(We) can do better

James Sinnamon debates Andrew Fraser on Privatisation and government encouragement of overpopulation in Queensland, proposing alternatives - Film. Filmed on Sunday, 30 November. Lasts 21 minutes. In three films on You-tube - links inside this article. 2nd & 3rd film of most interest. Please pass round to your Queensland contacts, but, since privatisation is coming up in other States again - notably in Victoria - this should interest people outside Queensland. See film inside

See also: "Courier Mail spins news of 79% opposition to fire sale to reveal its privatisation colours" of 11 Dec 09, "Queensland Rail workers strike against theft of public assets" of 9 Dec 09, "Brisbane ABC suppresses alternative candidates in state elections despite listener dismay with major parties" of 30 Apr 09, "Media contempt for facts in NSW electricity privatisation debate" of 28 Sep 08. Why I am contesting the Queensland Elections, E-petition to Qld Parliament,"Call for immediate resignation of the Queensland government and new elections," on grounds of not consulting public on privatisation.
Update: Letter of 31 July 09 to Andrew Fraser, included as Appendix 1 (12 Dec 09), Full transcript, Table of Contents, etc. added (2 Jan 10).

This article was orignally published on 4 Dec 09. It was subsequently updated with the letter to Andrew Fraser of 31 Jul 09 which propsed alternatives to privatisation on 11 Dec 09. The latest update of 2 Jan 10 includes the full transcript of the videos, together with comments, a table of contents, and other additions and changes.

Image from Sheila Newman's film of the 30 Nov 09 debate between Andrew Fraser and James Sinnamon to which there are links below in the article.

#main" id="main">

On Sunday, 30 November, almost 4 months after I had e-mailed state Treasurer Andrew Fraser proposing alternatives to the $15 billion of asset sales (see #appendix1">Appendix 1), and 9 months after I had e-mailed both the Treasurer and the Premier requesting that they reveal to the public any plans for privatisation and justify them during the course of the elections, I was able to confront the state Treasurer during a 15 minute interview at the Community Cabinet. The following film, divided into three parts, is a record of that interview, which turned out to be quite a debate. The full transcript of the debate is included below as Appendix 2.

#GettingTheMost" id="GettingTheMost">Getting the most out of the film

You can access the three parts of the film on this page, but, most people will find the first part boring, unless they are looking for documentation of the lead-up to the debate. I suggest you go to #part2">Part 2 for arguments about alternatives to privatisation - notably on banking systems - and to #part2">Part 3 for arguments about why Queensland's population is growing irresistibly and whether that is a valid excuse for privatisation.

#part1" id="part1">Privatisation and the Right to Govern - Part 1

The first part of the film consists of Andrew seeming to insist that we had debated together already and that he had answered my correspondence. I try to tell him that he responded to one email only - up until the invitation to meet him at the Community Cabinet - and that it was that response which confirmed my impression that, prior to winning the election, he was leaving privatisation of assets open; i.e. he was not excluding it. Andrew's answer to that is that the government did not know what its policy would be after the election. I maintain that it was well-known that population growth was costing the government money and that the government should have made clear to the public that there was a problem and that privatisation was not ruled out. Although it was the duty of the mainstream press to ferret this attitude out, it was also the duty of the government and the opposition to publicly discuss the problem of debt and the range of solutions ahead of the election. At one stage Andrew remarked that the whole world and the press were free to attend the small public question and answer session/meet the candidates affair that he describes as a debate we both attended. I reply that the press chose not to come. In other circumstances I might have emphasised 'chose'. Because, of course, my point is that the mainstream press have apparently colluded with the two party system to help them avoid publicly discussing the privatisation issue. See Privatisation and the Right to Govern, Part 1.

#part2" id="part2">Privatisation and the Right to Govern - Part 2

Not only did I raise the privatisation issue, but I also raised alternatives to privatisation.

The main one I discussed was for the government to set up a state bank and guarantee its own loans, rather than to go looking for forms of private credit. My reference was a book by Ellen Brown, Web of Debt. This was the source of the system that I had asked Andrew or his department - Treasury in Queensland - to give me a written critique of. If what I proposed was wrong, then, fair enough. I was prepared to learn. But I received no answer from treasury and, in the debate, the treasurer tries twice inaccurately to insinuate that I am proposing to have no ceiling on debt, then simply accepts my proposal as another way of raising money and does not contradict my assertion that it would be a cheaper way. You will find this discussion in Part 2 of Privatisation and the Right to Govern.

#part3" id="part3">Privatisation and the Right to Govern - Part 3

One of the alternatives to privatisation that I raised was for the government to stop encouraging population growth. Andrew gave what some tell me is the property developer shock-factor line on this - he insinuated that stopping population growth in Queensland would be akin to stopping Mexicans coming across the Southern Border of the U.S.. He used the term, "Checkpoint Charlie", and you will get the drift of some fantasy about uniformed guns patrolling the Tweed River. He also immediately pretends that I population growth reduction would inevitably include authoritarian controls over numbers of children per family in Australia. He was painting an extreme scenario, which could have had the effect of making me back down and away from the issue of population growth, but I didn't. At the stage we are at the only limits need to be on international immigration and construction permits.

On the issue of limiting interstate immigration, I should just have said to him that population growth is normally restrained locally by limiting the number of building permits issued. It is a normal function of town and country planning, and you would expect a state as planning-focused as Queensland, not to need to be told that. Restricting building permits goes hand in hand with the democracy of local government, where residents - i.e. members of a community - have the ultimate say over the density of settlement and how their environment is treated. They know best and they have to live there. So, no guns or patrols are necessary, just good old tried-and-true keeping building permits to a level that keeps the population stable.

This is a captured image of the Queensland Government web-site explicitly encouraging people from overseas to move to Queensland as of 2 January 2010. This is completely contrary to Andrew Fraser's #NotEncouragingPopulationGrowth">claim made during the debate that "We're not encouraging population growth".

Fraser said, rightly, that most population growth in Australia comes from overseas immigration, and he stated that the Federal Government is responsible for that. However I am well aware that the Queensland Government, like all the other state Governments in Australia, aggressively tries to attract immigrants to Queensland, from overseas and from interstate. Andrew denied that. The film editor, Sheila Newman, has inserted cuts from one of the Government's advertising films that urges immigrants to come and "Live, work and play" in Queensland. (This 50 Mb video is currently linked to from this Queensland Government videos web page, which is linked to from the Migrating from Overseas web page on the web site www.workliveplay.qld.gov.au.)

Australians should be very aware of how the Federal and the State governments- which are all aligned with the growth lobby - and even most local ones - have this agressive formula for putting people off discussing the problem they have created, and of how they will insist that it is not of their own making, even in the face of abundant evidence.

This is discussed in the last part of the YouTube video "Privatisation and the Right to Govern, Part 3," embedded below.

#history" id="history">History of this debate and information about material mentioned within

On 21 March 2009 the Queensland Labor Government was re-elected at the end of a snap early election campaign with little scrutiny by the newsmedia.

As an independent candidate, I tried, during the course of those elections, to hold the government to account for its past record of selling off publicly-owned assets without any electoral mandate. Since 1998, the Labor Government had sold off the state Government Insurance Office Government, airports, a lottery agency, the retail arm of the state owned electricity supplier, a coal loader and much public land.

I also asked for an assurance that the Queensland public would be informed of any further plans to sell off assets during the course of the elections.

On 17 February, even before the elections were announced, I e-mailed Premier Anna Bligh and Treasurer Andrew Fraser. My e-mail listed the assets sold since 1998, concluding:

"Given this history, it seems to me that the Queensland public have good reason to fear that, upon re-election, your Government may proceed to sell off yet more of their assets ...

"The reason I write this letter is to seek your assurance that if you do intend to privatise any of these assets that you state your intention to do so to the public before the forthcoming elections ..."

The letter was ignored, along with my subsequent correspondence.

My strenuous efforts to obtain air time, or, at least, to get the media to raise this issue were almost entirely ignored.

When the Queensland Government, barely two months after their re-election, announced plans to sell ports, a coal loader, the freight arm of Queensland Rail, commercial forests and toll roads, most Queenslanders felt outraged.

An opinon poll revealed that 84% of Queenslanders opposed the sale and 66% believed that the Government had intentionally misled them about privatisation during the elections.

The Queensland Government proceeded with its fire sale regardless.

On Friday 17 July, Andrew Fraser made the claim on the radio that no alternatives to privatisation had been put to him by anyone in state Parliament. This drove me to send him an e-mail (see #appendix1">Appendix 1) which proposed several alternatives. These were:

1. #StateBank">Setting up a state owned bank to raise the necessary loans to fund infrastructure projects more cheaply than could be done with private loans.
2. If the state owned bank is not to be created, then #borrowing">raise the commercial loans necessary to cover the shortfall, which would still have to be cheaper in the long term, anyway.
3. #population">Cease encouragement of population growth, since Premier Anna Bligh said that asset sales were necessary to fund the cost of new infrastructure to service that population growth
4. To Implement, at the state level, the comprehensive University of Newcastle #UsefulJobs">Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE) program. This program is fully costed, Australia-wide, at $9 billion per annum and would provide gainful employment to all the unemployed to meet the current needs of existing Australians, This would be a vastly cheaper alternative to the environmentally destructive infrastructure and housing construction juggernaut.

Andrew Fraser ignored this e-mail and my repeated subsequent attempts to have a meeting with him in order to discuss his proposals. On 21 November, during a discussion on Madonna King's program, Andrew Fraser repeated the claim that no alternatives to privatisation had been offered inside or outside of Parliament. This moved me to contact both the ABC and Andrew Fraser to ask that that misleading statement be corrected and to again request an interview with Andrew Fraser. Late on the Afternoon of 28 November I was informed in a voice message that a 15 minute interview at the Queensland Government Community Cabinet consultations on Sunday 30 November had been granted.

I was not able to prepare himself as well as I had hoped for the ensuing interview, which was filmed, and I made some mistakes during the course of the discussion.

Nevertheless, despite its weaknesses, that interview is the single most comprehensive debate with the Treasurer on privatisation recorded on any newsmedia. The only other broadcast 'debate' was a short conversation between Andrew Faser and economist Professor John Quiggin on Brisbane's ABC local radio station on Friday 28 November lasting all of five minutes. The ABC has, so far, failed to make a recording of that debate available.

At my meeting with Fraser, recorded on film, I still received no written response from Treasury, despite all the resources it has and the almost four months time which had elapsed. Also, neither Andrew Fraser nor the ABC have corrected the misleading statement that no alternatives to privatisation have been offered.

I hope that people will use this record as a resource to bring the Bligh government under control and/or to inspire future political candidates. I will be standing in the next Federal election myself, and this will be one of my important platforms.

See also: "Courier Mail spins news of 79% opposition to fire sale to reveal its privatisation colours" of 11 Dec 09, "Queensland Rail workers strike against theft of public assets" of 9 Dec 09, "Brisbane ABC suppresses alternative candidates in state elections despite listener dismay with major parties" of 30 Apr 09, "Media contempt for facts in NSW electricity privatisation debate" of 28 Sep 08.

#appendix1" id="appendix1">Appendix 1 - Letter proposing alternatives to privatisation.

Sent Friday 31 July.

Subject: Request for meeting as discussed on the phone

Dear Andrew Fraser,

You stated on ABC 612 Radio's Party Games a fortnight ago (I think) is that no-one had put to you alternatives to privatisation.

In fact, I think there are a many alternatives that would make unnecessary the $14 billion privatisation program, opposed by 84% of Queenslanders according to one opinion poll.

I would like at the meeting to put to you those alternatives, in case they had not already occurred to you, or else learn from you the reasons why you have not adopted those alternatives, if you have considered them.

I would also like to share this dialogue with the broader public.

If, after our meeting, you remain determined to persist with privatisation, and are confident in your case, then you would surely agree that this would be to your advantage.

A number of my suggestions are within the power of the Queensland Government to implement, whilst a few others could be implemented by Federal Government if the Queensland Government were to present its case publicly and assertively.

I can guarantee that all of the alternatives I intend to put would be far more acceptable to his constituency than continuing to sell off the family farm.

The alternatives include:

#StateBank" id="StateBank">1. Setting up a state bank

A state bank could be used to raise the necessary credit to fund any necessary infrastructure. This could be done at far less cost than raising funds through private banks. A state bank has been used successfully by North Dakota in the United States since 1919. Currently it is only one of two States in the US which is still solvent.

Ellen Brown, who has extensive knowledge of banking systems in the US and elsewhere has proposed that the North Dakota model be used as a basis for the solution in California.

Her articles include:

"But Governor, You CAN Create Money! Just Form Your Own Bank." at
http://www.opednews.com/articles/But-Governor-You-CAN-Crea-by-Ellen-Brown-090529-87.html

"California's Empty Wallet: Turning Crisis into Opportunity" at
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ellen-brown/californias-empty-wallet_b_222622.html

"California Dreamin': How the State Can Beat Its Budget Woes" at
http://www.opednews.com/articles/California-Dreamin--How-t-by-Ellen-Brown-090709-934.html

"Towards a Solution to the Debt Crisis in California: The State Could Walk
Away and Create Its Own Credit Machine" at
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ellen-brown/towards-a-solution-to-the_b_231021.html

I have yet to see the flaws in Ellen Brown's case. Of course, California still faces serious problems of water shortage, which are being exacerbated by population growth (as does Queensland - see below and see "Crazy From The Heat: An overcrowded California is running out of water and leadership" at http://www.capsweb.org/content.php?id=690&menu_id=8), but California would stand a much greater chance of getting on top of its ecological problems if it followed Ellen Brown's advice.

I am sure that Ellen Brown would be willing to advise you how to get Queensland out of its financial mess for a cost to Queensland taxpayers vastly less than the $200 millon cost of hiring Merrill Lynch and the Bank of Scotland for advice on how to sell our assets, or if she is too busy, I am sure she would be able to recommend others who could, possibly even from Australia.

#borrowing" id="borrowing">2. Borrowing the additional $14billion

As Dorothy Pratt pointed out in her speech in Parliament on 18 June out the $14 billion that Queenslanders stand to gain from the asset sales is trivial compared with the eventual $85 billion deficit that Queensland is expected to incur.

What, then, is the practical difference between $85 billion and $99 billion (less the enormous overheads, including the abovementioned $200 million incurred in privatisation) if in the latter case Queenslanders retain democratic control of so many of our assets and the income streams?

Also, what guarantee is that the ratings agencies won't next year demand that the debt be reduced from $85 billion in order to retain Queensland's AAA rating?

What guarantee do we have that the same arguments won't be put to justify the sale of our power stations, remaining ports, and water infrastructure?

And in any case, why should anyone pay any regard to what ratings agencies think, given their infamous role in having caused the global financial meltdown?

It has been well established by economists like John Quiggin that the benefits obtained by reducing debt almost never outweigh the loss to society of losing valuable assets.

The claim that private investors are somehow more efficient than Governments has been shown again and again to be nonsense. If anything the reverse is the case.

Where figures have been produced that 'prove' greater efficiency, they invariably ignore the shifting of costs onto the broader community by the private investor.

These costs include:

• wanton neglect of the environment;
• destruction of jobs and working conditions;
• loss of training opportunities and career paths;
• removal of services deemed to be 'unprofitable' (in the narrowest monetary sense)
• neglect of infrastructure and equipment;
• etc.

If all these were to be fully costed, we almost always find that large Government enterprises, particularly in natural monopolies, are more efficient.

Clearly, Queenslanders stand to lose massively and if privatisation is the means adopted to reduce debt.

#population" id="population">3. End Queensland economy's dependence upon population growth

In April 2007, then deputy Premier Anna Bligh defended population growth (explicitly encouraged by your Government by a full-page advertisement placed in the Courier Mail of 8 December 2005) implying that it was necessary to keep people in the construction industry employed.

So, according to Anna Bligh, we are deliberately crowding ever more people into South East Queensland, which has insufficient water reserves to cope with a prolonged drought.

This is why we face impossible congestion on our roads, and it is supposedly to fix this problem that communities all over Brisbane are being destroyed.

The clearing of habitat in order to house additional people is why the Koala may well be extinct in South East Queensland in two years.

We are all paying ever greater rates, water and electricity and gas charges, tolls in order to pay the cost of building additional infrastructure.

As you rightly pointed out a fortnight ago on the abovementioned "Party Games" it costs far more to build necessary additional infrastructure in established areas than in new areas.

On top of that, in a letter sent to me on 19 June, Premier Anna Bligh stated as a justification for the fire sale, "... a State with a rapidly growing population can't afford to ease off building the infrastructure that supports our economy and community."

So, according to the Premier Queenslanders are expected to pay by selling off the family silver for population growth that we didn't ask for in the first place.

To inflict all this upon Queenslanders in order to keep construction workers employed is insane.

At some point, before Queensland becomes as crowded as Rwanda was in 1994, this will have to stop and, according to Anna Bligh's logic, those workers will lose their jobs anyway. Why not, instead, take the truly 'tough' decisions today?

#UsefulJobs" id="UsefulJobs">4. Create jobs which meet the needs of Queenslanders foremost

The University of Newcastle Centre of Full Employment and Equity (http://e1.newcastle.edu.au/coffee/) has fully costed at $9 billion a year a program that will employ every unemployed Australian in fulfilling socially useful jobs. You can download their Full Regional Development Report from http://e1.newcastle.edu.au/coffee/pubs/reports/2008/CofFEE_JA/CofFEE_JA_final_report_November_2008.pdf

Why not implement this at a state level in order to wean us off our dependence upon socially and environmentally destructive housing and infrastructure building, for which we are now being made to pay with our rail forests, ports and roads, according to the Premier?

I look forward to discussing all of this with you in person at our meeting.

Yours sincerely,

James Sinnamon

#transcript" id="transcript">Transcript of Sinnamon-Fraser debate

This transcript was created by film maker Sheila Newman in the process of producing the three part YouTube video. All is included including some of the more clumsy parts of my own contribution. This was not me at my best. I know I have been a more effective speaker on a number of other occasions. Nevertheless, this interview remains the most substantial and sustained public challenge to Andrew Fraser on privatisation of which I am aware, that is, outside of State Parliament. Although a number of good speeches were made against privatisation by Independents and Liberal National Party members, they were not reported by the media.

I have added comments where I believe they would help clarify the issues.

#transcript1" id="transcript1">Privatisation and the Right to Govern - Part 1

Go to #part1">embedded video.

JAMES SINNAMON: ... email on the 31st of July... in fact I wanted to actually debate alternatives even before the election. That's why I wanted to have a debate with you and Anna Bligh about - or at least see a debate between you and Anna Bligh and someone who's competent to discuss privatisation.

ANDREW FRASER: You and I did participate in a public debate during the election campaign.

JAMES SINNAMON: Well ...I'm not quite sure what you're referring to.

FRASER: It was a candidates' forum that you and I were both present at, James.

SINNAMON: It wasn't ... well, I...I...Anyway, it wasn't actually a debate. It was a 5 minute speech by me. You had a speech...

FRASER: There was questioning from the floor and it was organised by an independent agency, not organised by me.

SINNAMON: It wasn't a debate. You know it was not. I didn't have a chance to respond to you.

FRASER: I'm pretty sure I turned up and there was a debate between candidates and all four candidates were there so let's not pretend something didn't happen that happened.

SINNAMON: That was a debate between about 40 people. It wasn't a debate between ... ah, you know, the public.

A whole lot of people that voted in that election had no idea that um, what was going to be at stake, the further sell-off of 14 billion of their assets. And, polls indicate quite clearly that a hell of a lot of people didn't know that that was on the cards, what was on the table. And the reason I raise this is that I think that people who are the owners of those assets - had every right, every entitlement - to know, firstly, that it was on the table and, secondly, to have the people that were in favour of privatisation put the ... defend ... put the arguments for, and those that are against privatisation put the arguments against it, and have the public decide. Have the public decide which ... whether, privatisation is necessary and whether they'd vote for a pro-privatisation candidate or an anti-privatisation candidate.

Now the people of Queensland were not given that opportunity because my letters were ignored by Anna Bligh and yourself and ...

FRASER: I've written back to you.

SINNAMON: Um...the ...question ...

FRASER: Let's be really clear for the record, seeing as you've chosen to videotape this. 1. We participated in a debate during the election campaign... 2. ...

SINNAMON: In front of 40 people, not on the media, not on any major television [unintelligible] not on prime time ...

FRASER: The media were free to attend. It was an open debate.

SINNAMON. Yes, and they chose not to.

FRASER: Secondly, I replied to your letter and other correspondence.

SINNAMON: You did not!

FRASER: And third, I'm now meeting with you now. So, I don't think you
need to ... um... mount a case that is not, in fact, supported by the
very plain fact that we did all those things.

SINNAMON: The fact was that ... and I freely replied ... I said I didn't get from you the categorical assurance that I sought against privatisation and I thought that since you didn't give that categorical ref... assurance, that what was in order was a proper debate, so that you could defend your refusal to give that categorical assurance. And you did not; you ignored that. That was ...

FRASER: Well, as I said really clearly during the election campaign, James, there were going to be tough choices that we had to face, and we've had to face those.

SINNAMON: But, you did not defend a specific tough choice. That was kept under wraps. 66 per cent of people ...

FRASER: Well we didn't make that ...

SINNAMON: ... believe that they were misled on that

FRASER: We did not make that decision about what we needed to do in terms of a budget.

SINNAMON: Well a lot of people seem to think it was. There's an article ...

FRASER: Well, I'm here to tell you ... I'm here to tell you James, that that's not what the case is ...

SINNAMON: The Courier Mail said that you were just looking for a good ..."it's a shame to waste a good crisis" ...[unintelligible] That's the Courier Mail, 21st of October 2009. I haven't heard your response to that.

FRASER: I'm happy to have a look at what you're suggesting. [Mr Fraser looked at the article.] That's an unnamed source about a meeting between the QC unions and the government and, I think you can safely presume that was something that was said by the QC unions, not by the government, so they can choose to defend that statement, rather than me.

SINNAMON: I note you didn't respond to that ...

FRASER: It's an unnamed source from a quote that's not from the government, so ...

SINNAMON: Okay.

FRASER: I'm happy, I'm happy to defend things from the government, but the other people can defend their unnamed sources.

SINNAMON: The fact is that you didn't raise the issue. You didn't respond to my asking you to debate the issue.

FRASER: I did attend the candidates' debate with you, James.

SINNAMON: That was in front of 40 people.

FRASER: And the whole world was free to turn up. I didn't organise the debate. I didn't set the terms of reference. It was organised by the local Chamber of Commerce and all of the rules were set by them. It was a free and open debate and people could raise questions and issues as you did on the night.

SINNAMON: And I said to you afterwards, in an email, that you had not categorically ruled out privatisation and that that needed to be debated before a wider audience and that was ignored, and because it was ignored the people ...

FRASER: And I acknowledge the point you're making, that I did not rule it out, because we couldn't rule it out, because we hadn't decided what or the way in which we would deal with the challenges of putting together a budget after the election, and that's what we said, clearly.

SINNAMON: Before a wider audience - not just the 40 people who were there - that was ignored. There was no further response. There was numerous correspondences between myself and you and Anna Bligh and I got no response further from that. So the whole thing was quietened up.

FRASER: James, I replied to your correspondence.

SINNAMON: You're trying to say...

FRASER: And I also did, on average, a media conference one day a week during the election campaign, so, the notion that you're putting forward, isn't in fact supported by the facts.

SINNAMON: The fact is that 66 per cent of the people felt that they were misled, according to the polls. 84 per cent of the people, according to the polls, opposed privatisation.

SINNAMON (Continues): They feel, as if they, the owners of the assets, were not given any say in the elections about whether ...

FRASER: So do you agree then that we should spend Queensland taxpayer money building rail-lines for BHP and Rio Tinto?

SINNAMON: I don't think ...I think..

FRASER: Whereas, in Western Australia, those rail lines are built by BHP and Rio Tinto?

SINNAMON: You're giving a false dichotomy. What you are saying is ...

FRASER: No, no, one fact is in West Australia BHP and Rio build the rail lines and in Queensland, the government does. So, my question to you is, do you agree with that situation?

#transcript2" id="transcript2">Privatisation and the Right to Govern - Part 2

Go to #part2">embedded video.

SINNAMON: I don't think it's as simple as that. You are, we are choosing on the one hand, these assets that belong to the public; I put to you in an email on the 31st of July (see #appendix1">Appendix 1) a lot of alternatives to privatisation, one alternative - and I've actually ... I've asked you several times could you please tell me what is wrong with my proposal.

