 2) offences under the Prevention of Terrorism Act in respect of bringing the government into disrepute by the publication of articles in said magazine; and 3) the violation of Emergency Regulations by aiding and abetting terrorist organisations through the raising of money for said magazine. It is said that North Eastern Magazine was known to be a pro-Tamil English-language publication that closed down over a year ago. It was not considered to be pro-LTTE. His trial is due to start on 18 September 2008.

On 19 March, J. S. Tissainayagam filed a complaint before the Supreme Court, claiming that since his arrest he had been tortured, suffered discrimination because of his ethnicity and denied equal protection under the law.

Fellow Tamil journalist V. Jasikaran has also reported being subject to torture since his arrest. On 23 June, V. Jasikaran stated in court that he had been assaulted by members of the TID and the police during his detention."

Around this time the Sri Lankan foreign minister Rohitha Bogollagama visited Australia requesting Australia to join countries such as Britain and the United States in taking the step against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Rudd Government received requests from the Sri Lankan Government to formally declare the separatist Tamil Tigers a terrorist group. ' Australia urged to list Tamil Tigers as terrorists' [AFP/Reuters, 13-Oct-08].

Rudd obliged, ignoring the worsening persecution of the Tamil population by the Sinhalese government.

In a statement by Dr Brian Senewiratne (MD, FRCP, FRACP) 7 May 2009 entitled 'Genocide of Tamils and atrocities in Sri Lanka while Australia looks on'

"Last week the Sinhalese-dominated Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) succeeded in its immediate aim of ending the armed resistance of the Tamil people, who live in the North and East of the country. "Bloodbath on the beach" was how the United Nations described the battle and we are yet to see the full extent of this major humanitarian catastrophe.

The GoSL of Mahendra Rajapaksa claims it has triumphed in a "war on terrorism". What it has really been doing is fighting the Tamil people to force them to accept Sri Lanka as a Sinhala-Buddhist nation. It is about the alliance between the religious fundamentalists and the state chauvinists who together, with the backing of key Western countries - have been able to deny the Tamils their rights. According to international law expert Professor Francis Boyle of the University of Illinois, the Europeans and the United States gave the green light to Rajapaksa to go ahead and destroy the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and their homeland.

There had been progress on a negotiated settlement between the GoSL and the LTTE, and even discussion about a federal structure for Sri Lanka, but Rajapaksa terminated the talks and the ceasefire and resumed the fighting, and now the world is witness to the dreadful consequences.

...It is a genocide when a war against 10% of the population over three decades culminates in the death of 10,000 people in a few months, about 100,000 in the last 32 years. It is genocide when governments try to wipe out a people's political voice and drive half a population into the diaspora.

Sri Lanka's Tamils are now facing genocide or internment in concentration camps that masquerade as "refugee camps". The Tamil civilians were supposedly "liberated" from the Tamil Tigers by the GoSL. But if they are liberated people, why keep them behind barbed-wire fences, and why are international observers, including the media and humanitarian workers, prevented from visiting these camps?

There are 154,000 Tamil civilians, some in tents, others under trees, in 24 camps, behind barbed-wire fences. The tents are for five people, but house between seven and 21. Living conditions are appalling, with deliberate starvation and the denial of adequate medical help.

The women and girls are raped by the Armed Forces, pregnant women are aborted and some even sterilised. The GoSL would deny all this. Can foreign observers check these allegations? No they may not. Why? Because it is an "internal affair". We beg to differ.

There are some 120,000 Tamil civilians left in the government "safe zone", which has been regularly bombed by its armed forces. Even hospitals have not been spared. The defence secretary, the president’s brother, in an interview with British media, said that bombing of hospitals is "acceptable". This contravenes the first and fourth sections of the Geneva Convention, signed and ratified by the GoSL.

The GoSL expelled all humanitarian workers and agencies, including UN agencies, from the conflict zone so that genocide could be done without witnesses. This has not been done in any other country in the world.

More than 6000 Tamil civilians have been slaughtered in just the past four months. Last week, the only obstetrician in the area was gunned down by the Armed Forces. Why? Genocide.

Kfir jets, bombers, multi-barrel rocket launchers and helicopter gunships have been used by the GoSL dropping, in addition to conventional arsenal, cluster bombs and white phosphorus bombs.

End Western complicity in war crimes
The foreign ministers of Britain, France and Sweden tried to get into Colombo to discuss the humanitarian disaster with the GoSL. The Swedish foreign minister could not even get a visa to enter the country. The other two got there and returned saying that they had “tried very hard” but achieved nothing.

In the face of increasing international concern at the civilian casualties, the Tamil Tigers declared a unilateral cease-fire. The GoSL refused to reciprocate saying that the offer was a "joke".

On May 21, 2008 Sri Lanka was tossed out of the UN Human Rights Council on account of its outrageous human rights record.

However, little or none of this is mentioned in the Australian media. Australians have a right to ask why.

The Australian Government has failed to act in condemning a serious abuse of human rights by a country with which it shares an ocean.

Commercial and geo-political considerations are clearly more important than humanitarian ones, however serious. Indeed, in giving "aid" to the Rajapaksa government in the middle of its killing spree against the Tamils, the Rudd government has been in political solidarity with the Rajapaksa's military mission.

This is simply not acceptable, and damages the image of Australia by its failure to condemn a murderous regime that has the temerity to call itself a "government", and for failing to institute sanctions on Sri Lanka until the killing stops.

The Australian Government and the Australian media have a serious case to answer for their silence and indifference towards a horrendous genocide. This must stop. The Australian government has a duty - not only to Tamil Australians, but to all those with a conscience - to make every effort to assist now. This must include:

Demanding that the Sri Lankan government be tried before the International Criminal Court for war crimes. This was a war conducted away from any international scrutiny. This massacre was largely hidden. But there has been enough independent information to know that the Rajapaksa government has committed war crimes.
Pressuring the Rajapaksa government to allow Tamils the right to decide where they live, including settling in Australia if they wish.
Ending all aid and support to the Rajapaksa government while it continues its genocidal policy against Sri Lanka's Tamil people."

How similar to the Indonesians treatment for East Timorese? Just like the Indonesians, the Sri Lankans justify banning international monitoring on the basis that it is an 'Internal affair".

Tamils in Sri Lanka have been subject to ethnic discrimination by successive Sri Lankan governments since Sri Lanka gained independence in 1948. Successive Australian governments have done nothing to acknowledge the right of ethnic Tamils to self-determination or to encourage a non-violent political solution.

'Silence is the voice of complicity'

(Click for Sideshow - WARNING! Images may disturb.)

I have been putting off finishing a long and detailed article about why the Labor Party's business interests and the policies of Labor Governments in Australia are cause for disquiet. No, more than this, they give cause to question the right to govern of our governments. The area is so big and scary that one would rather read a novel or stare out the window. How to open up a description of the way I see our situation escaped me.

Tonight, however, I wrote this short article in reply to Peter Bright's comment, "Be fair; The Prime Minister has to overview the whole picture in the national interest, long term as well as short term. Although a Green, I believe that he and his government are being unfairly criticised and insultingly abused with insufficient cause."

Well, Peter was talking about whales, and so was Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, but he was really talking about politics and economics and that's what I am talking about here.

The White Whale

The PM is forcing population growth on Australians and thereby depriving them of secure and affordable futures through driving resource scarcity. We have not been consulted. Not unrelated is the fact that he and Wayne Swann were also involved in the initial creation of Labor Holdings P/L and Labor Resources P/L see "Expert discusses 'deliberately confusing' Labor donations" in Queensland (when they were working for Wayne Goss in the opposition). These ALP-owned companies helped build up massive property holdings and insurance and development investments for the ALP.

Governments or Commercial Corporations?

The ALP governments, state and Federal, now resemble huge commercial corporations, far richer than the other parties in Australia and richer than many others in the world, according to Steven Mayne. Labor Holdings and Labor Resources are used by the ALP to hold donations and other payments so that those moneys will not have to be declared as ALP donations from their original sources; they are declared as donations or 'other receipts' from Labor Holdings or Labor Resources. You can, however, look up income tax declarations for Labor Holdings and Labor Resources here and see where their income comes from. Then, in the same site, you can look for the ALP's income tax declarations and see where the money goes to.

State Laws made for private profit against democratic objection

State governments control land-use in Australia. One must suspect that the laws that the State Parliaments make to privilege property development (e.g. Major Transports Facilitation Bill; DACS) also privilege the ALP's investments or those of their friends. The ruthless pushing of laws to override democratic objections is an indication of where the state and Federal governments' loyalty really lies.

The growing presence of property lobby professionals in government and as the major options in elections should raise alarm bells. See, for instance, the participation of candidates from or backed by the Property Council of Australia in elections here and here.

Federal Government immigration and financial policy

The Federal Government's pushing of population growth through high immigration is a way of keeping property and infrastructure development going (at great cost to the rest of us) - and that seems to be a major business of Labor Party investments in Queensland where Labor Resources and Labor Holdings started, although they go way beyond that state now.

The Federal Government's nearly successful attempts to finance private development through taxpayer funding in RuddBank is another indicator of the sick state of our parliaments.

Labor: In government or in business?

The relationship between the Labor Party's friends in private Lobby Groups, their people in government, and the staff in State investment companies (such as Queensland Investment Company) has been the subject of damning journalistic investigations. See, for instance: "In the murky world of lobbying ..." and It is now so blurry that I think you would have to be naive or not to have been aware of these vested interests to believe that our governments were in government rather than in business for themselves. But maybe it is hard for most people to figure out what this all means unless they already know the picture in the jigsaw.

Governments or Commercial Corporations?

What I make of all this is that our governments have crossed over the line between being governments into the area of being commercial corporations. And my next question is: Have they abdicated their right to govern since they no longer represent the electorate?

I think they have. I don't think that we have representative government in Australia anywhere anymore. Even under the Westminster system our governments are supposed to be seen to represent the public. Such representation is easily fudged around the edges on issues where cost and benefits are hard to pin down, but that is not the case here. It has become obvious that governments at state and federal level routinely benefit private corporate interests over the objections and interests of constituents by making laws to remove virtually all democratic rights to control the size of population, the ownership of public assets, and the extent of infrastructure expansion - whilst financing these undemocratic investments with taxpayers' money.

See also: other articles about Labor Holdings

The Australian group Citizens Electoral Council who promote the political program of Lyndon La Rouche is certainly a group with which candobetter has serious differences. They could fairly be described as extreme techonologically optimistic_#main-fn1">1 cornucupians. Examples of media releases which illustrate this include: Populate or Perish: Australia needs 50 million people plus! and "Lies, damned lies, and 'global warming' statistics" of 6 Jan 10.

Nevertheless, we aim to give credit where credit is due. If we can put aside the CEC's environmental myopia, it does have some ideas of merit. These include proposals for radical reform of our monetary system. Of Lyndon Larouche, Ellen Brown wrote in  "Web of Debt":

[Lyndon La Rouche proposes] to make cheap national credit available for putting the unemployed to work developing national infrastructure. La Rouche has launched an appeal for a new Bretton Woods Conference to reorganize the world's financial system, a plan he says is endorsed by many international leaders. It would call for:

1. A new system of fixed exchange rates,
2. A treaty between governments to ban speculation in deriviatives,
3. The cancellation or reorganisation of international debt, and
4. The issuance of "credit" by national governments in sufficient quantites to bring their economies up to full employment, to be used for technical innovation and to develop critical infrastructure.

La Rouche's proposed system of exchange rates would be based on an international unit of currency pegged against the price of an agreed basket of hard commodities. With such a system, he says, it would be the currencies, not the commodities, [which are] given implicitly adjusted vaues, as based upon the basket of commodities used to define the unit._#main-fn2">2

In accord with La Rouche's fourth point, the CEC's media release of 14 January calls for the re-establishment of a national bank as the (now privatised) Commonwealth Bank was prior to 1960, when Prime Minister Menzies took away its central banking powers that are now vested in the Reserve Bank which uses these powers secretively beyond any scrutiny by Parliament or the Australian public.

Candobetter would certainly want to join in the CEC's "fight to re-establish a national bank," referred to in the media release below, but we could not recommend a vote for CEC candidates should they choose to stand in the Federal elections, because of their extreme anti-environmental stance.

However, we see no reason why such policies could not be adopted by other parties with stances less hostile to the environment, such as the Greens or the New Australia Party.

If such parties, seriously wish to be considered as serious alternatives to both of the two major pro-big-business parties, then their adopting such a proposal would almost certainly add enormously to their electoral appeal.

However, after two and a half decades of their existence, the Greens, for their part, have failed to adopt any policy which challenges the fundumental economic direction of this country, so we don't hold out any hope that that will change any time soon.

The full media release from the Citizens Electoral Council is included below.

Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release 14 January 2010

To defeat the Money Power and guarantee Australia's economic future:
Re-establish a true national bank

Fifty years ago today—14 January, 1960—Prime Minister Robert Menzies committed an act of treachery on behalf of his private banker friends, and neutered Australia's national bank, by removing the Commonwealth Bank's central banking powers, and reducing it to a mere trading and savings bank.

The powerful central banking function, by which the Commonwealth Bank had regulated and leashed the private banks, was renamed the Reserve Bank of Australia, and placed under the control of a private board of directors; its first Governor, H.C. "Nugget" Coombs, boasted that he was a member of "the international freemasonry of central bankers".

The City of London-directed private banker fraternity, including Menzies' best friend, financier Staniforth Ricketson of J.B. Were & Son, whom the patriots in the early Labor Party called the "Money Power", had finally achieved what they had strived for since the Commonwealth Bank's establishment in 1911—the end of sovereign government control over banking.

Today, Citizens Electoral Council leader Craig Isherwood called on Australians to rejoin "old" Labor's fight against the Money Power, and demand the re-establishment of a true national bank like the Commonwealth Bank.

"If Australia is to have a prosperous economic future, we must harness the nation's credit to build large-scale water, power and transport infrastructure, and foster essential agricultural and manufacturing industries, which means we need a true national bank, owned and run by the government for the common good," he said.

"The early Labor Party fought against the Money Power's private control of banking, because they understood that a government only had true sovereignty, if it exercised ultimate control over the monetary system through a national bank.

"Thanks to the influence of pro-American forces in the early Labor Party and among the writers of our Constitution, Australia is a unique country, in that we are the only nation outside of the U.S. to have had a true, Hamiltonian-style national bank, which was expatriate American and Commonwealth Bank architect King O'Malley's intention when he created it, going so far as to proclaim, 'I am the Hamilton of Australia...'" [Alexander Hamilton was the 1st U.S. Treasury Secretary under President George Washington, and the inventor of national banking.]

In the two periods when the Commonwealth Bank was able to function as a true national bank under government control and directing finance for the public good, 1912-1923_#main-fn3">3 (under the governorship of Sir Denison Miller) and 1941-1945 (under the Labor government during WWII), its achievements were stunning:

• The Trans-Australian railway;
• Financing the national wool clip in WWI;
• Stopping a run on the private banks during WWI;
• Financing Australia's miraculous war-time economic mobilisation in WWII;
• Zero war-time inflation during WWII.

In 2001, the CEC published its book, What Australia Must Do to Survive the Depression, which includes ready-to-enact legislation for a new national bank, the Commonwealth National Credit Bank Bill, and an explanation for how a new national bank would function to be as successful as its predecessor.

Mr Isherwood concluded with a challenge: "Next year, 2011, is the 100th anniversary of the 22nd of December, 1911 passage of the Commonwealth Bank Act, the single most important piece of legislation in our history," he said.

"Join the CEC's fight to re-establish a national bank, and let us set that anniversary as the deadline to achieve it.

"God knows we need it," he said.

Craig Isherwood, National Secretary

PO Box 376 Coburg VIC 3058
Phone: 03 9354 0544 Fax: 03 9354 0166
E mail: cec [ AT ] cecaust.com.au
Website: www.cecaust.com.au

See also: Cut Wall Street out! How states can finance their own economic recovery of 3 Nov 09 by Ellen Brown, How a state-owned bank could make Queensland asset fire sale unnecessary based on original article by Ellen Brown of 29 May 09 by Ellen Brown, Call for the re-establishment of a true national bank of 17 Jan 2010

Footnotes

#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1. #main-fn1-txt">↑ The CEC does have some worthwhile ideas about technology. An example is their media Isherwood: Australia & India should cooperate on thorium nuclear power of 11 Jan 10. However, we regard their apparent belief that such technologies can fix all possible ecological, social and economic problems is reckless in the extreme.

#main-fn2" id="main-fn2">2. #main-fn2-txt">↑ The Web of Debt(2008 edition) is a towering work which blows apart the mystique of the worldwide monetary system. Its core thesis is that money has no intrinsic value and is no more than a means to exchange goods and services. As such, all money should be created as a service by the Government, whether as coins, paper, or electronically and not by private banks. The book shows how the undemocratic usurping of this function by private banks in most countries, principly the United States, has been the cause of almost every major economic crisis for the last 300 years. (This somewhat casts doubt on the Marxist thesis, that I had previously accepted, that capitalism, in and of itself, has an inbuilt dynamic that inevitably leads to economic crises.) The book does have flaws, including its implicit argument that monetary reform alone can fix nearly all the world's problems. As an example, it fails to acknowledge that China, which does have essentially the kind of monetary system that Brown (rightly) advocates, faces serious ecological crisis and may well be the casue of global ecological collapse. Also precisely because China's own economy works so well, other economies largely crippled by private banking system, such as Australia's face the threat of colonisation by China.

#main-fn3" id="main-fn3">3. The achievements of the Commonwealth Bank during this period, including enabling Australia's participation at a cost considerably less than would have been otherwise possible has to be somewhat tempered by the ongoing controversy about our participation in that war at the cost of 60,000 Australian lives. Another cost, not widely acknowledged, is the Armenian genocide, largely triggered as a consequence of Australia's participation in the attempted invasion of Turkey at Gallipoli. The Armenian genocide was swept under the carpet during rapproachment between Australia and Turkey following the war. The outcome of the First World, in paricular the Treaty of Versailles, was unjust and laid the basis for almost continuous conflict since then including the Second World War.

See also: Call for the re-establishment of a true national bank of 17 Jan 2010.

One would assume that an organisation entitled the 'Australia Strategic Policy Institute' would be a government body or a body at least having Australia's strategic interests at heart.

But its director, Dr Anthony Bergin, with a title one would assume would be capable of research, has written an article for Fairfax media supporting Japan's strategic interests.
Bergin's article: 'Ban Protest Vessels from using our Ports' dated 16th January 2010 in The Age and duplicated in the Sydney Morning Herald - (Fairfax empire privilege) sides with the Japanese whalers and calls on the Australian Government to support Japan in denying protesters access to Australian ports. Perhaps Dr Bergin should take up residency in Tokyo.

If Dr Bergin were respectful of the democratic rights to protest we have in Australia and recognised the Japanese incursion in Australia's whale sanctuary in the Southern Ocean, and respected the existence rights of whales, then perhaps his article for Fairfax would have instead read like this...

The Australian Government has been far too even-handed in its statements about the reckless actions of the Japanese whalers trespassing in the Southern Ocean in breach of commercial whaling prohibitions.

By not condemning this annual intrusion by Japanese ships undertaking commercial whaling, Australia is in effect acquiescing in illegal poaching of whales, while Sea Shepherd does Australia's naval monitoring of illegitimate Japanese whale poachers.

Harassment will not change Japan's position on whaling. And not condemning these Japans actions is counterproductive for Australia trying to secure its protection of endangered whales with the International Whaling Commission.

Australia could legitimately take Japan to court and hold Japan in breach of the Antarctic Treaty at the next meeting of the commission in Morocco in June. Australia could legitimately and formally demand Japan to cease its whaling actions immediately.

Given the public interest in these matters, the Australian Government has sensibly asked the Australian Maritime Safety Authority to examine the recent events in the Southern Ocean. But it is hard to see how, on any reading of the Convention on the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea, that the ramming of the Sea Shepherd vessel by the Japanese whaling vessel, could argue his actions were in compliance with it. The Ady Gill was stationary in the water at the time of the ramming and no action was taken by the Japanese whaling vessel to avoid a collision.

To demonstrate that Australia does not support the activities of the Japanese whalers, the Australian Government should ban the entry of its vessels into Australian ports.

In deciding whether to grant consent to vessels to enter its ports, a state is free to impose conditions as it wishes - access to a port of a state is a privilege, not a right. Australia banned port access to Japanese fishing vessels in 1998 when Japan would not agree on a total allowable catch for southern bluefin tuna in the Commission for the Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna. The port access ban was lifted in mid-2001. Why? It is an offence under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act for a whaling vessel to call at an Australian port unless the master has written permission from the environment minister to bring it into the port.