One alternative is that we set up a state bank as does the state of North Dakota, and then, instead of going to private banks, we raise a loan ourselves, through the bank, set up a state bank - North Dakota does that - it's obviously not cost-free but it's a hell of a lot less costly than having to raise it through a private bank then we use that to fund the infrastructure, rather ...

FRASER: James, whether you're a private bank or a state-owned bank, you still raise money through the same channels on the international market.

SINNAMON: No ...

FRASER: So GDC is the treasury corporation which raises capital ...

SINNAMON: Not true.

FRASER (continues): in the international markets for the use of Queensland government agencies, government owned corporations, and the budget sector. There's no such thing as magic money where you get debt for free.

SINNAMON: Well, in fact, the fact is that private banks create money out of nothing. All they do ... a bank considers an asset a promise to repay a loan as an asset, so, essentially you could have a state bank. A state bank that simply gets from the state government a promise to repay the loan. And that is actually considered as money. That's exactly the way that private banks raise their own finances and there's no reason why a state-owned bank can't do it as well. The only difference is that we ...

FRASER: So, your solution is more debt, raised in a different way?

SINNAMON: My solution is debt raised in a different way, but it will be a lot cheaper because it would ...

FRASER: But, more debt.

SINNAMON: Because, it's the way that North Dakota does it. That is the state that is not bankrupt whereas all the other states are done. It's been done successfully in other places.

FRASER: But if you just keep raising more money and more debt, without a way of paying it back, then what's your alternative?

SINNAMON: [Unintelligible]

FRASER: There's a limit, is there not?

SINNAMON: It is cheaper to do it if the government owns it. If you don't have to ...

FRASER: But is there not a limit?

SINNAMON: There are limits to how much a state can go into debt.

FRASER: And, what would you propose is the limit for Queensland?

SINNAMON: We're talking about a difference of $14 billion. And the total number of debt is of the order of $90 billion, so it's not making a huge amount of difference. Anyway, I've sent you my email. What I would like, is from Treasury, a written response as to what is wrong with it, rather than argue it out in this way. I haven't got that.

FRASER: Well, I've [? been] undertake to meet with you, James. So ...

SINNAMON: Yeah, okay, but I have also sent you a written document as well and I'd like that... You've had it since the 31st of July. I've given you all four points about the State bank and so forth... and ...

FRASER: And I've just answered your questions ...

SINNAMON: Well, you know, that is ... I don't think that is an answer because my point is that you haven't ...

FRASER:Well, I do not agree with the principle that you can continue to raise debt without a limit.

SINNAMON: But my point is that that is a cheaper way ...

FRASER: You're just proposing a different way to raise more debt.

SINNAMON: A cheaper way. A cheaper way that is done.

FRASER: You'd still have to pay it back.

SINNAMON: That is right. I didn't say it was cost free. I said it was cheaper.

We could have our own state bank. We could raise the finances as a state bank, the same way as any private corporation.

It was done in the past, when we had the Commonwealth Bank. It was done in North Dakota. It's probably been done in lots of other places in the world. It can be done that way. If you have a state bank tomorrow, we could do it. Okay, debt wouldn't go away. But it would be cheaper.

SINNAMON: (continued from above) The second alternative that you haven't responded to is population growth.

Now, my letter from Anna Bligh read, said, that we are paying for ... um... we are selling the assets in order to pay for infrastructure that is necessary to cope with population growth.

Now it is the */choice/* of Queensland Government and Commonwealth Government to deliver the greater population. Back in 2005, Peter Beattie put in an advertisement in the Courier Mail newspaper that asked people to move interstate- move from interstate into Queensland. He never told the people that four or five years down the track, we were going to be paying for extra population growth by selling off the family silver.

FRASER: Well, James, in fact, the biggest population flows, rather than interstate migration, are, in fact, from overseas migration.

SINNAMON: That's right ...

FRASER: So, let me finish my point, please ...

FRASER (continues): and secondly from increase in the natural birth rate. And, I do not believe, as a nation, that we need to have Checkpoint Charlie set up at the Tweed River. It's not only unconstitutional; it's unAustralian. Secondly, I don't support having birth limits for Australians who want to start a family and the reality is that population growth is not a pre-determined government policy, but, the challenge is for us to deal with the population flows which are occurring. So we can't stop people from coming over the border from New South Wales and Victoria. The Federal government sets the migration policy. People are free to move about within Australia, and, thirdly, I don't support a population limit in terms of birth limits, so there is a challenge that needs to be dealt with.

SINNAMON: Both you and Anna Bligh came out after Kevin Rudd made the statement in favour of Australia's population increasing to ... um...I think the figure was 40 million by 2050 or something like that.

You both said, that 'We can meet the challenge' ...

And it's obvious - the newspapers - every day of the week - are full of stories about how the Queensland government has failed, completely failed to meet the challenge of past population growth.

Our streets are a schmozzle. We are being told that our rates and our electricity rates must go up; we must pay more for water, because we have to build more infrastructure to pay for the additional numbers that the Queensland government has deliberately encouraged to come here.

Now, if - ah - and then back in - when the auditor general's report came out and you - it slammed the Queensland government's management of health, management of transport, Anna Bligh stood up and said, "It's not my fault, it's the fault of population growth." And yet, when there's a raging debate about increasing Australia's population by another 60 per cent, both you and Anna Bligh came out and publicly said that we can rise to the challenge.

Other people who are responsible, who care about our future, recognise that there are limits to what water, what we can pay for, said, "This is not on, this has to be stopped." The fact is that the Queensland Government, at every point, has encouraged population growth and it hasn't told the public, 'if we grow the population of Queensland, then you've got to pay for that population growth with selling off the family silver.'

FRASER: The reality that we have to face, James, as we said very clearly in the public arena, is we have to make choices. There's not - There's a finite resource out there in terms of the ability to raise debt. You don't accept that; you agree with more and more debt. I don't. That's the starting point to the debate.

SINNAMON: No, I don't agree with more and more debt. I think there has to be a limit too. So I propose one way to limit ...

FRAZER: What's your limit?

SINNAMON: Stabilise population. And if we are paying [by] selling off our public assets ...

FRASER: Do you support cutting the migration intake, banning interstate migration, and capping the birth rate?

SINNAMON: I say start with stopping international immigration. I say that, if the Federal government is so irresponsible that they want to increase our population by 60 million, then our state governments have responsibility to say, "Hey, we are having to flog off our assets to pay for this."

We are ... and we had to find the money to build desalination plants because there won't be enough water for people to drink, if we don't ... I mean ... we need that point of leadership. Now, a few councils, like the Sunshine Coast council are trying very hard to put a population cap up there. The Queensland government is bent over backwards to make sure that that doesn't work. You know, they're over-ruling their ... um... Instead of supporting those councils they are using every possible opportunity, including this advertisement back in 2005 to actually encourage more people to come here.

You know, it's clear that the Queensland government has created the problem that it now says it has to solve by flogging off our assets. Which are opposed by 84 per cent under Beatty so that people were never asked about in the first place. They were never asked about population growth. They were never asked about flogging off our assets.

FRASER: [Note distortion of terms] I'm happy to have a public debate about whether or not people think we should cap the birth rate orwhether we should put Checkpoint Charlie up at the Tweed River. I happen to think that the community won't support it.

And neither do I. And neither does the government.

SINNAMON: Do you think that it's excusable to actually encourage population growth as well? I mean, we're not talking about "CheckpointCharlie", we're just simply saying that the population has increased to astronomical levels that already raise ...

FRASER: I think we need to be honest about what controlling population growth means, and that means migration controls ...

SINNAMON: That's right, yes.

FRASER: That mean's Checkpoint Charlie, and that means, capping the birth rate, and I don't support it.

SINNAMON: It means that ... okay... well, basically we disagree, don't we? I say any community has a right to say what numbers come in tot his community. I'm saying that, if the community has to go bankrupt, as you are basically saying we are...

You're saying, you're basically telling me, and Anna Bligh has said, that we have to sell-off the family silver, we have to pay for ever-higher electricity rates, we've got to pay more water ...

We've got to basically throw the Mary River people off their farms, and so on and so forth. It's just never ends - to pay for population growth.

#transcript3" id="transcript3">Privatisation and the Right to Govern - Part 3

Go to #part3">embedded video.

SINNAMON (from before):Now I think that the community are entitled to have those alternatives put to them.

FRASER: James, you and I have very different views on this and you exercised your democratic right to stand as an independent candidate in the last election and put those views into the arena. I also stood as a candidate and others did and others are welcome to in the future and I'm happy for the debate tocontinue from here on in, but I don't agree that the propositions you're putting forward are supported by the broader community.

SINNAMON: Well, what do you say to the fact that 84 per cent of the people oppose privatisation, and that they felt - 66 per cent felt - that they were misled in the last election?

FRASER: What I've said - what I'll say to you - is what I've said all day every day, and that is, we had to make a choice; none of the choices were easy: cutting wages, freezing wages, less teachers, less doctors, less school cleaners, when population's increasing. Or you can make a decision about those things that government has done in the past, but, needs to make a choice about whether we choose to fund new rolling stock and new railway lines for BHP and Rio Tinto or, whether we put it into schools and hospitals and other resources that only governments would provide. We're not selling - ah - the timber business as the whole land ... we're selling the right to mill the trees... They're sold anyway, so they're getting the right to mill the trees. That's what we're proposing to transact there. Those are just the elements of what we are doing in making a decision about doing those things that we need to do ... and those things that are the priorities of government. And, when it comes to it, investing in hospitals, investing in schools, investing in disability services, are all the things that we believe, as a Labor government, ... are the priorities over building infrastructure for commercial interests that are able to do it themselves. That's the essential choice that we had to make and it's the one we made.

SINNAMON: Are you going to stop encouraging population growth? Are you going to come out and tell the public, tell the government, that we are ...

FRASER: #NotEncouragingPopulationGrowth" id="NotEncouragingPopulationGrowth">We're not encouraging population growth, we're just dealing with the natural consequences.

SINNAMON: Why not tell the Queensland public that we are paying for the past population growth ...um... with selling our public assets and inall sorts of ways? And why don't you get up and say to the Queensland public that, if this continues, then, what prospect do we have of having anything left in another fifty years time?

FRASER: Well, the problem with your analysis, James, is that it doesn't accept the fact that we're proposing to put $15 billion worth of assets onto the market, from an asset base of more than $200 billion... and by the time we finish, the asset base will be over $250 billion. So, this year alone, we're building an $18 billion dollar infrastructure program which supports building the asset base. Now, the debate we're having here is about $15 billion, which represents ... ah... a component of just one year'sinvestment that we're undertaking. So, everything that we are proposing to put to the market facilitates the capital expansion of the state. Building more assets, each and every day, each year, into the future. And that's the bottom line.

Comment: If this were true, then it would count as a substantive argument for privatisation. As result of selling $14 billion worth of assets, the Queensland Government's asset base is increased from $200 billion to $250 billion. Part of the reason for this would lie in the fact that more infrastructure assets are needed for Queensland's increased population, anyway. MUch of the money is being openly raised by increasing the charges for services as discussed above, so would not be dependent upon asset sales. All the same the figures Fraser has provided don't seem right and need further scrutiny.

SINNAMON: Okay. This letter in the Courier Mail, Friday, said that you haven't yet released the business case for privatisation. When do youintend to do that?

FRASER: We've put the rationale into the broader public arena.

SINNAMON: The general business case, the actual hard figures that actually show the sort of thing the figures of John - Professor John Quiggin's been asking for. When do you intend to do that?

FRASER: Well I debated Mr Quiggin on radio on Friday.

SINNAMON: For five minutes. For all of five minutes. Hardly a debate, I would have thought.

FRASER: Well, I certainly was ... ah... happy to debate him. The reality is we've had to make this decision and all those ... ah... figures are in the public arena, all the entities have reported as government-owned corporations, and ultimately ... and ultimately, you proposed a different policy and platform at the elections, which didn't gain the support of the people. You're entitled to put your views, James, and I'm entitled to put mine.

SINNAMON: Yes, I that's a bit [??vague]. I think that if people realised that privatisation was up for ... was an issue at the last election it would have been a very different story. I don't think you would be treasurer today if people realised that you were going to sell off $14billion of their assets. And I don't think Anna Bligh would be Premier.

FRASER: Well, you're entitled to put your views, James, and you're entitled to ... ah... proceed with them. That's your perfect entitlement as a citizen and I respect that. I've allowed you to film and record this interview. Use it for whatever political purpose you like into the future.

SINNAMON: Just one other question, Andrew, if you're wrong, if you're proven wrong, and our leaders have been proven wrong every time about privatisation, particularly the privatisation of the retail arm of electricity ... where we were promised cheaper electricity. If you're proven wrong, four or five years down the track, just as the Federal government was proven wrong about privatisation of Telstra, what recourse will they have? How do we get out of the mess that will have been created, that most people believe will happen?

FRASER: James, ultimately, I believe that what we are doing is the right thing to do ...

SINNAMON: How do we ... You're not answering my question ...

FRASER (continues from above): and that what we are doing is the correct thing to do, and that's what's decided to do.

SINNAMON: How do we, what recourse do we have? We have no recourse against Peter Beattie who privatised Ergon without ourpermission ...

FRASER: The recourse as ever, is daily media scrutiny, the parliament, and election. That's the way it's always worked in Australia.

SINNAMON: We've had no recourse against Peter Beattie, who sold off the assets against our wishes and we're all paying higher electricityprices. We believe that the same will happen.

SINNAMON (continues): What recourse will we have when it all goes pear-shaped, as people believe?

FRASER: I'm happy to be accountable for all my decisions, James.

FRASER: Thanks for meeting.

SINNAMON: Yeah. Just as Peter Beattie is accountable today. You know, he's headed off and we're in hock because of the decision that he made today and we'll be [indecipherable] ...

FRASER: Well, I disagree with you. You're entitled as a political candidate to put your view and I'm entitled as a political candidate to put mine.

SINNAMON: Why won't you hold a referendum on this? People ... 84 per cent of people are against it, why can't people have the final say on privatisation? You haven't swayed me.

FRASER: Because we're elected to make decisions. We're elected to make the tough decisions.

SINNAMON: People oppose that decision. They have consistently opposed that. They have opposed every privatisation. 70 per cent ofpeople opposed the Telstra privatisation. I believe that you know that they would have opposed you and would have voted you out if they were aware that you ... if they had had any hint that you were going to privatise, and I think ...

FRASER: Well, James, you're advancing a contradictory thesis that ... um...that one time you're saying I did say that in the election campaign, and the second time ... the second part of your question is that I didn't. So you need to decide which accusation you're going to make against me and the government.

SINNAMON: No, I believe that you're [??indeciferable] ...

FRASER: You're a political candidate and you're entitled to your views. I need to progress, so thanks very much for coming along.

SINNAMON: Okay, well thank you for your time.

#DebateRequest" id="DebateRequest">Appendix 3: Correspondence concerning my request for a debate amongst candidates contesting Mount Coot-tha electorate

The e-mail below is a request that there be a debate between the candidates. I took from Andrew Fraser's reply, that the 'candidate's forum' would be something approximating a debate. It turned out not to be. I was first speaker on the night and given only 10 minutes. No opportunity was provided for me to respond to Andrew Fraser's 'rebuttal' of my arguments against privatisation in my own speech.

My many other attempts to get Andrew Fraser to properly debate privatisation and the issues at stake in the elections can be found in "Open letter to Anna Bligh and Andrew Fraser asking that any planned privatisations be put to the public at forthcoming elections" of 17 Feb 09, "Andrew Fraser's three different responses to a question on privatisation" of 17 Mar 09, "Brisbane ABC suppresses alternative candidates in state elections despite listener dismay with major parties" of 30 Apr 09.

#request" id="request">E-mail requesting debate

Mount-Coot-tha candidates' public debate
Date: 24/02/09 03:47 pm
From: James Sinnamon
To: Andrew Fraser, Larissa Waters, John Pollard

Dear Andrew Fraser, Larissa Waters and John Pollard,

As an Independent candidate for Mount Coot-tha, I would like to have the opportunity to debate all other candidates standing for election before the electors of Mount Coot-tha.

I believe that this would give voters the best possible opportunity to decide which of us is the most suitable candidate.

I think it should still be possible, even given the time constraints (which I personally believe to be unnecessary) to find a suitable public venue for the debate and to organise a meeting.

I also think it would be worthwhile to engage in online debates. I suggest an online forum be set up for the Mount Coot-tha electorate.

In the meantime you can all also feel most welcome to post your own comments to my web site. The most suitable places to comment would be:

http://candobetter.org/QldElections
http://candobetter.org/QldElections/MountCoot-tha

I look forward to hearing from you all.

yours sincerely,

James Sinnamon

Pro-democracy independent candidate for Mount Coot-tha.

--

(contact details)

#response" id="response">Andrew Fraser's response

RE: Mount-Coot-tha candidates' public debate
Date: 24/02/09 04:50 pm
From: Andrew Fraser
To: James Sinnamon

Dear James Sinnamon

Thanks for your email. It has been past practice that the Brisbane Inner West Chamber of Commerce has hosted a candidate forum. I have already been approached, and I understand the Chamber is again proposing to approach candidates for participation in such a forum. I propose that, once again, the Chamber host such an event. I've forwarded your email to Lynne Brown of the Chamber, who is coordinating the time and place.

Yours sincerely

Andrew Fraser

[image from Sheila Newman & wikipedia] ScienceDaily (Feb. 2, 2009) — "The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) has released photos from the first large-scale census of jaguars in the Amazon region of Ecuador—one of the most biologically rich regions on the planet.
The ongoing census, which began in 2007, is working to establish baseline population numbers as oil exploration and subsequent development puts growing pressure on wildlife in Ecuador's Yasuni National Park and adjacent Waorani Ethnic Reserve. Together, these two protected areas make up some 6,500 square miles (16,800 square kilometers) of wilderness."

Mother Nature recognised at law

In September 2008 Ecuador became the first country in the world to declare constitutional rights to nature, thus codifying a new system of environmental protection. Original Article source.

Reflecting the beliefs and traditions of the indigenous peoples of Ecuador, the constitution declares that nature “has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.” This right, the constitution states, “is independent of the obligation on natural and juridical persons or the State to indemnify the people that depend on the natural systems.”

Nature not just an object for economic appropriation

The new constitution redefines people’s relationship with nature by asserting that nature is not just an object to be appropriated and exploited by people, but is rather a rights-bearing entity that should be treated with parity under the law.

Mari Margil, Associate Director of the Environmental Legal Defense Fund, worked closely over the past year with members of Ecuador’s constitutional assembly on drafting legally enforceable Rights of Nature, which mark a watershed in the trajectory of environmental law.

Ecuador’s leadership on this issue may have a global domino effect. Margil says that her organization is busy fielding calls from interested countries, such as Nepal, which is currently writing its first constitution.

Flawed by failure to mandate indigenous community consultation

For all of the hope and tangible progress the Rights of Nature articles in Ecuador’s constitution represent, however, there are shortcomings and contradictions with the laws and the political reality on the ground. A fundamental flaw in the constitution also exists due to Correa’s refusal to include a clause mandating free, prior, and informed consent by communities for development project that would affect their local ecosystems.

“I expect them [the multinational extractive industries] to fight it,” says Margil. “Their bread and butter is based on being able to treat countries and ecosystems like cheap hotels. Multinational corporations are dependent on ravaging the planet in order to increase their bottom line.”

Mining treats countries and ecosystems like cheap hotels

Investigation of Texaco [Caltex in Australia] oil-exploration in the Amazon.

The new Mining Law, introduced by Ecuador’s own President Rafael Correa and backed by Canadian companies, which hold the majority of mining concessions in Ecuador, is a testament to Margil’s forecast. The Mining Law would allow for large-scale, open pit metal mining in pristine Andean highlands and Amazon rainforest. Major nationwide demonstrations are being held in protest, with groups accusing Correa of inviting social and environmental disaster by selling out to mining interests.

Carlos Zorrilla, executive director of Defensa y Conservación Ecológica de Intag, who has been a tireless defender of the environment against transnational mining companies, says that while the new constitution looks good on paper, “in practice governments like Correa’s will argue that funding his political project, which will bring ‘well being and relieve poverty,’ overrules the rights of nature.”

Yet even as Ecuadoran President Correa embraces the extractive economic model of development, the inclusion of the rights of nature in a national constitution sets inspiring and revolutionary precedent. If history is any indicator, Ecuadorians will successfully fight for the Rights of Nature, with or without their president.

U.S. Media: Update by Cyril Mychalejko

When Ecuadorians drafted and passed a new constitution, which gave nature inalienable rights, the US media largely ignored this historic development. In the case of the Los Angeles Times, one of the few mainstream outlets to cover the story, the newspaper’s editorial board trivialized the development (“Putting Nature in Ecuador’s Constitution,” September 2, 2008) by suggesting it sounded “like a stunt by the San Francisco City Council” and that it seemed “crazy.”

“As ecological systems around the world collapse, we need to fundamentally change our relationship with nature. This requires changes in both law and culture, and ultimately our behavior as part of nature,” said Mari Margil, Associate Director of the Defense Fund, who is disappointed in how the US media largely ignored the story.

In Ecuador, at the time of the constitutional vote, the optimism over how the “Rights of Nature” clauses would translate into policy was guarded.
“As exciting as these developments are, it was also inevitable that the people in power would, and will, find ways to circumvent, undermine, and ignore those rights,” said Carlos Zorrilla, executive director of Defensa y Conservación Ecológica de Intag.

Multi-national mining companies dangerously influence national laws

According to Zorrilla, a major disappointment has been President Rafael Correa’s new mining law.

“The law takes rights-to-nature loopholes and widens them so that giant dirt movers could easily drive through them,” said Zorrilla, who has been working with communities of Ecuador’s Intag region to resist mining and promote sustainable development. “To mention a couple of examples, the law does not prohibit large-scale mining in habitats harboring endangered species, nor the dumping of heavy metals in rivers and streams.”
See also,"Ecuador Rising"..

Indigenous leaders file law-suit

Indigenous leaders responded by filing a lawsuit before Ecuador’s Constitutional Court in March 2009, seeking to overturn the mining law, which they believe is unconstitutional. Article 1 of the “Rights of Nature” clauses states: “Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of rights for nature before the public organisms. The application and interpretation of these rights will follow the related principles established in the Constitution.”

Regardless of the ongoing struggles to ensure that the true meaning and scope of the constitution is upheld, Dr. Mario Melo, a lawyer specializing in Environmental Law and Human Rights and an advisor to Fundación Pachamama-Ecuador, believes that the nature clauses which reflect the traditions of indigenous peoples could offer a path to an ecologically sustainable future.

Rights to nature = progress

“I consider that the recognition of the ‘Rights to Nature’ as a progress on a global scale and one that deserves to be globally broadcast and commented on as a contribution from Ecuador towards the search of new ways of facing the environmental crisis due to climate change.”

The struggles of Ecuadorian social movements and the Ecuadorian government to uphold the “Rights of Nature” and to create a new development model that places human beings as interdependent parts of nature, rather than dominant exploiters of nature, is something we should continue to monitor and learn from.

Source:
Upside Down World, September 25, 2008
Title: “Ecuador’s Constitution Gives Rights to Nature”
Author: Cyril Mychalejko
and
Project Censored
Student Researcher: Chelsea Davis
Faculty Evaluator: Elaine Wellin, PhD
Sonoma State University

(Australian Wood Duck - a "pest" - source: Wikimedia Commons)

Incredibly, Premier John Brumby has announced another duck shooting season for Victoria!

It will run for 10 weeks from March 20, about two weeks shorter than normal.

The Government says conditions have improved in parts of Victoria and game ducks can be hunted sustainably. Hunters would be permitted to increase their take from last year's two per bag to five.

Victoria's wetlands are drying and becoming degraded through soil compaction, increased nutrients, weeds, grazing, trampling and erosion. Waterbird numbers are reported to be down by 82% since 1983.

As a result of the threats to wetland ecosystems, many species that depend on wetlands are now threatened with extinction. According to Birds Australia , many species, such as waders and other waterbirds, are threatened by changes to wetlands and coastal environments.

Acting Minister for Environment and Climate Change Tim Holding said the compromise struck a balance between ensuring sustainable duck numbers and the interests of hunters.

There is a small increase in waterbirds in one location in South Australia, not in Victoria. This fact is considered sufficient for a shooting them!

This is pure politically-driven idiocy, considering that with so few waterbirds left in Victoria, any breeding pairs will be shot out of the sky and the next generation will be non-existent.