If the Federal Government is serious about ending whaling and shifting the Japanese Government's position - one that has hardened in response - it should directly monitor all whaling activities in the Southern Ocean, follow through on its promise to take legal action against Japan, ban all whaling vessels from Australian ports and ban all use of aircraft from Australian airports for use by Japanese whalers.

Dr Anthony Bergin needs to continue his research and then get back to us with what he has learnt.

On Wednesday 20 January, South Australian State Independent MP David Winderlich is organising a massive protest outside a scheduled Federal Cabinet meeting to demand effective action to save the Murray-Darling. The recent inundations of the northern headwaters give this Government a rare opportunity to save the our dying river system, that is, if it has the political will to stand up to commercial interests who would, instead, divert this much-needed water for their own short-term gain.

The following has been sent to me from David Winderlich's office. It was originally published on David Winderlich's web site at davidwinderlich.com. - JS

Massive murray protest

On the 20th of January, a Federal Community Cabinet meeting will be held in Adelaide. So I'm organising a Murray protest to be held outside, to let all the Federal ministers know what we think of their inaction on this national emergency.

An immediate Federal intervention can help save the Murray and get the floodwaters down to the Riverland and Lower Lakes. Even if there is agreement to send some water down the Murray this will only be piecemeal - we need a permanent whole river solution instead of constant crisis management!

Let's take our demands for immediate action right to the Prime Minister. All South Australians who care: turn up to the Community Cabinet meeting and send Rudd a rocket on the Murray.

When: 20th January 2009 at 4:30pm (assemble at 4pm)

Where: Norwood Morialta High School Oval, 505 The Parade Magill

Please pass this event on to your other networks, it is vital that we get enough people to get the attention of Rudd and Rann, and don't forget to bring signs stating what suburb or town you are from and if you like bring a bucket - some of those interstate Ministers might have brought some water.

If you're interested in being a part of this, or want to volunteer to help organise the protest, contact my office on (08) 8237 9278 or through email benjamin.howieson [ AT ] parliament.sa.gov.au.

See also: "MDBA legally obliged to place the health of Murray Darling above all else" of 12 Jan 10, See also: "Canberra must deliver on promised audit of private water storages" of 7 Jan 10, fairwateruse.com.au.

How the tragic situation of Haiti's overpopulation and poverty came about? There were not always 9m hungry people there. When this once rich and beautiful island was discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1492, it was inhabited by a population of about 100,000 Amerindians, living in a steady state economy. The Amerindians refused to mine gold for the Spanish, so the Spanish imported many thousands of slaves from Africa. The French took the whole island over in 1697 and it remained their most lucrative possession until 1825, despite the inhabitants claiming independence and freedom from slavery under the French Revolution of 1789. At that time there were few Amerindians but about 400,000 African slaves and 100,000 colonists. Added on 17 Jan 2010. Slavery is ongoing in Haiti.

We should never forget that the wealth of the developed world was originally built on the slave trade, until coal and oil became cheaper than slaves. And slaving is still going on in Haiti, as A Crime so Monstrous shows.

The Island of Hispaniola, which Haiti, on the western end, shares with the Dominican Republic to the east, was discovered by Christopher Columbus. In colonial times Haiti was known as Saint-Domingue. The west was rich in minerals, notably gold, but the east lacked minerals. The Amerindian population refused to be slaves, so the Spanish imported slaves from Africa to dig up the minerals and farm crops of sugar and coffee for export. On the east side French buccaneers set up camp and, in 1697, the whole island became a French possession. After vicious trade-wars with Britain and other countries lasting on and off for a century, Saint-Domingue was the only French colony left. At the time though, Haiti was the jewel that every country craved. One in eight French people derived their income directly or indirectly from that slave colony and picked it clean. Its GNP was around a third the size of the French mainland economy in 1789.

In 1789 the people of Saint-Domingue, being French, successfully claimed representation in the French revolutionary parliament, which banned slavery. But the French elite would not let go of their cash-cow so easily. The slaves fought courageously for freedom against colonial soldiers from Spain, England and France.

Slavery was formally re-established by Napoleon in 1802 after many battles.

It was not until 1833 that the French State recognised the independence of Saint-Domingue, which took the name Haiti. Incredibly Charles X extorted massive reparations from the Haitians, although so many Europeans had lived off their backs and their land for well over two centuries. The island was impoverished through the payment of the 'debt' which was paid by 1833. Whereas, at the end of the 15th century, shortly after discovery by Christopher Columbus, the population was about 100,000 indigenous Amerindians, following the discovery of gold, by the time of the French Revolution and its own revolutions, it had been unsustainably bloated by continuous importation of massive volumes of slaves from Africa, to a total around 400,000, plus 100,000 Europeans. In 2010, with a population estimated at around 9 million, it is among the poorest states in the world.

Yet, just before the French Revolution, Saint-Domingue was the biggest producer of sugar in the world and produced more than half the coffee in the world. Its external trade was more than one third of metropolitan France’s. One in eight French people lived directly or indirectly from its product, which depended on enslavement of the inhabitants.

This is what happens when a population is deracinated and disorganised in an economy where the only way of getting a living is by your hands. Remember how the original Amerindians had a small and steady population? So did the Africans in the countries from which they were taken. Artificial stimulation of population growth has disastrous consequences, even when it is not done by elites for outright slavery. Haitians have little money for food, let alone contraception, and little access to either.

Poor Haiti. And now this terrible earthquake.

It makes me really angry when all you hear in the news is that the Haitians were the first slaves to get independence and then of how they squabbled. I think that we can safely assume that they may have independence but that the old slave economy has remained, with wages very hard to come by, and that this overt poverty has permitted the classic slave trade to continue, as the book, A Crime so Monstrous, by Benjamin Skinner, shows.

"Chavannes says today’s “dramatic situation” has deeper roots. Delayed agricultural reform is partly to blame, he says, with no proper sharing out of land since independence in 1804, when division of the land of poor slaves amongst the generals merely produced what he refers to as “neo-slavery”. “Agrarian reform is pressing”, says Chavannes, pointing out that 80% of local court cases involve haggles over who has jurisdiction over which parcel of land.

Up to the 1960s however, Haiti was self-sufficient in food. After which the neo-liberalist regime began to bite and gradually destroyed local production, rice, poultry and eggs industry being examples. Since then, the country has suffered from a lack of political commitment to the sector, he argues." Source: Serge Gilles (Leader of the Fusion des Sociaux Democrates Haitienne - Haitian Social Democratic Fusion Party)

NOTES

Editor's note: Additional information about the slave trade in Haiti was included on 17 January 2010.

Friends of Felton Media release

11th January 2010

Queensland Government cannot allow Felton to be held hostage by mining company

Ambre Energy executives visited Felton just before Christmas and revealed the following information about their proposed so-called Felton Clean Coal Project:

• They have not yet secured a supply of water for the project (16,000 megalitres per year at full scale).

• They have no plans for Carbon Capture and Storage, even though their own figures show the project would produce 3 tonnes of CO2 per 1 tonne of fuel.

• They may not proceed with plans to produce di-methyl ether (DME)_#main-fn1">1, as there is little demand for it in Australia.

• The Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the project may not be released this year.

Friends of Felton spokesman Rob McCreath said, "This is a clearly an unviable project, which would have disastrous consequences for agriculture, the environment, and the community at large."

"Two years have passed since Ambre Energy first announced their plans for the Felton Valley. Local residents are virtual hostages, their lives and plans are in limbo." Mr McCreath said. "The efficiency of the district's cropping and horticultural industries is being reduced by the threat of the mine" he added.

Friends of Felton calls on the Queensland Government to intervene immediately to reject the Ambre Energy proposal, which is clearly not in the public interest.

Media contact: Rob McCreath 0409014219

Friends of Felton Inc.
c/o The Secretary, 2110 Karara Rd, Felton 4358
www.fof.org.au

See also: "Felton farmers left in the dark" in the Toowoomba Chronicle of 12 Jan 10, "Farmers 'held hostage by mining plans'" in the Sydney Morning Herald of 11 Jan 10, "Agriculture v Mining - Friends of the Felton Valley and the Haystack Plain" on Brisbane ABC radio's Evenings with Steve Austin of 4 Jun 09, including audio files of debate (10 Mb) between John Cotter, the President of Agforce and the Chief Executive of Queensland Resources, Michael Roche and interview (10Mb) with Rob McCreath of Friends of Felton, "Farmers occupy Qld Premier's office to save Darling Downs from coal mining" of 2 Nov 08, "Rural town threatened by open cut coal-mine: Acland, Queensland" of 10 Jan 10, Friends of Felton web site at www.fof.org.au and blog site at www.friendsoffelton.blogspot.com.

Footnotes

#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1. #main-fn1-txt">↑ Di-methyl Ether (DME) can be used a substitute for diesel as a fuel for motor vehicles. After world oil production inevitably peaks and begins its inexorable decline, it seems likely that we will look to the large scale production of DME as one alternative to petroleum. How we balance the needs of our industrial society with the needs of the natural environment and our need to produce food in areas such as the Felton Valley will be a difficult, if not altogether impossible problem to solve. It is urgent that we pre-empt this by planning to end Australia's unending economic growth and, instead, achieve a steady state economy within the limits of our natural environment as soon as possible.

After publishing articles about reports by auditor generals in Tasmania, Victoria and West Australia, on the state of threatened species protection, I sent emails to the Auditor Generals in the ACT, the NT, NSW and South Australia.
Today I received this email from the Auditor General's office in the ACT. This response tells us that no audit has yet been done in the ACT. To me this is an indicator that the ACT statistics are probably in the same poor order as those in other states. I am grateful to the ACT Auditor General for their prompt response. The ACT State of the Environment Report referred to seemed unhelpful regarding reliability of statistics in the mean time.

It is of particular concern that the ACT is not monitoring its wildlife statistics for reliability, validity and effective coverage of the area regarding the species there because of the recent highly controversial culls of kangaroos in Belconnen and in Majura. I believe that I have personally raised enough questions about those culls here to justify a complete moritorium until such time as the collection of statistics and their interpretation and the theory of population dynamics in wildlife in the ACT is brought up to speed, which should include genetic testing for diversity and origin of populations. It sounds like the entire system needs replacing - and perhaps the people running it.

ACT Auditor General's Response 13/01/2010

Dear Ms Newman

Thank you for your inquiry.

My office has not conducted an audit on threatened species protection in the ACT.

The Office is aware of the work done in other jurisdictions, and considers this is an important issue to examine.

However, the Office will not be able to conduct such an audit in the near future, due to our very limited resources. As you would appreciate, there are a wide range of government activities and services covering law and order, education, health, environment, disability, housing, etc..that need to be audited.

I have fully committed our performance audit resources to a number of audits that will cover the next twelve months or so. Our annual planning for performance audits is subject to the availability of resources and the competing priorities of audit topics, as well as important emerging or unforeseen issues. There are also topics already planned to take place on the 2010-11 program.

The Office has now included the protection of threatened species as a potential audit topic to be considered in our forward planning. The merit and priority of such an audit will need to be considered against other topics. Further information about the Office's performance audit program, including how audit topics are selected is available on our website. http://www.audit.act.gov.au.

You may also be aware that the ACT Commissioner for the Environment also has an independent role in assessing government activities in protecting the environment, and can carry out investigations on these matters. The Commissioner has also produced a report which may cover the environment issues of interest to you. This report can be found at http://www.environmentcommissioner.act.gov.au/soe/2007actreport.

Thank you again for writing to us about this issue. Should you have any further questions, please contact me or Mr. Rod Nicholas on 62070833.

Yours sincerely

Tu Pham

ACT Auditor-General.

Sent: Thursday, 7 January 2010 1:54 PM
To: ACT Auditor General
Subject: Wildlife protection audits

Dear Sir/Madam,

Has the ACT Auditor General provided a report on threatened species protection in the ACT, or will it be doing so in the near future?

In 2009 the Victorian and the West Australian and Tasmanian Auditor Generals published reports on wildlife protection laws in those states:
Victorian Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act 1988

Tasmania: SPECIAL REPORT NO. 78
Management of threatened species

West Australia: Rich and Rare: Conservation of Threatened Species, Mr Murphy found that, in many areas, the Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC) is not providing effective protection and recovery to WA’s threatened flora and fauna.

Sincerely,

Sheila Newman
Environmental Sociologist

Patty Casazza, Kristen Breitweiser, Mindy Kleinberg and Lorie Van Auken, otherwise known as the Jersey Girls lost their husbands in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. To learn why their husbands died and how a recurrence could be prevented, they forced the Bush adminisration to hold the 9/11 Commission. More than 8 years after 9/11, they have learnt, to their dismay, that all the same excuses for the intelligence failures which led to 9/11 are being made again today in regard to the attempted terrorist attack of 25 December 2009 (12/25). As a consequence, air travellers may soon face further impositions, including health-threatening full body scans whilst those, whose incompetence put air travellers' lives at risk, go unpunished again.

What's on: Free Screening of 9/11 Press for Truth about the Jersey Girls' struggle against the cover-up of 9/11. Where: Brisbane City Council Central Library(266 George St); When: 1PM Saturday, 16 January.

Also see below #HandlersTestimony">"Appendix: CNN Eyewitness testimony of well-dressed people helping terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab aboard Flight 253 at Amsterdam Airport"

Also published on 911blogger.com as "Statement of September 11th advocates in response to 12/25 terror attempt".

8 January 2010

It is with utter disbelief that we listen to the unfolding details of the attempted December 25, 2009 terrorist attack of Delta Flight 253.

Let us remind you, on September 11, 2001, 19 terrorists managed to evade all security measures, hijack four commercial airliners, slam them into three buildings and a field in Pennsylvania, killing 2,976 innocent people, including our husbands.

We responded by strenuously lobbying for an independent investigation to find out how on earth so many agencies could have failed in their duties to protect us, and our loved ones, from such an attack. We asked that they find and fix the loopholes that existed, in order to safeguard our nation.

After the 18-month 9/11 Commission investigation, countless systemic and human failures were uncovered, including: failure to analyze data, failure to share information, human error, failure to follow up, antiquated computer systems, too much information in the system, not enough information in the system, not enough time or people to analyze data, failure to watch list, failure to properly coordinate the watch list with other lists and visa issuance and monitoring failures. Despite all of this, the 9/11 Commissioners simplistically announced that it was a "failure of imagination" that caused the agencies to falter and allowed 9/11 to happen. Additionally, we were told that those in positions to protect us "could never have imagined this type of attack" and that "everyone is at fault, so no one is at fault."

The 9/11 Commissioners would not assign any accountability nor did they recommend that incompetent people be fired. Additionally, there was no urgency by the Bush Administration and/or Congress to make sure that common sense changes were made from "lessons learned". In response, we asked, "what will your excuse be the next time an attack occurs?" Apparently, the same excuses are being used again.

President Obama stated, "This was not a failure to collect intelligence ... it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had..." With all due respect to President Obama, we have heard these words before.

Watching the press briefing on January 7, 2010 and reading the summary of the White House Review of the December 25 Attempted Terrorist Attack and The Corrective Actions, left us stunned. The desperate attempt by the current administration to convince us that these problems were somehow different from the ones faced prior to 9/11 was absurd. We can tell you without a doubt, these problems are not new at all.

It was reported that on 12/25/09, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (Mutallab), the Nigerian alleged terrorist, boarded a plane headed for the United States. Reportedly, he had no passport, no luggage and paid cash for his one-way ticket. As early as August 2009, the CIA was gathering information on a person of interest dubbed the "Nigerian". The NSA was listening to discussions of a plot involving a Nigerian man. As with 9/11, the "system was blinking red". Five weeks before this attempt, Mutallab’s father, a prominent Nigerian banker, walked into the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria and alerted the CIA Head of Station that he feared his son had become radicalized. Mutallab was reportedly put on a U.S. terror watch list. However, like the 9/11 hijackers, he held a valid U.S. visa and he was not put on the no-fly list.

Are we expected to believe that after spending billions of taxpayer dollars our agencies still do not have the ability to connect the dots – especially in light of the fact that post 9/11 (December 2004 to be exact) the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) was created, with special analysts that were trained to understand the details of exactly this type of threat? Are we supposed to accept that almost eight and a half years post 9/11 our visa department still has an antiquated computer system and is still not integrated with the rest of our intelligence community?

Currently, many of the members of Congress, as well as former Vice President Dick Cheney, are loudly criticizing the current administration for how they are handling this latest terrorist attempt. We would like to remind them that they were in office during the years post 9/11. We would like to tell them they should be ashamed and should be held accountable. It was during this time that existing loopholes that allowed 9/11 to happen were supposed to have been fixed.

It is utterly offensive and dangerous when politicians attempt to turn a national security issue into a partisan battle over who is the mightiest terror warrior. The safety of American citizens is not a schoolyard game.

Over the course of the last eight and a half years, America was taken into two wars, costing billions of dollars, further fueling the fires of those who might want to do us harm. During this time, extraordinary measures were implemented, including changing laws to enable wiretapping, torture and holding prisoners indefinitely in specially erected, secret prisons.

p>As with 9/11, none of these measures were necessary to stop this attack. If the INS, FBI, CIA, NSA, State Department, airline security and both the post-9/11 newly formed Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the NCTC had been doing their jobs properly, this attempt could have been prevented. All the necessary dots of information were in the system ready to be connected and all the protocols already in place simply needing to be followed.

Throughout these past eight and a half years, we requested accountability for the individual failures that allowed 9/11 to happen. We insisted that without cleaning out the incompetence, the U.S. would remain a nation at risk. We reasoned that if the same people who failed to protect us on 9/11 remained in their jobs, they could ultimately fail us again.

President Obama has stated that he was less interested in passing out blame than in correcting mistakes, and he has made it clear that senior intelligence officials would be overseeing the reforms rather than looking for new jobs. However, it is clear that without accountability there is no impetus to prevent failures from recurring as is evidenced by this latest debacle.

Therefore, in spite of measures taken over the years reacting to whatever the latest threat (i.e. taking off shoes, allowing no liquids then allowing only four ounces of liquid), nothing has truly changed regarding air travel safety. Most importantly, nothing has changed in the way our multi-billion dollar intelligence apparatus works to protect the public. Washington continues to respond the way it always does, wasting tax dollars, this time proposing potential health-threatening, full body scanners in reaction to this last attack.

Post 9/11, billions of tax dollars have been thrown at programs and additional bureaucratic layers, such as the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), DHS and the NCTC. This wasteful spending only pretends to protect us. It does not fix what is really broken, which is the bloated bureaucracy that prevents people from properly doing their jobs and fails to fire those who are inept.

Enough is enough.

President Obama, said "The buck stops with me. I am responsible."

Real accountability, from the top down is imperative. Unless people are fired for their incompetence, this statement is meaningless. Individuals who failed in their jobs need to be held accountable and fired, that’s what "the buck stops here" means.

This time it happened on President Obama’s watch and when the time comes, make no mistake, the American people will hold him accountable.

Patty Casazza
Monica Gabrielle
Mindy Kleinberg
Lorie Van Auken

#HandlersTestimony" id="HandlersTestimony">Appendix: CNN Eyewitness testimony of well-dressed people helping terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab aboard Flight 253 at Amsterdam Airport

The following explanatory comment was posted to the story Tom "Flight 253: Anatomy of a Cover-Up" referred to below.

1) Mutallab had a handler at the Amsterdam airport. Two passengers on the endangered flight, American attorneys Kurt and Lori Haskell (husband and wife), were eyewitnesses to this and they told their story in the media right after it happened. They went on CNN, PBS and other major media outlets. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAtK7FFDukQ Their eyewitness testimony was that a "well-dressed man" escorted Mutallab and spoke to airline authorities to get Mutallab on the plane, among other things.

2) The eyewitness testimony of the Haskells is being ignored and suppressed by the FBI and the corporate media. If the coverage were on the level, wouldn't there be an international manhunt for the "well-dressed man" as a terrorist accomplice? Wouldn't the video footage of him at the airport be on TV? Shouldn't it be a big news story? It's as though the Haskells saw something they weren't supposed to see...an inconvenient truth that interferes with the official story being presented to the public.

In one sentence: Mutallab had a handler, and it's being covered up.

See also

"Flight 253: Anatomy of a Cover-Up" of 11 Jan 10 by Tom Burghardt on dissidentvoice.org (also published on 911blogger.com), "'Conspiracy or cock up?' White House reaction to ersatz bomber" of 8 jan 10 by Michael Collins on dailycensored.com (also published on agonist.org and 911blogger.com), "The Strange Case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab" of 4 Jan 10 by Tom Burghardt on dissidentvoice.com (also published on 911blogger.com), "Airport Droids Attack Human Gene Pool" about the health risks posed by full body scanners of 29 Dec 09 on peaksurfer.blogspot.com (also published on culturechange.org), "DNA Full-body scanners used on air passengers may damage human DNA" of 11 Jan 10 on naturalnews.com, Passenger profiling at airports is unavoidable" in the Australian of 7 Jan 10.

Originally published: 8 Jan 10. Updated and revised: 12 Jan 10.

#EliteImposition" id="EliteImposition">How Australian "democracy" imposes "elite as opposed to popular views"

In the March 2009 Queensland elections, called early and conveniently before the Auditor General's damning reports on Health and Transport, Labor clung to power by concealing the likely privatisation of publicly owned assets and promising to maintain the state fuel subsidy. Regaining office, the fuel subsidy went, charges for registration and public transport rocketed and a $15 billion public asset fire sale was announced - although opposed by 79% of the Queensland public.

The citizens of most other Australian states are treated little better. So, in early 2010, Australians are not in any meaningful sense ruled by "government of the people by the people for the people."

Former Prime Minister Bob Hawke actually boasted about his similar failure to democratically consult during a speech at a Bureau of Immigration Research conference, when he claimed that he had enforced "elite as opposed to popular views on immigration."_#main-fn1">1

Over the last 3 decades at least, "elite as opposed to popular views" have been imposed in regard to many other important policy decisions. Examples of such unconsultative policies implemented include the removal of tariff barriers to prevent the export of Australian jobs to slave wage economies; the removal of barriers which prevented foreign companies from buying our mineral wealth; the removal of barriers to foreign investors being able to buy up Australian real estate; the deregulation of our finance sector; the privatisation of our retirement income on a model similar to the one enacted by the Chilean military junta in the 1970's,_#main-fn3">3 the privatisation of government-owned businesses including Telstra, QANTAS and the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories; and the corporatisation or privatisation of vital resources: water and power utilities, and of infrastructure normally owned and paid for by taxpayers, such as roads and public transport.

There have also been numerous disposals of public parkland, such as 20 hectare Royal Park in Melbourne, and the massive rezoning to urban of "Green Wedges" (environmentally beneficial low-impact rural and publicly accessible bush and recreational land)._#main-fn4">4

We have also lost publicly owned state banks, insurance companies, and local, state and national services, including road-making, land-development, public housing construction, the prison system and monopolies on marketing agricultural product - such as in the privatisation of the wheat board._#main-fn5">5 The public is the poorer.

We have also seen the imposition of the National Competition Policy on all levels of Government, the forcible amalgamation of local governments, the removal of the rights of local governments (and therefore of residents and citizens) to oppose local housing and other developments,_#main-fn6">6 the imposition of costly environmentally destructive projects against the wishes of the local communities, the destruction of farmland and bushland to allow the construction of mines, the threatened imposition of a Chinese-style Internet firewall, etc., etc.

Who can argue that these changes have not diminished our democracy?

#ElectiveTyranny" id="ElectiveTyranny">An elective tyranny

Nicholas Aroney, one of the authors of "Restraining Elective Dictatorship: The upper house solution?" (2008) describes our system, as the title of his book implies, as elective dictatorship_#main-fn7">7 A more accurate term in 2009 would, perhaps, be elective tyranny.

Amongst the latest examples of the enforcement of "elite as opposed to popular views" is, as mentioned at the start of this article, the Queensland State Government's plan to sell off $15 billion of assets: coal railway lines and the newly built Abbot Point coal loader; ports, tollways and state forests. This fire sale is on top of the already considerable number of publicly owned assets that the ALP dominated Queensland parliament has already allowed to be sold off since first winning office in 1998. This latest "fire sale" has been opposed by between 79% and 84% of Queenslanders according to the Courier-Mail's Galaxy poll._#main-fn8">8

The newsmedia still insist that this system that allows our Governments, as a matter of course, to thus "impose elite as opposed to popular views" is democracy.

Why?

Because every three or four years, voters are given a the right to vote out a Government that the majority has judged to have served them poorly and vote in another they hope will do a better job.

There are a number of problems with this.

1. By the time voters remove a government, much irreversible harm may already have been done.

   Many policies, even if made against the will of the people, will have been locked-in by contracts that typically are difficult or impossible to cancel. For instance, while they were successively in opposition, the NSW Liberal and Labor parties both promised to cancel tollway-construction contracts that governments of the day entered from the late 1980s onwards. Upon winning office however, the new Liberal or Labor government would invariably announce that the financial penalties so-incurred would make breaking the contract impossible.

   It is even harder to reverse privatisations, environmental destruction or population increases.

2. Even at election times, Governments are rarely held to account by the newsmedia.

   The snap elections of Queensland in March 2009 were a glaring example. Between them, the Labor Party and the media_#main-fn9">9 literally cheated the Queensland people out of having any say about privatisation at those elections. Having feared this and prepared for it by presenting as a candidate myself, I provided abundant evidence, to the media and to the ABC in particular, that privatisation was a major issue in those elections. Despite my repeated efforts documenting this, the media in question persistently, refused to seriously question the Government on the issue. As a consequence, the Labor Government was returned to office without once having been required to state clearly what its intentions in regard to privatisation were or to justify them.

   The power for an incumbent Government to choose the time of the election can also help it to evade scrutiny. For instance, if the Queensland elections had been held after the publication of the Auditor General's damning reports on Queensland's health_{#main-fn10">10} and transport systems_{#main-fn11">11}

   , the Labor Party probably could not have been re-elected.

3. Alternative candidates not backed by corporate funding are unable to present their views to the public.

   Even though polls taken during the 2009 elections showed that 59% of electors opposed Labor and 59% opposed the Liberal National Party_{#main-fn12">12}, the newsmedia refused to give air-time to alternative candidates so that the public could learn of their existence before they got to the ballot box and decide ahead whether or not they deserved their vote.

   Consequently, most voters would have seen no choice except to vote for the lesser of two evils promoted by the media almost as the only two on offer, rather than candidates who, finding Tweedledee and Tweedledum wanting, stood for different policies.

So, even at elections, the rare occasion upon which the public has any opportunity to have any say over the direction of their country, in our mainstream media-captive elections, the mainstream media does not provide the public with a real opportunity to make a properly informed choice. It fails to make public, or to adequately promote, all the available choices.

You would be right to call the media 'anti-choice'.

#BetweenElections" id="BetweenElections">Decisions between elections

Between elections, the situation becomes immeasurably worse as Governments assume the right to do anything that comes into their heads, which may benefit party investments or may be put to them by corporate lobbyists. Often they act behind closed doors, refusing to answer questions, claiming protection through "in confidence" agreements,

Yes, government decisions don't just fall out of the sky. They are discussed and agreed to behind closed doors by corporate elites and the political parties' negotiators, then they are conveyed to the parliamentary delegates to enact.

For instance, from former Labor Government member Cate Molloy, we know_{#main-fn13">13} that the disastrous and unpopular local government amalgamations enacted in 2007 by Premier Beattie and the then Minister for local Government, Andrew Fraser, and forced upon the people of Queensland, were made at the behest of the Property Council of Australia (PCA). The PCA behaved as if it considered the popular Noosa Shire Council and Douglas Shire Councils, and probably others, as impediments to its plans.

#CostOfLiving" id="CostOfLiving">The cost of losing democratic control is already measurable in our environment, quality of life and cost of living

In 2009, as a result of many years of what our anti-choice media continues to call 'democracy', the quality of life of Queenslanders has eroded enormously, whilst the cost of living in terms of housing, food, council rates, water charges, electricity charges, vehicle registration charges, public transport charges, traffic infringement fines, etc. has gone through the roof and is heading towards the stratosphere. Indeed we have no idea where, when, or if ever it will stop. For instance, the Courier Mail story "Monster power price hike" of Friday 18  Dec 09 reports:

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

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

It is the fourth successive jump in electricity costs since the State Government claimed deregulation of the industry would put downward pressure on prices._{#main-fn14">14}

Thus in 2009, the heavy price already paid by Queenslanders for former Premier Peter Beattie's decision - similarly made without their consent - to privatise the retail arm of the state owned electricity utility, continues to climb.

Meanwhile, the Queensland Government seems barely constrained by the breaking of its explicit election-promise to retain the fuel subsidy or the failure to materialise of the 100,000 new jobs it promised at election-time to create.

As with the 2006 privatisation, Queenslanders are today being assured that the fire sale will be for the best. A significant number of respected economists dispute this, however. Among these dissenters are Professor John Quiggin and Professor Bob Walker. Both have written detailed studies which dispute the case for privatisation. Thus far, Andrew Fraser and the Queensland Government have not responded in any written detail to their suggestions.

But why should the people of Queensland have to wait over two more years to remove the Government from office? Why should they be expected to watch passively as a wave of privatisations sets in concrete along with other policies that will further degrade their quality of life and destroy their children's future?

#AssertingCitizensRights" id="AssertingCitizensRights">How can citizens assert their right to self-government?

Governments that have betrayed the trust of the public as the Queensland Government has done do not deserve to remain in office. Citizens must somehow establish their constitutional right to force such governments to face new elections.

On 11 December 2009, the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper set up online a petition_{#main-fn15">15} which called for the establishment of such a constitutional right in NSW. The petition is:

We, the people, believe the State of NSW is being neglected. The State government has failed to adequately address the crisis in hospitals, public transport, education and housing supply. Continuing factional warfare has paralysed the government. We should not have to wait until March 2011 to exercise our democratic right. To stop this happening again we need a mechanism to call an early election. By supporting this petition, we are calling for a change to the constitution to enable this to happen. We demand a referendum on this at the next State election.

I support the right of the people of NSW to call an early election.

The reasoning in support of this petition seems somewhat flawed. Although the petition calls for a structural change which would improve democratic rights, its reasons are quite undemocratic, for example, the petition's complaint of "Continuing factional warfare has paralysed the government." The article in support of the petition further complains:

The failure to privatise the power industry - an attempt undermined by Labor's union allies - has kept the budget on the edge of crisis.

Taken together, these words essentially parrot the stance of the NSW corporate media including the SMH and the ABC in favour of the privatisation that the Iemma state Labor Government attempted to undemocratically impose, without any electoral mandate, against the wishes of between 79% and 86% of the NSW public and against those of the Labor Party itself.

Whilst the factions in the NSW Labor Party are generally little better than fiefdoms to serve the political aspirations of Labor politicians, Labor apparatchiks and Union officials, at the expense of ordinary Labor Party members, union members and the broader NSW public, there is actually nothing inherently wrong with factions. A faction can also be a vehicle for disaffected rank and file members to regain control of a corrupted organisation. At the least it may provide the means to assert the will of the rank and file on an issue such as privatisation. In the fight against privatisation in 2008, the dominant right wing faction of the Labor Party stood for democracy and the people of NSW against the dominant clique in the NSW Parliamentary Labor Party and the NSW corporate sector. Whatever can be rightly said against that faction, they deserve credit for having taken that stance and not to have been pilloried_{#main-fn16">16} for that.

If there is anything worse than factional in-fighting, it would be the uncritical conformity and discipline that Premier Morris Iemma attempted somewhat unsuccessfully to inculcate in Labor MPs who were resolved to vote against privatisation in 2008.

Such an implicit condemnation in principle of a sometimes necessary vehicle in democracy should not be found within a petition calling for democratic reform.

It seems likely that media moguls think that they would be able to persuade the public to vote out governments which fail to do what the corporate sector and its media-mouthpiece demand._{#main-fn17">17} We should keep this in mind, whilst remembering that the media already run Australia's political show, so we still will gain by increasing our power through election referenda.

The petition therefore deserves the enthusiastic support of NSW residents despite its corporate baggage.

#e-petition" id="e-petition">Your support for on-line petition, calling for resignation of Queensland Government and new elections, needed

In Queensland, I have set up a Queensland Parliamentary e-petition, on the e-petition page, sponsored by Independent Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) Dorothy Pratt. This petition takes a more direct approach than the NSW one and simply calls for the government to resign and for new elections. It does not also address the constitutional question that the SMH petition addresses. This is partly due to the 250 word-limit rule on both petition and preamble. Future petitions might address the question of citizens' referenda separately.

Meanwhile here are the words of the petition calling for the resignation of the Queensland government:

TO: The Honourable Speaker and Members of the Legislative Assembly of Queensland

Queensland citizens draws to the attention of the House the Queensland public, the rightful owners of $15 billion worth of assets which are to be sold, were denied any say over this because of the failure of the Queensland government to reveal those plans during the course of the elections. We consider the stated intention of the government to proceed with the sale in the face of opinion polls, which show at least 80% public opposition, to be amongst the most serious breaches of public trust imaginable.

Your petitioners, therefore, request the House to call upon the Queensland Government to resign immediately to give the Queensland public a chance to elect a new Government which can gain its trust. Your petitioners also warn any private investors considering buying the assets, not to do so and call upon a future State government which does enjoy the trust and confidence of the Queensland people not to honour any such contracts for the sale of assets.

#WhatCanE-petitionAchieve" id="WhatCanE-petitionAchieve">What can this petition hope to achieve?

Queenslanders were outraged at the announcement of the $15 billion fire sale and the breaking of an explicit promise to retain the state fuel subsidy. The government responded to this by claiming that it had sought and received a mandate to take whatever tough measures it deemed necessary to get Queensland through the Global Financial Crisis. As put by Treasurer Andrew Fraser to me during the course of an interview on Sunday 29 November, 2009:

Well, as I said really clearly during the election campaign ... there were going to be tough choices that we had to face, and we've had to face those._{#main-fn18">18}

Andrew Fraser's apparent interpretation that, by voting the government back in, Queenslanders were giving it a blank cheque to flog off their assets came as a shock to many Queenslanders, 72% of whom in a Courier Mail Galaxy poll said they believed that the Labor Party had lied about its privatisation intentions._{#main-fn19">19}

The simple fact is that the Queensland Government would not even be in office today if it had given to the Queensland public any hint that an asset fire sale was a possibility,_{#main-fn20">20} or if it had not promised to retain the state fuel subsidy._{#main-fn21">21}

As such, the people of Queensland are entitled to view the Government itself as illegitimate and should say so at every possible opportunity, such as the one which this petition provides.

If this petition were to be supported by large numbers of Queensland citizens it could be a powerful demonstration that of their rejection of Bligh's and Fraser's implied rationale for proceeding with the fire sale in defiance of their clear wishes. It would be a clear message that it is wrong for the Queensland government to pretend that they somehow know better what is good for Queenslanders than Queenslanders do. It would show that Queensland voters expect to be asked about hard decisions and to have a full range of options considered, contrary to the implication that, deep down a childlike public wants the Government to proceed in an authoritarian way.

If the many Queenslanders enraged by this Government's high handed arrogance become aware of this petition, there should be no reason why it would not attract at least as much support as any other petition thus far, at the bare minimum. Whilst it is difficult to be able to predict just how many will eventually sign, the order of at least 100,000 signatures should be achievable.

To make this happen, a lot of people will need to sign the petition themselves and to make efforts to contact other people who they know are likely to want to sign.

Those in a position to help make this happen include:

• Independent members of the Queensland Legislative Assembly (MLA's)
• Liberal National Party MLA's
• Local Government Councillors
• Trade Unionists
• The Greens Party
• Other political parties such as the New Australia Party, the Democratic Labor Party, Australia First, etc.
• Environmental organisations
• Grass roots community groups fighting environmentally destructive infrastructure or mining such as the Save the Mary River Coalition, the Stop the Hale Street Bridge Group, Friends of Felton.
• Scientists and other public servants fighting to save their jobs from this Government's short sighted budgetary cutbacks._{#main-fn22">22}

Of course even if every voter in Queensland, who is not a member of the State Parliamentary Labor caucus, were to sign this petition, no constitutional requirement exists as yet to make the Government carry out the petition's request.

History has shown, however, that it is difficult for any Government to continue to act in defiance of an effective grass-roots political movement such as that which could emerge from this campaign if backed by the weight of massive public opinion.

#LaborPartyMembers" id="LaborPartyMembers">Why Labor Party members and trade unionists should sign the petition

Whilst Labor party members and trade unionists are as disgusted as the rest of Queensland with the fire sale, some are, nevertheless, unwilling to do anything that might entail the removal of the Bligh Government from office. They feel this way in spite of the large hoardings all over Queensland denouncing the Labor Government's betrayal of working people.

This reluctance is partly understandable for a number of reasons. The memory of the Federal Howard Government, the record of some extremely reactionary Liberal National coalition governments in other states holds them back. They may also not be altogether convinced that the LNP, in Government, would reverse privatisation.

They should still ask themselves: What possible good can come from the perpetuation of the misrule of the Bligh Government? They need to ask: When only two Labor Parliamentarians voted against privatisation inside Parliamentary caucus, where they are entitled to freely express their views and vote whichever way they choose, in early June, what possible good can come out of such a caucus? Yes, only two Labor caucus members voted against privatisation_{#main-fn23">23} even though the Government had no electoral mandate whatsoever for privatisation, 84% of Queenslanders opposed it, and it was against the Labor Party's own platform.

Again I ask, what good is such a caucus?

If the government manages somehow to scrape back into power in 2012, it will almost certainly claim to have been vindicated and feel emboldened to do even worse. What then will be safe in Queensland?

If the government is thrown out, despite continuing Labor Party member and trade union support, those supporters are likely to be seriously scapegoated (through savage industrial legislation and discriminatory electorate funding) just as the incoming Howard Government was able to scapegoat and victimise much of Labor's constituency upon winning office in 1996. This is likely to happen because they will be seen to have supported a rotten and unpopular government, through blind obedience or a pathetic desire to retain eroding positions of government influence._{#main-fn24">24}

Because of the cowardice of the majority of delegates at the Queen's Birthday weekend Labor Party conference, who voted to support privatisation,_{#main-fn25">25} formal Labor Party avenues to rectify the situation have now been closed off. Other practical alternatives need now to be found.

#WhatRisks" id="WhatRisks">What are the risks?

If the elections to be held were fair, unlike those of March 2009, in which the ABC and the corporate media deliberately censored news of alternatives to the major candidates, there is every chance that the new Parliament would contain a large number of Independents, Greens and representatives from other minor parties, who would be able to wield considerable influence.

An outcome which also seems possible is a Parliament in which the Liberal National Party might comprise an outright majority.

It can't be be known for certain whether such a government would not turn out to be in the mould of an extreme, "Shock Doctrine" style government similar, for example, to that of Jeff Kennett's, which ruled Victoria from 1992 until 1999, rather than one merely governing in the public interest within the constraints of its electoral mandate.

#CounteringRisks" id="CounteringRisks">How can the risks be mitigated?

Even if the worst fears were realised, the precedent established by the removal of the Labor Government would be every bit as applicable to an LNP Government, the moment it was seen to have exceeded its electoral mandate.

Whatever the outcome, the known risks for Queenslanders in meekly acquiescing to the dictatorial misrule of the Bligh Government are greater than the risks of the unknown, as I have argued above.

In all likelihood, removal of the despised Government of Premier Anna Bligh would be the first step on the road to politicians becoming, once again, the servants of ordinary people, instead of the other way around.

Further steps along that road, would include making a change to the constitution to formally incorporate the right of citizens to recall unsatisfactory elected representatives, as is now being sought in NSW (see above) and the enactment of laws that enshrined the right of ordinary citizens, upon demonstrating a threshold of support in the community for a proposal for a legislative change, to initiate a binding referendum. These measures would comprise strong safeguards against politicians ever being able to abuse their office in the way that the Queensland Government is doing today.

A grass-roots political movement (perhaps not altogether dissimilar to that which let to the formation of the original Australian Labor Party in the 1890's, before it become so thoroughly corrupted by the influence the wealthy corporate benefactors and, more recently, private party investments_{#main-fn26">26}) could help propel that process forward.

#WhatYouCanDo" id="WhatYouCanDo">What you can do

• If you are Queensland citizen, please sign this petition yourself without delay. The sooner you sign it, the more others will feel encouraged also to sign. It will be active until 2 March 2010.

• If you are a New South Wales citizen, please sign this petition. It is important that you do so, without delay as the close-of day has not been specified. It appears to have been set up on or before 11 Dec 09. When signing, please be mindful of the unfortunate anti-democratic baggage contained in it, as discussed #AssertingCitizensRights">above.

• Tell others about the petition and urge them to sign. Please send e-mails containing this article or links to this article and a link to the petitions.

• Publish this article on your web site, or post links to this article and to the online petitions.

• Post links to the article and the online petitions to mailing lists and to online forums.

• Write letters to the paper in support of this petition.

• Phone radio talkback shows to announce this petition.

• Post your own thoughts about these petitions, whether wholly supportive or critical.