RSPCA Victorian president Hugh Wirth said the decision showed a "blatant disregard for the welfare of Australian wildlife".
"It is no secret that thousands of ducks are wounded horrifically each and every season and die a slow and painful death," he said. He said 87 per cent of the community supports a ban, but the community's voice had fallen on deaf ears.

There is a total ban on the taking of Blue-winged Shoveler, Pink-eared Duck and Hardhead (White-eyed Duck).

The remaining five species – Pacific Black Duck, Grey Teal, Mountain Duck (Australian Shelduck), Maned Duck (Wood Duck) and Chestnut Teal – may be hunted.

Warrnambool Field and Game Club secretary Graham Kemp said duck hunting season was necessary to cull species which were regarded as pests. "Wood ducks in particular have been pests and have a deleterious effect on dam water and get into farmers' crops. We are legally, responsible shooters."

Wood Ducks:

The Australian Wood Duck is found in grasslands, open woodlands, wetlands, flooded pastures and along the coast in inlets and bays. It is also common on farmland with dams, as well as around rice fields, sewage ponds and in urban parks. It feeds mainly on grasses. It will often be found around deeper lakes that may be unsuitable for other waterbirds' foraging, as it prefers to forage on land. The Australian Wood Duck forms monogamous breeding pairs that stay together year round.

As some breeds of kangaroos, the Australian Wood Duck has “benefited from the creation of dams and irrigated crops on farmlands”. This assumes that Wood Ducks were not plentiful and that water was less available before European settlement. It can sometimes “damage crops and pastures”.

Why make this environmentally damning decision? It will provide entertainment for a privileged few shooters!

(Cartoon by permission of Carol Drew)
“Ornithologists predict it will take many years of flooding for waterbird numbers to return. With the looming disastrous impact of global warming it is imperative that we look to the future and protect our native waterbirds. Since their numbers have declined by 82% across eastern Australia over the last 25 years, it is evident they will need all the help they can get to survive into the future,”
Coalition Against Duck Shooting Campaign Director Laurie Levy said.

During an interview with the US Public Broadcasting show NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on 26 March 2009_#main-fn1">1, after having acknowledged that Australia's commitment to the war in Afghanistan was becoming increasingly unpopular, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd justified that commitment:

But the bottom line is this: [Afghanistan is] the right place to be.

When you think about Afghanistan, think about this. I cannot remove from my mind the image of the twin towers coming down. We are there because terrorists, operating out of the safe haven of Afghanistan, caused that to happen. They also, having been trained in Afghanistan, were responsible for murdering nearly a hundred Australians in Bali a year later.

We have therefore a combined responsibility to do whatever we can to make sure Afghanistan does not become a safe haven for terrorism again. It's going to be tough, it's going to be hard, and it's going to be difficult and dangerous.

If Kevin Rudd "cannot remove from [his] mind the image of the twin towers coming down," then perhaps it's time he took another look at those images in order to learn what really happened on 11 September 2001. He may then come to understand why not one single person with a proven link to September 11 has been captured in over 8 years of military occupation of the supposed "safe haven" out of which he insists those attacks were launched.

There is abundant evidence to be found on the Internet that conclusively proves that the 'collapses' of three tall buildings at the World Trade Centre, one of which, World Trade Center Building 7, was not even struck by an aircraft, were, in fact. controlled demolitions. Much of this evidence can be found on the web-site of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth or sites linked to from there.

Amongst the latest is a video "Cutter Charges at Work in the North Tower of the World Trade Center" produced David Chandler a member of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth and Graeme MacQueen, Carolyn Chandler and Tony Szamboti, which is also embedded below.

Two videos, which captured different views of the 'collapse' have been combined to show clear evidence that a #figure1">violent ejection of debris, observed at one of the corners of the North Tower as it was being engulfed by a much larger violent cloud of debris, had severed the #figure3">two combined corner 14" supporting box columns at that point. The top of the remaining unsevered part of those columns was shortly after observed briefly above the swirling cloud before it began to descend at free fall speed. (For more information, see #appendix1">Appendix 1 and #appendix2">Appendix 2 as well as the video itself.

Kevin Rudd should ask himself how Al Quaeda, operating out of Afghanistan, could have gained the access to the North Tower, which would have been necessary to plant the charges. If he thinks this unlikely, then he should support the demand of made by the current 985 professionally qualified members of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth for a new investigation into the collapses of the Twin Towers and World Trade Center Building 7 on 11 September 2001.

Article, including embedded video, has been adapted from material found in story "Cutter Charges in the North Tower of the World Trade Center" of 26 Dec 09 on 911blogger.com. See also: ae911truth.org, "WTC7 in Freefall", "'WTC7: NIST Admits Freefall' ...The Movie", parts 1, 2,3.

#appendix1" id="appendix1">Appendix 1:David Chandler's introduction to this video

This project began with an email from Graeme MacQueen to me describing an explosion on the NW corner of WTC1. I started looking for other such explosions and found a prominent one right at the initiation point on the 98th floor. I further noticed a corner column sticking up after the roofline had fallen past. The top of the surviving column matched the height of the corner ejection moments before. This seemed to be the event that cut the column. The column hovered and swayed for several seconds then precipitously dropped. I wondered if Graeme's explosion was the one that triggered the drop. I found a way to synchronize the videos and then was able to verify that Graeme's "puff" occurred exactly at the moment of drop of the column.

The main significant points I see in this observation are:

1. The building is doing more than just blowing smoke out the windows. The puffs we see are part of the cause of the collapse.
2. We are seeing charges that can cut through the steel corners of the buildings
3. We are seeing a specific 14" column cut by explosives in two places: one to set it loose, and one to cause it to drop.
4. The two explosions occur in a time-delayed sequence, indicative of demolition

(Tony Szamboti and my wife, Carolyn, also made observations that contributed toward this video. All are acknowledged in a credits screen before the closing logo.)

#appendix2" id="appendix2">Appendix 2: Key images from video

The quality of these images is poor. When viewed in motion within the video embedded above, the features described are easier to see.

#figure1" id="figure1">Figure 1: Violent ejuction of plume emerging from corner which can be seen as slightly lighter coloured region on top of black cloud on the right side, roughly one third way into the image from the bottom.

#figure2" id="figure2">Figure 2: Close up of violent ejection seen in Figure 1.

#figure3" id="figure3">Figure 3: Photo taken from inside corner of the North Tower, during construction showing 14" box columms and connecting steel.

#figure4" id="figure4">Figure 4: Close up of outside of corner of the North Tower.

#figure5" id="figure5">Figure 5: Box column with top severed suspended and teetering over to the right.

#figure6" id="figure6">Figure 6: From second video: sequence of violent ejections of debris lower down on same corner, at point in time which coincides with commencement of free fall of the column above in the process of being severed.

#figure7" id="figure7">Figure 7: Event on first video which matches event on second video: The last moment at which light can be seen on the tip of the severed section of column in free fall. This made it possible for the two videos to be synchronised.

Footnotes

#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1. #main-fn1-txt">↑ It's not completely clear that the interview of Prime Minister Keving Rudd occurred on that date. The source of this a report "Rudd backs Afghan war in talks with US leaders" of 26 March  09 on ABC Radio's The World Today.

Click for French tv coverage

Airport closed by Islanders

In August this year (2009) Easter Islanders, who are mostly of Polynesian origin, 'closed' their island for 24 hours, blocking the one airport. Their purpose was to demand limits on immigration from Chili and on the length of time tourists might come and stay.

The were demonstrating because of the impact of tourism and population growth on the island. The French Press described it as a fear that their 'island paradise' might be lost, but we should remember that the Rapanuans, as the inhabitants of Easter Island probably prefer to be known, clawed back from the brink of extinction after overpopulation, nearly reduced their island to a desert in the 18th century, forcing some of their ancestors to survive by cannibalism. If this island has returned to paradise status, it has been dearly-won.

It is ironic that the island that the world knows as the most famous case of overpopulation should even have to ask for control over their population numbers, but inspiring that the Chilean government has recognised this right in a country not known for its attention to human rights.

According to the Blog for the Association of Adoptive Families of Children born in Chili, Rapanui Mayor, Luz Zasso Paoa, commented, "We depend for our heritage on sustainable development; we have to take care of resources such as water, energy and the managment of waste, reminding people that Rapanuians have been sounding this warning bell for ten years.

Illustration: Interactive Wikipedia map of Easter Island and its sights

Dangerously High European Immigration

The population has increased at a dangerously rapid pace, mainly due to the influx of people of European descent via the Chilean mainland. At the 2002 census there were 3,791 inhabitants, up from 1,936 inhabitants in 1982. By 2009 there were about 5000 inhabitants. Rapanui is 163.6 km2, with little fresh water.

The island is also losing its native Polynesian identity to European Chilean sea-changers. The native Polynesians (known as Rapanuians) have dwindled from around 70% in 1982, to 60% in the 2002 census. Chileans of European descent formed 39% of the population, with 1% Native American from mainland Chile.) (Source: Easter Island Article ID: 53418

Each year 50,000 tourists come to visit the beaches and volcanic landscapes which are world famous for their giant Moai statues of stone. Rapanui is 3,500km from the Chilean coast, once the most isolated island in the Pacific, and the last to be settled by Polynesians. Some theories have it that the islanders' ancestors chopped down the last trees in order to keep on making those statues. The statues stare out to sea like an island SETI program, as if signalling that the island was inhabited, hoping that this once most isolated island in the Pacific might to be found by other friendly Polynesians in the once endlessly large universe of the Pacific Ocean.

In fact the island was found by unfriendly Europeans and many of the islanders who had survived cannibalism and starvation, were taken away as slaves in the 18th century.

Today the stone statues are again attracting the wrong sort of crowd.

Easter Islanders get power to limit immigration to their island

In October this year, after public consultation, the people of Easter Island (Rapanui) approved a reform of the Chilean constitution which will give authorities on Easter Island more control over migration movements. This was an initiative of the Chilean Government, designed in response to Islander concerns about the impact on their ecosystem and culture of growth in tourism and immigration.

96% vote to restrict immigration and tourism

Some 1,300 - or more than 96% of voters welcomed the reform, according to Chilean media sources,

The Vice Minister of the Interior, Patricio Rosende, explained that the vote will "help to regulate the growth of the population of the island. It is a very fragile place which won't support an indeterminate number of permanent inhabitants."

In September the government had launched a system of immigration cards to control the reason, length of stay and place of stay for visitors, as a first step to control immigration traffic. The Supreme Court in early October had ruled that this idea was 'illegal and arbitrary in the name of freedome to come and go in the country.'

The vote in October would launch a process to revise the article in the Constitution which already recognises that Easter Island has a special status.

Source of above:"L'île de Pâques vote pour contrôler ses visiteurs," Agence France-Presse, Santiago, Publié le 27 octobre 2009 à 07h52 | Mis à jour le 27 octobre 2009 à 07h55 and France2 archived television video at http://info.francetelevisions.fr/video-info/index-fr.php?id-video=MAM_1500000000004645_200908181520_F2 Accessed on 27 December 2009. Easter Island Article ID: 53418

The Future Eating Syndrome

Nowhere is the ability of a system to limit growth more important than on isolated islands. The Pacific Islands were the last in the world to be severely disorganised by colonisation and the ideology of "Progress" so dear to the growth lobby. The destruction of their original societies was documented by many sources, including religious, commercial and anthropological. But the fact is, Easter Island's grisly history turns out to be the exception to the Pacific Islander rule - at least for those many island societies that survived well. Generally, Pacific Island societies have been the greatest survivors ever known, with some lasting more than 40,000 years. Even Hawaii had lasted for about 3000 years before the arrival of Europeans. Japan is another example of a Pacific island that succeeded for a very long time without overshooting its resources. No modern European society can claim anything like this success.

The Easter Island story is of the late colonisation by a single party of Polynesians of one of the most isolated islands in the Pacific.

It was so isolated that it is thought likely that no further traditional Polynesian colonisers ever arrived. Despite these inauspicious circumstances, this one party of Polynesians seeded a complex civilisation in 390 or 400AD which reached numbers between 7000 and 10,000, profiting from the abundant sea-life and productive vegetation. But the downfall of the Easter Islanders apparently lay in their very success, for they reputedly ate themselves out of house and home, finally dwindling to a handful of incestuous cannibals, surrounded by those mute giant statues which had been produced by their dead civilisation. By 1700 AD population had dropped from an estimated 10,000 to around one or two thousand. It is thought that no visitors landed until the first European voyagers in 1722 who described the straggling survivors of the former nation.

This form of death to a society by over consumption has been held up as the likely or even as the inescapable fate of modern man and consumer society by eco-gurus such as Jarad Diamond (Collapse) and Tim Flannery. Tim Flannery called it "Future Eating" in his famous 1994 book, The Future Eaters (Reed Books). In a series of international petroleum depletion discussion e-lists led initially by Jay Hansen of www.dieoff.org, Easter Island has been held up to illustrate the proposition that humans will always overshoot their environmental carrying capacity.

That people of 'progressive' cultures have so easily identified Pacific Island societies as hopelessly unsustainable lies in the severe dysfunction of most Pacific Islander cultures since the majority were exposed to 'Progress' through mostly British colonisation from the 1850s. The spectacular fate of the Easter Island, which was thought to have occurred before any colonisation, simply confirms in most "Progressive" peoples' minds that the poor Pacific islanders must always have existed in hopelessly dysfunctional societies, doomed to bloom and die like so many tropical blossoms, due to some innate lack of the progress gene.

But all Pacific islands did not end up like Easter Island. Most did not. So the whole proposition that Pacific Islanders are chronicly in need of direction from outsiders is flawed. And there must be an antidote to the Easter Island future-eating syndrome.

Australia is to be counted among the once-isolated islands of the Pacific and Australian Aborigines once used the same sustainable land-tenure and inheritance system as all other successful islanders. The Australian and New Guinean Lapita people were present in societies at least 40,000 years ago.

'Modern' Australia is a product of British colonial history and a victim of the British capitalist land-tenure and inheritance system. For all that it is bigger and more resourced than its smaller neighbours and for all that the white population far outnumbers the original black population, Australia is dogged by the same exploitation, overpopulation, and ruin as the other British-colonised islands. Because Australia is bigger than the other Pacific islands, its ruin is taking a little longer than some islands' and most of us cannot see that what is happening in our suburb is happening all over Australia's thin strip of fertile coast. Rest assured, however, that if we keep going as we are, we won't last nearly as long as Easter Island did before it crashed. And, what is happening to Australia is also happening to North America, Canada and Britain.

Wouldn't it be great if the people of Rapanui, having learned from the pain of being unfairly held up as an example to the world, were able to stop overpopulation destroying them a second time.

Let's wish them the best of luck and follow their example!

JUST PUBLISHED UPDATE:

UPDATE DEC 2012: If you would like to know more, Sheila Newman has applied a completely new test of the collapse model of Easter Island, which will stun those who thought they knew all about it. Read about this in chapter four of Demography, Territory & Law: The Rules of Animal and Human Populations (see link). Forensic biologist, Hans Brunner writes of it: "This book takes us to a completely new paradigm in multiple species population science. It shows how little we understand, and how much we need to know, of the sexual reactions when closed colonies with an orderly reproduction system are destroyed, be it people or animals." Two chapters are on multi-species demography, the rest apply the theory to non-industrial societies, including Rapanui

This TV ad takes the cake. Have you seen it? It is paid for by an organization that calls itself “Alliance for Life” (Ontario). It is a “provincial coordinating organization” of some 44 affiliates which, surprise surprise, includes seven Christian denominations, of which, another shocker, five are Catholic. Most interesting is an organization calling itself the “Population Research Institute”, founded of course by a priest, Father Paul Marx. Its mission? “...to expose the myth of overpopulation, to expose human rights abuses committed in population control programs.”

The Alliance, meanwhile, claims to present “a united voice for the dignity and worth of all human beings from conception/fertilization to natural death.” I can personally attest to the kind of dignity in death to which they are referring. My brother writhed in agony for months from terminal cancer, and repeatedly indicated that he wanted to die. But his Christian fundamentalist doctor was too concerned with his dignity to assist him in executing his wishes, and so my brother was forced to suffer without the ability to swallow or control his bowels. This conduct is sanctioned by the Alliance for “Life” as “morally and ethically acceptable”.

And of course, the Criminal Code, built on this kind of “morality”, stands behind them. This is the cultural “heritage” which some Canadian anti-immigrationists are intent upon saving. They are the people who grasp at environmental reasons for limiting immigration, but then turn around and advocate more birth incentives for native-born Canadians, most of whom are self-described Christians. Their objective is an ancient one. “Grow the tribe and screw carrying capacity.” So how does the Alliance for Life present its case on television?

The ad features children playing, when in a stroke, one in four of them vanish from the screen. This is to simulate the number of “children” or “babies” destroyed since the abortion law was struck down in 1988. That’s right. After 20 years the Christian right still doesn’t get it. They don’t understand the difference between a baby and a foetus. Between a life and a potential life. I once bought a lottery ticket, and I discovered that there was a substantial difference between a ticket that had the potential of winning the jackpot and one that actually did. It only took one purchase for me to figure that out. But then my learning curve is rather shorter and higher than a Bible-thumper’s I think.

But the Alliance for “Life” , or more aptly, the Alliance for the Increased Quantity of Life (rather than Quality of Life) is animated by different logic. They claim that since one-quarter of all pregnancies were terminated in Canada since the abortion law was passed, young Canadians are “missing” 3 million of their friends. Think of what a difference they would have made, they ask. Over to you Julian Simon. Another Sydney Crosby, or 100 cancer researchers, or 10,000 teachers perhaps. Forget the extra criminals, dead beats and real estate speculators. The more “life” we have the better. After all, “people” are our greatest resource.

Yeah sure. But each Canadian member of that “resource” emits, on average, 23 metric tonnes of green house gas (GHG), consumes 3 million tons of metals, minerals and fuel per year, and produces more than 150 pounds of waste annually as well. So what would those 3 million “missing” friends bring us? For starters, about 65% more GHG emissions than the tar sands produce, and about half the farmland that has been developed to accommodate the New Canadians that have arrived since the abortion law was enacted. And let us not forget the number of non-human species that would have been obliterated by the bulldozer to clear the way. Do you still miss those 3 million potential consumers now?

Each extra Canadian, whether he or she enters the country through the hospital or through the airport, diminishes the per capita share of non-renewable resources that existing Canadians enjoy. Even if the extra 3 million would have spurred more economic growth---a proposition refuted by two or three studies so far---that growth is still contingent on the supply of cheap fossil fuel and rapidly scarce minerals and metals upon which an industrial economy depends. More people does not mean a higher per capita GDP, and even if it did, the economic foundation upon which our inflated population rests is built on quicksand. The bigger we are, the harder we’ll fall. Triple digit oil will kill our transportation system and our ability to grow, harvest, transport and refrigerate our food. If we continue to grow our economy and grow our population, many more of us will starve, freeze and die, along with the flora and fauna we take down with us.

What is really required is an advertisement showing the number of various species on a screen, and those that disappear with each increment of the human population. Christians are fond of justifying the Biblical mandate for humans to exercise dominion over all God’s creatures by stressing our obligation to be wise stewards. That is a difficult task when the human population, to Catholic and evangelical cheerleading, has nearly tripled its size in my lifetime and is shrinking wildlife habitat relentlessly and mercilessly. Whether a primate’s life begins at conception or not, there are now fewer primates in existence than there are human beings born in any given day. If each one of God’s 214,000 miracles born each day is precious, what of the tens or hundreds of thousands of non human life forms that are murdered that day by our expansion? Yes, 100 species are lost each day. But many more life forms are killed than that each day. How many? Who knows? Each and every day we are breeding our life support system into the ground.

It is in this sense, then, that the Alliance for Life is the Alliance for Death.

Tim Murray
December 26/09
PS Happy New Year to Canada’s greatest and most effective environmentalist, Dr. Henry Morgenthaler.

The Antarctic Treaty

The original Parties to the Treaty were the 12 nations active in the Antarctic during the International Geophysical Year of 1957-58. The Treaty was signed in Washington on 1 December 1959 and entered into force on 23 June 1961.

The Governments of Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Chile, the French Republic, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, the Union of South Africa, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the United States of America, recognizing that it is in the interest of all mankind that Antarctica shall continue for ever to be used exclusively for peaceful purposes and shall not become the scene or object of international discord.

The now 47 Antarctic Treaty nations represent about two-thirds of the world's human population.
Article I
1. Antarctica shall be used for peaceful purposes only. There shall be prohibited, inter alia, any measure of a military nature, such as the establishment of military bases and fortifications, the carrying out of military manoeuvres, as well as the testing of any type of weapon.
2. The present Treaty shall not prevent the use of military personnel or equipment for scientific research or for any other peaceful purpose.

Japan has deployed military personnel on two security vessels sent to protect its Antarctic whaling fleet from intervention by the Sea Shepherd conservation group's flagship, Steve Irwin , its skipper Captain Paul Watson said.

The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) is the body responsible for the conservation of marine resources in the Southern Ocean.  It is supposed to regulate the harvesting of, or research into, all living organisms that are found in the marine environment within the Convention that implements CCAMLR.

Protecting Antarctic Wildlife

Guidelines for visiting the Antarctic include ensuring that "wildlife and vegetation are not disturbed". 

By David Spratt and Damien Lawson
21 December 2009

See also: A critical response from Peter Christoff.

Originally published on climatecodered.blogspot.com on 21 Dec 09.

Climate Action Centre Briefing Note

"In biblical terms it looks like we are being offered 30 pieces of silver to betray our future and our people ... our future is not for sale." Ian Fry, Tuvalu negotiator

"This is a declaration that small and poor countries don't matter, that international civil society doesn't matter, and that serious limits on carbon don't matter. The president has wrecked the UN and he's wrecked the possibility of a tough plan to control global warming. It may get Obama a reputation as a tough American leader, but it's at the expense of everything progressives have held dear. 189 countries have been left powerless, and the foxes now guard the carbon henhouse without any oversight." Bill McKibben, 350.org

"The city of Copenhagen is a crime scene tonight, with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport. There are no targets for carbon cuts and no agreement on a legally binding treaty. It is now evident that beating global warming will require a radically different model of politics than the one on display here in Copenhagen." John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK

"So that's it. The world's worst polluters -- the people who are drastically altering the climate -- gathered here in Copenhagen to announce they were going to carry on cooking, in defiance of all the scientific warnings. They didn't seal the deal; they sealed the coffin for the world's low-lying islands, its glaciers, its North Pole, and millions of lives. Those of us who watched this conference with open eyes aren't surprised. Every day, practical, intelligent solutions that would cut our emissions of warming gases have been offered by scientists, developing countries and protesters -- and they have been systematically vetoed by the governments of North America and Europe." Johann Hari, The Independent, 19 December 2009

"I think that our prime minister has played an outstanding role ... He's been working very hard for the last few months... and he's just been fantastic all the way, he just shines at it... he's been really important through these meetings". Tim Flannery, ABC News, 19 February 2009

What is in the accord

The Copenhagen Accord could not be further from what civil society, along with most developing countries sought to achieve at this conference. There is no Fair, Ambitious and legally-Binding deal.

Instead it is a non-legally-binding three page document, drafted by United States, China, India, Brazil, Ethiopia and South Africa that says little beyond what had been discussed at previous international meetings.

Yet US President Obama and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd both held press conferences announcing the accord before it had been completed and attempted to spin the document as a historic achievement.

But the Conference of the Parties [COP15] at Copenhagen decided only to "take note" of its existence and some countries including Tuvalu strongly repudiated the document. The COP15 agreed to continue negotiating on an extension to the Kyoto Protocol and a new agreement on "long-term cooperative action." The next full meeting is scheduled for late November in Mexico.The specifics of the accord include:

Dangerous support for two degrees: "We agree that deep cuts in global emissions are required according to science, and ... with a view to reduce global emissions so as to hold the increase in global temperature below 2 degrees Celsius, and take action to meet this objective consistent with science and on the basis of equity." It entrenches further the dangerous goal of two degrees, with the goal of 1.5 degrees, now supported by over 100 countries, only given lip service in the final paragraph which discusses a review of the accord.

No peak emissions target: just says emissions should "peak as soon as possible".

No 2020 targets: the accord will just list voluntary targets by developed and developing countries, in Annexes to the accord. Countries are asked to provide their target by February 1. So there are no binding targets, just a totting up up of country promises and not even a target or goal for 2050. Based on current assessments of country promises the 2020 targets will head us towards 3.5-4 degrees, which would be a catastrophe.No 2050 targets: there is no reference to any 2050 targets.