See also: Murdoch media contradicts itself on immigration of 18 Feb 09

#Footnotes" id="Footnotes">Footnotes

#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1. #main-fn1-txt">↑ Cited in Overloading Australia (2009) by Mark O'Connor and William Lines, p186. Cited earlier in This Tired Brown Land (1998), p179. From "This Tired Brown Land":

Former Prime Minister Bob Hawke boasted at the Bureau of Immigration Research's National Outlook Conference in Brisbane in 1993 that his government had enforced "elite as opposed to popular views on immigration." By "elite" he did not mean "expert", for, as explained in a previous chapter, he had ignored advice not only from the Australian Academy of Science and CSIRO, but also from the government's two main sources of economic advice, Treasury and EPAC. By 'elite' he was referring to the bipartisan political support for high-immigration that existed in Australia throughout the 1980s and much of the 1990s, supported by large sections of the media -- especially by most of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation -- and by most of the public service and the most tertiary teachers.

#main-fn2" id="main-fn2">2. ↑ See, for instance: "Review of ABC 7.30 Report on Australia's steeply rising population" of 13 Oct 09, "Bernard Salt on the Population 'debate'" of 10 Oct 09, "Concerns about the Age, the Australian and the ABC censoring population debate" of 14 Dec 09, "Growing population calls for big picture focus" - Democracy, immigration and the politics of the Age Newspaper" of 12 Feb 09.

#main-fn3" id="main-fn3">3. #main-fn3-txt">↑ In "Australia's neoliberal path" (p3) in Dissent Magazine number 23 of Autumn/Winter 2007, Kenneth Davidson writes:

A major 'reform' imposed on Chile on the advice of the 'Chicago Boys' was the privatisation of public pensions, which was replaced by privatised superannuation (adopted in Australia in 1986, proposed by President George W. Bush in 2004 and rejected by a Republican-controlled Congress).

#main-fn4" id="main-fn4">4. #main-fn4-txt">↑ See articles grouped by the tag "Protectors of Public Lands" at http://candobetter.org/taxonomy/term/1231 .

#main-fn5" id="main-fn5">5. #main-fn5-txt">↑ See "Why privatisation is wrong" of 10 May 08.

#main-fn6" id="main-fn6">6. #main-fn6-txt">↑ See "Bligh Government tramples on community rights to impose over-development" of 11 Jun 08.

#main-fn7" id="main-fn7">7. #main-fn7-txt">↑ See transcript of The National Interest story "Upper houses: relics or champions of democracy?" of 20 Mar 09.

#main-fn8" id="main-fn8">8. #main-fn8-txt">↑ At least three polls of public opinion have been taken by the Courier-Mail's Galaxy Poll. The first two both showed 84% opposition. The first poll was reported in the Courier-Mail story "Voters believe Bligh lied before election" of 19 Jun 09. A subsequent poll reported in "Queensland anger over Anna Bligh's asset sale on the wane" of 3 Dec 09 showed that this opposition had dropped by 5% top a still overwhelming 79%. I wrote of this in my article "Courier Mail spins news of 79% opposition to fire sale to reveal its privatisation colours" of 11 Dec 09.

#main-fn9" id="main-fn9">9. #main-fn9-txt">↑ The LNP's record was also questionable as I reported in my articles "Independent candidate seeks categorical assurance against privatisation" of 11 Mar 09 and "Media release: Lawrence Springborg out of step with the public on privatisation" of 20 Mar 09.

However, since the elections, the LNP under its new leader John-Paul Langbroek have consistently argued against privatisation. However, the fact that one of their stated reasons for opposing the fire sale is that they don't think that assets should be sold when the market is depressed could leave the door open for that policy to be changed in future. Conversely, the fact that a Courier-Mail article in December or November by Paul Williams exhorted John-Paul Langbroek to abandon his naive 'idealism' is a clue that it is by no means assured that the LNP will reverse its current stance against privatisation. Moreover they appear to be vastly more responsive to the will of their constituencies, who are opposed to privatisation, than are the Labor Party MLA's. On at least one occasion that was barely reported in the media, John Paul-Langbroek called upon the Government to put the question of privatisation to the people of Queensland.

#main-fn10" id="main-fn10">10. #main-fn10-txt">↑ See "Auditor questions hospitals' patient flow system" by Petrina Berry in the Brisbane Times of 29 Jul 09. Download report (PDF, 647K) and executive summary (PDF 310K) from http://www.qao.qld.gov.au/pages/publications/pub_ag.html.

#main-fn11" id="main-fn11">11. #main-fn11-txt">↑ See "South-East Queensland transport planning in disarray" by Daniel Hurst and Tony Moore in the Brisbane Times of 23 Jun 09. Download report (PDF, 534K) and executive summary (PDF 285K) from http://www.qao.qld.gov.au/pages/publications/pub_ag.html.

#main-fn12" id="main-fn12">12. #main-fn12-txt">↑ The first Galaxy poll was reported very early in the campaign, whilst the second was reported on the 20th March, the day before, the election from my recollection.

#main-fn13" id="main-fn13">13. #main-fn13-txt">↑ "Cate Molloy : Forced council amalgamations planned by Property Council of Australia" of 7 Sep 07.

#main-fn14" id="main-fn14">14. #main-fn14-txt">↑ "Monster power price hike" in the Courier-Mail of Friday 18 Dec 09.

#main-fn15" id="main-fn15">15. #main-fn15-txt">↑ The petition is at http://polls.smh.com.au/index.php?sid=36127&lang=en. The article in support of the petition is "It's time the people of NSW were heard" in the SMH of 11 Dec 09.

#main-fn16" id="main-fn16">16. #main-fn16-txt">↑ The Four Corners program "Off the Rails", whilst providing a useful account of the mismanagement of the public transport system by the NSW Labor Government, inexplicably and falsely blamed that on its decision not to privatise the publicly owned electricity generating assets. This is explicitly stated in the promotion for that program:

When talking with Labor insiders, Wendy discovers that this latest project is simply the end game in a bitter battle waged over the past ten years between Labor's MPs and the union dominated party machine.

In that decade two Premiers, who wanted to sell public assets to provide decent public transport, have been sacrificed so that union leaders could protect their members' jobs and their own political power. Meanwhile, major tracts of Sydney's west go without adequate public transport.

Another example of the ABC parroting the corporate media view on privatisation is described in the story "ABC gives free kick to Iemma, NSW electricity privatisation" of 21 Jul 08.

#main-fn17" id="main-fn17">17. #main-fn17-txt">↑ One famous attempt to use recall provisions to oust Governments which are genuinely acting in the interests of the people and not corporations is the ultimately unsuccessful attempt to recall Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez. One successful recall attempt which appeared to have been inspired by corporate interests, in this case Enron, was the Californian recall election of 2003, which removed sitting Governor Gray Davis and allowed Arnold Schwarzenegger to come to office. In spite of these examples, the right to recall still seems far more likely to strengthen the hands of ordinary citizens against corporations that the reverse.

#main-fn18" id="main-fn18">18. #main-fn18-txt">↑ "Anti-privatisation candidate confronts Queensland Treasurer" (updated) of 2 Jan 09.

#main-fn19" id="main-fn19">19. #main-fn19-txt">↑ "Voters believe Bligh lied before election" in the Courier-Mail of 19 Jun 09. I initially wrote 66%. This is the figure I used in the interview with Andrew Fraser, referred to in #main-fn18">(18). The Courier-Mail article, which refers to the Galaxy Poll, says 72%.

#main-fn20" id="main-fn20">20. #main-fn20-txt">↑ As mentioned above, it was not clear during the course of the election campaign that the LNP was opposed to privatisation. However, in the unlikely event that the LNP as well as Labor explicitly endorsed privatisation, voters would have flocked to the Greens and Independents. On top of that there would have been a huge outcry against privatisation from much of the LNP's own rural base of support, who are at least as much opposed to privatisation as ordinary Labor supporters. The very best that Labor could have hoped for in these circumstances would have been to able to form a minority Government dependent upon the votes of a large number of Greens and Independent MPs. Had the LNP opposed privatisation there would have been a landslide against Labor.

#main-fn21" id="main-fn21">21. #main-fn21-txt">↑ In fact, in the light of looming petroleum depletion, a case can be made for abolishing fuel subsidies, in order to encourage business and private individuals to limit the rate at which they consume petroleum in their day to day activities. The Queensland Government has not made this case, however. Instead it has committed public funding to costly, impractical and unsustainable infrastructure that will increase both population and car dependency. However, whatever the reasons for the scrapping of the subsidy were, they should have been put during the course of the elections.

#main-fn22" id="main-fn22">22. #main-fn22-txt">↑ An example is the 40 workers at the Leslie Research Centre whose jobs were axed in December. After years of running down its once world-leading agricultural research facilities, the Government of the "Smart State" decided just before Christmas to close down the Leslie Research Centre in Toowoomba, together with irreplaceable staff with many years training and experience. Stories about this include: "Primary industries staff won't be sacked: minister" in the Brisbane Times of 21 Dec 09, "Aussie ag 'losing edge'" by Peter Hunter in the the Weekly Times Now of 30 Dec 09, "Foundation cries foul over sale" in the Toowoomba Chronicle of 1 Oct 09.

#main-fn23" id="main-fn23">23. #main-fn23-txt">↑ "Only two Labor MPs -- Jo-Ann Miller and Evan Moorhead -- are believed to have voted against the plan,..." from "Premier defies angry backlash over assets sale" in the Courier-Mail of 2 Jun 09.

#main-fn24" id="main-fn24">24. #main-fn24-txt">↑ A lot of letters and online comments against privatisation, in fact, proffer the solution of savagely cutting back on employment in the public service. A number have expressed disgust at the refusal of Trade Unions claiming opposition to privatisation yet failing to seriously oppose the Bligh Government on this matter.

#main-fn25" id="main-fn25">25. #main-fn25-txt">↑ "Delegates give green light to push ahead with $15b sale" in the Courier-Mail of 7 Jun 09, "ALP conference gives Bligh an ovation" in the Age of 7 Jun 09, "Electricians split from Labor left over asset sell-off" in the Brisbane Times of 10 Jun 09, "Documents are real eye-openers" in the Gladstone Observer of 21 Jul 09.

At the conference 44 delegates from unions claiming to be opposed to privatisation abstained from the critical vote. If those 44 votes had been added to the 156 votes against privatisation, the vote would still have been 207 to 200 in favour of privatisation. However, the abovementioned story in the Gladstone Observer reports that three delegates from the Gladstone branch, which was opposed to privatisation, voted for privatisation on the floor of the conference. If they had voted against privatisation, the majority would only have been 204 to 203.

How many other votes that made up the pro-privatisation majority would have similarly been cast by delegates against the wishes of branch members?

In any case, if the vote had truly represented the views of unionists and rank and file Labor Party members supposedly represented by the delegates, the vote would have been overwhelmingly against. As an example, it seems inconceivable that a majority of members of the Australian Workers Union, which voted as a bloc for privatisation, would have been in favour of privatisation.

#main-fn26" id="main-fn26">26. #main-fn26-txt">↑ See "John-Paul Langbroek and why the Liberal National Party won't survive unless Labor Governments reform" of 4 Dec 09.

Last month, Fair Water Use contacted the Chairman of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, Mr Mike Taylor, urging him to clarify the priorities of the Authority.

It appears that the advice was heeded.

In a statement received yesterday (11th January), Mr Taylor has affirmed that the Authority is legally obliged to place the health of the river system ahead of all other considerations.

This news should be applauded loudly. It is now generally understood that if the ecological decline of the Basin is not reversed, a bleak future awaits all who wish to utilise its waters.

Australians now seek confirmation that the MDBA is walking-the-walk: A highly significant first step would be for it to do all possible to ensure that the entire system reaps the environmental benefits of the inundations that have blessed much of its northern headwaters.

If Mr Taylor feels he is unable to achieve such an outcome, then the Commonwealth must be encouraged to invoke urgent legislation to enable him to do so - now and in the future. Failing that, the Authority should be put out to pasture, as was its predecessor, and a new, entirely independent body established; one invested with the powers to enable it to truly act as the guardian of the Murray-Darling.

Should a declaration of a state of emergency be able to facilitate these changes, then the Federal Government should be aware that resistance to such a move has collapsed in recent months: it could well be a very sound and defining decision in this election year.

See also: "Canberra must deliver on promised audit of private water storages" of 7 Jan 10.

In November 2010 Floridians will vote on an amendment to allow affected citizens to vote on proposals for urban development. Such a constitional amendment is desperately needed in Australia, particularly in Queensland, NSW and Victoria, where Governments in the pockets of developers habitually over-ride the objections of local governments and local communities to new urban developments.

The following letter Michael P. Aston, was published on 9 Jan 10 on the web site of Florida Hometown Democracy.

Amendment 4 hot issue for November

In his January, 2010 article Tom Patton said if Hometown Democracy Amendment 4, passed it would bog down the system and thousands of business decisions would be subject to a vote.

He praised politician’s ability to correctly handle comprehensive plan changes but not questioned his own and all citizen’s ability to make knowledgeable decisions on such matters.

That thinking is apparent in all those opposing Amendment 4. They consistently rant about the need to have thousands of changes made to our comprehensive land use plans and about citizen inabilities.

But why do we need thousands of changes to our plans if they are already state-mandated and created by local officials with input from the citizens, then fully reviewed and approved by all parties?

Why would citizens not have the interest, time, or mental capacity to review and decide on a developer’s comp plan change request that could negatively affect their lives or increase their taxes for infrastructure and services?

If citizens lack these abilities is it a foregone conclusion that our local officials possess them and will rightly apply them, without yielding to pressure from lobbyists or special interests? Florida’s history of development doesn’t support that conclusion.

Mr. Patton implies all growth would stop if Amendment 4 passed. But, according to Florida Hometown Democracy, "Current land-use plans already allow development for over 100 million people in Florida which is more than 5 times the current State population ….even if not one more land-use plan change is approved".
He also predicted the inevitable "politicians are in the pockets of developers" cry. He is sadly correct because of powerful lobbyist firms like Associated Industries of Florida.

They have tremendous sums of money behind them, employ previous political office holders and try to influence our legislator’s vote in an effort to secure the best interests of their clients. Senator John Thrasher worked there prior to reentering politics.

Amendment 4 will be a hot issue for November. It will trigger a massive, expensive campaign by developers, realtors, and everyone dependent upon them to defeat it for their own self interest. The smoke-and- mirrors effort to deceive people has already begun, and their voices will get louder as we approach the vote.

Citizens need truth to make an intelligent decision about this issue. They’ll find it at www.FloridaHometownDemocracy.com

Michael P. Aston, Neptune Beach, FL

See also: Florida Hometown Democracy's Amendment 4: A battle for the remains of Florida. of 12 Dec 09 in eyeonmiami.blogspot.com. Floridians for a Sustainable Population.

Originally published as "Community must ask who bears the cost of progress" by Dr Mark Copland of the in the Tooowoomba Chronicle of 5 Jan 10 (URL of article unkown).

This story first appeared, along with the koala photograph, in the Toowoomba Chronicle on 5 January 2010.
Story written by Dr Mark Copland

Acland - a town on death row

Late last year I took a short drive and visited the town of Acland. It was a haunting visit. Like a town on death row -- or a community on life support -- except they've already started ripping the drips and sensors from the veins before the patient is even dead. The Acland story is like the Australian movie "The Castle" -- except this one doesn't have a happy ending. It left me full of uncomfortable questions -- with far too few answers.

As people we are good at opening things. We bring in the politicians, the brass bands, the plaques and all enjoy a very civilized morning tea as we bask in the warm glow of progress. One of the many questions sitting with me as I left Acland was, "How do you close a town?" How do you honour the memories, the lives lived, the countless hours of voluntary community building given by loving citizens? It's a bit embarrassing and so we mumble something about progress once again and then just move on.

Environmental Impact Statement farce

I met one of the last men standing in Acland. Glen Beutel. Glen isn't ready to move on. And I don't blame him. Us Aussies love the glorious defeat -- Gallipoli, Ned Kelly etc. And Glen is in this tradition. By staying - he is shining a light on the farce that passes as the Environmental Impact Statement process. In this process, mining companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on expert consultants who create very large documents telling us why the mine must go ahead. There is barely even the illusion of independence. The average citizen with no resources is given a few weeks to respond. The question is not will the mine go ahead -- but how can the mine go ahead? The key word for the proponent is mitigation - how to respond to government regulations and possible community complaints. And the company gets its money's worth. If you read one of these things you would almost believe that the local environment will be enhanced with an open cut coal mine, which if all goes to plan will eventually engulf the town that once was Acland.

Koalas in Acland

I met somebody else on the road to Acland. The guy in the picture above. Last Summer our hearts went out to image of the koala burnt in the Victorian bushfires. In 1995 furry friends like this one helped to bring down the Goss government as proposed roads in South East Queensland were believed to be destroying koala habitat. And while there are even fresh water tortoises that call Acland home -- there won't be a Mary Valley Turtle to bring a halt to things a la Traveston Dam. I wonder if finding this bloke and his friends a new home is part of the planned expansion of the Acland mine. No doubt the plan will be buried somewhere in the Environmental Impact Statement.

Acland like Pandora in Avatar - Who pays for 'progress'?

A few nights ago I sat with my 3D glasses on watching the blockbuster movie Avatar. The plot is thin -- but familiar -- a colonizing power wishes to remove some Indigenous people to rip a precious mineral out of the ground. It's Hollywood where the good guys win and the baddie gets his just desserts. All the while I was watching it I had Glen Beutel and my Koala friend sitting somewhere on my shoulder. One of the serious questions that Avatar leaves the viewer with -- "Is it always necessary and right to take things out of the ground, and use them -- just because they are there?" I am sure when the Acland mine was first proposed there was never any mention of closing down a town. For me the sadness is not just the passing of the town -- but the way that it has been done. As a region we must ask the question, "What price progress -- and who will bear the cost?"

See also: Also from the Toowoomba Chronicle: "Our region could be one big hole" of 16 Nov 09 by Madeleine Logan, "Removal trucks spell last rites for Acland" of 10 Oct 09 by Madeleine Logan, "Coal mine nightmare" of 12 Nov 09 by Madeleine Logan, "Facebook keeps residents on line" of 9 Nov 09 by Madeleine Logan, "Friends take heart from senators' visit" of 30 Sep 09 by Roseanne Schefe, "Jones labels Acland's decline as 'sickening'" of 30 Jan 09 by Madeleine Logan about Sydney radio personality Alan Jones' feelings about the threatened destruction of his home town, "$200m mine deal sparks water war" of 16 Nov 07 by Sue Searle, "Acland producing the cleanest coal" of 22 Mar 07 by Greg Berghofer, "Couple join exodus as Acland 'closes down'" of 2 Mar 06 by Sarah Vogler; Web site of the New Hope coal company: www.newhopecoal.com.au (including environmental impact statements, newsletters and assorted other pro-coal-mining propaganda); Friends of Felton web sites: www.fof.org.au, www.friendsoffelton.blogspot.com.

What you can do

Sign e-petition calling for resignation of Queensland Government. For futher information, please read "Why Queenslanders must demand new state elections" of 8 Jan 10.

'On the trail of the gunman from Snowy River' is the bleeding heart front page story in the Sydney Morning Herald by Fair fax journalist, Yuko Narushima, today (9th January 2010) of poachers slaughtering brumbies.

It is a sick sad tale and one hopes the poachers will be caught and dealt with as soon as possible.

Well I dare our Fairfax journalist, Yuko Narushima, and his employer to provide us with a similar bleeding coverage on the front page to the same plight of kangaroos. Kangaroos are Australia's iconic native animal, in case I need to clarify. Yet the same traumatic wounding to hundreds of kangaroos is occuring daily across outback Australia by state-sanctioned poachers, yet the media remains very quiet.

It's like how the media kept quiet in southern states of American in the Nineteenth Century when white posses went out and strung up blacks.

If Fairfax's front page story on brumbies were actually about the daily comparable slaughter of kangaroos, perhaps his article may then read along these lines...

-------------

"Mountain massacre ... some say the kangaroos, must be controlled; others at the sight of a recent shooting, are appalled that as many as 200 kangaroos have been killed.

HIGH in the Snowy Mountains a slain kangaroo lies rotting, her neck twisted horribly.
It is how the female fell when shot by a sniper still at large in the Bago and Maragle state forests. As many as 200 kangaroos have been shot here in the past 18 months.

The gunman, who may not be acting alone, is believed to use a high-powered rifle he is not licensed to shoot.

The female kangaroo was the first of six to be picked off in the latest killing at Christmas. Locals say she was a local who ran wild with other wild kangaroos after a tree fell on her enclosure.

Now the pale kangaroo's insides are visible from a large cavity under her tail where maggots have eaten into her rump. Decaying flesh hangs like stalactites from her hide and the carcass reeks.

Downhill 30 paces, a chestnut yearling lies with a belly deflated into crinkled leather. A fly buzzes in the hole where her eye should be. Another four kangaroos lie dead in a trail behind her.

One shooter lights a cigarette. Smoking helps mask the stench.
''That aroma coming out of it is like perfume, compared with how it was the other day,'' says one bloke, the city friend of a local intent on saving the kangaroos.

"He's obviously shot this one and gone, bang, bang, bang, and shot them in a line.''