Markets: statement supports using a variety of methods for pollution cuts, "including opportunities to use markets"

Adaptation and deforestation: General statements about need for adaptation, development and end to deforestation. There is no concrete deal on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, although this may be a good thing as the direction was towards offset loopholes.

Financing for Developing world: "commitment by developed countries is to provide new and additional resources, including forestry and investments through international institutions, approaching US $30 billion for the period 2010 -- 2012." "A goal of mobilizing jointly US $100 billion dollars a year by 2020", "Funding will come from a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources of finance." Statements by US negotiators including Hillary Clinton implied that you needed to "associate" yourself with the accord to be eligible for funds. The funds could also explain why many countries subsequently and prior to the accord very critical have acquiesced in its creation.

The promises of finances are woefully small, much lower than the demands of developing countries and civil society groups. For example, the African countries had sought sought $400 billion in short term financing, with an immediate amount of $150 billion. In the longer term they say 5% of developed country GNP is needed (approx. $2 trillion).

Governance of finance: Creation of a Copenhagen Green Climate Fund. The accord also suggests funding can be delivered through "international institutions" possibly code for the World Bank and IMF and the promise of a new fund. Civil society had campaigned for funds to be administered by the UN.

Technology: decided to create a Technology Mechanism to accelerate technology development, but with no further details.1.5 degrees delayed: assessment of accord by 2015 including scientific need for 1.5 degrees.

The only possible concrete achievement of the whole conference was the refusal to include carbon, capture and storage within the Clean Development Mechanism, staving off another loophole for rich countries to keep on polluting.

Analysis

The United States won. Killing the Kyoto Protocol (KP) as the primary international climate policy instrument has been their intent for years, so the impasse which flared at COP15 has deep roots on the long road to Copenhagen.

In early October, US climate negotiator Jonathan Pershing announced: “We are not going to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. That is out”. The USA set out to destroy it at COP15, actively supported by the Annex 1 bloc, with Australia in the lead behind close doors. Obama’s climate position was described by Bill McKibben of 350.org as a "A lie inside a fib coated with spin".

Developing nations accused Australia of "trying to kill Kyoto". Australia appeared to be saying one thing in public and another privately, with the chief negotiator for China and the small African nations accusing Rudd of lying to the Australian people about his position on climate change.

Months ago the G-77, a loose coalition of 130 developing nations, accused the US and other developed countries of trying to "fundamentally sabotage" the Kyoto Protocol (KP). They were right in their fears. Instead of enforceable targets in an updated KP, the Copenhagen Accord (CA) contains only voluntary, non-binding, self-assessing targets which amount to "pick a figure, any figure, and do what you like with it" because you will face no penalty for blowing it.

COP15 failed because the US and the major economic powers did not want the KP renewed and the climate action movements within those nations did not have the power to stop them behaving this way. China appeared not to care too much what happened one way or the other. With central planning of their booming green/climate sector, they have no need of global agreements or carbon prices to drive their industry policy; they may even have a competitive advantage in seeing the process fail.

Climate multilateralism may already be dead. It is reported that US officials were boasting privately that they are "controlling the lane". Most developing nations are deeply unhappy that the CA is outside the climate convention framework, but they were bribed to sign on by the USA with threats that poor nations who refused would loose their share of the $100 billion that rich countries have (theoretically) pledged to compensate for climate impacts the rich countries themselves have caused. Unless every country agrees to the US terms, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton explained, "there will not be that kind of a [financial] commitment, at least from the United States."

The majority COP participants -- the world's small and poor nations -- were well supported by the activist movement in making heard their views about historic responsibility and the scientific imperative for deep emissions cuts, undertaken first and foremost by the developed world. At COP15, those poor nations embarrassed the rich, who have a powerful interest in a new voluntary international climate agreement without the need of the formal support of the developing nations, who will not accede to a suicide pact.

So the big polluters have reason to move the real decision-making out of the UN forums, and with the CA having exactly that status, the major emitters have an opportunity to keep it there (while leaning on the UNFCCC Secretariat to do the office work).

What happened at Copenhagen is probably the start of a process where the real politics of international climate policy-making becomes the perogative of the G20, and similar forums, where the big developed and emerging polluters can pretend to save the world (by talking 2-degree targets) while acting for 3-to-4-degree targets, and selling that as a success at home without those pesky developing nations causing trouble.

The suicidal assumption of the rich nations is that those with money can adapt to 3 degrees or more. This delusion is strongly built into the current debate at every level, from government and business to many of the NGOs in their advocacy and support for actions that are a long way short of what is required for 2 degrees, let alone a safe climate.

What has happened exposes the smouldering contradiction at heart of the international process: while the science leads to 0-to-1-degree targets, the large emitters refuse to commit to actions that will leads to less than 3-to-4 degrees because it challenges their "business-as-usual", corporate-dominated approach. The best commitments on the table at COP15 would produce a 3.9-degree rise by 2100.

For years, the "2-degree fudge" has been developing: countries could (and continue to) talk 2 degrees so long as they don't have to commit to enforceable actions consistent with a 2-degree target (and they haven't had to do that since 1997!). This contradiction has been obvious for years: from Stern to Garnaut, who were both explicit in saying that 3 degrees was the best that could be achieved politically, because doing more would be too economically disruptive. Even at Bali two years ago, the supposed 2 degree emissions reduction range for Annex 1 nations of 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020 was relegated to a footnote.

Even as they propose actions which will lead to 4 degrees, they still talk 2 degrees. That is Rudd's strategy.

And we know that 2 degrees is not a safe target, but a catastrophe. The research tells us that a 2-degree warming will initiate large climate feedbacks on land and in the oceans, on sea-ice and mountain glaciers and on the tundra, taking the Earth well past signi?cant tipping points. Likely impacts include large-scale disintegration of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice-sheets; sea-level rises; the extinction of an estimated 15 to 40 per cent of plant and animal species; dangerous ocean acidi?cation and widespread drought, deserti?cation and malnutrition in Africa, Australia, Mediterranean Europe, and the western USA.

As Postdam Institute Director Schellnhuber, who is a scientific advisor to the EU and to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, points out, on sea levels alone, a 2 degree rise in temperature will be catastrophic: "Two degrees ... means sea level rise of 30 to 40 meters over maybe a thousand years. Draw a line around your coast — probably not a lot would be left." Recently-published research on climate history shows that three million years ago — in the last period when carbon dioxide levels were sustained at levels close to where they are today — "there was no icecap on Antarctica and sea levels were 25 to 40 metres higher," features associated with temperatures about 3 to 6 degrees higher than today.

COP15 shows that international processes cannot produce outcomes substantially better than the sum of the national commitments of major players, and in the present case a lot worse. On the latest science and carbon budgets to 2050, none of the Annex 1 countries have committed themselves to actions consistent with even a 2-degree target, so it is unrealistic to think/hope they would do so collectively in the short term, and until the domestic balances of forces change.

It is a challenge to see how they could come back in a year and make serious, legally-binding 2-degree commitments at COP16 in November in Mexico, since on equal per capita emission rights to 2050, the carbon budget for 2 degrees demands Australia and USA go to zero emissions by 2020, Europe before 2030. By dumping the multilateral approach, they have a way of avoiding that embarrassment.

We cannot blame the COP15 process for this disaster. Australia did not go to COP15 with even a 2-degree commitment on the table, for which we share responsibility. Those NGOs who tied Australian action (and the CPRS) to a successful COP15 outcome have shot themselves (and us) in the foot. The struggle now returns to the national stage.

There are disturbing parallels in the approaches some advocacy groups took to both the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) and Australia's role at COP15: deliberately and systematically avoiding the conclusions from the most recent science and instead advocating a soft, incremental, 'business-as-usual" approach to policy-making. And that's what we got from Obama. By continuing to play the game of the 2-degree fudge, the talks were structured to fail, even with a "good outcome".

Urging world leaders to get together again ASAP is pointless at present with the current framing of the debate and the balance of forces, because we will only get more of the same. The dilemma is as gross as it is simple: the G77 will never accept a 3-degree deal, Annex 1 won't commit to actions consistent with a 2-degree enforceable target, and only a a safe climate target of close to a zero-degree increase will keep the planet liveable for all people and all nations.

Here in Australia, the problem we face is obvious. In 2010, much of debate is likely to be framed between no action (federal opposition/deniers) and incremental action (Labor/some eNGOs), and it is murky because both the CPRS and the Copenhagen Accord which are indefensible will be used by the opposition to whack Labor, while the Climate Institute and its NGO associates will dutifully spend the year mine-sweeping for Rudd.

How do we define and move the debate to occupy the space between incrementalism and the large, urgent, economy-wide transformations that the science demands? We can only start by putting the science first and not negotiating with planet, recognising that politics-as-usual solutions are now dead and that only heroic, emergency action has a chance of succeeding. The time for dinky, incremental policy steps has run out: it's now all or nothing, and we must be saying so loud and clear at every opportunity and organising and gathering popular support around the only strategy that can actually succeed.

It's the 1938 moment in Britain: appeasement or urgent mobilisation, Chamberlain or Churchill.

See also: carbonequity.info, "The 2009 Copenhagen Conference 'took note' of Accord, but it did not progress beyond a talk fest" of 22 Dec 09, "Question for Climate Change Minister Penny Wong" of 21 Dec 09, "Copenhagen was a deadline without a plan" of 18 Dec 09.

#appendix1" id="appendix1">Appendix 1: WHO DUNNIT? A reply to 'A Climate Con' by David Spratt and Damien Lawson

David Spratt writes:

The following is a response to the piece circulated four days ago. While I disagree with several lines of argument and will respond, I believe it is important to debate the issues, as there has been, for example, articles in The Guardian and comments:

Copenhagen's failure belongs to Obama of 21 Dec 09 by Naomi Klein.
How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room of 22 Dec 09 by Mark Lynas.
If you want to know who's to blame for Copenhagen, look to the US Senate of 21 Dec 09 by George Monbiot.
Gutless, yes. But the planet's future is no priority of ours of 18 Dec 09 by Polly Toynbee.

David Spratt and Damien Lawson offer a pungent description of the flaws and weaknesses of the Copenhagen Accord (see also, of course, Rob Fowler's excellent treatment of the same!)

However their analysis of how this came about is based on mistaken assumptions and fictions about what happened at the COP, and a superficial and unhelpful misreading of the forces and motives that shaped the final agreement. If we are to dig ourselves out of the very deep hole we are now in, a reality check would be more helpful.

They write as if there had been no change at all in the American political scene since the rise of Bush II -- as if the underlying intent of the 'United States' is monolithic and immutable. Only if one supports this view can one say, as they do, that 'the United States won. Killing the Kyoto Protocol (KP) as the primary international climate policy instrument has been their intent for years, so the impasse which flared at COP15 has deep roots on the long road to Copenhagen.'

The stand-offs between the USA and the Kyoto Protocol, and between China and the USA, are indeed long and complex. They are in part based in the unjust and inequitable stance used by Bush (and Howard) to justify inaction until major emerging economies such as China adopted measurable and verifiable emissions reduction measures -- despite the clear requirements of the UNFCCC that developed countries lead in their actions. They also reflect the undeniable fact that China, now the planet's largest single national emitter, is moving into a position where it too must take increasing responsibility for its emissions.

Unfortunately for all of us, the balance of forces shaped by almost a decade of neo-conservativism in the USA retains a strong hold over both the US 'psyche' (look at the opinion polls) and also, more importantly, the numbers in Congress.

In particular, because the Kyoto Protocol is seen by many in the USA -- and not just those on the Right - as reinforcing the right of developing countries to not adopt emissions targets, and therefore working against US economic interests, the KP remains illegitimate in the USA. The numbers for its ratification are simply not there in the Congress at present, whatever the liberal minority might want.

So, without both symbolic and substantive movement by China at Copenhagen, there would be no chance of getting the US Congress to pass even the weak US climate Bill (with its target of minus 17% from 2005, or minus 4% at best from 1990 by 2020).

This is the ugly reality of the Bush legacy, like it or not (and there are many in the Obama administration who are deeply unhappy about this). And it was this legacy that Obama was seeking to challenge and overturn. As I will explain, there are more than a few forces happy for him to fail -- and not just climate skeptics and industry groups within the US.

So, to ignore the complex realities of US domestic politics -- as Spratt and Lawson do - is comforting if one wants to run a facile line on the 'USA's' intent, but this obstructs any consideration of domestic political blockages in the US, and how to deal with them.

Let us then turn to what actually happened at Copenhagen during the negotiations. The run-up to the COP was handled with incompetence by many parties -- with no text being put on the table for consideration until far too late in the day.

When the Danish Chair's text was 'leaked' early during the COP itself, it was seen by many as a preemptive move by a small bloc of developed countries. The leaked text heightened a tone of suspicion about backroom deals and deepened rifts between various developing and developed country groupings -- and was rejected.

So by the time we got to the last days, and high-level negotiations between heads of state, little of substance had been resolved. There was no coherent 'main text', only flimsy fabrics built around bracketed (disputed) points.

The disputes were in five critical areas, including:

1. the over-arching goal for limiting global warming (whether 2 degrees or 1.5 degrees);
2. individual countries' targets and their aggregate ambition by 2020 and 2050;
3. the amount, source and security of funding for adaptation by developing countries;
4. transparency (the verifiable measurement and reporting of mitigation measures) especially by developing countries; and
5. the legal form of the agreement itself and its relationship to the Kyoto Protocol.

The sense already afoot before the COP began, that the best that could be achieved was a political deal and an outlined negotiating path towards a legally binding agreement sometime next year, was well entrenched.

But there was no sense -- contra Spratt and Lawson - that the developed countries, including the USA, were hostile to enforceable targets. There was disagreement about whether or not these would be embedded in a new agreement under the Kyoto Protocol, or some other single agreement -- but the two-track process that had been set in train in Bali (and related to the US's position outside the KP) could have been maintained all the way to a two track agreement (and still survives).

SO why then does 'the Copenhagen Accord (CA) [contain] only voluntary, non-binding, self-assessing targets which amount to "pick a figure, any figure, and do what you like with it" because you will face no penalty for blowing it'.

On the final day, President Obama tabled a new draft text that included a long-term warming goal (admittedly 2 degrees) and commitment to a peaking date, annexes that would require developed countries to submit targets that amounted to these broader outcomes, a verifiable record of commitments and measures to be undertaken by developing countries, and also significant short and medium term adaptation funding for the Least Developed Countries and other needy states.

It appears from substantial testimony now emerging from various negotiating teams that most of these points were wrenched from that draft by China -- not the USA - during backroom negotiations that (sometimes) included the USA, and Brazil, India and South Africa. It was not that 'China appeared not to care too much what happened one way or the other'. Apparently it did -- with very significant and damaging force.

Similarly it is not true that 'the COP15 failed because the US and the major economic powers did not want the KP renewed'. This is wrong in terms of the sort of agreements that might have been achieved or were sought, although it is correct that blockage over the KP was used as a political football throughout.

So the question then is why did China pursue this approach? Spratt and Lawson write that 'with central planning of their booming green/climate sector, [China has] no need of global agreements or carbon prices to drive their industry policy; they may even have a competitive advantage in seeing the process fail.'

True. But that 'competitive advantage' would be greatly enhanced if the negotiations were a failure, for the initial inclination would be to slate the failure home to the usual suspect, the USA -- as has indeed happened. For then, without a strong deal, Congress would fail to pass the US climate Bill, stalling whatever kick-start this Bill would provide for an American clean energy economy. (Despite its sluggishness, the US economy is still six times larger in aggregate terms than the China's, with one quarter the population and ten times the annual income per capita. So, if the US does turn around -- even if 'not on a dime' -- then it will be a force to be reckoned with.) The USA could then, again, be reviled as a pariah state and blamed for failing to lead.

It was most likely this brutal assessment that led China to challenge the US as directly as it did, gutting the draft in the hope of scuttling US domestic progress via a failure in Copenhagen that would be blamed on Obama. (It also explains the US' brutal response in trying to weld developing country support to its draft accord via the offer of 'tied' adaptation funding).

Consider, however, what the big-picture outcome of a failure to pass the US Climate Bill might be. We are not talking about a CPRS in a minor state here, but the failure to get legislated targets and implementation from the world's biggest developed country emitter and second largest emitter overall. Such failure would -- via CBDR - give China carte blanche to adopt the softest of domestic mitigation efforts and still look good. Such failure would shatter momentum towards any sort of collective, global mitigation effort. This was a high stakes game indeed!

Ultimately this damagingly self-serving gambit - a pure power play for short-term economic advantage and greater political power derived by pulling the USA down a peg - will likely damage China's reputation as a defender of developing countries' rights. It also makes no sense in terms of China's longer-term interests, as China itself is highly vulnerable to the impacts of global warming. In all, it remains puzzling - and one needs to look at Chinese domestic politics, I suspect, to get a clear understanding of its nuances!

Fortunately the gambit has probably failed. In the end, although the CA is exceptionally weak and is merely a process 'noted' at the COP, it has provided a starting point from which to strengthen over the next year -- and seems likely to be sufficient for Obama to claim a victory that will provide enough momentum to pass the Climate Bill next year.

OK, so then where does this leave us? I don't agree with Spratt and Lawson that 'what happened at Copenhagen is probably the start of a process where the real politics of international climate policy-making becomes the prerogative of the G20, and similar forums, where the big developed and emerging polluters can pretend to save the world (by talking 2-degree targets) while acting for 3-to-4-degree targets, and selling that as a success at home without those pesky developing nations causing trouble.'

Inclusive multilateralism (with all states at the table) isn't dead yet. But it is very unwell. It is increasingly tempting to suggest that a strong agreement between the top 25 emitter nations -- including many developing countries - would come close to covering some 85 per cent of GHG emissions for, at the end of the day, no process can endure a handful of states acting as the proxies of the major powers to block and wreck -- as did Sudan on China's behalf. The danger is, of course, that excluding such interventions also leaves the most important players in terms of impacts -- small island states, low-lying states, and least developed countries -- voiceless.

We now have a highly fragmented and deeply divided groupings of states, which have been pushed about by China (and the USA) but to no satisfactory conclusion, and we need to think of how to get around this problem. Fast.

I also don't agree that 'all rich nations assume that those with money can adapt to 3 degrees or more.' No reading of the climate policies of the UK or Germany supports this view.

However Spratt and Lawson are absolutely right to underline that while the science leads to 0-to-1-degree targets, the large emitters refuse to commit to actions that will leads to less than 3-to-4 degrees because it challenges their "business-as-usual", corporate-dominated approach, and that the best commitments on the table at COP15 would produce a 3.9- degree rise by 2100.'

It was notable at Copenhagen that China did not demand stronger targets from the USA, nor did it push hard for 1.5 degrees -- on the contrary, and remarkably, it said that even a 2 degrees warming limit was secondary to its development needs.

In conclusion, each country brings the contradictory contemporary and historical burden of its own internal politics clanking into these international negotiations. That includes the USA and China and, of course, Australia.

Between now and the end of next year, we in civil society need to be mercilessly clear and accurate in our analysis of the political landscape we must navigate. We need to articulate a very clear alternative that builds on the Copenhagen Accord (whatever it shows itself to be by 31 January next year, when national commitments are revealed) in order to bring a much more focused, and more politically powerful, set of demands first to our individual countries and then to the UN process. This is a step along from where we were before December in Copenhagen.

But we can only begin to do all this by first understanding the complexities of our situation - not by telling ourselves comforting political fairytales instead.

Peter Christoff teaches climate policy at the University of Melbourne and is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Environment at Oxford University.

The 2009 Copenhagen Summit “took note” of an 'Accord'.

Well, what a hell of an expensive note taking exercise that was!

The full cost of the Copenhagen Conference (or was it 'talk fest'?) should be disclosed including all return flights, accommodation, livestock killed and A4 paper printed off, etc. Given that green house gases are their specialty, the conference hosts (the UN) should also disclose the total tonnage of greenhouse gas emissions of this latest Conference of the Parties (COP15). This then must become the decadent standard never to be exceeded in future.

Why could the Copenhagen Conference not have been done online through a series of video conference calls? It would have set a leadership example of how human behaviour can be modified to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Stephen Minas in his review article ‘Flight From Copenhagen’ of 21 Dec 2009 at New Matilda is right – “Copenhagen shrank…from the comprehensive, legally binding treaty envisaged in the Bali Road Map”.

The Bali Road Map came out of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Climate Change Conference in Bali Indonesia in December 2007. Many developed and developing countries agreed to step up their efforts to combat climate change and adopted the ‘Bali Road Map’, which included the ‘Bali Action Plan’ charting the negotiating course leading up to the Copenhagen Conference in December 2009 (just gone).

But for the Copenhagen Conference to have been in an "oven-ready" political framework, capable of immediate implementation, time shouldn’t have been wasted since Bali. Just like cramming for an exam rarely works, drafting workable legislation, which was what Copenhagen was headlined to be, invariably takes many iterations of drafting and negotiating.

As Minas points out, "For the legally binding Copenhagen 'Accord' to have stood a chance of success, the positive willingness that emerged from Bali needed to have had its enthusiastic momentum tapped."

Between Bali and Copenhagen there were 24 months. What was achieved during those two years?

To label the outcome of Copenhagen Conference as an 'Accord' is false and misleading. An Accord is a binding agreement and that did not transpire. Copenhagen as an event was indeed an important global summit. But in terms of results, at best it was an 'in principle' broad undertaking by a few of the attending nations that requires follow up. Those now using such a label are only perpetuating the hype in an exercise of face saving - most notably China.

Perhaps the most poignant assessment of Copenhagen comes from Oxfam Executive Director, Andrew Hewett, in Fairfax's The Age and The Sydney Moring Herald papers simulateously dated 21 December 2009, in his article: 'Poorest of the poor ask why Copenhagen failed to listen'

"...it's hard to see how the Copenhagen 'Accord' delivers justice to people in poor countries that are least responsible for climate change but suffer its impacts right now.

The accord is an empty political statement, shredding two years of negotiations down to 2½ pages of purely aspirational goals.

While it recognises the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be kept below 2 degrees, it does not set out a trajectory for achieving this.

In February, countries will list their emissions reduction targets, which will be voluntary. They will have little to do with climate science and everything to do with the political climate in capitals around the world. If this is all the world can muster, we can expect a world that is 3.9 degrees warmer, year-round droughts in southern Africa, and water shortages affecting up to 4 billion additional people."

As for Australia's contribution, why was Australia not part of Obama's late minute accord that tried to salvage what was left of any undertakings over the two weeks?

"THE Australian delegation to the Copenhagen climate change conference could number 114, official documents reveal.

The carbon footprint for 114 people travelling to Copenhagen and back business class amounts to 1817 tonnes of emissions -- the equivalent to the annual output of 2500 people in Malawi. The list appears to contradict assurances from Kevin Rudd's office last weekend that fewer than 50 federal officials would attend.

It includes 10 attendees listed as members of the Prime Minister's personal staff, on top of six representatives from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.

The names of 29 officials from the Department of Climate Change are listed, along with bureaucrats from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Australian Agency for International Development, the Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism, the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Treasury and the Bureau of Meteorology.

Tim Wilson from the Institute of Public Affairs, who discovered the list, told The Australian from Copenhagen yesterday: "I keep spotting commonwealth bureaucrats here. It seems to reflect the enormous bureaucracy that will grow to support any agreement from Copenhagen."

Was this Rudd putting on one hell of an extravagant staff Chistmas party to Scandinavia at taxpayer expense? If not, what return on investment did the Australian contingent make at Copenhagen?

See also: "A climate con: Analysis of the 'Copenhagen Accord' of 21 Dec 09.

Picture:3 year old kangaroo stops his recreational boxing to watch wildlife carer,
Anne-Marie Dineen (Oakview Refuge, Queensland) go past in her front garden.

Campaign supported by high profile actress

Philip Woolley, UK Rep and EU Campaign Director for the Australian Wildlife Protection Council writes that Dame Judi Dench, star of the new Robert Marshall film NINE to be released on 26 December, has become the latest celebrity to add her voice to the campaign to have kangaroo products banned from all EU member states.

Dame Judi, one of Britain’s best loved and respected actors and a great animal welfare supporter said:

“As a lover of animals and their welfare I am pleased to add my name to the many others across the world who are supporting this very worthwhile campaign.”

She joins a growing list of well known people who are appalled at what is happening to these sentient beings in Australia, all for the sake of a few dollars and the manufacture of sports footwear.

Philip Woolley expressed his pleasure at Dame Judi's support.

“ It is just amazing to get Dame Judi to support the campaign. We have wonderful people now supporting us and we look forward to starting off the New Year off on a very high note. Other celebrities have signed up and their names will be released in the New Year. This campaign needs as much support as we can gather and already over 5000 citizens have signed up.”

Dame Judi, well known for such roles as M in the James Bond films, Miss Matty in the successful BBC series Cranford with a special appearing over Christmas and now the film Nine went on to say that,

“Cruelty to any animal is barbarism and killing a joey after killing the mother is totally unacceptable.”

The petition can be signed at:- www.440000joeys.eu

END

NOTE TO EDITORS
Further information can be obtained by contacting the campaign office:-
Contact name:-
Philip Woolley, EU Campaign Director / Australian Wildlife Protection Council - UK Rep.
www.440000joeys.eu
E:-philip[AT]440000joeys.eu

I understand that Australia, if it keeps to its present course, is projected to grow its population by some 14 million people, or 65%, in just 25 years. Climate Change Minister Penny Wong of the growthist Labor administration of Kevin Rudd, was asked this question on September 21/09:

Interviewer:
"Minister, Australia's population is projected to increase by 65% to the level of 30m people by 2050. During that same period, the government is committed to cutting our carbon emissions by 60%. Aren't those goals or those facts mutually exclusive? How are we going to massively cut carbon as our population continues to massively grow?"

Penny Wong:
"Well, absolutely not, because the key issue with reducing emissions is that we have to de-link our levels of carbon pollution from economic growth and population growth. We have to ... Whereas the last few hundred years emissions growth - that is, growth in our carbon pollution - has essentially tracked our population and economic growth, we have to break that link and that the whole world has to break that link and so does Australia. So the key issue here is breaking that link, not, not trying to reduce population." Source: http://candobetter.org/node/1563

Letter to the Minister:

Penny, I have a weight problem. My doctor tells me that if I persist in eating a litre of ice-cream every day, I will increase my weight by 65% in just 25 months. But since it is chocolate ice-cream, I feel it is racist to pin the blame for my growing girth on it. I also feel that it is possible to “de-couple” my weight gain from my caloric intake.

In fact, while I now wolf down 4,000 calories a day, I believe that I should look forward to doubling that intake by 2035. I need a caloric stimulus package that will kick-start my body and brain from its current slow-down. I can compensate for any negative consequences by metabolizing the ice cream more efficiently. I call it “smart gluttony”, and already the environmental movement is wanting to adopt the phrase as a slogan for their “green living” tips.

If I buy green-coloured ice cream, lime-flavoured, it would be a symbolic statement of my fresh approach to a sustainable future for my body. As we know, cosmetic labeling in and of itself usually suffices for a substantive policy shift.

Ms. Wong, I must congratulate you for your faith in human ingenuity. Julian Simon was right. Malthusians chronically underestimate our intelligence. With enough brainpower, we can have our cake (or ice cream) and eat it too. Ice cream that doesn’t consist of calories. Growth that doesn’t result in carbon emissions. The Peter Pan School of Greenwash. Make a wish that growth will have no ecological cost, and that wish will make it true. Pure magic. Hey, I have seen that trick played in Canada too. We signed on to the Kyoto accords in 1990 with the promise that we would reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 6% by 2012 but by 2006 we were 22% beyond our emissions level in 1990. Of course, that had nothing to do with the fact that immigrant-driven growth has increased our population level by 22% (27.7 to 33.7 million today). Like the environmental establishment, we simply ‘de-coupled’ our imagination from reality. Population growth, where? Who cares? Perhaps we could become a race of 15 billion “breatharians” who simply subsist on air in a world where thirst is decoupled from water use and hunger is decoupled from food use. As our population grows, so grows the pool of our ideas. The sky is the limit!

Oh to be young again. Hopeful, credulous and cornucopian.

Tim Murray

My website: www.somethingfunnygoingon.com ~ My Book: Agent Provocateur: the backlash against the anti-smoking campaign ~ is concerned with Civil Rights, Over Population & Pollution

Origins and explanation of illustration [1]
Just so we understand one and other, I have some (not all!) - definitions of the words Patriot; Traitorous, and Bigot; they are derived from a thesaurus, and as such, become somewhat diluted as one progresses through the synonyms, however, I believe that essentially, the following words are best described as follows:

The thesaurus definition & synonyms of a patriot are: devoted; dedicated, dutiful, faithful, fervid, jingoistic, loyal, nationalistic, statesmanlike, zealous.

The antonyms of patriot are: antisocial, misanthropic, traitorous.

The Thesaurus definition of traitorous are: unpatriotic; double-crossing, double-dealing, ,betraying,

Outside legal spheres, the word "traitor" may also be used to describe a person who betrays (or is accused of betraying) their own political party, nation, family, friends, ethnic group, team, religion, social class, or other group to which they may belong.

The main definition of a racist is bigot: and a bigot is describes as being an intolerant, prejudiced person.

... And so, I would like to reiterate what many of us quite well understand, and that is, that further populating of Australia by means of Immigrants is unsustainable.

I hope not to be 'read' as a bigot, but rather as a patriot, wanting to preserve for current and future (made in Australia) - generations, a sustainable Australia.

From http://www.biosensitivefutures.org.au/overviews/overviews-1/major-ecological-issues-in-australia-today

- I have understood this:

All sustainability of our community requires adequate, clean water and housing. Neither of these requirements is commensurate with burgeoning populations who require more than an adequate supply of water.

Equally devastating to sustainability is the increasing requirement to find land suitable for housing (using arable land) and infrastructure, within the newly built ‘communities’, to enable them to function as a robust, productive society.

None of us wants to see our quality of life reduced – we all want to be able to use water when we want to, and a comfortable, affordable home – and jobs to fund our standard of living.

None of what I am saying is news ~ but I put forward the notion that it is patriotic to feel this way, and not a bigoted, antisocial motivation that drives me to write here, in this blog.

Further more, it should be noted that there is unlikely to be a reciprocity in the countries from whence our immigrants arrive; i.e. I would almost be certain that amongst other nations there would be a legal instrument to prevent advantage being taken of the nationals of those countries by international arrivals, intending to 'set up house'.

I believe that, as expected of us, we would fight, as patriots, for our Country - if we were at war ~ why are we not expected to feel the same way to keep our standard of living - to keep the peace? .. to maintain and keep our way of life, our valuable resources?

I believe that all Australians have a right to keep Australia safe, viable, and sustainable.

... Singapore has to buy water from its neighbor - Malaysia... do Australians want to... be in the same boat?

By the way, hands up those of you who feel betrayed by successive governments who have 'sold us out' to an unsustainable 'ideology' of populate or perish? I, at least feel, that successive governments in Australia have been treasonous - have been traitorous - to the Great Australian Dream.

Notes

Candobetter Editor:

Nation and Citizenship

Agent Provocateur has hit the nail on the head in defense of patriotism. There have been attempts recently to massage 'Nationalism' into a politically incorrect term. Whilst nationalism can get out of hand, as in National Socialism, and whilst Marx made good points about international workers' rights, the location of human rights and rights of citizens has always resided in the concept of the nation - first in Roman law, and later in French law. (To contrast: in Ancient Rome about 2% of people were citizens with full rights (women could be citizens but did not have full rights. ). By the end of the Roman Empire about 9% of people were citizens. A theory is that the rulers began to sell citizenship in order to increase their tax-base. [Sources: It has been estimated by William Scheidel, "Population & Demography" (Princeton-Stanford Working Papers in Classics, 2006, that, towards the end of the empire, about 9% of the Roman Empire of about 70 million were citizens. This was after the rules of citizenship had been considerably relaxed. Bruce Bartlett, “How Excessive government killed the Roman economy, The Cato Institute, http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cjv14n2-7.html. David Mattingly, An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman Empire, 2006, pp 166]

Nationhood and citizenship within it was the basis of the French revolution, which substituted a code of rights to property, shelter and self-government (i.e. the rights of 'free'-men for feudal subjection where only a very limited number of people in a polity had the right to own property and their own persons. If we abandon the concept of citizenship and the rights of citizens we abandon our rights to self-government. Then we risk becoming plastic entities in small power-bases where rights must constantly be negotiated. This was the situation during the medieval era in Europe. Because of the very poorly defined rights of citizens in most anglophone government systems, this constant renegotiation is a feature of our struggle to control national assets and resources.

[1] Origins and Explanation of Illustration. The illustration is of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, dated 1789, and the chief document of the first democratic French Parliament, 1789. Called a 'revolutionary' parliament, it was actually a legal parliament, formed with the King's consent, and based on legal rights of subjects which were carried principally by representatives of the low clergy and the ordinary people of Britanny, who were soon joined by people from all over France. The first violent act of the Revolution was when the king, in an attempt to rescind his authorisation of this document, surrounded Paris with royal troops under his command, with the intention of intimidating the people there. This prompted the famous 'storming of the Bastille', which has often been severely misinterpreted by anglophone sources as a strange attempt to liberate a few disreputable nobles from a debtors' prison by ignorant and misguided 'commoners'. The Bastille was, in fact, broken into by the frightened people of Paris in order to obtain gunpowder and weapons to defend themselves against the King's army.

The king backed down on this occasion, but monarchists in Europe constantly attempted to give him support to bring down the revolution. The French revolution did not end until 1846, and there were three restorations of monarchy. Napoleon's role was very interesting and important and represented France's war against a coalition of European monarchies, plus fascinating trade wars with England using this coalition. I

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens 26 August 1789was passed by the Assembly on 26 August 1789.

Passed by the National Constituent Assembly.

"All men are created and remain free and have equal rights.
That the natural rights of man are liberty, property, safety and resistance against oppression.
That the principle of sovereignty resides in the nation.
That the law is an expression of the general will and that all are equal before it.
That every man has the right to be presumed innocent.
That everyone has the right to liberty of expression and that no-one may be harassed because of their opinions, including religious ones.
That the Constitution rests on the separation of powers.
That Property is an inviolable and inalienable right."

Under the Roman Law structure of French (and most European government) which Napoleon reinforced, it is difficult for private individuals to control more property and power than the state. The key to democracy here is citizens' rights as members of the state. In British law it is more easy for private individuals to gain control of property and power, which we seen in the rise of massive international corporations, which began in the era of coal-and iron based colonialism from Britain. The interpretation of the inviolability of property within the british structure of US government has had a problematic and undemocratic outcome in the US system. The Australian system also lends itself to this distortion, whereby it is possible to aggregate enormous amounts of land and resources under private ownership. Then the owners can form a private power-base, such as we see in The Property Council of Australia. Such a base has the power to influence government well beyond democratic control and there is always the danger that Government will merge with such power bases, which has happened in Australia.

Right to Vote

In France and Britain, women did not acquire full citizenship with voting rights until the 20th century. (British women 1928, with some property restrictions, and French women in 1944, with no property restrictions) However, France was way ahead of Britain and the rest of the world, in granting qualified (i.e. with exceptions) ‘universal’ male suffrage in 1792. Although this suffrage excluded women, the clergy, soldiers and Algerian French, it did not exclude the poor and landless (as long as they were men, of course). Universal male suffrage in Britain did not occur until 1918. Prior to the granting of universal male suffrage in France and Britain, voting rights depended on the possession of landed estate.

On 30 November 2009 I wrote the following letter to Anna Bligh:

Dear Anna Bligh

It's time the Queensland kangaroo killing industry was shut down before kangaroos become extinct. At present they are abundant and it's best they stay that way for the sake of this country's ecology. Kangaroos have always benefitted the environment (unlike humans who destroy it). Read The Canberra Environment and Sustainability Resource Centre report found at http://www.nokangaroomeat.org/ACT%20biodiversity%20report%20final%20copy.pdf

Conservation Icon, Steve Irwin had this to say about the lie of sustainable wildlife use:-

"As the horrific propaganda of sustainable use of native wildlife continues, and those people pushing it continue to attack me and threaten us, our world's precious wildlife is suffering as a result.

"Since when has killing animals saved a species? The farming, killing, skinning and eating of native animals is a rife and evil industry, which operates under the cloak of science and lies.

"Crocodile farmers claim that since they started farming and selling legal skins, meats and products, they have single-handedly saved crocodilian species from endangerment. This is the easiest lie to expose. In the countries that the croc farmers claim success, it's actually established protection laws and enforcement that protects these animals.

"Example: - Australian Crocodiles and American Alligators fully protected and policed in the 1970's. This is the truth of the Crocs and Gators recovery, protection by law!

"Now for the worst possible news - BUSHMEAT! As a result of established wildlife and
conservation organisations backing the sustainable use of wildlife and actually supporting the 'killing' of native wildlife, they have created a market. Third world nations now see examples of modern nations supporting killing, eating and wearing wildlife for money, so now they're doing it. The latest and most horrendous markets created are in Africa, South America and Asia where enforcement of laws is impossible and even though the animals may be protected, the policing agencies have neither the money or power to do anything. So mass wildlife slaughter takes place unchecked.

'Sustainable Use' of native wildlife in so-called modern nations like Australia and the U.S.A. has inadvertently created a multi-million dollar 'bushmeat' industry, where local people kill native wildlife for meat, skins and products. Please don't blame the local people; it's not their fault! They're simply hunting for much needed money. The greatest wildlife perpetrators of today's world are those behind the driving force of 'Sustainable Use.'

"How are the Tiger Farms in Taiwan and China helping to save Tigers in India, S E Asia or
Siberia? They are perpetuating the market in Tiger products, which is the single greatest reason for the endangerment of Tigers.

"How are the Bear Bile farms helping Bears in Asia? Endangered. How did Mink farms help Mink in Europe? Endangered. How do Tuna farms help Blue-fin Tuna? Critically Endangered.

"Since when has killing any animal saved it? If wildlife and conservation organisations continue to support 'Sustainable Use,' then 'BUSHMEAT' industries and global endangerments will continue until all the animals have gone.

"We in the so-called modern world must set the examples. This current example we've set - that eating, killing and wearing wildlife products is legal and 'sustainable' is obviously the
greatest disaster for today's wildlife. If we don't eliminate 'Sustainable Use' now it will be too late.

"If we can destroy the market, we'll destroy the industry. Historically the only reason spotted cats, like Leopards and Cheetahs are still found in the wild, is because of peer pressure. It became 'uncool' and controversial to wear spotted cat fur coats, so the market was destroyed and the industry suffered. Slowly, less and less Leopards and Cheetahs were being shot for their skins, and just as well or they would've been extinct 20 years ago.

"If we can all refuse to buy, eat or purchase native wildlife products and express our disgust in the industry, then every single person can help slow down this incredibly disastrous wildlife atrocity.

NEVER PURCHASE NATIVE WILDLIFE PRODUCTS!!"

As you know, Australia has the worst reputation in the world for wildlife extinction having driven 38% of its species extinct in a short 230 years, species that have been here for millions of years living harmoniously with the land. Since Australia is party to the Convention on Biodiversity which has as its aim to reduce biodiversity loss significantly by 2010, isn't it time we stopped the sustainable use lie and started protected our ecosystems instead? We are in the midst of the 6th Mass Extinction caused by one species - homo sapiens - so it is our responsibility to act now. That means governments who make policies and enforce them.

IT's time to stop crunching out the same old drivel that the kangaroo killing industry is an important industry. It is driving kangaroos to extinction, destroying the land, making people and their pets sick, putting a nail in the coffin of Australian tourist industry (worth $73 billion) and heaping shame on Australia. It's time to put it to rest forever.

More Australians are beginning to wake up to the 'sustainable use' lie so don't think you can continue to pull the wool over our eyes because you can't.

Sincerely,
Menkit Prince

ON 18 DECEMBER 2009 I RECEIVED THE FOLLOWING REPLY:-

Dear Mr/Ms Prince

Thank you for your further email of 30 November 2009 concerning animal welfare issues associated with commercial kangaroo harvesting. I have been requested to reply to you on the Premier's behalf.

The contents of your message have been noted.

This matter has been referred to the Honourable Tim Mulherin MP, Minister for Primary Industries, Fisheries and Rural and Regional Queensland for consideration.

Again, thank you for contacting the Premier.

Margaret Klatt
Acting Director
Executive Correspondence

The contents of my letter representing many hours of labour have been noted? Is this your idea of democracy? It isn't mine. I get the feeling governments do whatever they want and virtually ignore the people. What is it going to take to really get them to pay attention to us?

A friend of mine wrote to the local department regarding illegal kangaroo shooting in her town. Correspondence follows.

Fran Bailey, Australian Parliament House, Donna Petrovich, Victorian Parliament

Dear Fran,

I know you have always been prompt to respond to any of my correspondence with you in the past, but this time I would like to bring to your MOST URGENT ATTENTION a matter that has been making me SO UPSET AND UNWELL FOR QUITE SOME TIME NOW, that I have had to visit my local doctor to be subscribed medication to help me to relax at night time and try to sleep. This is certainly not like my normal behavior Fran, as I am a positive thinker, a high achiever and a normally very happy go lucky type person, but as a result of what has been happening in my local area over the past two years, my general well being has changed dramatically.

On almost a weekly basis, if not, every 10 days, I hear and sometimes see hunters shooting from dark until the early hours of the morning. There are lots of gun shots on each of these nights, some close to my property and others a little further away in the distance. The hunters are in utes or four wheel drives and have very high powered, bright lights mounted on these vehicles. On several occasions I have called the police, however, although reported, I have never seen or heard a police siren or received a phone call back from the police to say that they have investigated the reason for my call. I assume the shooters are hunting for kangaroos and I demand to know why!

Kangaroos are a protected species Fran and we have lost so many of our precious native wildlife since the February 7 bushfires, I think it is absolutely disgusting that we allow shooting and hunting of any kind to continue. . Australia has the highest rate of extinction on the entire planet and we have lost 38% of our wildlife in the short time we have settled here! This is a disgusting reality Fran and WE MUST NOT TAKE THESE FIGURES LIGHTLY! BY ALLOWING PEOPLE TO CONTINUE TO BLAST AWAY AT OUR WILDLIFE, ESPECIALLY OUR KANGAROOS, THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT IS HAPPENING!

TOO MANY POLITICIANS ARE SITTING ON THEIR HANDS RIGHT NOW OVER ANIMAL WELFARE ISSUES FRAN, FROM HUNTING OF KANGAROOS, TO ALLOWING THE JAPANESE TO CONTINUE WHALING !

So Fran, I am asking you to make a difference on this issue of hunting in the Yarra Valley. Fran you are always involved in so many issues around the valley and I can imagine you are a VERY compassionate person. So PLEASE FRAN, PLEASE DO YOUR PART IN STOPPING HUNTING IN THE YARRA VALLEY! OUR BELOVED KANGAROOS ARE A PROTECTED SPECIES !

I DON’T KNOW WHERE TO START, BUT I AM WILLING TO WORK WITH YOU ON THIS FRAN AND THE DSE NEED TO BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR ALLOWING THIS SHOOTING TO CONTINUE!

It always happens at night time and these poor nocturnal creatures do not stand a chance of survival against lights, guns and redneck hunters. This is simply not able to be policed out there, so heavy fines and jail terms need to apply and we must ADOPT A “DOB IN A HUNTER” POLICY!

I know I am not the only person upset by this nightly carnage, as I know other wildlife carer’s in the area, and they too are very saddened and sickened to hear and see these people murdering the very animals they are fighting to save. They are on stand by 24 hours a day to rescue, rehabilitate and release back into the wild, injured, burnt or orphaned animals, only to have them be hunted down and killed by low life moronic scum!

I know that I can hear and witness it on certain nights of the week, so what is happening in other parts of the valley that I cant hear or see! Kangaroos are being slaughtered everywhere!

I don’t know if you know this Fran, but I have seen footage of what goes on amongst these horrible people who kill the kangaroos. So many times they are under the influence of alcohol when they go out shooting and it often takes them several attempts to kill the poor darlings and when they get close to the injured or dying kanga, if there is a young joey in the pouch or at foot, they are ripped from the pouch and bashed against the bull bar until they are dead! These morons practice this form of killing whether they have been drinking or not Fran.

I am sorry to go on about this Fran, but you must be able to tell how passionate I am about this issue. I am particularly upset at the moment because I have heard at least 15 shots fired tonight since around 9.30pm. On two occasions in the past, I have got in my car (despite the protest from my husband) and gone to where I could see the lights darting around and hear the gun shots but unfortunately I haven’t been brave enough to approach these bastards as they are usually on land not far from my home, shooting.

I am going to sign off now Fran, as the shots are continuing and I am becoming more and more upset. I am very eager to hear your response.

Please do not hesitate to contact me either by email or telephone Fran.

Thank you in anticipation.

REPLY FROM DONNA PETROVICH'S SECRETARY:

From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of [email protected]
Sent: Wednesday, December 16, 2009 3:49 PM
Subject: Re: Kangaroo shooting

Dear Vicki,

Thank you for your email re the shooting of kangaroos.

If you could email me with your residential address I will send out to you some specific information regarding the shooting of kangaroos.

I look forward to your reply.

Carmel Clancy
Office of: Donna Petrovich
Member for Northern Victoria Region

84 Sydney Street, Kilmore 3764
Telephone; 03 57822011

Of course, no mail was sent to my friend ... not that it would do anything to ease her mind as long as the kangaroo shooting was continuing night after night. What is the result of this passionate letter? Absolutely NOTHING!!

If you have any creative ideas of how we can get through to these politicians, please share them with us by replying below ~ we would love to have some success for a change! In fact, we would like to have our democracy back because it sure appears that we don't have any.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The editorial concludes:

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

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

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

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

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

Copenhagen was a deadline without a plan. Like Vikings, they rushed in. Too many issues, too many causes, too many delegates, too much reading, too many options and yet forced to deliver a global consensus solution in just 2 weeks!

Copenhagen's approach ought to have been pragmatic. It needed to come down from the statosphere in idealistic thinking to have focused on what could be the fastest means to offer the greatest reduction in greenhouse gases commencing in 2010.

Money is the obvious facilitator. The G11 response to the Global Financial Crisis 'Mark I' demonstrated the sheer scale of quick cash available from developed nations. Since developing nations need the cash, therein lies an obvious negotiating connector.

Try this scanario... rank countries on the basis of to aggregate carbon emissions and also carbon emissions per capita. The size of reduction responses and the amount of funding for carbon reduction programmes should be proportional on both bases. That is, the worst emitting developed nations pay more, and the worst emitting/deforesting developing nations get compensated more.

Pay compensation to countries to stop deforestation is simply a matter of money and there is certainly enough of that around it seems. This should start by Christmas - calculate the forest area, calculate the compensation value, sign the agreement, developing coutries countribute to a trust account, transfer the funds electronical to the host country of the forests, send in UN monitors to enforce the agreement to make sure no trees fall. If Copenhagen just did that, it would have achieve a significant inroad - 20% reduction in one year or something in that order.

News of the pledge by US based Climate Progress of US$1 billion over three years towards decreasing deforestation is an excellent outcome. The funding will go to developing countries that develop REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) programs.

Horse trading in emissions is pure problem avoidance.

Perhaps a less patriarchal culture may have helped too. Perhaps less Viking patriarchal culture and perhaps a more matriarchial approach to negotiation would have achieved better. The alpha male approach has clearly failed.

'COP15' was also a silly name. It just meant the 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference. Rather than the meanlingless 'COP15' ('Conference of Parties' #15) , such a vital global forum series deserves a more accessible and meaningful name in order to better engage with ordinary folk. Perhaps the Greenhouse2009, then work towards Greenhouse2010, Greenhouse2011 and for each year, set and achieve a distinct global reduction outcome by legal treaty. Such numbering and annual frequency would better convey the sense of urgency.

Australia presently exports about 260Mt of coal each year, or about 30% of the world’s total coal export trade.

Coal produces 25% of the world's energy (including transport and heat), and 40% of the world's carbon dioxide emissions from fuel combustion . Coal is responsible for 88% of Australia's electricity generation, and 75% of Australia's greenhouse emissions from energy (including transport and heat).

"Every tonne of export Australian coal comes back to us as climate change – more droughts, water shortages and sea level rises," Ms Rhiannon, Greens MP and mining spokesperson, said.

Coal is the dirtiest of all fossil fuels. When burned, it produces emissions that contribute to global warming, create acid rain and pollute water.

Carbon Capture and Storage - “Clean coal”:

Those who claim that “clean coal” can help solve the global climate change crisis are referring to a process called “Carbon Capture and Storage” (CCS) , also known as “geosequestration”. This refers to the capture of carbon dioxide emissions from a coal- or gas-fired power plant or other industrial source, transport via pipelines or haulage, and storage of the gas underground or in the ocean, in isolation from the atmosphere.