''He's getting gutsier,'' says a local wildlife photographer . ''I've got photos where a female kangaroo's given birth while she was dying and the foal has joey too. This is Man From Snowy River country. I just can't get over how someone can be so cruel.''

Hunters shoot to kill. They are trained to pull the trigger only when they are sure of the target. But many of these kangaroos have been gutshot, taking up to four days to die.

Carcasses have been found in state forest - particularly in clearings under powerlines -on leasehold land and on private property. Shooting kangaroos on any of them is immoral and should be illegal if our government had balls. About 32 kangaroos have also been shot.

Police know no one with a licence was hunting in the area at the time of the most recent shootings. ''Our biggest problem is they are in such isolated areas, they don't get identified quickly,'' local police sergeant says.

Compounding the problem are wild dogs and pigs that move in to feast on the evidence.

This is Banjo Paterson country. Yellow road signs that warn of crossing wildlife show a brumby before they show a kangaroo.

On the main street is a saddlery, a takeaway shop and a cafe with meals from $4.50.

''This is a redneck town, and the people's views of kangaroos being vermin go back a long way,'' a local forester says. ''It's opened up a lot of emotion.''

But not everyone is upset. The local roo shooters believe kangaroos are in plague proportion.

''There's romantic shit that goes on, this Skippy stuff. He's got a lot to answer for,'' he says. ''Skippy the bush kangaroo is not genetically related to anything that the first settlers saw.

''We are obligated to control feral kangaroos.''
A local sheep and cattle grazier are trying to ensure sufficient pasture for their livestock which he claims the roos steal. He says the grasses have ''recovered beautifully'' since he removed hundreds of kangaroos that roamed the plains before he arrived in 1999.

The former Rabbitoh used to sell roo meat to the local meat works for $5 each, he says.

There is no suggestion he is involved in the current shootings. As he says: ''I don't have a licence and I don't have a firearm.'' He points to the difference between his part of the plains and that under the ''passive management'' of state forest.

''No one seems to acknowledge that these plains have heritage value - hundreds and thousands, millions of years of heritage value - and people can turn around and say that something [the roos] that's got 50,000 or more years is more important and should be allowed to destroy colonial sheep country.

''As far as the removal of the roos go, I don't know who's shooting and where they're shooting. I really don't know. I sort of clap my hands about it but I can't clap too loud.''

A few kilometres away raindrops glint on a carpet of blackberries. A bull grey looks up and stands rigid in front of his mob.

He twitches, pauses, then bounces off across the plain, a mob of females with joeys and hopping paws behind him.

Original Story: 'On-the-trail-of-the-gunman-from-snowy-river'

Photo from National Marriage Coalition
Angela Shanahan - The Growth Lobby's last resort. If you thought that the growth lobby had retired this weapon, you probably have underestimated how much Kelvin Thomson has them in a panic.
If you want to email letters to The Australian, the address is: letters[AT]theaustralian.com.au

Dicing with statistics

Angela Shanahan, in "Demographic reality tells us it's never too late to populate", the Australian, 9 January, 2010, p.7, continues a late career in writing about population numbers from the point of view of a person for whom economic growth ideology is central and who seems to have no idea at all about ecology as well as an attitude of what she doesn't know doesn't matter.

Right away she shoots herself in the foot by saying we Australians aren't replacing ourselves, when we are. She also quotes the 2.1 replacement rate fallacy as the Rule. Relying on such [erroneous] statistics, she goes on to accuse a straw-man Malthusian of seeing humans only as statistics.[1]

"The anti-populationists' ideological armour of righteous environmentalism leaves them blind to the fact that we need a sustainable rate of growth because without at least stasis in natural increase, we will have an unnaturally ageing population, like Japan's. Without a natural increase of at least 2.1 children per woman -- ours is only 1.9 -- we cannot achieve the age balance that will give us enough children to fuel the future economy and care for the aged. If we can't get sustainable natural growth, we must have immigration." (Shanahan)

Unwilling to engage with Kelvin Thomson's actual arguments, presumably because she has no answer for them, she stigmatises his policies and those who support his policies by attacking him for wanting to restrict the Family Tax Benefit, but even there she wisely doesn't quote him fully. What he actually said was:

"A renewed focus on educating, skilling and training young Australians at Universities, TAFEs and apprenticeships would receive a funding boost with money obtained from abolishing the baby bonus and limiting family payments for third and subsequent children to those already receiving them." Thomson.

She also fails to take into consideration looming fuel and vital resource scarcities. Either she is actually unaware of these scarcities or she does not want to ruin a remunerative propaganda piece with facts. Why does a major newspaper lend authority to people who simply ignore basic realities?

Don't get me started!

And, this stuff about maintaining the current population size or increasing it ignores the anomaly of post war populations, instead attempting to normalise it. It isn't 'normal'. Our 20th and 21st century populations are unnaturally big, reflecting sudden access to cheap and abundant fossil fuels. Why should we keep up such unnaturally large societies when their fossil fuel basis is not going to keep up?

Singapore and Hong Kong

Illustration from France2 news, 9 September 2009. The report showed people in Hong Kong living in cages, several to a room, and paying USD$120 weekly in rent.

"Finally, we might ask ourselves what happens if the anti-natalists take over. Would it affect family life? The brutal answer is yes. Look what has happened in Singapore, which went from being a poor and overcrowded island-state to a rich, not at all crowded place in a generation. It did it with ruthless anti-natalist policies that penalised people after they had two children. Now Singapore has trouble getting people to marry and have children, and the government has reversed its policy." (Shanahan)

If Ms Shanahan's passingly odd reference to Singapore is meant as an argument that urban overcrowding is okay it is questionable. There is only one native animal left in Singapore - assuming it is still there, and that is a small mudskipper. Everything else has been subsumed to humans and their infrastructure. Every day a large population of immigrants comes in to work. Manufacturing and transport are bedeviled by the logistics of high rise; it takes forever to move things down from the factory floor, through the streets and to ports and airports. The people of Singapore are in fear of their government, which owns all the housing and much of the employment. It is probably no longer possible to live independently in Singapore because it is completely urbanised and managed. Singaporeans are keen migrants to Australia because they like our [threatened] space and freedom. People are complaining like mad about overpopulation there. I notice she didn't mention Hong Kong - another ex-British colony, about which I wrote in connection with another big population advocate, Bernard Salt. Like Singapore, like India, like many ex-British Pacific Islands, including Australia, the political system fosters overpopulation against the wills of the residents.

China

Shanahan also writes:

"China, with its disastrous one-child policy and an ageing and gender-unbalanced population as a result, might have to do the same because trying to regulate human beings as you regulate animals on a farm is wrong and eventually pointless."

I love this one. It's so bare-faced. The pronatalists always pretend that China's female infanticide is caused by the one-child policy, but they never include India in their propaganda. India, which has a laissez-faire policy, also practises female infanticide and abortion. Both societies have had a long-time preference for male children because of inheritance laws which mean that to keep land in the family, you need male heirs. I don't know if this is the case in all Chinese and Indian regions, but the lesser value attributed to the lives of women and girls goes back a long way in China and India, which have entirely different family planning policies.

As for regulating animals on a farm: that is exactly what Angela Shanahan is advocating: manipulative policies rewarding high reproduction and taxing low reproduction.

"The farmer always wants more animals on the farm than the animals would like," to paraphrase Alfred Sauvy, the French wartime pronatalist economist.

I don't want Australia to be an intensive farm for humans.

Fingerpointing

It looks to me as if the editors of The Australian or someone, at any rate, know how to wind Angela up by telling her that people who want small populations make fun of people like her with large families. The reason I think that is that she mentions being accused of having 'litters' rather than families and goes on from there to decide, with little or no evidence, that Sustainable Population Australian (SPA) supporters and political supporters of Kelvin Thomson's population reform program must dislike children, see people as mere statistics, and, furthermore, have a liking for birds which she just cannot understand.

Well, I am sorry for Angela if people have made fun of her fecundity. She might consider though that rude and nasty people will make fun of anything that is unusual in a person. They made fun of Quasimodo's hump and they made fun of Pauline Hanson's accent. Galileo was persecuted for his beliefs, as was Descartes when he was in Holland, and Virgilis, the Bishop of Saltsberg was condemned to be burned for believing that the antipodes existed. If Angela has a genuine talent for children, then I have nothing against her expressing it. Most people don't want or expect to have many children in a society like ours where compulsory education raises the cost of children, and child labour is prohibited, so we are unlikely to be over-run by large families. Remove laws against child labour, stop compulsory education, pay bonuses for the third and subsequent children and the large family will soon be the norm.

It is indeed a bad move for anyone wanting a small population to point their finger at specific immigrants or at large families, because those people then might rightly take it personally. That is a way to make enemies and who needs enemies? It is reasonable though for people to state how they feel about their society and whether they wish to underwrite with their taxes or emotionally and politically encourage increasing demands on water, fuel, housing and democracy. Just as it is reasonable for Ms Shanahan to express her views, but she really should stop the rude finger-pointing and name-calling of people who do not share her perspective.

Family allowances

It should also be mentioned that most research into family allowance policies shows that when there are more than three children in a family, there is a downwards trend in multiple aspects of child and family well-being and the ability of parents to participate in the workforce and consumer society - statistically speaking, of course. This is a reason that it is quite rare for industrialised 'modern' societies to have government incentives for large families. The exception is in extreme pronatalist societies, such as Romania under President Nicolae Ceaucescu, or Hitler's third Reich or the Petain government in Vichy France. These last two wanted more children to fuel armed conflict and they would award prizes to mothers of very large families. Pronatalism in France (where leaders feared Germany's high birth-rate and related ability to supply soldiers) from the 19th century on was so pronounced that people were jailed for distributing contraceptive literature and women declared the "La Grève des ventres" - "Wombs on strike" because they refused to provide children for cannon-fodder.[2]

Priorities

Ms Shanahan also mixes up priorities by putting what she thinks women want (more children) ahead of social and environmental factors that make it safer to have small families. She vaguely refers to surveys that show women want more children, but doesn't examine the quality of those surveys nor who is running them. She suggests that people are not having many children because they lack encouragement, but then she says that the rise in the ex-nuptial birthrate is genuine cause for alarm, a comment which is discouraging for those mothers.

So, does she feel about ex-nuptial children the way she feels about birds? Is she defending marriage and large families rather than children and mothers? She seems to talk about ex-nuptial births as if they were 'an amorphous mass of humanity without form or character, sex or religion, colour or dress, size or age', rather than children who might well grow up like Hans Christian Anderson (whose grandmother was thrown in jail twice for ex-nuptial reproduction) or the poet, Guillaume Apollinaire, or actress Sarah Bernhardt, or Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio, or composer Aleksandr Borodin, or Pope Clement VII, who was Spiritual head of the Catholic Church, or the artist, Leonardo da Vinci, or Josephine de Beauharnais, Napoleon's wife ("not tonight, Josephine"), or Frederick Douglass, who was a slavery abolitionist, or the younger Alexandre Dumas, who was a novelist and playwright, or the scholar and author, Desiderius Erasmus, or Alexander Hamilton, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, or Marilyn Monroe, or playwrite, August Strindberg, or ... a lot of us, almost.

More on Fingerpointing

As I have said in "Fingerpointing" (above) I think that Ms Shanahan in her article stigmatises people for their political beliefs, such as people who support Kelvin Thomson and his 14 point population reform plan or people who are members of SPA by attributing nasty characteristics to them.

She unfairly ignores the fact that Thomson is trying to make it easier to have traditional housing blocks and peaceful lives for families. She fails to engage with his well thought-out policies and by failing to engage with them she leaves herself open to an accusation of her arguments being at least partly motivated by a personal vested interest in keeping family support payments going, rather than for the benefit of the greater society.

"Thomson might be interested to know that the City Futures Research Centre at the University of NSW has proved that the most economical and least polluting household is a family living on a traditional block and family home. As I wrote last year, if the tendency for smaller households continues, particularly single-person dwellings, then combined emissions from each of the separate households would actually make the situation worse even if the population were to decline. So it is actually in the interest of the environment to maintain the traditional large family household." (Shanahan) [Editor's emphasis.]

(Of course that is if the large family stays on that block forever, grows its own food, and never goes out the gate and none of them grow up and drive cars or move into new houses or purchase imported food or ... You see what I mean, I hope.)

And Angela Shanahan shows callousness towards the plight of birds in our increasingly hostile industrialised environment. She talks about birds as if they were 'an amorphous mass of feathers without form or character, sex or song, colour or plumage, size or age'.

Twice she dismisses concerns about birds and implicitly the wider fauna of our natural environment.

"But the anti-natalists don't care about the causes and social consequences of children born out of wedlock; they are more worried about the bird life." (Shanahan)

If I did not know better I would think that she was deaf, blind and heartless and had never been outside an institution.

She is insensitive to the needs of people who love birds. She seems only to see other people as economic factors and ciphers, without human needs for rich natural environments. She does not see the other creatures at all, and never mentions trees, forests or the earth. Through the ages people have loved to have birds around; the human race evolved with birds alongside. Now, because of her ideology of more and more people, must the human race divorce itself from its long association with birds and (by implication all other non-human animals) go on in an impoverished environment? This may sound like a joke, but the question is a serious one. Let us not downgrade the birds to ciphers too by noting their contribution to balancing insect populations, but consider for a moment the danger to a child of growing up in an environment where abundant pesticides had replaced all the birds. Not such a great idea after all, Ms Shanahan?

It is all very well Angela having the freedom to express her point of view and have a large family, but if we have to do without birds and allow them to go extinct so that she [and others like her] can have her way, then I say she must be stopped, not from expressing herself, but from ever getting her way with the world.

I am sure that Saint Francis of Assisi would agree.

Ms Shanahan fails to see that the far greater threat to her kind of family and political views is the mass immigration lobbied for by property developers and their friends in government. Like a high birth-rate, high immigration rates, by increasing population growth and size, raise the cost of living per capita and put the price of the traditional house so far out of reach that the choice becomes, not 'how many children' but, should you save up for a house or have a child. You can have a house without a child, but a child without a house is a hard call. The 4Corners film, "The Last Chance motel" demonstrates the brutal reality of homelessness for children. How is having more people going to improve this untenable situation?

She says that

"Those who think of policy in terms of for mass population may disguise their anti-person crusade but they have no interest in the broader welfare of society."

But it is precisely because of the deterioration in the broader welfare of society that people have become concerned about population growth. They are concerned because they are asking those very questions that Angela asks herself:
"What state is family life in, since the health of the family is a reliable indicator of the moral, social, cultural and economic life of the nation? How are children being educated and protected? What about the medical system? Who is to look after the aged?"

"It is absolutely central to the core obligation of stewardship that we have as human beings to pass on to our children, and to our grandchildren, a world, and an Australian way of life, in as good a condition as the one our parents and grandparents gave to us." (Kelvin Thomson.)

The one thing that would solve all those problems would be to dramatically decrease the cost of land. Then the cost of manufacturing and all other activities in this country would decrease. So would the cost of schooling, of hospitals, of protection and of housing and caring for the aged.

Don't forget that the reason we are told that we all have to put up with the highest housing costs in the world, environmental deterioration, inhuman-scale projects for expensive toll-ways, rising water and food costs, and the selling off of public assets, is because we have to pay for a growing population. See "Why Queenslanders must demand new state elections."

And yet, if we stopped growing our population, the only people who would lose anything are those who make a lot of money out of predating on the rest of us - and we aren't talking about warm and friendly human values there. If the draconian Australian population policies of forced growth ceased, the ordinary person would then easily be able to afford a home and no-one would have to work nearly as hard as they do now. As Clive Hamilton says in Growth Fetish, we could spend so much more time playing with children and participating in our society.

We are born with eyes and ears to enjoy the world around us. If Angela Shanahan wants to have nine children then no-one is going to stop her in Australia, but she should not try to force her lifestyle on other people, and she has no right to tell us to give up loving birds or the trees they need and which we need and Angela also needs, if only she knew it.

Angela Shanahan

Apart from the more specialised Financial Review, The Australian (which also appears as the Weekend Australian) is the only wide circulation national newspaper in Australia [26]. In 1999 Angela Shanahan first appeared as an occasional feature writer in a column called Focus. Shanahan seems to have been selected by the Australian as a pronatalist writer. Her major qualification for this post, apart from her reasonable ability to write, is her claim to be the mother of nine children. Since mothers of nine are a distinct minority and therefore could not represent a large and influential market for the Australian, one assumes that the newspaper is towing a pronatalist line.

“Procreative minority” was the title of her piece in the Weekend Australian on 20-21/5/2000 [27]. In it she describes a “kind of pursed-lipped, neo-Darwinian attitude of “the poor breed like rabbits”” She pushes the line that Australia has a “shrinking and aging population”, concluding therefore that “opposition to income support for big families is puzzling.” She attributes this to “extreme environmentalism or an ideological antipathy to the nuclear, patriarchal family which, in feminist newspeak, is always oppressive.” She promotes the idea of greater financial support for big families because they produce the “taxpayers of the future.” Disparagingly, she describes single people as “lonely old singles who never did manage to confront their fading youth”, and she complains that her children will have to support these singles as well as herself and their father.

Essentially she is suggesting that government should pay a wage to women who produce children and that this should be scaled to the number of children and that the tax system should be reformed to tax families rather than individuals. She does not go into detail but refers to the policies of the National Civic Council linked Australian Family Association. [3]

Angela Shanahan is married to The Australian’s political editor Dennis Shanahan, who is also a big fan of big populations, as are most Murdoch journalists.

NOTES

[1] Here is an extract on The Replacement Rate fallacy in In Barry Maley's world humans breed then die like fruitflies: Mark O'Connor & The Replacement Rate Fallacy.

Can you spot the elementary error?

In fact to keep stable and just replace itself, a relatively young population like Australia’s would currently need something even lower than Western Europe’s rate of around 1.3 children per completed family. More like 0.93. And that’s without immigration!

(Barry Maley also writes: "One of the symptoms of this problem recently confronted Greg Combet, Minister for Defence Personnel and Science, when he drew attention to the demographic problem of a shrinking pool of young men available for recruitment to the defence forces." O'Connor puts this one in its place here but elsewhere as well.)

Misunderstandings like Pell’s often come from those who a decade earlier might have tried to argue that we need more people for defence, or for “respect” in the world. As those older props are discredited, more weight has fallen on the Replacement Rate Fallacy. Underlying all this is a natural bias of human beings towards pro-natalism.

The replacement rate was a useful, if theoretical, concept back when couples everywhere were having 4 and 5 children as a matter of course. Since couples often justified this by saying that the world must be populated, demographers would point out that all a couple need do to replace itself, was to have 2 children. More exactly, about 2.05 children, to allow for the odd child that dies before reaching reproductive age, and for the slight excess of male births. But basically, if women in their reproductive years average two surviving children, or one surviving daughter, a generation will simply replace itself, won’t it?

[2] Francis Ronsin, La Grève des Ventres, Seuil, Paris, 1998.

[3]The above profile comes from Sheila Newman, “Pronatalist Policy in Australia from 1945 to the turn of the century,” (2000)

Click here to see an excellent film interview with Christopher Cook, who wrote, Diet for a Dead Planet about the industrialised world's grossly inefficient industrialised food processing and distribution system (notably the US branch.) A quite rivetting book that goes into the destruction of small farms and the evolution of today's system, with full documentation.

The film-link below takes you to the same film (The Official Meatrix) as the link in the teaser to this article.

Avatar is a remarkable movie, about a fabulous world and an old story with some great new twists and perspectives. This is an exciting and skilled 3D graphics state of the art creation which puts the viewer on a new planet in the skin of an alien tribe. We discuss this experience and the political message of the movie.

Avatar is a remarkable movie.
It is remarkable for its art and special effects and its ability to make the audience feel a part of the movie and identify viscerally with an alien population of hunters and gatherers. It is remarkable for its creation of a beautiful planet with no machines and a strangely sculpted pastel menagerie.

Most remarkable, perhaps, is how a 20th Century Fox blockbuster exposes the colonial ideology that all undeveloped peoples are crying out to have their environments transformed by 'progress and development' and the capitalist brand of 'democracy'. It tells the truth about deforestation and why it occurs.

Forest warriors, take heart!

Colonisation - the theme

The Masai, the Australian Aborigines, the American Indians, the South American Indians, the Maori, the Zulus, the Fijians, the Hawaiians, the Irish, the Irian Jayans - all these tribal people resisted being 'civilised' by colonials who wanted to expand their empires. Was there ever a people that still had land which was happy to hand it over to the historical waves of expansion by Romans, Normans, Muslims, Hispanic, French, German, British, Indonesian, American, Chinese, Indian colonists?