The Government is putting hundreds of millions of dollars towards championing the commercial use of carbon capture, regarded by many as a key to cutting greenhouse emissions from coal by storing the polluting gases deep below the surface.

A report, prepared by the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute, finds the cost increase to coal electricity generation if fully-fledged clean coal technology is installed will be up to 78 per cent.

diagram source

ABARE predicts that Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (AP6) has the potential to “reduce” global emissions in the year 2050 to between 11 and 23 percent lower than they would otherwise have been. This translates into a doubling of greenhouse emissions compared to today's levels.

ABARE's estimate assumes CCS deployment in all new coal plant in Australia, the US, and Japan from 2015, and in China, India, and South Korea from 2020. This seems hopelessly unrealistic, and it should be noted that the Federal ALP's enthusiastic embrace of CCS aims merely for commercialisation by 2030!

In 2006 a report by the Energy Supply Association estimated the wholesale cost of electricity would increase by about 50 per cent to make cuts of 30 per cent by 2030.  That's a 50% hike in electricity prices for a mere 30% reduction in emissions cut. 

According to the World Wildlife Fund: “The reality is that if CCS (or other renewable technologies) is ruled out or delayed we face the the reality of accepting a 2.5 - 3 degrees rise. If we reach a three-degree rise in temperature, 35 per cent of species will become extinct. “

Senator Brown cited generation of electricity as the largest source of green house gas emissions in Australia, noting further that 85 percent of our electricity generation comes from coal burning. " The government wants to inject billions of dollars into upgrading infrastructure in coal industries so we can export more rapidly once the recession is over.”

False hopes?

Former US deputy president Al Gore has likened "clean coal" to "healthy cigarettes" . 

"Clean" coal power stations are not viable until the carbon price reaches a minimum of $60 a tonne, and that is not predicted to happen before 2030, according to Rudd government's own global carbon capture and storage institute.

A recent Greenpeace International report, tracking all peer-reviewed studies of 'clean coal technologies', found that it remains a false hope peddled by coal industry PR merchants and some governments who are in their back pockets (eg. New South Wales).

According to the report:

"The climate crisis requires urgent action. Climate scientists warn that to avoid the worst effects, global greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2015 and then start falling by at least 50% by 2050, compared to 2000 levels".

Dr Mike Raupach, CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research and the Global Carbon Project:

Carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is likely to reach the first climate change danger level by 2028 and if emissions growth continues at the present rate, the point of no return will be reached with dire consequences by 2046, according to new scientific research published at the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr Mark Diesendorf:
This is unproven technology. The reality is that this unproven technology needs a lot of research, development and demonstration. The timescale for developing this technology is longer than getting nuclear power up.

Yet if each person in the world had produced as much carbon as the average Australian, the total release of fossil carbon would have been four times higher.

Nations such as China and India may be in the top five emitters by volume, but on a per capita basis they are both way below the world average. As they industrialise, their per capita rate will go up.

Former Greenpeace International chief executive Paul Gilding said there was growing frustration at the Howard Government and now Labor for building their climate change policy response around long-term charismatic mega-projects with 40-year targets like clean-coal technology and nuclear power.

"It's easy for politicians to make statements about the long term because they don't require much policy action or affect voters now." ( The Australian in April 2007)

Emissions per capita:

Australia has surpassed the US as the world’s biggest per capita producer of carbon emissions, according to a report by a British risk consultancy.

Analyst Maplecroft estimates that Australian CO2 output per head of population now stands at 20.5 tons annually, putting it ahead of the 19.7 tons emitted by the average American.  By comparison, China – which emits more carbon overall than any nation – has a per capita average of about 4.5 tons. In India, where greenhouse gases are expected to double by 2031, emissions are just 1.1 tons per person.

An  audit, by the Global Carbon Project, found carbon dioxide levels from human activities are increasing by about 2 per cent per year, or 1.3 tonnes of carbon per capita.  By 2011, emissions will have "recovered" to something like 3 per cent per year, roughly what they were before the global financial crisis.

Scientists blame an increasing use of coal for the continuing rise in carbon emissions.

Livestock industries:

According to the WorldWatch Institute Livestock now account for 50 percent of emissions from agriculture and land-use change.
"Indeed, a cow/calf pair on a beef farm are responsible for more GHG emissions in a year than someone driving 8,000 miles in a mid-size car.  Serious action on climate will almost certainly have to involve reducing consumption of meat and dairy by today’s major consumers and slowing the growth of demand in developing countries."

Population Growth:

The Economics of Climate Change Report by Sir Nicholas Stern, former World Bank chief economist, clearly shows that reducing greenhouse gas emissions immediately is the cheapest option and essential to limiting the total damage climate change will bring.
How do we immediately reduce our greenhouse gas emissions?

The UN Population Fund report predicted that the global population could reach 10.5 billion by 2050, up from 6.8 billion today, unless urgent action was taken to reduce fertility rates. It said that even its medium-growth forecast of 2.3 billion more people by 2050, which assumes a fall in average fertility from 2.56 to 2.02 children per woman, would make it much harder to achieve the cuts in carbon emissions needed to prevent catastrophic climate change. 

Investing in birth control to reduce population growth could be more effective in cutting greenhouse gas emissions than building wind turbines or nuclear power stations, according to a United Nations report.

The emission of greenhouse gases, associated with industrialisation and strong economic growth from a world population that has increased sixfold in 200 years , is causing global warming at a rate that began as significant, has become alarming and is simply unsustainable in the long term.

"Even if humankind failed to produce a single baby during the next generation, its life on Planet Earth would still be endangered by climate change.
On the other hand, if the per capita consumption levels of the relatively small and slow-growing developed countries (under the same technological and environmental control conditions) were to be achieved by some of the large and/or rapidly-growing countries, the serious environmental problems of Planet Earth would inevitably take a quantum leap".

 
Can cleaner coal technologies really increase and overtake our rate or industrialisation and population growth without blowing out the costs? With the failure of Copenhagen summit, a more realistic "solution" to climate change would be to reduce our population with birth control, surely.

Where did the photograph come from and was this really a bridge built for animals? Update inside. Original teaser: Majestic picture inside. They had to build the animals their own crossing (especially the elk) because that was where the natural crossing was and after the highway was built there were far too many accidents. Pity Australia's developers and road makers seem to be too mean to do this kind of work for animals, although there are a few, small exceptions. Let's hope that Australia will follow this example. Unfortunately, on population policy, Canada is nearly as bad as Australia.

Elk used railway bridge.

Not a scam, but a reasonable mistake.

Futher update, from the wife of the photographer, Bob Peters.

On May 5, 2011, Mrs Peters wrote (see comment below article) that the photograph of the elks was first published on Picassa in 2006. "We did a little research of our own yesterday and we discovered that the bridge the elk were using is, indeed, a railway overpass. From the lower roadway, we couldn't tell that it isn't one of the animal overpasses Parks Canada has been building."

Scam?

The article was described as a scam by www.snopes.com, but it turns out that it was a simple mistake which illustrates, nonetheless, the principle that animals will use wildlife passes or whatever comes to hand, paw, hoof.
www.snopes.com has a page giving the background, which links to a much more interesting site with photographs of lots of different wildlife passes - here.

Below is an article where the true role of the bridge as a wildlife crossing was mistaken. We have republished the wonderful photo with the name of the photographer, Bob Peters. We are glad to be have the full story and to give due credit to Mr Peters. (Maybe he will send us some more wildlife photos one day!)

The bridge. Nice work, Canada !!

WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT?
If You Build It, THEY Will Come...

This is the actual turn-off From Banff, Alberta, Canada to the #1 highway to Calgary .

Great picture isn't it? They had to build the animals their own crossing (especially the elk) because that was where the natural crossing was and after the highway was built there were far too many accidents.

It didn't take the animals long to learn that this was their very own bridge!
And then you have some people saying 'Animals are stupid.'
Really....?

Candobetter Editor: This came to candobetter by email, but without the original author and photographer's name.
If you know them, please let us know and we will attribute the article and photos.

Copenhagen indeed has proven yet 'Another overhyped talkfest in a series of duds!'

Copenhagen's much hyped COP15 was all navel gazing on communications consultants' hype. Like Copenhagen tourism, I bet the consultants pocketed nicely! And what a setting, beautifully detached Copenhagen!

Arrogant to the needs of developing nations and of sea-level nations and strangely even to the needs of developed nations, Copenhagen was doomed to fail. Copenhagen was doomed to fail simply on the basis of distrust on entry by each of the 192 nations and on account of the threatening opening speech of the conference.

The previous climate forum of 12 years before, labelled the 'Kyoto Protocol', had developed/industrial nations in breach of its undertakings. So with trust breached by industrial nations going into Copenhagen, any offerings of goodwill by developing nations had been undermined before the Danish talks commenced.
So on the back of this leadership shamozzle, do gooding Scandanavians held fast to host 192 disunited countries make cast iron national decisions under the pressure of just 2 weeks. Forced marriages are outlawed in civilised countries these days.

Worse is that the participants were being asked to commit to economic restrictions in the wake of a global financial crisis so that the UN could impose a sense of idealism at a time when pragmatically traits of a recession lingered. Perhaps this aim was a tad adventurous.

When it comes to complex global issues posing long-term adverse economic, social and environmental consequences whose expectations thought a two week brainstorming session by opposing ideologies under duress would deliver a silver bullet consensus blueprint appeasing developed and developing nations in one go?

It's Alice in Wonderland and if the Danish government were accountable beyond its tourism boom it would make publicly transparent the total conference costs, the total greenhouse gas emissions by staging the conference.

Copenhagen was just another wasteful talkfest as predicted. The Scandinavians should think twice next time about offering their white knight image to solve the dirty world's problems.

Tuvalu should host the next one in a year's time, at the complete expense of the top 3 worst greenhouse gas polluters. Nothing like working at the 'coal face' to deal with the real problems and issues.

But wherever the next conference is held, it must be preceded by a series of multilateral negotiations on each of the issues with agreements and funding already legally secured. This should be done using online conferencing not airline fuels. Such a complex overarching conference can only be a consolidation of previously secured agreements.

Population growth out of balance with nature on Sunshine Coast

Attempting to find the balance in the debate about population growth isn’t realistic as exponential growth will always present detrimental environmental, social and economic imbalance. It also won’t be achieved in an equitable way as the biodiversity and liveability of the region is already under acute stress. The stark reality is that development on the Sunshine Coast has degraded environmental values to the point where ‘critical threshold’ has been exceeded. The damage is already irreversible. Adding 200,000 more people is hardly going to reverse this devastating trend.

The coast cannot handle any more development or people

Sonia Marshall, campaigner at the Sunshine Coast Environment Council said “A glance at the SCRC Biodiversity Strategy will tell you that there is only 42% of remnant vegetation left on the coast. Development due to rapid population growth is fast encroaching on what is left. The coast can’t handle any more development or people without consequences. If we lose our environmental values, then we also face serious economic and social impacts. For example, recent data collected by Sunshine Coast Tourism indicates that 56% of tourists are drawn to the area to experience nature. Those visitors will be deterred if we have poor quality natural experiences or ambience to offer. The Sunshine Coast’s ecosystems play a huge role in the triple bottom line approach and in the community’s corporate plan vision– vibrant, green and diverse.”

Development industry's perceived financial imperatives can never justify destruction of natural capital

The development industry would have us believe that continued development is the panacea for the global financial crisis, yet their efforts continue to draw down the natural capital on which we fundamentally rely and do not equate to financial prosperity. Tactics to avoid the need to restrict development are also unacceptable.

Environmental offsets primitive and unreliable

“We can’t expect that environmental offsets will always work. The State’s offset policies are in their infancy and lack detail. In many cases, these policies facilitate development in core habitat areas, yet the development lobby wants more. Replacing remnant vegetation with a development accompanied by generous tree plantings might look good, but doesn’t adequately offset the damage. You can’t knock over mature koala food trees and replace them with seedlings. It will take years for the revegetated ecosystem to be able to support koalas again. Meanwhile the local koala population have taken yet another blow from development and their numbers decline even further. There are also other impacts such as the sediment runoff from land cleared for development, which can sit bare for several years before construction begins. This is having a massive impact on our waterways. The implications and cost of using techno fixes to reverse all the damage is horrendous” Ms Marshall explained.

Opening floodgates to development won't fix housing crisis

The Sunshine Coast community is being shot in the foot by the State Government’s ‘gung-ho’ attitude towards development at the behest of self-interest by the development industry. Opening the floods gates for development won’t fix a housing affordability crisis. Developers hold the land and release it when the price is right. Land banking has assured a steady stream of profit will be enjoyed at the expense of the wider community. Further unbridled development will equate to degrading our life style by eroding the natural beauty of the area. The science and the practicalities of inadequate infrastructure dictate a much more conservative approach.

There is no more give in the eco-system; population growth and development must now stop

Our ecosystems are too far gone and time is running out. The necessary and achievable action is to halt population growth to sustainable levels, protect and enhance what we have and diversify to the imperatives of sustainability. It’s is the only way that the Sunshine Coast will achieve the triple bottom line.

MEDIA RELEASE from the Sunshine Coast Environment Council
Tuesday 15th December 2009

Source of small picture with coat-hanger in teaser was http://new.savethecourt.org/content/womens-rights

I am frankly sick and tired of growth-promoters raising the spectre of “coercive population measures” whenever a suggestion is made that we must promote family planning or smaller families. Is there some sacred reason why fertility should not be limited if deemed necessary? In a world of 6.8 billion people going on 9 or 10 billion, or in any nation suffering from exponential population growth, there can be no “pro-creative” right.

This must not be confused with “reproductive” rights. Women should have the right not to have children. But they have no right, in the context of overshoot, to have as many children as they or their husbands want. The “right to choose” cannot be the right to abuse. Even the most jealously guarded right must be measured against equally fundamental rights, most especially the right of our species, and others, to live.

I have, at present, the "right" to drive a car. But I do not have a right to drive it over the speed limit. And it is society that establishes that limit, not me. Indeed, if society determines that there are too many people driving cars, it has the moral right to impose petroleum taxes, restrict parking permits and spaces, put tolls on highways and bridges and employ an assortment of other measures to discourage me from driving. I similarly have the right to go fishing, but I don't have the right to catch as many fish as I may like. In the face of shortages, we have come to accept that our collective right to achieve sustainability supersedes any individual “right”. The number of consumers who will compete for critically scarce resources is surely every bit as important as the number of people who go fishing and how many fish they catch. If there is a licence needed to fish, why should there not, in principle at least, be a licence required to inflict a child upon the rest of society? Am I advocating “coercion”? Absolutely. Coercion if necessary, but not necessarily coercion. Mutual coercion mutually agreed upon, if voluntary efforts, yet to be exhausted, prove ineffective. But would fertility controls represent the introduction of coercion where none presently exists? Absolutely not.

Let's get real. A great many women in the undeveloped world at least, are having children precisely because they are coerced. Coerced by husbands, priests and mullahs to have more than the number they want. Coerced by their cultural programming to give male wishes greater priority than their own. Coerced by their lack of access to birth control information, and by the denial of educational opportunities. This is where coercion makes itself most present. Not in China. Not by communist bureaucrats and law-makers. But by the dictates of domestic and religious patriarchal power.

And what of my rights? What about my right not to see my share of non-renewable resources diminished by the “personal” decision of the couple down the street to have an unnecessary child? Did they consult me about their decision to conceive another Canadian, an earth-trampling shopping machine who emits 23 metric tonnes of carbon each year, consumes 40,000 pounds of metals and minerals and accounts for over 150 pounds of curb side waste each day? Did they submit an application to the local planning authority or town council for a permit to stress the environment even further than it is being stressed? Why is their “right” to create more life considered more fundamental than our right to sustain the life that is already here? Why should the human population level of a country or a planet be subject to the whimsy and haphazard “personal” decisions of fertile individuals? Why must they replicate their own genes? Why are so many children forced to live in orphanages, foster homes and on the squalid streets of sprawling cities to fend for themselves while irrational ego-trippers generate more children just because they want to raise someone with the same pair of ears or eyes as they have? Children do not have to share your genes to share your love.

I wouldn't dream of telling anyone to have a child. So why would anyone tell me that I should move over for theirs? To paraphrase Hilary Clinton, it takes a whole ecosystem to raise a child, and as a charter member of it, I have the right to participate in the decisions that affect me. On an overloaded planet anybody's pregnancy is everybody's business. For every extra billion we grow in number, another 200 billion tonnes of Green House Gases are emitted, and to effectively reduce emissions, we must, among other things, reduce the number of emitters. Unfettered procreative rights are of little value on a dead planet. Beyond a certain point, parenthood is not a service but an imposition, not only upon humanity, but disproportionately upon the most disempowered and poorest part of it, the very people whom many Western feminists and human rights crusaders are most concerned with. How can an unsustainable population level enhance their rights? Can anyone seriously contend that the sum total of unplanned or unwanted pregnancies does not restrict personal autonomy more than the most intrusive family planning program? Or maintain that the absence of effective birth control is not the most coercive regime that women can suffer?

Just who is coercing whom?

Tim Murray, Quadra Island, BC

Property Council of Australia "Nation Building Congress 2008"

This conference affords many insights into the values and sophistication of the growth lobby community, which has such undue influence over the lives and freedom of Australians, with an impact that extends world-wide. The pressures for high immigration and massive urban expansion from this lobby group are responsible for the quasi-normalisation of a declining quality of life, freedom and natural environment in Australia.

Short review of some of the content of films from this conference.

Immigration

In this particular segment, entitled, "Immigration", Bob Carr reminds me of a man gingerly attempting to convey the concept of vegetarianism to a community of cannibals.

"Immigration - a social good. On economic terms - neutral. But, on ecological terms, on environmental terms - very very high risk, for a country that resembles Northern Africa."

The Property Council and the Prime Minister cannot say that they were not warned.

"Vision"

Bob Carr gave good value in the so-called "Vision" section of the congress as well.

"I was reminded of what John Kenneth Galbraith said, that the ruling caste of any country will just blithely identify its interests with those of the nation."

Some of the comments preceding his were of the cart before the horse variety, for instance, one young person indignant that government didn't just name a goal then work out how to get there in the Rudd 2020 summit. That seems to sum up the PCA tunnel-vision, actually. Hard to imagine how Rudd can be seen to fail them; they were the ones invited to his 2020 summit [it wasn't Australia's summit] and his Big Australia 'vision' seems made to order for the PCA - or a psychiatric facility, unless you allow for a religious belief in human destiny to 'progress' materially forever.

Environment

The remarks below are also in the 'vision' clip above.

Whatever objections may be raised about Carr's government record in New South Wales, his comments in the "Environment" section are worth recording, as I have done below.

"I think there's some very useful stuff ... for instance in the South Australian plan on biodiversity, it says, 'Objective number one: lose no known native species as a result of human impact.'

Now, that is a terrific goal; that is a quite inspiring goal, to say, 'We're going to draw a line over the dramatic loss of species that has occurred since 1788.'"

Stabbing his finger at a document, for emphasis, he says, kindly but forcefully: "It's going to be hard to implement."

One is reminded of an overworked schoolmaster trying to get four-year-olds to focus on the difficulty they will encounter in building and testing a rocket to Mars during the Xmas break.

He continues:

"And, a challenge for this industry sector, is that you might only achieve this by calling a halt to development that's going to achieve other objectives in the plan - for example, housing affordability. You might have to say, 'The only way we achieve this objective is by protecting as bushland land that would otherwise have gone to urban expansion on Adelaide's fringe'. So, the challenge for people who are enthusiastic about plans is that one inspiring objective can undercut another inspiring objective. So you get back to the 'old rule of politics'. 'Politics is a choice between different goods; between different good outcomes. Or, politics, as one American put it, is choosing between the unfortunate and the catastrophic.'"

(Gurgling from the audience.)

"Very often it is," Carr insists. "Or, as Henry Kissinger put it, about decision-making in the White House, 'Most decisions are made on the basis of a calculation that's 51 to 49'. So, your plans ... I think your plans are useful in providing an agenda for the minister and his or her head of department, so you can say, 'How are we going on this front. How are we going on that front? But it doesn't overcome the traditional tension of the political process."

Apart from Bob Carr's very important example of biodiversity, in this series of conference recordings, most of the participants seem to understand 'the environment', at most, as limited to climate change considerations.

Energy strategies

Energy strategies are discussed, disclosing a poor understanding of what 'renewables' (flow energies) can deliver and the state of nuclear breeder reactor development. Bob Carr seemed to be the most technically knowledgeable of the people in the video, yet he talks as if we already have Generation IV reactors, (whereas they are only experimental) and he also says that it might be 20 years or more before renewables "could conceivably" supply base-load energy ... 'infinitely available energy'. Film clip on energy from the congress

He was probably thinking of deep geothermal, but there is not guarantee that we will overcome the technological problems of how to get water back when it is sent down immensely deep lateral drill-holes in rock.

Carr explains the policy of intensifying development and population density around train stations as a means of planning for peak oil, whereas the usual explanation for this style of development intensification in Victoria is to accommodate population growth. Carr also tries to convey the growing unmanagability of population growth and development, saying that we are running at high risk environmentally, of collapse of the Murray Darling Basin and running out of water, so it is very high risk to grow the population. He says that he would lower immigration, although he says he knows this is

"like going into the lion's den in the Property Council and poking it in the eye."

Carr describes the NSW Government as having needed to 'force' people in Karingai, Sydney to accommodate intensification around railways. Carr blames the previous Howard government for the high immigration which is causing this problem. This chilling admission of the adoption of force seems to be accepted with no difficulty by the big population advocates of the Property Council of Australia. Indeed, this will come as no surprise to anyone who has been observing the damage to democracy involved in forced population growth all over Australia in the past few years. There is more talk about moving people around as if they were cattle without any citizens' rights. Population growth is never questioned. (Note that there is a 'Population Debate congress' scheduled for March 2010 when the PCA will no doubt expect to dictate the terms and have its own way as usual.Film clip here)

From these film records of the 2008 congress, one gets a glimpse of the intellectual level and educational scope of participants. One should not overestimate the capacity of this group to understand the democratic consequences of their behaviour, the concept of human rights to self-government, and the impact of their (enormously energy and material-intensive activities). Going by the tenor of Carr's explanations to them, they need education in the absolute basics of Australia's ecology and human rights. We know that the people in the property development lobby range from engineers with good understanding of the thermodynamics of building materials - but who seem to be naive about energy technologies - and probably have almost no idea of biological ecological systems, through to accountants, financiers and land-bankers, who may have had the narrowest of educations, lacking even science. In short, a population that has lived to one side of the world that people who love nature and freedom value. In that mix there must also exist some outstanding individuals - and maybe even some who have some idea of what we are all up against. If so, they have yet to make their impact in the industry lobby forums, and one cannot imagine their opinion being welcome in a self-satisfied organisation which expects to have its cake and eat it.

The Property Council You-Tube Channel is here: http://www.youtube.com/user/Propertyoz#p/u/193/dzE-wa9viMM. More reviews by other writers would be useful for candobetter.org

So Australia's Rudd Government proclaims that some internet content is "simply not suitable in a civilised society".

Mmmm, smells of public communications consultant speak!

This latest Ruddism could possibly become broadest claim of the 21st Century thus far. Could thy Rudd-speak imply anything beyond banning child porn? Could it in fact imply that any website critical of Rudd and Ruddism be instantly labelled 'not Rudd suitable' and so excommunicated by his holiness?

Check out today's ABC news 'Greenlight for internet filter plans' 15th December 2009.

So when can I but my brown shirt and leather sash, Herr Rudd?

Das Goebbels speak is said to save our innocent children from harmful overseas sites which contain criminal content, including child sex abuse and sexual violence.

Sounds noble enough, but Rudd's censorship powers will be in their detail.
Is the Ruddnet being cast wide across a realm he fears he cannot otherwise control -the Internet and Blogosphere? Our Rudd is known for his clandestine flights to Afghanistan, but has he in the wee hours taken off to Fiji to get direct dictator advice on censorship from from neighbouring Josaia Voreqe Bainimarama or even Robert Mugabe?

Father Rudd is unprecedentedly stepping into the role of parental responsibility if people accept the spin that it is only about protecting children. To claim "the Government believes that parents want assistance to reduce the risk of children being exposed to such material" sounds no more than moralistic spin. But it could be read that parents have been found irresponsible and its time government took over parental responsibility!

Is Rudd capitialising on spin of noble child protection while extending Federal censorship to anyone online daring to criticise Rudd, Rudd Policy, Ruddnomics and any Ruddism? Are we about to witness unprecented government censorship on any opposition akin to what Howard and Bush did.

See also:"Greenlight for internet filter plans" of 15 Dec 09, Stop Internet Censorship! of 4 Dec 09.

What you can do: Attend an Anti-Internet Censorship meeting (see facebook). When: Monday 21 Dec 09, 7:30 PM; Where: Brisbane Square Library – Community Meeting Room

POPULATION REFORM – POLITICAL CHALLENGES

SPEECH TO SUSTAINABLE POPULATION AUSTRALIA 29/11/2009

by KELVIN THOMSON, MHR FOR WILLS
I have been greatly encouraged by the avalanche of supportive emails, letters and phone calls I and my office have received since I first spoke on the issue of population in the Parliament back in August. The response I have received – over 95% support – reaffirms the opinion poll evidence that 60% of Australians believe that a population of 35 million by 2049 (the most recent official Treasury projections) is too many.

We have a lot of supporters out there. What I want to talk about this afternoon is how do we win this – how do we meet the political challenges and translate that support into real policy change and a better future for our children, Australia and the world.

The first political challenge

is to understand the problem. We have to understand where the push for higher population comes from. While some of it comes from migrant representatives, and some of it comes from particular religious leaders, who adhere to highly literal interpretations of religious texts written when the world’s population was one twenty-fifth what it is now, most of it comes from sections of business. Business enjoys close and regular access to political parties and political leaders courtesy of endless fundraising breakfasts, fundraising lunches, and fundraising dinners.

During my political lifetime money has assumed a progressively larger role. Mass political parties used to have plenty of volunteers to letterbox their material. Increasingly the volunteers have disappeared, and political parties look to paid distribution services such as Australia Post or the private distributors to distribute their material.

This of course costs money. So too does alternative means of campaigning, such as TV, radio and newspaper ads. And it’s also the case that political parties are wary about getting offside with business. And regrettably some business entities, and property developers in particular, are in the ears of politicians, day in, day out, seeking high population. They regard population growth as the yellow brick road to easy profit. For them it has two functions – creating a pool of surplus labour to put downward pressure on wages and salaries, and even more importantly building a bigger market to generate more sales. It seems easier than competing with rival businesses over market share.

One other group we need to be aware of who are fond of population growth is Treasury and other government bureaucrats, because population growth means a bigger GDP. It doesn’t mean we’re better off – if a country’s wealth increases by 25%, while its population increases by 60%, on average each resident is actually poorer. But the media always report GDP, rather than GDP per person, and it always sounds good to be able to say the economy is growing, and hope that nobody looks at the fine print.
Upton Sinclair put it succinctly: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”.

So that is what we are up against. I don’t think anyone in this room underestimates them, and we certainly shouldn’t – they have won every single battle so far. Australia’s runaway population, and the world’s, bears that out.

The second political challenge

is to expose the arguments in favour of rising population for the myths they are . Let me deal with seven of them. First, that we need a bigger population to drive economic growth and prosperity. The bigger is better myth. If this were true, the wealthiest per person nations in the world would be those with the biggest populations. They’re not. In fact eight of the top 10 nations in the world in terms of per person GDP have populations of less than 10 million.

Sweden, for example, is entrenched in the world’s top 10, with a growing economy but a population which has been stable for many years. On the other hand, Argentina started the 20th Century far wealthier than Australia, but having doubled our population growth, Argentina today has per person GDP worth only 40% of Australia’s.

I hear some population boosters lamenting that Europe’s population has stopped growing and saying we don’t want to follow that example, calling it stagnation and so on. Europe’s population is indeed now about the same as it was in 1950. But of those ten wealthiest per person countries, eight are in Europe.

Do the population boosters seriously prefer what has happened in Africa? Since 1950 Africa’s population has more than quadrupled, growing from 221 million then to 973 million last year. 25 years ago Ethiopia had a population of around 34 million. Now its population is 72 million.

According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation the number of chronically hungry people in the world – people suffering from perpetual and severe hunger – has risen to 1 billion. In addition, as many as two billion more people live in perpetual food insecurity, missing meals and often not knowing where their next meal will come from.

No prizes for guessing where this increased misery is happening – it isn’t Europe. World population growth is precisely the reason why world food prices have risen and why more people, not less, are starving and suffering from water-borne diseases.
And for Australia, runaway population means our mineral and resource wealth is spread more thinly, and there is greater competition for our available food, water, petrol and land, pushing up food prices, pushing up the price of housing, pushing up the price of water, pushing up the price of petrol. We are not – repeat not – better off as a consequence of this.

The second myth is that a bigger population will tackle population and workforce ageing, and that population and workforce ageing is a terrible problem. Let me observe that the 14 point Population Reform Plan I have proposed would not lead to an ageing population or workforce. But we should not fall for this idea that social ageing is a disaster and older people are a burden. Ageing is a sign of success, individually and as a society. The ‘oldest’ societies are the healthiest and wealthiest, the youngest societies are those with the lowest life expectancy. We are not just ageing, we are ageing healthier, and are capable of working on for longer than we used to. And there is abundant scope to bring people into the workforce who are presently not in it –many young people are out of it, many aged between 45 and 65 are out of it, many indigenous Australians are out of it. Bringing them in would be good for them and good for the country.

And if you really think workforce ageing is a disaster, let me quote from the Department of Treasury Economic Roundup of December 2000, which said “in response to the slowdown in the growth of the working age population, business may introduce incentives to retain existing workers, encourage them to increase the number of
hours they work or defer their retirement, and to attract additional workers into the labour force. These incentives could take the form of higher real wages or other non-pecuniary benefits such as the opportunity to work from home, part-time hours for those full-time workers considering retirement, or more generous maternity leave arrangements”.

So there you have it, folks – this is the catastrophe that awaits us if we don’t act to increase the population – higher real wages, working from home, part-time options, more generous maternity leave arrangements! What a disaster!

The third argument for increasing population is that this will make Australia a bigger country, and that we should aspire to a ‘big’ Australia. This argument is harder to understand than an episode of “Lost”. Australia is already a big country. Bringing more people to Australia means there is less room for us as individuals, we lose our backyards and get cooped up in high rises. In my book that makes a place smaller.
A big country is one we can share with koalas and kookaburras and platypus and wombats and lyrebirds. A big country is one with wide-open spaces where you can drive for miles and hear yourself think. If you drive up or down Australia’s eastern seaboard now it’s all suburbs and traffic lights and retail franchises – that’s not a bigger country, it’s a shrinking one!

The fourth argument for increasing our population is that other countries have. Australia is not overcrowded compared to other countries, it is said, and our cities are not overcrowded compared to other cities around the world. Recently we were told to take a look at Bangladesh. We have, believe me, we have! We don’t want to live like Bangladesh. With the greatest of respect, that’s the whole bloody point!

The population of Bangladesh has doubled since 1971, from 75 million to 150 million. Needless to say its per person GDP is miserable – just $421 US for the whole year 2003-04, and it is one of the poorest countries in the world, with severe deficiencies in its health and nutrition services.

And yes, Australian cities are less crowded than many of those overseas. But what is this cultural cringe that causes us to believe that Australia and the Australian way of life are somehow inferior to those of other countries and other cities? If Australia is not as good a place to live as other countries, how come so many people are busting their backsides to live here?

When we start seeing boat loads of people leaving Australia, then it will be time to start thinking about where we’re going wrong. In the meantime, why don’t we celebrate Australia and its way of life and seek to protect it?

The fifth argument for increasing population, one I heard recently from a former Howard Government Minister, is that this will give us more weight in international forums. By this he means more power and influence. But power for its own sake is over-rated. The power and influence I want for Australia is the power and influence which comes from setting a good example – keeping open spaces for our unique native wildlife, keeping our food, water and housing affordable and our cities safe and liveable, having room for refugees and a generous overseas aid program, cutting our carbon footprint. These are the things that will provide leadership to the world and give us real weight.

The sixth argument for increasing population relates specifically to migration, and says that a high migration policy is evidence of our compassion, and is a duty we owe to peoples around the world less fortunate than ourselves. I am personally strongly in favour of Australia being a compassionate international citizen, and have proposed a 45% increase in our refugee intake from 13,750 to 20,000 and that we maintain our family reunion intake at 50,000 per annum. But the skilled migration program cannot be defended as Australia’s obligation to the world. Skilled migrants are claimed to be bringing to Australia skills we don’t have; to the extent that they are skilled they are actually denuding the countries from which they come. This is not Australia being compassionate; this is us being selfish.

Moreover, I think we should be wary of appeals to our better nature when the outcome of those appeals is not a better Australia or a better world, and when those appealing to us to be unselfish are in fact being utterly selfish themselves, putting their corporate bottom line and personal financial interests ahead of everything else.

It is utterly insincere of business or political leaders or commentators to call on Australians to make sacrifices in the shape of water restrictions, reducing our carbon emissions, paying more for food, housing, water and petrol, having less open space and more traffic congestion, less say in planning decisions about the neighbourhood in which we live, when the value of these various hardships is absolutely undone by increasing population.

I am not in favour of selfishness in the pursuit of ever greater material wealth, I am not in favour of greed, I am not in favour of ripping off and exploiting those less fortunate than ourselves, but I believe we are entitled to fight to protect our standard of living and the Australian way of life. Don’t be conned into giving these things up by appeals to selflessness made with all the sincerity of a Mississippi river boat gambler.

The last myth coming from population boosters I want to mention is that it will all take care of itself. Yes population is rising now, they say, but soon it will level off and stabilise of its own accord. Extreme versions of this even claim that in future our population will fall. For a long time I thought there was something in this. The realization that all the past projections of population numbers were gross underestimates and that this problem is not going to solve itself, is a key reason why I have started calling publicly for population reform.

Back in 1984 the World Bank’s population projection for the year 2100 was 21 million. We reached that in 2007! A decade ago, forecasters were predicting we wouldn’t hit the 22 million mark until 2040. We’re there already! Two years ago Treasury’s Intergenerational Report predicted Australia would be 28 million by 2049 – within just 2 years, they’d revised that figure up by 25% to 35 million.

So the idea that population growth is a problem that will one day solve itself is also a myth.

Having refuted the arguments in favour of higher population, the

next political challenge

is to come up with an alternative. As well as addressing those who believe population growth is desirable, we have to address those who think that it’s inevitable. They don’t believe anything can be done about it, that it’s out of control. We have to point out that some countries have done it, so we can too. And we need to have an alternative.

Two weeks ago I set out a 14 point Plan for Population Reform.
The heart of this Plan is a proposal to stabilise Australia’s population at 26 million by 2050, by cutting net overseas migration to 70,000 per annum. While refugee numbers would increase, and family reunion numbers would be held constant, skilled migration would return to the 25,000 figure of the mid 1990’s.
Temporary entry sub-class 457 visa permits would be restricted. 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.

The policy I released generated a certain amount of controversy in New Zealand because it proposed a cap on the presently uncapped Trans-Tasman scheme. So I did some more work on this, and the formula I propose in fact would not have prevented any New Zealanders wishing to migrate to Australia from doing so in any of the years I looked at, which were the four years from 2004-05 to 2007-08.

You might ask why I put the cap in place, and why I have kept it, when it doesn’t seem to have any practical impact. The reason is this. When I propose stabilising the population through 70,000 net annual migration, I can be asked – “but you don’t know how many people are going to leave Australia in any given year”, and I would have to admit I don’t. And I could be asked – “you don’t know how many people are going to come to Australia from New Zealand in any given year, do you?” And I would have to admit that I don’t. So I could be challenged that given this, I simply couldn’t guarantee a net 70,000 or indeed any figure. So the point of having a cap, and linking Australian departures to New Zealand arrivals, is that it will give us control over our net migration figure, and is an essential ingredient in delivering a population policy. And indeed there may be circumstances where the levels of departures from Australia or the levels of applicants from New Zealand necessitate the application of the cap.

The fourth political challenge

is to have a strategy. There are a number of elements of such a strategy I want to suggest this afternoon. The first is about unity. To succeed in any political endeavour you have to work co-operatively. There has to be some give and take. People will naturally have differences of opinion about particular points, though I have been delighted by the degree of support I have received for important elements of my plan, such as increasing the refugee intake while at the same time greatly reducing the overall migration program. We need to respect differences of opinion, and keep nitpicking about detail to a minimum. When you’re up against what we are up against, it’s a luxury we can’t afford.

Next, avoid traps which see people of goodwill who care about Australia’s future being played off against each other.

Planning is a classic example. People who oppose the loss of open spaces and backyards in the inner city to high rise and multi-unit developments get told they are contributing to urban sprawl. People who oppose the extension of the urban growth boundary get told they are contributing to high rise and contributing to the blight of “veni, veci, verdi”, which I am told is “I came, I saw, I concreted”. By pitting people in the inner city areas against people in the outer suburbs, planners and developers get to have their cake and eat it too. Our cities grow both upwards and outwards. It is OK to say, Not In My Backyard! We do have rights and should have rights, concerning the kind of neighbourhood we live in. But when we seek to exercise those rights, it should not be at someone else’s expense, and that is what population stabilisation is all about. It means no-one has to lose their neighbourhood character, no-one has to lose their open space.

I was pleased to see the public transport campaigner Paul Mees recently come out and say we don’t all have to surrender our backyards and live in high rise in order to have a decent public transport system. I have always supported public transport, but it should not be used as a justification for increasing population density. People who don’t like increasing population density should not be played off against public transport advocates.
We also need to draw the link between the myriad problems we see daily in our community, and runaway population growth. Interest rate rises is a classic example. The Reserve Bank regularly cites rising house prices as a reason for lifting interest rates. And the principal factor driving house prices ever higher is population growth. Rising interest rates is a bad thing for both business and home-owners with mortgages, and we should constantly point out the link. And we should not fall for the idea that rising house prices is a good thing. It might feel good if the price of your house goes up, but it doesn’t feel so good when your mortgage and rate bills follow it. And yes you could sell your house, but you will still need somewhere to live, and you will find that the price of houses everywhere, and rents for that matter, have gone up as well. It is a zero sum game. And yes, some people own more than one house, and use property as an investment. But they will find this doesn’t make it any easier for their children to afford to purchase a house.

Housing affordability in cities like Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane is among the worst in the world. When I was 25 I put down a deposit and took out a loan to purchase a house. Today a 25 year old doing that is as rare as rocking horse manure. It is a shame. Home buying encourages personal financial responsibility, as opposed to binge drinking and endless expenditure on mobile phones and computer games.

Similarly, we need to draw the link between rising prices for essentials like food, water, petrol and electricity and population growth. The reason these prices keep rising is simple – demand is outstripping supply. People need to understand that the reason their trips to the supermarket keep costing more is population growth.

When unemployment is discussed, or casualisation of the workforce, we need to point out if that we reduced skilled migration and temporary entry 457 work visas, there would be more jobs available for our young, for our mature-aged workers, for people with disabilities, for aboriginal Australians.

When climate change is discussed we need to make the point that it’s pretty hard to reduce your carbon footprint when you keep adding more feet. This is true right around the globe – the world is on the road to increase its population by 50% by 2050, at the same time as scientists are saying we have to cut carbon emissions by 60%. This needs to be on the Copenhagen Agenda.

And when business leaders say, government should be spending more on infrastructure, or levels of government impose taxes and levies to fund new transport or electricity infrastructure, or when people complain about traffic congestion or the monstrosity being built next door to them or down the street, we need to point out – these things wouldn’t be needed if we stabilized our population. We need to hammer home the daily consequences of runaway population growth. We need to point out that a man who drives like hell is bound to get there.

The final element of campaign strategy

I want to suggest is the need to build support networks and international contacts with like-minded people and organizations. I am recommending that people join
Sustainable Population Australia , and I believe that by working together and sharing information and making our views known through the media, the Internet, and directly to political leaders and policy makers we will make progress. We need to encourage and learn from the experience of like minded groups around the world. I believe there is a lot of support for our position, but it needs to be harnessed and mobilised.

This brings me to my fifth and final political challenge

– the need for patience. Quite a few of the emails and letters I have received have urged me to present my views to the Prime Minister or the Immigration Minister at once. They have the view that what I am saying is so sensible and reasonable that all I have to do is to present my views and they will be instantly adopted. Would that things were so simple! The pressures governments and policy-makers are under from business are massive.

Political leaders, appropriately in a democracy, listen for the voice of the electorate. We need to make our voice heard. Since I first starting raising this issue back in August, I have received a supportive stack of emails and letters you couldn’t jump over. I have received support from former Labor Ministers, State and Federal, members of other political parties, and hundreds of ordinary Australians.

I said back in August that we needed to have a debate about population reform, and it is happening. Newspapers are regularly carrying articles and opinion pieces about it. Radios and TV stations have carried stories and interviews about it. Two opinion polls have showed that 60% of Australians believe that Australia at 35 million is too many. The Australian Conservation Foundation is supporting population stabilisation, and I sense that other environmental and non-government organizations are starting to find their voice concerning an issue about which they have long been timid.

For environmentalists for years population growth has been like Voldemort in the Harry Potter books – the evil which can’t be named. I hope that is changing.
But these particular Walls of Jericho are not going to fall down after a couple of days or months of trumpet blowing. It will take a sustained effort. Sometimes political victories come swiftly, but other times it requires a long hard slog, and the patience to see it through.

So, to recap, understand who you’re up against, counter their myths and arguments, come up with an alternative, have a strategy, and settle in for the long term.
I know this is intensely frustrating to people who see this beautiful country and its precious native wildlife being exposed to new pressures and stresses every day. I share that frustration. But I am totally convinced that this patience, and this issue, is worth it.
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.

Nicolas Howe has been watching how the Fairfax, Murdoch and ABC media are treating alternatives to the population growth scenario of 35m plus. He finds that they are not giving them due representation and therefore biasing the debate. Letters not published. Rights of reply not balanced. His article confirms others on candobetter.org which have found this to be a consistent pattern with Australia's commercial mainstream media. They publish material to normalise population growth. They belong to the growth lobby. They have vested interest in population growth. As for the public media, the ABC - as has been pointed out before, it employs a number of ex-Murdoch journalists and allows professional property developers and other members of the growth lobby to dominate debate. Propaganda Watch Growth Lobby

Article by Nicolas Howe

The Age

I have concerns about the commitment The Age has made to engage in the population debate. There were no letters published in response to Kevin Andrews call to reduce immigration. [1]

On the same day that the article was published there was an opinion piece written by Julie Szego condemning the call by Kevin Andrews.[2] Julie Szego also criticised Kelvin Thomson's position on population. Kelvin's right of reply was limited to 200 words in the general letters section of today's Age.

If The Age were truly serious about engaging in the debate they should have allocated at least as much space to Kelvin Thomson (federal politician with well thought out platform on population) as Julie Szego had been allocated to express her strange opinion on the issue.

I get the impression that The Age is going through a process of "manufacturing consent" or having the Australian public accept that an increase in population, despite the policy options available, cannot be avoided.

The last time The Age spoke seriously on this subject was in an editorial on 11/11/2009. That editorial expressed an opinion of acceptance of 35 million by 2050. It belittled Tim Flannery's call for an independent authority to administer population policy. The editorial suggested that the authority would determine immigration levels on "the whim of technocrats".

I responded to the editorial of 11/11/2009, as I guess so did many others. However no letters were published. The Age has closed down the debate despite a commitment expressed in the editorial of 19/9/2009.

The ABC

I am witnessing a pattern here. It looks like the mainstream media are purposely not talking about population. During one episode of ABC TV's program Q & A, two of the panelists started discussing a topic in the context of population growth. The host of the program, Tony Jones (who normally I consider a tough and intelligent journalist), quickly changed the topic. I felt that I sensed some anxiety in his behaviour, as if discussion on population was off limits.

The Australian

The Australian newspaper is particularly biased. They regularly run a column written by Angela Shanahan who is dismissive of any calls to reduce population. The logic of these opinion piece's does not stand up to scrutiny. Angela Shanahan is a mother of nine children. I imagine it is almost impossible for her to express a reasoned view on population growth given her fecundity and religious conviction. Angela Shanahan is also a regular panelist on ABC's Q & A.

I think there is a determined effort being made by a group (or groups) of people with influence who are determined not to see democratic debate exploring small population options in the mainstream media.

Nicholas Howe

Notes and comment provided by Candobetter Editor

[1] Misha Schubert, "Andrews call for debate on slashing immigration," The Age, December 11, 2009.
This article was based on a telephone conversation that Schubert had with Kevin Andrews, ex Minister for Immigration with the Howard Government, currently Shadow Minister for Families, Housing and Human Services. It reported that Andrews had "called for a debate on slashing Australia's immigration from 180,000 people a year to a ''starting point'' of just 35,000." Andrews reportedly pointed out that 60% of our growth is via immigration which could be reduced. Andrews reportedly disapproved of Kevin Rudd's 'Big Australia' and described or agreed with the description of immigration levels as 'plucked out of thin air'.

''If you look at the 2008 data, you would need about 35,000 immigrants on top of births to replace the population (for that year). So I say the starting point should be replacement levels of population, then ask what additional population we need so the country can be economically and otherwise sustainable and growing,'' he said.

The current Australian immigration minister, Chris Evans, reportedly accused Kevin Andrews of hypocrisy since, when in Government Andrews and Howard had authorised a jump to 158,800 planned immigrant intake for 2007-08. Evans claimed to have long term policies on numbers.

[2] Julie Szego Article ‘Migrants Enrich our way of life’, The Age 11/12/09. (Feedback can be sent to: http://www.theage.com.au/national/letters/submit)

This article also appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald as, "Wake-up to the opportunities in population growth", December 11.

In this article Szego talks about the Scanlon Foundation, which is linked to the commercial growth lobby uncritically as a philanthropic organisation, and cites one of its surveys in support of high immigration.

"A social cohesion survey by the philanthropic Scanlon Foundation released this month showed only one in 10 Australians held strongly negative views about immigration, while 37 per cent of the 3800 respondents thought our immigration intake was too high - a result that tallies with similar polls and is pretty encouraging given it was taken in the aftermath of an economic downturn."

To cite this source as a valid comment is naive.

Szego also writes, with remarkable puerility, "Policy should instead amount to a pep-talk on how more people are simply a wake-up-call and an opportunity, not a problem."

Although there was only one letter in the hardcopy Age the day after Szego's article, there were many e-comments of which the great majority lambasted her. Of the one or two who thought her article was okay, this one caught my eye due to its organically egocentric focus and mad overvaluing of a single remote concern:

" Djinn | Sydney - December 11, 2009, 9:36AM

Thanks Julie for telling it how it is. Arguing against immigration is usually a fig leaf for xenophobia and selfishness. Every person in Australia is an immigrant. Besides, there is one simple question that none of the critics of immigration can answer - "Who is going to wipe your bum when you're old?". Answer: Nobody, if the likes of Kevin Andrews have their way."

Also published on Global Research and rickrozoff.wordpress.com. I have added footnotes to give my own perspective on some points raised in this generally excellent article. - JS

The "Obama Doctrine": Eternal War For Imperfect Mankind
"For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world."

By Rick Rozoff, 11 Dec 09

President and commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United States Barack Obama delivered his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance address in Oslo on December 10, which has immediately led to media discussion of an Obama Doctrine.

With obligatory references to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi (the second referred to only by his surname) but to no other American presidents than Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy - fellow peace prize recipients Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter weren't mentioned - the U.S. head of state spoke with the self-assurance of the leader of the world's first uncontested superpower and at times with the self-righteousness of a would-be prophet and clairvoyant. And, in the words of German philosopher Friedrich von Schlegel, a prophet looking backward.

Accompanied by visionary gaze and cadenced, oratorical solemnity, his comments included the assertion that "War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man." Unless this unsubstantiated claim was an allusion to the account in the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible of Cain murdering his brother Abel, which would hardly constitute war in any intelligible meaning of the word (nor was Cain the first man according to that source), it is unclear where Obama acquired the conviction that war is coeval with and presumably an integral part of humanity.

Paleontologists generally trace the arrival of modern man, homo sapiens, back 200,000 years, yet the first authenticated written histories are barely 2,400 years old. How Obama and his speechwriters filled in the 197,600-year gap to prove that the practice of war is as old as mankind and implicitly inseparable from the human condition is a question an enterprising reporter might venture to ask at the next presidential press conference.

Perhaps delusions of omniscience is the answer. The Oslo speech is replete with references to and appropriations of the attributes of divinity. And to historical and anthropological fatalism; a deeply pessimistic concept of Providence.