And yet, to this day, we of the 'developed world' are told that we are paying for the expansion of capitalism to bring 'democracy' to the 'undeveloped' or 'unfree' world. And when everywhere is 'developed', the story goes, there won't be any overpopulation or poverty or injustice ... Unfortunately this isn't true. Development is what starts problems in steady state economies and populations. You wonder why more foreign aid people don't wake up to this.[1] Perhaps many stay in the business to try to make the process less awful or simply because, like most of us, they have no land and therefore need their jobs, however awful.

In this film the indigenous are humanoid and their appearance and rituals are perhaps most reminiscent of Africa - a land of immense abundance and variety with fantastically varied peoples, economies and fauna - attacked mercilessly by colonial processes from the industrial revolution of the 1750s. (Viewers might be interested to know that currently, on Earth, Africa is being subjected - along with other lands - including, possibly, Australia - to yet new waves of colonisation - by Chinese and Indian agricultural corporations this time - which are taking over remaining tribal land and 'remanaging' it. We hear so little of this.) [2]

Resettlement of the indigenous in special areas, where they were put to work, was practised by the Romans and the approach is the same today. Move the indigenous, get rid of their leaders, disorganise them, and make them work in the new economy. The business excuse (typically used against the Arabs by the British who displaced them for the Zionist diaspora) is that the people being displaced don't use the land efficiently, because they don't mine it or farm it. Or, if they do mine and farm it, they don't do it efficiently enough. Or if they do it efficiently, they aren't putting their goods on the international open market, and they have to be made to do so. Mess up a country badly enough and soon you can go in and save the starving and place a military presence there to protect your international charities. Coincidentally the country next door usually turns out to have oil or rare minerals or presents a corridor to oil and rare minerals (Somalia).

Avatar is a story about this process in the future, reaching out now into outer space.

In 3D it is absolutely rivetting, and I found myself ducking when missiles came towards me.

The story

The third world has now extended beyond our solar system as the US mercantile spacefleet tries to keep shareholders happy. This involves negotiating the rape of an incredibly beautiful planet with indigenous people who, like most indigenous people, have everything they want and need and don't want colonisation.

"We don't have anything to offer them," says the hero.
"Just go in and negotiate," he is told.

One author in candobetter pages was struck by the plausible ruthlessness of the conquerers in discussing moving the blue native people on. They agreed with one another in such a "civilised" way. To them - the blue people were just an obstacle to the main game...and one instantly saw that this is how forest people and forest animals are regarded by invaders on Earth- something to be brushed aside or bulldozed.

Another candobetter writer said, "This seems to be what they are doing in Queensland to the ordinary Australians in order to go ahead mining coal in agricultural country."

The armed conflict in the pursuit of greed motif in the film is also reminiscent of the US war on Iraq.

This is a planet filled with fabulous rainforest, not really much different from real old rainforest in Australia, but a bit bigger. The creatures in it are huge, of triceratops size, and the flying animals are reminiscent of pterodactyls. The muscle and organ structure of the animals makes it obvious that they are of a different world.

Every species in this world is connected, as indeed are we on this world, but the phenomenon is more obvious here because different species can physically connect to communicate. The ecology of the world is explained using mystical and religious icons, which stand in quite well for a kind of biological ecology.

It was a psychologically clever thing to make the indigenous people so much taller than the humans. Usually the indigenous people, however patronised in movies, are the same size as us or smaller. To get the superiority of these peoples' ability to live within a naturally integrated environment, instead of one like ours, which is disconnected, you need something to convince the audience immediately. Big is usually read as better and these are very large, therefore superior people, with enormous eyes, which convey intelligence. Whilst incredibly gracile, like the Hereros of Namibia, with somewhat similar hairstyles without the red mud, these people are immensely strong and agile. They use the huge tree trunks as paths for running. They are open to the signs of the environment around them and the expression of all the other living things. This is obviously how hunter-gatherers used to live. The way they would have enjoyed life and the knowledge they would have had in the best of societies and environments is well-conveyed here.

And surely the obese children, teenagers and their parents, who go to see this film will wonder at the strength and fitness of the forest people and want to be more like them.

Technology has solved no social or ecological problems

Although set well into the future, we see that more technology has solved nothing fundamental.
Neither has growth economics and globalism.
The US system still has unaffordable health-care and the crippled marine hero in Avatar cannot afford the medical treatment he needs, even though the technology to make him walk again is available. He also needs a job and is expected to perform as well and work as hard as a person with no handicap.
Presumably the population has continued to grow on earth because there are so many marines available to go to outerspace, who need jobs, and are willing to risk their lives.

Instead of sharing the wealth we find that money is still being spent to keep some shareholders happy. And industry must find new minerals to invest in to keep on growing that bottom line.

The machines look as if they are still being powered by petroleum, so the fossil fuel problem must have been solved, although this is not discussed. In fact humans are never going to go to outer space en masse unless they find something completely new to power their vehicles. (This isn't discussed either, obviously.)

War

It looks like a high-tech oil-war like the one in Iraq is still going, but it has moved into outer space, seeking to expand its influence in the pursuit of materials and energy. Although we only hear what goes on in the colony, one assumes that the folk back on earth are told that this is all to bring democracy and wealth to the undeveloped worlds out there.

The audience

I was interested to observe the faces of the people who live in Melbourne where I saw this film. A lot looked shocked, unused to questioning the whole notion of progress, yet almost certainly emerging from close to three hours of intense identification with a hunter-gatherer tribe, hoping that Earth's progress would be halted.

I hoped that the many people who see this film will actually retain something useful to help them resist the media and government propaganda that are used to destroy forests and people and to grind the rest of us exceedingly small in a vast commercial con-job.

Of course, with every new exploitation, we are always told, "Now we are modern, it will be different."

Great film!

NOTES

[1] On foreign aid, Michael Maren, The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity, Free Press, Simon and Schuster, 1997 ; Graham Hancock, Lords of Poverty, Atlantic Press, 1989
[2] Recolonisation of Africa by China and India: See, for instance: "China and India Battle for Influence in Africa: Part 4" (although this one lets India off lightly); Exploiting Africa [history]. You can also find multiple business and foreign aid articles saying how great it is that foreigners are renting vast terrains in Africa and employing the villagers who once managed them. You have to look quite long and hard to find out that most of the Africans initially resist this loss of power over their own territory. If Africa is to feed China and India, it will be sucked totally dry, but, hey! there will be a few jobs along the line.

In true Ruddism style (hollow popularism) Australia is domestically making noise while doing squat to resolve Japan's state-sanctioned slaughter of endangered whale species or to ethically stand up to an illegitimate foreign aggressor. So year on year, Greenpeace's Sea Shepherd does the dirty work of another Australian government.
So why should Hollywood not sponsor the Sea Shepherd's costs?

Japanese whalers, tens of thousands of miles south of Japan in Australian Antarctic waters and seriously outside any feasible extension of what may constitute 'traditional' Japanese hunting grounds, try to argue on the one hand that:

(1) whaling is a cultural tradition practiced by the Japanese for centuries and so have an inherent right to continue this tradition, then on the other that
(2) Japanese whale hunting is purely scientific

Combined, the two justifications expose the motive as a prima facie fraud and as one more important that the mainstream media have realised. Japan's justifications for whaling are not commercial and not scientific. They are culturally deep and desperately self-preserving, despite being wrong, wasteful and backward.

Proud Japan's once mighty economy overtaking the west through the 1970s and 1980s reached it's inevitable bubble, but the Japanese rebirth in pride since humilating defeat in World War II, could not foresee a second cultural failure.

But when the Japanese real estate and stock price bubble burst in 1990, immediate nation-wide shock and depression ensued lasting throughout the 1990s, which now has been acknowledged as Japan's Lost Decade. Worse for Japanese pride has been its once globally accepted and admired business management practices that have consequently fallen into disrepute internationally. These include Japan's once acclaimed Kaizen management practice, market first product focus, Genbutso Genba (facts, figures and check) learning from competitors, and Hoshin Kanri (process management). So right now, Japanese pride is at an ebb one could say. Then to hammer the nail into the coffin, Japan has seen its historic arch rival, China, recently replace and exceed Japan's economic success.

How is Japan's cultural pride relevant to Japan's whaling activities in the Southern Ocean? Well let's investigate the facts.

Japanese whalers, tens of thousands of miles south of Japan in Australian Antarctic waters and seriously outside any feasible extension of what may constitute 'traditional' Japanese hunting grounds, try to argue on the one hand that (1) whaling is a cultural tradition practiced by the Japanese for centuries and so have an inherent right to continue this tradition, then on the other that (2) Japanese whale hunting is purely scientific - is an exposed prima facie fraud.

Founder and President of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, Paul Watson, provides an historical synopsis of the Japanese 19th Century commercial interest in whaling in his article of 27 June 2006 'The Truth about "Traditional" Japanese Whaling':

"In the 1890's Japanese man, Jura Oka, made his way to Norway, the Azores, and Newfoundland to study whaling and learn of the commercial rewards. Oka then formed the first Japanese whaling company Hogei Gumi with one vessel, the Saikai-maru, and killed a total of three whales. In 1908 the Nihon Hogeigyo Suisan Kumiai was established (Japanese Whaling Association) with Jura Oka as the first President. In 1908 the association's 12 companies with a total of 28 whaling vessels killed 1,312 whales. The average kill for the next 25 years would be around 1,500 whales.

...The 1930's became the greatest decade of whale slaughter in history. In 1931, 37,438 blue whales were massacred in the Southern Oceans. Japan sent its first ships to Antarctica in 1935. The sale of whale oil helped to finance the invasion of Manchuria and China. In 1937 alone, more than 55,000 whales were slaughtered yielding 3 million tons of animals."

Post World War II, America's General Douglas MacArthur, encouraged the revitalisation of a defeated and demoralised Japan.

"In 1946, General Douglas MacArthur proposed the creation of a Japanese whaling fleet to secure protein for the conquered Japanese people. He did so in order to cut down on the United States' costs of transporting food to post war Japan. On August 6th 1946 MacArthur signed the directive authorizing two factory ships and twelve catcher boats to begin whaling in the Antarctic for the 1946-47 season. The deal was that Japan would get the meat and the oil would be turned over to the United States. The United States provided $800,000 in fuel for the ships and received over 4 million dollars in whale oil in return.

The two ships sent down to Antarctic waters were the Hashidate Maru and the Nishin Maru."

Do these vessel names sound familiar?

"The brutal killing of whales has become an icon for the Japanese identity. This is not unusual. Japan has always closely identified with blood and slaughter. From the decapitations by the Samurai upon innocent peasants to the suicidal insanity of the Kamikaze, violence and self destruction have been a part of Japanese culture."

- - - - - -

With Japan's Samurai culture castrated, its military culture castrated, its economic miracle failed, what pride can traditional Japanese otherwise cling to?

Few eat whale meat in Japan. The scientific research of whales is only an excuse so that that Japan can claim to be technically complying with the Antarctic Treaty. But the activity is one of lost Samurais with no other quest. It's all really quite sad for Japan and symptomatic of a once proud people having become culturally lost.

Today (6 Jan 2010) in the Queensland Courrier Mail, http://www.sunshinecoastdaily.com.au/story/2010/01/06/bligh-delivers-a-farce/ Bill Hoffman has written a robust opinion piece entitled, "Bligh delivers a farce".

Queensland's Marie-Antoinette Government

Pointing to the Queensland Government's forcing the Sunshine Coast Council to cooperate with the development of three sites, "owned by less than a handful of property development companies," Hoffman accuses the government of hiding behind the need of low-income families for housing in order to excuse unaffordable and environmentally damaging developments.

Queensland's Deceptively named Sustainable Planning Act

"Current infrastructure and planning minister, and former Property Council advisor, Stirling Hinchliffe[candobetter ed's emphasis] has been given unprecedented power under Queensland’s new and equally deceptively named Sustainable Planning Act, which was introduced in late December, 2009, to ride roughshod as he chooses over local government planning objectives."

He criticises the Queensland Government for allowing developers to buy up land with the intention of developing it, but holding on to it until the price goes up.

"A simple use-it-or-lose-it provision as a condition of approval would have at least guaranteed the articulated intent of the policy," he writes.

He describes how hypocritical this in the light of Kevin Rudd's early comments about combating the obscenity of homelessness. Today, however, about 100,000 Australians are estimated to be homeless in any week.

"The Affordable Housing Strategy has delivered an estimated $1 billion to the bottom line of just one property company," Hoffman ells us.

And he asks why "the unions, students, church groups, lawyers and community groups" aren't on the streets demanding an end to the farce."

Why the unions, churches, students, lawyers say nothing about this shame and destruction

I think I know why. They unions and church groups have invested their funds in property development; the lawyers make money out of conveyancing; many students are studying to be planners and won't pass or be employed by developers or the government if they stand up against corruption in development and population-building; and the community groups are disorganised through immigration, pace of projects, and poor information and communication, since they tend to rely on newspapers, tv and government for news. (This Hoffman article is a bit of an exception to that). Of course, if he is talking about mainstream environmental groups, well, most of them get grants from the government and their staff want to keep their positions.

Hoffman also says, "There is little the electorate can do about this having voted Labor back in at last year’s early poll, which was called before all the bad news began to filter out. ..."

Not true that people can do nothing

People can do something. Instantly! They can sign this petition calling for the government to resign:Sign here

How about a groundswell?

Here it is:

"Queensland citizens draws to the attention of the House the Queensland public, the rightful owners of $15 billion worth of assets which are to be sold, were denied any say over this because of the failure of the Queensland
government to reveal those plans during the course of the elections. We consider the stated intention of the government to proceed with the sale in the face of opinion polls, which show at least 80% public opposition, to be
amongst the most serious breaches of public trust imaginable.

"Your petitioners, therefore, request the House to call upon the Queensland government to resign immediately to give the Queensland public a chance to elect a new Government which can gain its trust. Your petitioners also warn any private investors considering buying the assets, not to do so and call upon a future State government which does enjoy the trust and confidence of the Queensland people not to honour any such contracts for the sale of assets. "

"If this means having a LNP Government led by John-Paul Langbroek in office instead, that certainly seems preferable to the continued misrule by this crowd,"says its author, James Sinnamon. (See coming article from James Sinnamon).

The film below shows the Japanese ship turning towards the Ady Gil prior to ramming.

Click to play film

Here is the Sea Shepherd's press release for Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Japanese Whalers Ram Sea Shepherd Ship Ady Gil

Famed trimaran is sinking in the Southern Ocean

Six crewmembers Rescued by the Sea Shepherd Ship Bob Barker

In an unprovoked attack captured on film, the Japanese security ship Shonan Maru No. 2 deliberately rammed and caused catastrophic damage to the Sea Shepherd trimaran Ady Gil.

Six crew crewmembers, four from New Zealand, one from Australia, and one from the Netherlands were immediately rescued by the crew of the Sea Shepherd ship Bob Barker. None of the crew Ady Gil crew were injured.

The Ady Gil is believed to be sinking and chances of salvage are very grim. [Ed. It sank completely.]

According to eyewitness Captain Chuck Swift on the Bob Barker, the attack happened while the vessels were dead in the water. The Shonan Maru No. 2 suddenly started up and deliberately rammed the Ady Gil ripping eight feet of the bow of the vessel completely off. According to Captain Swift, the vessel does not look like it will be saved.

“The Japanese whalers have now escalated this conflict very violently,” said Captain Paul Watson. “If they think that our remaining two ships will retreat from the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary in the face of their extremism, they will be mistaken. We now have a real whale war on our hands now and we have no intention of retreating.”

Captain Paul Watson onboard the Steve Irwin is racing towards the area at 16 knots but still remains some five hundred miles to the north. The Bob Barker has temporarily stopped the pursuit of the Nisshin Maru to rescue the crew of the Ady Gil. The Japanese ships initially refused to acknowledge the May Day distress of the Ady Gil, but ultimately did acknowledge the call. Despite acknowledging the call, they did not offer to assist the Ady Gil or the Bob Barker in any way.

The incident took place at 64 Degrees and 03 Minutes South and 143 Degrees and 09 Minutes East

Until this morning the Japanese were completely unaware of the existence of the Bob Barker. This newest addition to the Sea Shepherd fleet left Mauritius off the coast of Africa on December 18th and was able to advance along the ice edge from the West as the Japanese were busy worrying about the advance of the Steve Irwin from the North.

“This is a substantial loss for our organization,” said Captain Watson. “The Ady Gil, the former Earthrace, represents a loss of almost two million dollars. However the loss of a single whale is of more importance to us and we will not lose the Ady Gil in vain. This blow simply strengthens our resolve, it does not weaken our spirit.”

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is requesting that the Australian government send a naval vessel to restore the peace in the waters of the Australian Antarctic Territory. We have 77 crew from 16 nations on three vessels, six of them were on the Ady Gil. Of these, 21 are Australian citizens: 16 Australians on the Steve Irwin and five on the Bob Barker. Sea Shepherd believes that the Australian government has a responsibility to protect the lives of Australian citizens working to defend whales from illegal Japanese whaling activities.

“Australia needs to send a naval vessel down here as soon as possible to protect both the whales and the Australian citizens working to defend these whales,” said Steve Irwin Chief Cook Laura Dakin of Canberra. “This is Australian Antarctic Territorial waters and I see the Japanese whalers doing whatever they want with impunity down here without a single Australian government vessel anywhere to be found. Peter Garrett, I have one question for you: Where the bloody hell are you?”

Are Sea Shepherd's tactics appropriate?

On a web discussion on the ABC site the Moderator asked, on 23 Dec 2009 10:57:11am, "Are Sea Shepherd's tactics appropriate?"

Among the responses, Greg wrote: "Of course they are, no one else has the balls to do any thing. Especially our piss weak government."

That about sums up the situation, I think.

And it brings us back to the need to audit the Australian government and all the Australian states not yet audited, for their performance in protecting Australian wildlife, including whales, of course.

You cannot help but suspect that there is money in it for some people close to government

An old age pensioner tells his heartbreaking story of Josie, the little possum joey who he and his wife lovingly raised but was unable to release due to human imprinting. After 6 years of being part of Raoul Harvey's family, suddenly the RSPCA tried to confiscate her and another possum they were rehabbing. That's when all hell broke loose! It's time some new laws were made in the best interests of the animal, not the law. Read what this courageous man did to outwit the system.

I wonder if our childrens’ children will read about us as the ones who looked after the animals we used to have in the wild?

My first experience with "real" wildlife care started on 21/01/2003 when a female possum who used to stop by our door regularly for a handout came inside our house one night and would not leave despite gentle persuasion. We went to bed leaving the door open should "Mrs Possum" change her mind and leave.

In the morning she was dead on our loungeroom floor and in her pouch was a little pinky who became Josie and a unique and wonderful bond was forged that January morning. I rang around and the word was to tap her on the head, something I could not do because of the trust Josie's mother had in me looking after her baby. Talk about jumping in the deep end! I purchased every book, searched every site that mentioned possums and did everything possible to get this little charge through.

Most of our friends thought us mad when we would visit with our baby and I'm sure some thought we had early dementia but each day Josie became stronger and we became prouder with what we were seeing, our baby was going to make it. So like the proud parents we had become we built Josie a nice new home and when she was about 26 weeks of age we moved her in.

Well, what a disappointment! She wanted nothing to do with her sheepskin covered bed, her new shiny stainless food and water bowls and the two fans installed at each end of her house, all she wanted was to be in my shirt (I learnt very early to put a T shirt on first).

What to do? Being an experienced dad I knew exactly what was needed. I would sit in her cage with her until she nodded off and quietly sneak off. Well I forgot possums play at night and sleep all day. Josie thought it was wonderful that her dad had moved in with her and showed her happiness by jumping from the top of her box on to my head all night, each time she had a breather I crept out but each time she would see me gone and scream out until I returned.

This could not continue so I got in touch with a carer and it was suggested I put a child's teddy bear in her box. I dont know what Josie thought the toy was but it did the trick and a little sanity returned to our house.

Next trick was to find what bush tucker she ate. Another bright idea, I put her in my shirt and we would ride around our 5 acres on the rideon mower and stop at every likely tree and shrub and find out what she liked and after a few days I had a fair idea but it seemed Josie liked the ride as much as jumping on my head and so began a ritual that lasted for 6 years and 190 days.

I should mention here that the reason I never went to QPWS or any other authority to ask about permits to have and keep Josie was that I was told that the law said she would have to be put down if she could not be released, so I gave them a miss.

We now had to reconsider our retirement plans which included a 4WD and caravan to hit the road but we thought travelling with a possum who thought she was a kid (so did we) might be a little hard in caravan parks so with a stroke of genius we decided an off-road camper trailer was the way to go. We became the proud owners of a Pioneer camper and did a few trips to secluded fishing and camping locations which Josie thought was magic. She would grab any smallish fish I caught and "protect" me from these flopping strange things. She would stand on the bow of our tinny like a pointer dog as we ran our crab pots. She really did enjoy our trips away.

She would be in my shirt when we went to town, my wife did the shopping and we would stay in the car but when I had to buy "mans" stuff Josie would be in my shirt and if she was noticed she would revell in any attention, especially from kids. At times a quick dash in to buy a filter for the car turned into an hour. She really did know she was special and would pose for the camera and allow people to pat her, not once did she nip anyone but on occasions if I failed to heed her need for the toilet she would do her thing much to the delight of any kids who were present at the time.

When Josie was 2 years old a family member presented us with an orphaned male brushtail who was about 6 months old. This little bloke was very traumatised as his mother had been killed by dogs on a golf course. Talk about a special needs kid, Fred as we named him was very clingy for months and is still very timid.

I must mention here that up until Josie was 2 years old we tried 7 times to release her at varying times of her cycle but she would not have a bar of being a "real" possum. Fred has always been free to come and go but on the two occasions he left home he came back very hungry and sorry looking, the only time his cage is closed is when we know there are dingos in the area or we are away for the day.

Everything apart from my health was going well until Friday September 25 when we got a phone call from my mother in law telling us that acting on information (don't you just love it?) the RSPCA were taking Fred and I had 2 hours to surrender Josie. I will not repeat what I said but it included the fact that if not returned Fred would die from stress very quickly. Josie had already sensed my stress and was cuddling very close to me. Josie and I went into hiding but not before I contacted the local Rockhampton newspaper and met them in an isolated place, like a criminal. They did the story which was published on the Saturday generating unbelievable support from the public for Josie and myself (see links at end).

Friday night was spent up in the state forest as was Saturday and Sunday. Josie would not eat and I could not so it was a very uncomfortable weekend for us both. While we were in hiding, the local wildlife carers were busy letting NPWS and RSPCA know that their action would kill Fred and he should be returned immediately.

I got a call on my mobile on Monday morning from a wonderful lady telling me Fred was on his way home and Josie and I could come home. All carers will understand this next part of the saga, as my stress level fell and my tears eased my little Josie gave me a big wet kiss, cuddled even closer and went to sleep. The transformation was unreal, animal magic.

Unfortunately the ending of this story is not so happy as my beautiful little friend died at 1.30pm on Sunday 6th of December. Even though she calmed down after the terrible incident she and Fred went through she was never as calm as before this garbage happened. I have had wonderful support from the carers in the area and have joined one group. They all agree that the stress Josie went through was why she is no longer with me. Of course only an autopsy would prove the cause but I would not allow that to happen.

After Fred was returned I had to hand feed him and sat in his cage with him for hours letting him know he was okay. Hopefully things will turn out well for him.

To this day I still do not know the reason why the RSPCA was called or why NPWS became involved. These "public servants" would not know a feral pig from a bower bird and when confronted they have to be non commital for fear of being seen to actually make a comment off their own bat and therefore rock the good ship NPWS. Their efforts would be better directed toward the bird smugglers and the people trading off the misery of our wildlife instead of giving fair dinkum animal carers a hard time and wasting tax dollars on witch hunts.

On a happier note I now have 2 young possums about 9 months old, one an orphan and a little female who was burnt in the recent fires in our area. They are both doing well and will be released as soon as there is enough food out in the bush to sustain them.

In ending my story I would like to say that the time Josie and I had together was an absolute privilege, a relationship built on respect, trust and most of all LOVE.

Raoul

To get in touch with Raoul email him at rharvey [AT] cqnet.com.au
Please share your 'Josie' stories with us by commenting in the box below.

P.S. Check out the newspaper articles below - the comments of supportive people below the article show the true heart of where wildlife carers are coming from.

http://www.themorningbulletin.com.au/story/2009/09/26/raouls-possum-magic/

http://www.themorningbulletin.com.au/story/2009/09/28/josie-is-still-on-the-run/

http://www.themorningbulletin.com.au/story/2009/10/06/possum-carer-raoul-takes-on-his-new-charge

http://www.themorningbulletin.com.au/story/2009/09/29/beady-eyed-freds-back-now-for-josie/

Traditional Chinese have deemed 2010 the Chinese Year of the Tiger. But some traditional Chinese medicine is based on superstition, and some Chinese men still think the bones of a tiger will increase their libido and so want to kill tigers to get a hard on.

AdultShop should set up in Beijing and sort these misguided blokes out.

"Zion Organic's Tiger Bone contains herbs that have been associated with love potions and sexuality for thousands of years! These herbs enhance libido, boost sexual vigor, performance stamina and heighten sexual excitement for both males and females. The formula in this tonic will stimulate gland hormone activities, increase body energy that helps improve blood supply, nerve stimulation and glandular activity.

Better Sex naturally emerges from a healthier body and mind. If there are psychological or stress related problems impending sexuality (Up to 80% of sexual dysfunction is of mental or emotinal origin), our tonic drinks can hep over come them by turning the attention to love making and stimulating short term energy against impotence or frigidity. For the 20% of psychological factors causing sexual problems , the most common are diabetes, the use of certain prescriptions and poor circulation. Aging is not a cause of impotence or lack of libido for either male or female. Normal sexual function requires healthy organs and balance glands to produce necessary sex hormones. The herbs found in Tiger Bone help to establish a superior body balance by working through the glands, and they are uniquely qualified to help combat disorders associated with sexual function.[Source: zionorganic.com].

"A Chinese court has recently sentenced a man to 12 years in jail, plus a fine, for killing an endangered Indochinese tiger - which was made into a stew and eaten."

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has long advocated applying Tiger Bone as a traditional medicine for male impotence. With a billion Chinese, the Chinese Year of the Tiger translates to neanderthal Chinese paying big yuan to slaughter endangered tigers (mainly from impoverished India and Indonesia) in order to think their penises will grow and make more Chinese boys.

Unscientific people can be really backwards.
TCM used tiger bone in prescriptions for centuries, perhaps more than 1,500 years to treat pain and inflammation and to strengthen muscles, tendons and bones.

But wait!
Backward Chinese have no reason to be shy about their libido and size. The Chinese Government owned Tanggula Pharmaceutical Company has published results of 10 years of research showing that sailong (mole rat) bone “can completely substitute tiger bone for the effective treatment of rheumatism.

So misguided impotents can get help from mole rats and leave tigers alone. Their numbers in the wild have been reduced to just hundreds.

Seriously, the Chinese Government's 14 year ban on trade in 'tiger bone' is a positive step forward out of a backward superstition that only serves to drive a significant top order mammal into extinction.

If not, the 1 billion Chinese pathogen should be returned to the one child policy.

Film: Writer and environmentalist, Mark O'Connor says that this is the first time since the mid 1990s that the ABC has interviewed someone from Sustainable Population Australia for the environmental view on population problems in Australia. I can't wait for them to interview someone from Candobetter.org. In the mean time:
See also poll in The Age: "Suburban sprawl: Is a pause in extending Melbourne's boundary a good thing?" (Obviously the answer is "Yes").

The poll is obviously a response to public fury about DACS. In the Age today (Tuesday 5 January 2010) "Rethink on Outer Suburban Expansion" carries the news that Minister Madden appears to have done a backflip on the Extension of the Urban Growth Boundary. Don't hold your breath though: he will still try to build upwards and more densely, which is also unacceptable. Basically the government and developer induced growth must stop altogether.

Back to last night's ABC news

As numerous articles on candobetter.org attest, the ABC usually presents the population numbers in Australia in a biased way, which gives big business members of the growth lobby a free kick and assists the continuing decline of democracy in Australia as governments dispense with consultation and dance the growth lobby tune. Indeed, the amount of real-estate and property growth investment people frequently invited to speak on the ABC makes it look as if someone in the know is pushing growth via the ABC, perhaps taking advantage of the usual presenters not realising the vested interest of their interviewees.

On this interview, ANU demographer, Graeme Hugo appears. This makes a nice change from the usual ANU Demography talking head, Peter McDonald, who always talks up population growth, often in association with Australian ATSE, the Multicultural Foundation, the Scanlon Foundation. Hugo is usually good on the need to brake our population growth for environmental reasons. Here he talks about us 'needing to replace the aging population', but adds that in the long-term he expects immigration to be cut back for environmental reasons. I've heard him speak much more strongly against population growth.

We have yet to hear anyone official showing concern about democracy and forced population growth except the amazing Victorian environmentalist MP, Kelvin Thomson, who was not interviewed by the ABC news. Kelvin Thomson is standing up for democracy and the environement and kindness to our indigenous fauna, in a one-man crusade completely counter the Lebensraum-for-developers-uber al-ALP-culture. See more here. Thomson is a Federal MP in a Victorian electorate that is densely populated with old and new immigrants and they give him plenty of support!

(Scroll down for information from writers in Australia, Canada, USA to date. More input welcome)

Solar Power - photovoltaics - in France

In France, as in Australia, many people have installed solar panels in order to benefit from selling electricity they generate but do not use back to the grid. In France they sell it back to Electricité de France (EDF). The number of professionals who supply electricity back to the grid in France is increasing.[1]

In the photograph of a rural landscape we can see the equivalent of 300 football fields has been dedicated to photovoltaic surfaces.
Workers add 4,500 daily.

The photovoltaic-center is huge, on a non-human scale.

When it is finished it will be the biggest site in Europe. It is 300 hectares (ha) in area and is expected to produce 76 megawats (MW) once completed, which would supply the consumption of something around 40,000 citizens.

(Ed. We are not told by France2 whether this is average French per capita, or average French private household. Obviously, by taking such factors as industry and food transport into account, consumption per capita would far exceed consumption per capita per household. Also, in Australia electricity and fuel consumption per capita or per capita per household are greater than in France. Per capita, this is because Australian food and other goods travel further than in France and, per capita per household, it is because we have very poor building insulation and design (deterioriating as we speak and many new suburbs replace vegetated areas with eaveless, tarmack-surrounded, uninsulated boxes.)

This year part of this new photovoltaic center will use 'tracking' technology whereby the panels can turn themselves to follow the sun. This is expected to increase electricity production by between 20 and 30 per cent.

France has 30 times less photovoltaic stock than Germany

France's 175 MW of public stock of photovoltaic panels was multiplied by three in one year, but remains 30 times less than the German stock.

Yves Bruno Civel, General Director of the Observatory of Renewable Energyies, commented, "If France tried to catch up with Germany by making giant photovoltaic installations, it would run into limitations eventually due to competition for ground space, which is already intense, between those who want more land to expand cities and roads [2]and those who want it for biofuels and food."

Tariffs for grid-feed

Photovoltaic panels are not only found in vast fields. More and more are found on house roofs. Individuals sell all their production to EDF. They get 60c per kilowatt and can buy back electricity for only 10c a kilowatt.

Erwan Tesson, Director of Arkensol Society says this isn't the only benefit. You get money back on income tax, which, for the average family in France, would amount to 8000 Euros.

Retirement income

Frederic Borrot, a farmer in Gironde says, "It's better than life insurance. The return over 20 years is 10-12 per cent."

With 200 square meters of photovoltaic panels on his outbuildings a farmer can pay back his loan. Borrot's aim is to prepare for the future.

"To have additional revenue and for my retirement, because today farmers haven't got much of a retirement income - far from it. With this one can expect a monthly return of 1,500 Euros.

But future profits may not be guaranteed

The possibility that the rates the EDF currently pays may be revised downwards is causing some anxiety - especially for professionals.

In France 34,000 projects are in a queue for connection.

Australia

From Bill Parker, Editor of Australian Solar Energy Society's on-line magazine

The PV industry in OZ is dominated by installers. There is no longer any pull through that builds a real industry with the departure of BP Solar. Their factory is now in the hands of a nuclear company and the only other organisation is Spark Solar in Canberra.

The "industry" is hardly stable and has to react to the mismanagement in Canberra - the investment is not there and the
players are scratching at the edges. Australia has failed and failed to get to grips with an industrial development policy that creates stability and certainty. The knee jerk operates. There is no sound thinking, and any of the sound thinkers who were left are now gone.

The country needs a uniform GROSS fee in tariff, like France, to create the proper settings for a sunrise industry. It MUST be enshrined in legislation nationally otherwise we are just talking greenwash and hot air. On a bigger scale, there is a simple mechanism that would assist - a bit like the completion guarantee for a film. Indemnify the companies that would build bigger solar plants. The money is out there.

Frankly, Australia is not even in the race anymore and to even contemplate that K. Rudd would change that is wishful thinking only.

Bill Parker

Ontario, Canada

Don Chisholm writes:

In Ontario Canada, our provincial gov has take a lead in promoting "green" energy. Last May they passed the Ontario Energy Act.

Its Feed In Tarrif (FIT) program provides easier access to the grid by large produces, and long term contracts for wind and solar developers, with prices significantly higher than current fossil fuel costs, today.

I live in an island county on the eastern end of Lake Ontario, with excellent wind potential. However, a very strong well-financed NIMBY lobby has, to date, prevented wind-farm developers from becoming established here. I'm co-chair of a local group called, the County Sustainability Group, and we have written an essay to rebut the NIMBYists, and to elaborate on why their disinformation holds appeals to many in the general public. You can see this essay
here.

At the home owner level, the FIT provides great incentive for rooftop or backyard wind or solar, up to 10 kw. For example, it gives a 20 year contract for solar energy paying about 6 times the home owners cost from energy from the grid. Buy low, sell high – it should work! ROInvestment should be over 10%/year, significantly better than money invested anywhere else these days. I have recently had a contract proposal accepted and am currently working on getting a 10kw system system in place.

Of interest might be the Ontario hourly energy that provides our grid.
Details here
The CANDO reactor chug along providing almost half of our energy with the other large contributor hydro, especially the Beck generators at Niagara Falls.

Don Chisholm (watching the snow fall at -15c,)

New York, USA

Sir Edmund the Green writes:

I just had a 2.08 KW solar PV system installed on a shed i built for the purpose in New York State.
We qualified for a New York State rebate of $4. per watt (this has since been lowered to $2.50 per watt.)

We were required to use a "professional" installer approved by NYSERDA (NY Energy Authority) to receive the rebate.

Between a labor charge of $2,000 for about 40 hours of work, and hidden mark-ups of about $5 - 6 K, the entire rebate went to the installer, who made out like a bandit. We could have purchased the materials, (10 Sharp panels, 216's rather than the 208's we got , a Sunnyboy SMA3000 US inverter, and a rail mounting system) in the competitive marketplace from a supplier like Solar Electric Supply in California, for LESS than we paid after the rebate!

The rebate system as it currently exists in NY is a rip off, basically a welfare program for approved installers, and does little or nothing to encourage more people to go Solar.

Most of the work of installing a PV system involves knowing how to operate a ladder, and basic electricity. The rebate system needs to be re-oriented towards allowing the do it yourselfer to take advantage of it, and the greed of professional installers needs to be capped. Of course, as in any electrical project, there must be rigorous safety inspection.

But as marginal as the financial payback is for photovoltaic, the current rebate system is a killer for anyone but the true solar fanatic.

sir edmund the green

In general, cut down

From Dave Kimble, North Queensland, Australia
[Referring to report on France]:

76 MW is the peak power of the installed panels under full summer midday sun.
Most of the time the panels will produce a lot less than that.
Customers actually consume energy, not power.
In Queensland the average household uses at an average rate of 21 KW.h per day.
But they don't use it at a continuous rate of ( 21 / 24 ) KW, nor at the rate at which the solar panels supply it (mostly around midday).
So the solar farm must be connected into an electrical grid that has sufficient generating capacity of other kinds to be able to match supply to demand.

While it is important to know the peak power, so that electrical equipment can be sized to cater for full load, what is also important is the KW.h produced each hour over the day and over days at different times of year.

In France an average day for a 1 KW panel might produce 4.5 KW.h ( that's a guess - search for "insolation" ).
If each household uses 21 KW.h per day then 76 MW is equivalent to 3,619 households, so that 40,000 citizens looks wrong - more like 14,000 .

As well as being weaker in winter, when the sun is lower in the sky, and the days are shorter, there is also the interruption of clouds. As solar becomes a larger proportion of the national energy mix, the "matching" capacity must get larger to cover for the cloudy days and cloudy hours.

Coal and nuclear cannot do this matching capacity job because they are very slow to change their output.
Wind can't do it either, because it also is variable.
Hydro is good, but good locations are few and far between.
Gas is OK, but it is wasteful to keep it "ready to go" - it might be economically OK because the grid controller will pay highly for matching capacity, but it is poor from the GW viewpoint to have gas running at night and gas spinning in reserve during the day.

And the solution is ...
there is no good solution.
Cut down.

Dave Kimble

Candobetter invites people to describe their experiences in different places.

Articles are also welcome.

NOTES

[1] Source of pictures and much of report: France2, (tv news) 1 Jan 2010

[2] Note that France is not intentionally growing its population, which is projected to fall after the deaths of the 'baby-boomer' bubble, over a period extending between around 2010 and 2060. Only the English-speaking polities are currently afflicted by their property development magnates with a populate and perish democratic opposition mentality. See more on The Growth Lobby

The Growth Lobby seemed to have gone to some trouble to justify immigration to Australia on Wikipedia. Immigration_to_Australia It seems dated during Rudd's tenure.

The arguments are shallow but useful in gaining an insight into the case for more immigration. The same old pro claims are presented:

Historical Success Claim - Immigration is good for Australia because historically Australia has had continual immigration and this has resulted in a growing economy.

Of course, this economic justification ignores the problems and injustices associated with invasion, convict settlement, colonisation, Aboriginal genocide and widespread deforestation.

It also presumes Australia’s historical circumstances have not changed and that carrying capacity is infinite. It also fails to acknowledge that immigration has concentrated in the Capital Cities of mainly Sydney and Melbourne, to the detriment of rural communities, which has encouraged the development of two Australia’s – an urban one and a rural one, with the bulk of government resources allocated to the urban one.

Skilled Migrants Claim Australian immigration policy is highly focused on encouraging selective skilled immigrants to fill skills shortages.

This argument is contradicted, when it identifies “in March 2009, the Australian Government announced a 14 per cent cut in the 2008-09 permanent skilled migration program intake from 133 500 to 115 000 in response to worsening economic conditions.” This indicates that migration does not encouraged improved economic conditions but exacerbates economic woes.
This argument ignores the 635,000 currently unemployed across Australia. How many of these are immigrants?

Immigration encourages multi-culturalism claim

The settlement patterns of Australian immigration have not been followed up with any programme of assimilation or any concern for demographic planning to avoid ethnic ghettos. As a consequence, instead of a gradual filtering of different ethnic groups across Australian society, each ethnic group has retained ethnicity, ways of life, cultures and values and many ghetto communities have been allowed to form. For example:

* Samoan enclave in Logan City (Brisbane)
* IndoChinese enclaves in Springvale, Richmond, Collingwood and Footscray (Melbourne)
* Korean enclave in Box Hill (Melbourne)
* Turkish enclave in Brunswick (Melbourne)
* Indian enclave in Hawthorn (Melbourne)
* Lebanese enclave in the Bankstown – Lakemba (Sydney)
* Vietnamese enclave in Cabramatta (Sydney)
* Indian enclave around Parramatta (including Harris Park, West Mead) (Sydney)
* Sri Lankan enclave at Strathfield (Sydney)
* Chinese enclave at Epping (Sydney)
* Sudanese enclave in Blacktown (Sydney)
* Malaysian enclave in Willeton (Perth)
* Indian enclave in Canning Vale (Perth)
* Papuan enclave in Cairns (Far North Queensland)

The trends show that these enclaves are being reinforced, rather than there being active assimilation with the broader community by federal immigration. Immigration is state-sanctioned invasion. Responsibly immigration respects local values first and ensures assimilation. Responsible immigration does not stop at the airport arrivals gate.

Immigration does not harm the environment claim
The argument runs that “on a global level immigration does not affect population” – it just redistributes it. Well since Australia is a more attractive destination for living, that redistribution is biased to Australia. Australia has become a melting pot magnet. Once Australia becomes over-crowed that attraction will dissipate but by then it will be too late to change. Forced emigration is not a democratic option, like encouraged immigration is.

The argument relies on the Productivity Commission, which has a mandate to encourage growth, so hardly a reliable source. “The Productivity Commission Inquiry Report No. 28 ‘First Home Ownership’ (2004) also stated, in relation to housing, that “Growth in immigration since the mid-1990s has been an important contributor to underlying demand, particularly in Sydney and Melbourne.”

Counter arguments about aligning population to environmental carrying capacity and the link between population growth and greenhouse gas emissions have been ignored.

Immigration doesn’t reduce housing affordability, rather it drives demand for better quality housing claim No basis is provided for this claim. It suggests migrants have more disposable income than locals which results in better quality housing. If this is true than wealthy migrants are displacing poorer locals.

Immigration raises employment levels for Australians who are relatively unskilled claim
No basis is provided for this claim. If migrants are only filling employment vacancies that cannot be filled by Australians, where are the verifiable statistics? How many recent migrants are in fact unemployed? Why are 635,000 Australian’s unemployed? Why would employers seek foreign workers in favor of local workers if the labour costs are equivalent, given foreign workers have added problems of language conversion, resettlement, cultural assimilation, permanency uncertainty. Why are Australia’s not allowed education opportunities to enable them to meet the local skills needs?

Negative population growth has adverse long-term effects on the economy as the population ages and the labour market becomes less competitive.

Perhaps more Australians would have larger families if the costs of living that existed in the 1950s boom were re-established. Immigration has raised demand, increased scarcity and driven up the cost of living, making large families unaffordable to all but e wealthy.

Immigration decreases unemployment claim This is a complete falsehood. Such a unsubstantiated claim needs more than theoretical regression analysis to even be listened to. While more immigrants will increase demand consumption for goods and services, that will encourage increased employment, if supply exceeded demand then why are process rising and not falling?

Immigration does not necessarily cause an overburden on public infrastructure claim
No basis is provided for this claim. The only justification offered is the biased “Productivity Commission's final research report found that it was not possible to reliably assess the impact of environmental limitations upon productivity and economic growth, nor to reliably attribute the contribution of immigration to any such impact.”

See also: "How the Growth Lobby threatens Australia's future" of 24 Jan 09.

Short interview with anti-growth advocates highlights Canadian apathy

“Populations, like potholes, are produced locally....” Garrett Hardin

You may have heard of "S.O.S." (Save our Suburbs), an anti-growth organization that has set up shop in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide, Australia. You may even of heard of how Noosa Shire, Queensland had developed a vision of sustainability that involved capping their population level. But what about North America?

This is a 13 minute radio interview from Charlottesville, Virginia with Jack Marshall of ASAP (Advocates for a Sustainable Abermarle Population) and Brian Czech of CASSE (Centre for the Advancement of a Steady State Economy). "Jack Marshall and Brian Czech discuss limits to growth" . Canadians like to think of themselves as more "progressive" and "enlightened" than Americans. Yet where are conversations like this taking place in Canada? There are or were groups like ASAP in Vermont, Minnesota, Colorado, Oregon, California and Hawaii. Other than Qualicum Beach, BC and Okotoks, Alberta, or briefly, "Save Our Valley" in Chilliwack, BC, where is there a critical mass of citizens who have formed a strong anti-growth lobby in this country? This despite Canada having the highest population growth rate in the G8 group, with our major urban centres sprawling into greenbelts even while they densify, putting more than 500 species at risk and paving over one-fifth of our prime farmland. It is not a question of building "up" or building "out". We are just "building". Why aren't Canadians up in arms? We are pathetic and apathetic. And those of us who are not are muzzled, blacklisted and shunned by the media, staffed as it is by journalists schooled in political correctness and editors mindful of where advertising revenue comes from. There ain’t much money in giving a podium to growth-bashers.

To use Brian Czech's metaphor, we are building our house higher and higher by robbing its foundation of building materials. The foundation being finite natural capital. Yet every hick town and every major city, from Campbell River, BC to Vancouver to Saskatoon to Sudbury, Ontario and beyond is chalk full of mayors and councillors, elected by developer campaign funds, calling for more growth. Of course, it must come in the fashionable clothing of the time, that is, it must be "sustainable" or "green", complete with the necessary seal of approval from an environmental review process or ecological impact statement from the environment branch of the planning department. But all of that is cynical green wash, and those who are asked to file the impact statements clench their jaws in the knowledge that conservation and growth don't mix. And while they unleash the bulldozers these hypocrites on council are calling for more water and energy conservation, telling us to turn our computers off for an hour or stop watering our gardens while they issue more building permits, still unable to notice that tax revenues seldom recoup the infrastructure costs of the new subdivisions.

Granted, it is the federal government which controls immigration levels, enacts pro-natalist policies and effects stimulatory fiscal policies. But it is at the grass roots level, in city councils, real estate offices, chambers of commerce and planning departments where growth is born---that is the lair of the growth lobby. It isn't a monster in a distant boardroom, or the conspiracy of a bank chairman on Bay Street. It is the sinister gremlin of greed that hides behind the face of your friendly, smiling neighbourhood realtor, loans officer, mortgage broker or small town newspaper editor a half mile down the road on Main Street. Even college presidents and trade union bureaucrats are charter members of the growth club. More growth means more students and more revenue for the school, and more jobs for union members. MPs typically cut their teeth on local politics, and they build their careers as growth-boosters, flush with the cant of growthism. "Growth is good", "growth is necessary", "growth is inevitable". "We must have growth. That is the measure of our success. Why, people come from everywhere to live in our beautiful community, and who are we to say that they can't? Our greatest resource is our people....etc etc." Let me puke.

It is about time people were told the truth about growth. It is about time that politicians and environmental NGOs were told that is not sustainable, that it cannot be "managed" or rendered "smart". Is it going to take triple digit oil and $20 a gallon gasoline to send them that message? It looks that way, doesn't it?

It will be interesting to see how the Sierra Club and members of parliament screen out the apocalypse with their spam filters. "A power-down you say? Take me off your email list!"

Tim Murray
January 1/10

See also by Tim Murray: "What is a racist?" of 3 Jan 10, "The Green Badge of Courage" of 3 Jan 10 and "It is socially responsible to be socially irresponsible" of 4 Jan 10.

Failing to understand the exponential function or failing Kant’s moral litmus test? Jason Brent is a unique individual. By his early twenties he was he was a young man of astounding academic accomplishments, having earned both an MBA and a degree in engineering, and later on, the legal training to finish his working life as a judge. He is a dedicated Malthusian from Brooklyn who lost well over a hundred relatives in the Holocaust, and his draconian prescriptions for rapid population reduction to sustainable levels are rooted in a desire to avoid a holocaust inflicted by nature on a vaster scale failing our intervention. As such, Jason has a problem with Orthodox Rabbis who tell their flock to go forth and multiply and at the same time be good stewards of the earth. Viable biodiversity cannot co-exist with relentless human expansion. Moreover, as a resident of Las Vegas, Nevada, he is all too aware that water shortages trump the tribal ambitions of orthodox Jews to win a breeding war with the Palestinians, whose wombs, according to the late Yassir Arafat, are their best weapon. Mr. Brent also finds that one Rabbi Shanowitz is caught in another moral contradiction. He is in logical violation of Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative. Namely, that one cannot will for himself, a privilege or a right which he would not accord to everyone else in the same situation. I cannot, for example, argue that it is acceptable for me to steal someone’s wallet without allowing everyone else the right to steal mine. Thus, if Rabbi Shanowitz is morally justified in siring 9 children, as he has, then he must permit everyone else the same privilege. What would be the consequences then, if those 9 children, and the 10 generations which followed them, modelled their reproductive behaviour on Rabbi Shanowitz’s example? Mr. Brent answered that question by constructing a table consisting of 10 generations each separated by 35 years. He calculated that the number of the good rabbi’s descendents would rise exponentially from 9 in the first 35 years to 6,561 in 140 years, to 43,046,721 in 280 years, to over 3 billion Shanowitz products in 350 years. Then, he pointed out to the rabbi, “ln just one more generation (11 generations), a total of less than 400 years, you would have in excess of 31 billion descendants. If this were to continue for just 100 generations or 3,500 years, your descendants would exceed the number of atoms in the entire universe. And by the number of atoms in the entire universe I include not only our sun and its planets, not only our galaxy, the Milky Way, with in excess of 100 billion stars, I include at least 100 billion galaxies with each having in excess of 100 billion stars and each of the stars having a number of atoms that you cannot conceive of. God himself could not cause the number of human beings to exceed the number of atoms in the entire universe in 3,500 years. To be more realistic, not even God himself could cause the earth, our planet, to support in excess of 31 billion human beings and your descendants would exceed 31 billion in under 400 years...Your descendants, based on the assumptions above, will destroy all of humanity substantially before 400 years by destroying the ability of the earth, our planet, to provide the resources needed by humankind to survive. And the previous statement does not take into consideration the descendants of any other person on the face of the earth.” Mr. Brent then concludes that, “Your descendants will cause resource wars, with or without weapons of mass destruction, concentration camps will make those of Nazi Germany look like a picnic, ethnic cleansing, massive rapes of innocent women, and deaths beyond your wildest imagination. Having nine children is an evil so monstrous that there aren't any words in the English language to describe it. Hitler killed six million Jews. (But) you and your penis will cause the death of every Jew on the face of the earth when the earth is no longer able to support the needs of humanity and humanity turns into wild beasts fighting for every scrap of resources to survive. Any person who advocates having a large number of children should be executed for crimes against humanity.” Amen to that! Tim Murray, January 2/09

"How thick can a political skin get?" writes Victorian wildlife ecologist, Hans Brunner.

Mr. Brumby's minister for the Environment, Gavin Jennings, turns a damning report by the Auditor-General on endangered species into receiving a “pat on the back”.

In a media report he welcomes the Auditor-General’s report and stating, “ The findings are a “pat on the back” as well as a remainder that we must continue working to protect Victoria’s unique plants and animals”, hence, nothing will change.

He has received this report with a poker face grin and treated it like water of a duck.

Here are some of the Auditor-General’s remarks:

• “ At the current rate of progress, with existing resources, it will take a further 22 years for the department to complete action statements for the 653 items currently listed threatened.”
• “ Of those threatened species listed as threatened, less than half had an action statement prepared”.
• “ The gap between listed items and items with action statements continue to widen.”
• “On the advisory list are 2249 species of flora and vertebrate fauna.”
• “ Listing decisions are compromised by a lack of reliable, up to date, scientific data and limited stakeholder participation.”
• “ The Act enables the department secretary to prepare formal plans to guide the management of threatened flora, or potentially threatening processes – NO MANAGEMENT PLAN HAS BEEN PREPARED TO DATE.”
• “ This review concluded that the existing regulatory policy framework for the protection of threatened species is in need for a major overhaul.”
• “ There is no legal power to compel department or other agencies to complete the directions within action statements. Departmental staff who prepare and monitor action statements relay on GOOD WILL of other departmental and agency staff to undertake tasks in the action statements.”
• “ The full range of management processes and consideration and control measures available in the act has NOT BEEN USED.”
• “ The greatest human threat to other species is habitat loss. Accordingly, tools to protect ecologically significant areas of habitat are essential.’

The report also pointed out on numerous occasions on inefficiencies, duplications and limits of resources. What it missed to clearly highlight is that huge amount of time and money is spent on listing endangered species and the production of management plans but no further action is taken or enforced to properly rectify the problems.

A typical example is the under resourced and incompetent handling of the nationally endangered Eastern Barred- and Southern Brown Bandicoot. Further more, habitat loss is still continuing unchecked with no realistic offsets possible.

If this deserves “a pat on the back” for Mr. Brumby, ordinary, daily work would have to make him immortal.

Hans Brunner
Wildlife Ecologist, Victoria
(shown left pointing out bandicoot activity in the Frankston area, Victoria)

Photo by Brett CliftonText added by Sheila Newman

In a press release on
April Fools Day 2009,
Victoria's Minister for the Environment,
Gavin Jennings
interpreted as a 'pat on the back' a condemnatory report by the Auditor General on the Victorian Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act 1988.[1] Jennings' response seems like a crude damage-control exercise. The report said "the government's lack of baseline data or output performance measures means that it is not possible to conclude whether or not the Act has achieved its primary objectives. The available data, which is patchy, indicates that it has not," and notes failure to use the conservation and control measures in the Act, inadequate listing of threatened species, failure to develop action statements, to monitor implementation of these, or to assess their effectiveness, and that penalties for offences under the Act have not been reviewed or updated and therefore are not an effective deterrent." The Minister and the Government should resign; they are a sad joke.

[1]The media release cited was from the Minister for Environment and Climate Change, Gavin Jennings, was dated Wednesday, 1 April, 2009, entitled, "Government welcomes auditor-general report".

The Australian Wildlife Protection Council has long said that Victoria lacks any framework within which our fauna are managed and has noted that there has never been a prosecution under the Victorian Fauna and Flora Act since it was created in 1988. Victorians who have looked and listened carefully have noted the silence in many forests once alive with song and movement, the deserted grasslands, and the corpses of kangaroos, koalas, wombats on our roads. Those of us who have tried to tackle the situation with Department of Sustainability Victoria (DSE) have also observed the avoidant, unassertive, endangered staff and ever-diminishing habitat of the biodiversity section of DSE and its encroachment by primary industries, find this comes as no surprise.

But will the backbenchers of the Bracks/Brumby government's aspirational classes come to their senses and stop chorusing on cue that Victoria is the "best place to live work and raise a family". Instead, will they stand up for their constituents on nature, justice and democracy and refuse to kowtow to hollow leaders more interested in commercially trading property and finance than good government?

Below is the summary of The Victorian Auditor General's report on the Administration of the Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act 1988

1. Audit summary

1.1 Introduction

Conserving biodiversity is core to responsible environment and natural resource management and is fundamental to maintaining both quality of life and economic well-being, both now and in the future.

The Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act 1988 (the Act) is the primary Victorian legislation providing for conservation of threatened species and ecological communities, and the management of processes that threaten the sustainability Victoria's native flora and fauna. The Act establishes a listing process. Once an item is listed the Act sets out a range of management processes and conservation tools that can be implemented to protect and conserve species.

Since the Act was passed in 1988, 653 plant and animal species, communities and threatening processes have been listed.
The objective of the audit was to review the Department of Sustainability and Environment’s (the department) administration of the Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act 1988 and to assess how effective the processes and actions developed under the Act have been in preserving Victoria’s native flora and fauna.

1.2 Conclusions

The full range of ‘management processes’ and ‘conservation and control measures’ available in the Act has not been used.
Action statements are the primary tools in the Act being used to protect and conserve threatened flora and fauna. However, the effort directed to listing threatened species and processes has not been matched by effort to develop action statements, to monitor the implementation of actions, or assess their effectiveness. The gap between listed items and items with action statements continues to widen.

The lack of baseline data and outcome or output performance measures means it is not possible to conclude whether the Act has achieved its primary objectives. The available data, which is patchy, indicates that it has not.

2 Administration of the Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act 1988

1.3 Findings

1.3.1 The listing process

The department has invested most effort in listing threatened species. However, there is duplication of processes within the department and with the Commonwealth Government’s listing process. The time taken to list an item, while within the three year (156 weeks) timeframe specified under the Act, continues to exceed the department’s internal benchmark of 31 weeks. The internal benchmark is an optimum period that requires each stage to be completed as quickly and reasonably as possible. This benchmark could not always be met in part due to factors beyond the department’s control, such as the Scientific Advisory Committee requiring multiple meetings to consider a nomination.

Over 800 items have been nominated for listing and 653 have been listed under the Act. However the department’s ‘advisory’ list (a separate list not subject to the listing process), contains over 2 200 species of flora and vertebrate fauna. Many of the species on the advisory list are likely to satisfy the criteria for the ‘threatened’ list maintained under the Act.

The listing process while conforming with the Act is compromised by a lack of up-to-date scientific data and by limited stakeholder participation. The department’s information systems relating to conservation and biodiversity are incomplete and disjointed. Major system development and integration projects are underway to address current shortcomings.

1.3.2 Conservation tools

The various management processes, conservation and control measures available under the Act to conserve and protect flora and fauna are not being used, largely because of their perceived complexity and difficulty of administering these provisions.

The department has relied on provisions in other environmental legislation, strategies, policies and plans in preference to those available under the Act to conserve and protect flora and fauna.

While ‘action statements’ are mandatory, their development and finalisation has been protracted. There is no time limit in the Act for these tools to be finalised—‘as soon as possible’ is the time standard set. At the current rate of progress, with existing resources, it will take a further 22 years for the department to complete action statements for the 653 items currently listed as threatened.

1.3.3

The Act The Act was reviewed by the department in 2002. This review concluded that ‘the existing regulatory and policy framework for the protection of threatened species in Victoria is in need of a major overhaul.’ A number of recommendations to improve the Act resulted from this review, but no amendments to the Act have been made.

Audit summary Administration of the Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act 1988 3 The state government’s April 2008 green paper, Land and Biodiversity at a Time of Climate Change, acknowledges the need for legislative reform (State and Federal) and the proposed white paper will identify the extent to which legislative change is required.

1.4 Recommendations The department should:

• review the internal timeframes it sets for listing, against the resources it applies and the processes it adopts, to confirm they are realistic

• continue to build its knowledge-base on threatened species, causes of their decline and how best to mitigate threats to them; and expedite the transfer of information held on manual files to the ABC system

• formalise its collaboration on conservation activity with the Federal Government and seek a joint agreement to eliminate duplication in the listing process (Recommendation 4.1).

The department should:

• assess the resources it applies to developing, monitoring and reviewing action statements and establish a prioritised action plan to address the backlog of listed items with no action statements
• include in new and revised action statements the processes by which it will monitor progress and evaluate the effectiveness of each initiative within the action statement • review the efficacy of conservation and protection tools available under the Act
• assess whether the listing process is the most effective and efficient means of protecting species and communities
• develop a suite of output efficiency and outcome effectiveness measures to monitor and assess its conservation efforts (Recommendation 5.1)."

The Report can be downloaded here

Photos of Tasmanian Devils are from this wonderful you-tube movie by Chris Coupland of a devil in the snow at Cradle Mountain. (The music may not be to everyone's taste but it suits the devil's walk.) Note that Tasmania's devils are so inbred due to isolation that somewhere round half now suffer from a fatal mouth cancer. For this reason vigilance must be of highest order.

Fauna protection in every state is a disaster!

Victoria isn't the only state that has received terrible criticism of their administering of fauna protection laws.
You only have to google for Auditor Generals' reports on fauna to come up with them for most or all states in Australia. Here are some examples:

Tasmanian Government

Threatened Species Report, Auditor-General of Australia, March 2009
http://www.audit.tas.gov.au/publications/reports/specialreport/pdfs/specialreport78.pdf

A damning report on the state of Tasmania's rare and endangered species by Australia's Auditor-General, was released in March, 2009 and among may issues notes how only 2 of Tasmania's threatened species have full recovery plans in place.

Tasmania's Southern Forests are habitat-in-crisis for many of these species.

“It was pleasing to find evidence that private forest covenants had been numericallyeffective but that only two public authority management agreements, which provide an effective mechanism to allow public sector entities to commit to arrangements for management of species and habitats, had been made.

Another concern was that the existing organisational structure did not encourage a strategic approach to conservation of threatened species, their habitats and the threatsconfronting them. However, a divisional plan with clearly defined objectives exists and performance against the plan was regularly monitored and results published.
The Report includes 19 recommendations primarily aimed at introducing a structuredand prioritised approach to managing Tasmania’s threatened species with a focus on assessing implementation plans and monitoring progress.”

West Australian Government

West Australia:
10 June 2009
Auditor General finds number of threatened species increasing and few are improving (West Australia)

With WA’s list of threatened species now over 600 and rising, Auditor General Colin Murphy has found that recovery action is not happening for most, and few are improving.

In his report tabled in Parliament today titled, Rich and Rare: Conservation of Threatened Species, Mr Murphy found that, in many areas, the Department of Environment and Conservation (DEC) is not providing effective protection and recovery to WA’s threatened flora and fauna.

“Only a handful of threatened species are actually recovering, while the number of species on the list continues to grow,” Mr Murphy said.

“My office has found that only one in five threatened fauna, and fewer than half of threatened flora species have recovery plans, and those plans that are in place are often not fully implemented.”

The report also found that DEC’s $8.2 million threatened species program prioritises recovery plans and actions towards critically endangered species, leaving vulnerable and endangered species at increased risk of decline.

A major obstacle to DEC’s performance is the long delay in drafting a Biodiversity Conservation Act, to replace the existing Wildlife Conservation Act 1950. DEC has pursued updated legislation for over 20 years.

The current legislation restricts DEC’s ability to effectively conserve threatened species; existing protection measures are largely inadequate, and DEC does not have the power to access threatened species on private property to implement much-needed conservation action.

The report found that multi-species approaches to conservation can be effective in dealing with the growing number of threatened species.

“DEC is undertaking a number of multi-species approaches. For example, the Western Shield program has improved the status of several native mammals,” Mr Murphy said.

“DEC is also acquiring land to secure species habitat, but less than half the nationally agreed target has been reserved in WA.”

The Auditor General’s report found a number of other areas for improvement, particularly:

* DEC cannot demonstrate that all of its threatened species conservation activities are effective.
* DEC has not identified habitat critical to the survival of all threatened species.
* State and Commonwealth threatened species lists are not aligned and 190 WA species do not receive protection from the Commonwealth Government.

“Increasing numbers of threatened species and the size of WA present a significant challenge for DEC,” Mr Murphy said.

“Achieving the right balance between programs which benefit large numbers of species at once, with those targeted at individual species’ needs, will be critical.”