Obama affirmed that "no Holy War can ever be a just war. For if you truly believe that you are carrying out divine will, then there is no need for restraint." Then shortly afterward stated "Let us reach for the world that ought to be - that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls." An adversary's invocation of the divine is false, heretical, sacrilegious; Washington's is true, unerring, sufficient to justify any action, however violent and deadly. As unadulterated an illustration of secular Manicheaism as can be found in the modern world.

Toward the beginning of his speech the first standing American president in ninety years to receive the Peace Prize acknowledged that "perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars."

Understandably he exerted no effort to justify one of the two wars in question, that in Iraq, but endorsed and pledged the continuation of the other, that in Afghanistan and increasingly Pakistan - while elsewhere speaking disparagingly of the European Crusades of the later Middle Ages.

Neither the Nobel Committee nor its honoree seemed ... concerned by the unprecedented awarding of the prestigious and generous ($1.4 million) Peace Prize to a commander-in-chief in charge of two simultaneous wars ... in countries whose governments and peoples never threatened it in any manner.

Neither the Nobel Committee nor its honoree seemed inordinately if at all concerned by the unprecedented awarding of the prestigious and generous ($1.4 million) Peace Prize to a commander-in-chief in charge of two simultaneous wars far from his nation's shores and in countries whose governments and peoples never threatened it in any manner.

In language that never before was heard during a peace prize acceptance speech, Obama added "we are at war, and I'm responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land. Some will kill, and some will be killed."

With not a scintilla of national self-awareness, balance or irony, he also derided the fact that "modern technology allows a few small men with outsized rage to murder innocents on a horrific scale," as he orders unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) linked by space satellites to launch deadly missile attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

With not a scintilla of national self-awareness, balance or irony, he also derided the fact that "modern technology allows a few small men with outsized rage to murder innocents on a horrific scale," as he orders unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) linked by space satellites to launch deadly missile attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The central themes of Obama's speech are reiterations of standing U.S. policy going back over a decade with the waging of war against Yugoslavia in early 1999_#main-fn1">1 without United Nations authorization or even a nominal attempt to obtain one; that the U.S. and its Western military allies can decide individually and collectively when, to what degree, where and for what purpose to use military force anywhere in the world. And the prerogative to employ military force outside national borders is reserved exclusively for the United States, its fellow NATO members and select military clients outside the Euro-Atlantic zone such as Colombia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Israel and Saudi Arabia of late.

What is arguably unique in Obama's address is the bluntness with which it reaffirmed this doctrine of international lawlessness. Excerpts along this line, shorn of ingenuous qualifications and decorative camouflage, include:

"We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations - acting individually or in concert - will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified."

He offered a summary of the just war argument that a White House researcher could have cribbed from Wikipedia.

"[A]s a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their [Gandhi's and King's] examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world."

"I - like any head of state - reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation."

Evil, as a noun rather than an adjective, is used twice in the speech, emblematic of a quasi-theological tone alternating with coldly and even callously pragmatic pronouncements.

Indicative of the second category are comments like these:

"[T]he instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace."

"A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism....

"I raise this point, I begin with this point because in many countries there is a deep ambivalence about military action today, no matter what the cause. And at times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America, the world's sole military superpower."

Comparing a small handful of al-Qaeda personnel to Hitler's Wehrmacht is unconscionable. Whatever else the former are, they barely have arms to lay down. But Obama does, the world's largest and most deadly conventional and nuclear arsenal.

His playing the trump card of Nazi Germany is not only an act of rhetorical recklessness, it is historically unjustified. There would have been no need to confront the Third Reich's legions if timely diplomatic actions had been taken when Hitler sent troops into the Rhineland in 1936; if Britain and France had not collaborated with Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy to enforce the naval blockade of Republican Spain while German aircraft devastated Guernica and other towns and German and Italian troops poured into the country by the tens of thousands in support of Generalissimo Franco's uprising. If, finally, Britain, France, Germany and Italy had not met in Munich in 1938 to sacrifice Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland to Hitler to encourage his murderous drive to the east. The same four nations met 70 years later, last year, to reprise the Munich betrayal by engineering the secession of Kosovo from Serbia, to demonstrate how much had been learned in the interim.

As to the accusation that many nations bear an alleged "deep ambivalence about military action" and even more so "a reflexive suspicion of America, the world's sole military superpower," it bespeaks alike arrogance, sanctimony, and an absolute imperviousness to the reality of American foreign policy now and in the recent and not so recent past. According to this imperial "sole military superpower" perspective, the White House and the Pentagon can never be wrong. Not even partially, unavoidably or unintentionally.

If others find fault with anything the world's only military juggernaut does, it is a reflection of their own misguided pacifism and ingrained, pathological "anti-Americanism." Perhaps this constitutes the aforementioned "threats to the American people," as there aren't any others in Afghanistan or in the world as a whole that were convincingly identified in the speech.

What may be the most noteworthy - and disturbing - line in the address is what Obama characterised as the "recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason." Lest this observation be construed as an example of personal or national humility, other - grandiose Americocentric - comments surrounding it leave no doubt that the inadequacies in question are only applied to others.

One would search in vain for a comparable utterance by another American head of state. For a nation that prides itself on being the first one founded on the principles of the 18th century Enlightenment and the previous century's Age of Reason, that its leader would lay stress on inherent and ineradicable human frailty and at least by implication on some truth that is apart from and superior to reason is nothing less than alarming. The door is left open to irrationalism and its correlates, that the ultimate right can be might and that there are national imperatives beyond good and evil.

And if people are by nature flawed and their reasoning correspondingly impaired, then for humanity, "Born but to die and reasoning but to err" (Alexander Pope), war may indeed be its birthright and violent conflicts will not be eradicated in its lifetime. War, which came into existence with mankind, will last as long as it does. They may both end, as Obama believes they originated, simultaneously.

How the leader of the West, both the nation and the individual, has arrived at this bleak and deterministic impasse was also mentioned in Obama's speech in reference to pivotal post-Cold War events that have defined this new century.

It is only a single step from:

"I believe that force can be justified on humanitarian grounds, as it was in the Balkans, or in other places that have been scarred by war. Inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later. That's why all responsible nations must embrace the role that militaries with a clear mandate can play to keep the peace."

To:

"The belief that peace is desirable is rarely enough to achieve it. Peace requires responsibility. Peace entails sacrifice. That's why NATO continues to be indispensable."

In proclaiming these and similar sentiments, Obama made reference to his host country in alluding to the war in Afghanistan: "[W]e are joined by 42 other countries - including Norway - in an effort to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks."

Again, threats are magnified to inflated and even universal dimensions. All nations on the planet are threatened and some of them - 43 NATO states and partners - are fending off the barbarians at the gates. It is difficult to distinguish the new Obama Doctrine from the preceding Blair and Bush ones except in regard to its intended scope.

It is a mission outside of time, space and constraints. "The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms....America's commitment to global security will never waver. But in a world in which threats are more diffuse, and missions more complex, America cannot act alone. America alone cannot secure the peace. This is true in Afghanistan. This is true in failed states like Somalia....And sadly, it will continue to be true in unstable regions for years to come.

"The leaders and soldiers of NATO countries, and other friends and allies, demonstrate this truth through the capacity and courage they've shown in Afghanistan."

The U.S. president adduced other nations - by name - that present threats to America and its values, its allies and the world as a whole in addition to Afghanistan and Somalia, which are Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Sudan and Zimbabwe_#main-fn2">2. All five were either on George W. Bush's post-September 11 list of state sponsors of terrorism or on Condoleezza Rice's later roster of "outposts of tyranny" or both.

Hopes that the policies of Obama's predecessor were somehow outside of the historical continuum, solely related to the aftermath of September 11, 2001, have been dashed.

Hopes that the policies of Obama's predecessor were somehow outside of the historical continuum, solely related to the aftermath of September 11, 2001, have been dashed. The rapidly escalating war in South Asia is proof enough of that lamentable fact. War is not a Biblical suspension of ethics but the foundation of national policy.

In his novel La Bête Humaine (The Human Beast) Emile Zola interwove images of a French crowd clamoring for a disastrous war with Prussia ("A Berlin!") and a locomotive heading at full steam down the track without an engineer. Obama's speech in Oslo indicates that America remains bent on rushing headlong to war even after a change of engineers. Veteran warhawks Robert Gates, James Jones, Richard Holbrooke, David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal have stoked the furnace for a long run.

See also: Stop NATO Yahoo Group, Rick Rozoff's blog site

.

Footnotes

#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1. #main-fn1-txt">↑ I have to admit that at the time, I considered the war against Serbia in response to its said ethnic cleansing of the province of Kosovo as one of the few wars waged by the US which was morally justified. I am aware that there is more to the story than what we were told, but I will need to study this issue more before I am personally able to condemn the action against Serbia as outright military aggression.

I also considered the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 as justified because of my acceptance of the US Government's explanation that the September 11 attacks were orchestrated by a terrorist group known as 'al Qaeda' operating from sanctuaries in Afghanistan. I now know this to be a lie. - JS

#main-fn2" id="main-fn2">2. #main-fn1-txt">↑ In truth, all these countries seem to be tyrannies, but how much less tyrannical are many Western governments, such as the Government of the Australian state of Queensland, which intends to defy the will of at least 79% of its citizens in order to sell of $15 billion worth of public assets?

Virtually every state Government and the Australian Federal Government continue to implement policies, for which they have gained no popular mandate, that are harmful to their citizens' best interests . Another example is the Federal Labor Government's record high immigration program.

In regard to Third World tyrannies mentioned in this article, opponents of war often appear not to have provided realistic and practical alternatives to the continuation of those tyrannies. This is not to excuse military invasion but it has caused some to form the war-mongers the appearance of being the the only people concerned by these tyrannies.

Experience has shown that invasions invariably makes matters works. In theory, a military invasion by a country like the US to overthrow a dictatorship is one way to bring about democracy. However, Part 6 of Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" of 2007 shows how the US occupiers prevented elections that the Iraqis wanted in order to impose a dictatorship and policies designed to allow favoured corporations to loot both the wealth of Iraqis and the US Treasury. - JS

Australia is copping an annual record 383,000 net migration as of last year. Why? Historically, this is tantamount to foreign invasion by stealth. In any preceding deacde in Australia's history, this number would be publicly considered an 'immigration invasion'. That it is not funded with proportionate government infrastructure to secure and maintain Australian living standards (aka home affordability, the idealised 1/4 acre block achieved by our parents, 2-3 kids able to attend affordable childcare, schools followed by affordable tertiary education, time with the children.

Wake up! Middle Australia and its ideal of a comfortable disposable income, low costs, spare time, paid overtime has gone. It has all gone since business was given cheaper options of overseas contract labour who knew nothing about unions and our legacy of fighting for workers rights, and since Australia's immigration tsumani forced an escalation in domestic demand.

Problem is Governments keep listening to their economic performance druids so as to pacify a media brainwashed in economic-or-bust theory. Perhaps as ancient Pagans listened to their druids, we are captive of the same aura.

Kevin Rudd and his Labor Party and the Liberal Party are conditioned to following modern day economic druids to guide them on national economic policy, but also to guide them on national social policy and national environmental policy. This is even though their druids have no knowledge, training or omnipresent guidance in social or environmental issues.

Makes one wonder!

Australians are being pacified and re-educated into believing misleading justifications like economic growth, addressing skills shortages, multi-culturalism, being a world citizen, etc.

Pacification is the final stage of any invasion and we're copping that when all criticism gets morally put down as 'racist'. But race has nothing into do with it. The problem is the sheer numbers, not whether they're from Suffolk or Timbuktu.

Emigration poster 1948: ‘Australia, land of tomorrow’, Joe Greenberg. Courtesy Museum Victoria


Australia's post-WWII notion of 'populate or perish' was a falsehood promoted by PM John Curtin's man Arthur Caldwell, fearing Australia's vulnerability to invasion from the north in the wake of how close the Japanese got in 1942. Our government no longer uses the justification 'populate or perish'; it's been long tried, debated and dismissed as nonsense.

But Rudd's Mass Immigration is nonsensical. He is fuelling domestic demand on the one hand and yet supposedly leading the international charge to cut greenhouse emissions on the other side of the world. Is this two-faced, dumb or is there an ulterior motive? Look at all the stress increasing population is putting on urban infrastructure and resources in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane - where all most of the migrants chose to stay! There is an absence of demographic planning to spread the populatiion demand burden. Rudd is accelerating urban sprawl in these cities, repeating California's Dust Bowl Migration of the 1930s which caused the massive urban sprawl in Los Angeles. We have also adopted the US 20th Century car-centric urban design model. Rudd has a 20th Century US mindset and prima facie condemning Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane to a Hong Kong vision.

A consequence of this invasion is the emergence of ghetto cultures. Assimiliating Immigration (sporadic, small scale) works when a few from many different nationalities integrate, then after a few generations they assimilate into the mainstream culture. New Australians learn the language, acclimatise, get accustomed to Australian mores and values. We witnessed this gradually, progressively over decades with the Greek and Italians, then the Vietnamese, and we are midway through with the Lebanese. Each of these people in many cases were fleeeing poverty, like the initial British colonists a hundred years before them. They were seeking a new life and oppogC?M?>??d?V???e?_?|?6hey keenly acculturate, adapt, blend in, intermix and become accepted as Australians. This is how immigration should work to maximise the benefits to both settler and host country and to minimise the problems...again to both settler and host country.

Muslim immigrants demanding minarets in Switzerland. Courtesy The Economist, 3rd Dec 2009, 'Return of the nativists'

But the 'Rudd Gates' policy of Mass Unsustainable Immigration is churning such a mass influx of new arrivals in such a short time. The social outcomes have been ignored is a desperate attempt to maximise the perceived faster economic benefits. New arrivals are abandoned at the airport arrivals gates to fend for themselves. With so many arriving so quickly, there is no time for them to properly assimilate into Australian society, culture and way of life.

Through no fault of their own, new immigrants without a sense or compulsion of assimilation retreat to their own group and end up forming ghettos of different cultures, quite emotionally detached from the Australian mainstream. How is this good for the host country, Australia, and indeed for the new arrivals themselves? This government abandonment helps no-one - the locals, nor the new arrivals. Immigration without active integration is flagrant social neglect and abuse on a national scale to all involved.

Mass unsustainable immigration over a short time has been shown to cause a deculturation of the prevaling society's values, cultures and ways of life. On only has to look at the social outcome and costs of the mass influx of Turkish immigrants in Germany, or the recent mass influx of Middle Eastern muslims into Switzerland or closer to home at the 2005 Cronulla Riots.

Mass immigration without integration unnecessarily hightens the risk of fuelling social friction and antagonism on both sides. It breeds nationalism and in the worst cases, racism and racist violence. And it is all because governments naively manage complex societies with an economic hat on, wanting to boost its economic performance figures.

But immigration without integration and assimilation is effectively a decultural invasion, that threatens the identity of the imcumbent culture. Look at what a Koel does: >em>"The Common Koel is a brood parasite, that is, it lays its eggs in the nests of other bird species. Common hosts are the Red Wattlebird, Anthochaera carnunculata, friarbirds, the Magpie-lark, Grallina cyanoleuca, and figbirds. A single egg is laid in the host's nest and once hatched the chick forces the other eggs and hatchlings out of the nest." [SOURCE: http://birdsinbackyards.net/bird/54]

Common Koel, male. Photo: N Fifer ©

So what are 'Australian Values'?

Australians need to start debating what it means to be Australian, what values we treasure, and which aspects of our way of life we are prepared to compromise and which ones we are not. Then we need to look at what is happening to those values and way of life and start addressing their erosion.

If we don't and just sit back, 'she won't be right'. Those values will have eroded and have become relegated to history, under our watch. When 383,000 from overseas are rocking up every year, their sheer numbers unchecked will inevitably reshape Australia.

What is Immigration Policy accountable for?

Government immigration policy needs to be held accountable to immigrants and to the consequential impacts that immigration brings to Australia and to Australians. It has become clear that it is unacceptable to all parties that immigration policy stops at the International Arrivals Gate, that it ignores the special needs of immigrants, ignores integration and assimilation, ignores the costs to accommodate this direct increase in demand, ignores the consequential costs on Australia. Assimilation takes time and generations.

Public and private infrastructure and resources are proportionally consumed for every additional person added to Australia (be it by birth or immigration) - housing, roads, schools, public transport, hospitals, childcare, fuel, groceries, and every human consumption need and want. Marginal planning for immigration that stops at the International Arrivals Gates and hand balls the triple bottom line problems to under-resourced State government budgets is irresponsible. It is no different to allowing cheap import dumping into Australian markets and sending local industry broke.

This is not an argument for protectionism. It is an argument about the lack of accountability of Australia's current immigration policy for the economic, social and environmental consequences it is causing. Immigrants deserve protecting and nurturing more than most and it takes decades to assimilate. Look how long it took the Greeks and Italians post-WWII to assimilate. My estimate it took two generations and it wasn't until the 1970s until the Australia-Italian mixed culture was embraced by the mainstream, even then there must have been a lot of trauma in the intergenerational acculturation process.

Are we really 'sorry' for marginalising some of Australia's society?

What is appalling is the continued marginalisation of Australia's traditional people from the mix. If Australia's way of life and values embraced aspects of that of Aboriginal peoples, like in some way the Maori in New Zealand have shaped Kiwi culture - (look at the All Blacks Haka), then as a society Australia may not have as much need now to reverse its environmental damage.

Rudd-gazing

Mass immigration is indeed the elephant in the room. For Rudd to ignore this, the dominant driver of consumption, and to spend time on trading green house gas emissions is to negligently navel gaze as if pre-occupied in Sudoku on one of the Titanic deck chairs. 'Rudd-gazing' has become the greatest eroder of Australian way of life.

Interactions between microbes and human hosts can range from a benign, even symbiotic collaboration to a competition that may turn fatal — resulting in death of the host, the microbe or both.  What could seem benign could be a threat to existing host cultures.

Rome Scenario:

British Military strategist Rear Admiral Chris Parry pointed to the mass migration which disaster in the Third World could unleash. "The diaspora issue is one of my biggest current concerns," he said. "Globalisation makes assimilation seem redundant and old-fashioned due to the Internet and communications..."  Europe, including Britain, could be undermined by large immigrant groups with little allegiance to their host countries — a "reverse colonisation" as Parry described it.

Parry stressed that these mass population movements could lead to the “Rome scenario” – a reference to the collapse of the western Roman empire in the 4th and 5th centuries under repeated blows from groups such as Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Suevi, Huns and Vandals surging over its borders.
"In my view," concluded historian Peter Heather, "it is impossible to escape the fact that the western Empire broke up because too many outside groups established themselves on its territories." In the end, the Roman Empire, built by controlled immigration, perished under an onslaught of uncontrollable barbarian migration.

Rear Admiral Parry went on to say he was not labelling any particular group as threatening stability , but observed that there were already more than 70 diaspora groups in Britain.

More white families are moving from London to the regions while many immigrants arrive in the capital from overseas, the think-tank
Migrationwatch says.

The change in 10 years has been "extraordinarily rapid'', with 606,000 more people moving out of London than arrived from elsewhere in the country. In the same period, a net 726,000 immigrants arrived in the capital.

The recent referendum in Switzerland that saw 57.5 per cent of the population voting to ban the construction of minarets.  This is extreme tolerance considering Christians in many Muslim-background countries are being evacuated, persecuted and even martyred for refusing to conform.

Denmark now has a law preventing citizens under the age of 24 from securing residence rights for their foreign spouses. In September this year, the Flemish city of Antwerp joined France in banning the headscarf in schools.  This is hardly "ethnic cleansing" or persecution but a protection of the host's skyline, religions and cultural identity.

Weapon of “racism”:

The weapon of choice for the political elite, against any members of the indigenous population who show dissent against loss of their homeland, is the charge of 'racism'.  The pursuance of 'racism' as the ultimate taboo is the means to a political end. This is about changing the face of a nation.

The best estimate of the First Fleet, that we celebrate on Australia Day, is 1373 people.  Today the numbers of permanent and long-term migrants arriving in Australia to more than 500,000 a year. 

A 50 year 'visionary' migration plan for Australia is being developed to take into consideration such things as climate change, water availability, security and labour demands.  There is nothing about preserving our identity, or assimilation, wildlife, or the greater challenges of climate change and the higher costs of living with more people here. 

It is all so easy to come to Australia and apply to stay here.  Students can do "post graduate" studies without having completed their first degree.  Students numbers who successfully apply to live here are a hidden number.

Ad hoc population growth is colonisation:

Immigration Minister Chris Evans may have branded Mr Andrews as hypocritical in saying that our intake of migrants to Australia is too high when the Howard government welcomed more than 1 million migrants during its tenure.  (#10;http://www.theage.com.au/national/andrews-call-for-debate-on-slashing-immigration-20091210-km93.html"> Andrews call for debate on slashing immigration, )
However, Kevin Rudd has increased the number of permanent and long-term migrants arriving in Australia to more than 500,000 a year!  John Howard was Prime Minster from 1996 to 2007, and this means his government's increase happened over more than eleven years!

Australia is already under stress from population. We are losing Ramsar wetlands, record numbers of native species, even flagship species, our coastlines are under threat from oceans rising, the Great Barrier Reef, the Murray Darling food bowl and our rivers are being choked by dams and drying. The projections for Australia’s climate make it clear that farmers and other Australians should be prepared for a hotter, drier future. Higher temperatures, less rainfall, and extreme events will affect water availability, water and soil quality, fire risk, loss of wildlife and the proliferation of pests and weeds. Despite the warnings, food producing fertile land, is under threat from urban sprawl.

Ad hoc population growth, without a population policy or scientific assessment of our carrying capacity, is reckless and potentially disastrous!

In fact 'immigration',  at Australia's rate of half a million new people a year,  is an incorrect description for a process that is, to all intents and purpose, that of colonization.

The Queensland Government and the Brisbane City Council plan to allow developers to turn Queensland's historic Yungaba immigration hostel into yet another luxury gated residential housing development against the overwhelming objections of local residents.

Included below is a letter from Delend Cuddihy of the Yungaba Action Group.

Dear Yungaba supporters and friends,

In these days leading up to December 15, the date set down for the hand-over of Yungaba to the developer, it seems appropriate that this act of despoliation will happen in the season of Scythrops novaehollandiae.

The largest parasitic Cuckoo in the world, Scythrops novaehollandiae, migrates to Queensland from overseas between August and October each year. This fearsome bird, with its raucus cry -- listen to the audio file (191K) here. -- strikes fear into the hearts of local birds as it seeks out nests, destroys eggs or eats the young, and then lays its own eggs in the nest. The youngScythrops chicks don't evict the host's young or eggs from the nest, but they simply grow faster and demand all the food, thus starving the others. Then, through deception and gluttony, they grow to full, awesome size and depart Australia.

Just so, the reign of the Scythrops novaehollandiaedevelopers and profiteers has descended on Queensland - with the sale and redevelopment of Yungaba, the 30 story highrise developments in West End, the sale of public forests, ports, motorways and parts of the rail network and, now the announcement late last week that the State's National Parks are to be opened for eco-tourism development. See the Courier Mail story "Parks Tourist Storm Looms" of 25 Nov 09.

To paraphrase Tony Fitzgerald's recent warning, Scythrops novaehollandiaeare already in the nest of Queensland!

Queenslanders have but a short time for our voice to be heard, to raise our own storm in protest at this despoliation.

Yungaba Action Group invites you to join us in
Demonstration on the grass on the river side of Yungaba at 10am -- 12.30pm Sunday, 13 December 13.

Can you help us spread the word of this demonstration? -- see poster attached (pdf 168KB).

Perhaps you could spread the poster to your friends, family, through your networks, facebook etc? or print copies of it and paste them around your neighbourhood?

Or perhaps you could ring the Government Call Centre on 131304 to have your comment recorded and reported.

Whatever we can, wherever we are, with whatever we have, we must act now to protect our heritage and culture.

Delene Cuddihy 0402 597259

See also: www.yungaba.org.au, "Yungaba's is a history that should not be lost" by Australian author David Malouf in the Australian of 5 Dec 09, "Ghost of Cloudland back with a vengeance" by Rosemary Sorensen in the Australian of 5 Dec 09, "Govt rejects tag of 'red-neck developer'" by Tony Moore in the Brisbane Times of 5 Dec 09,

#update" id="update">Update, 11 Dec 09: Bulldozers already on site,

Delene Cuddihy writes:

Dear Yungaba Supporters & Friends - Remember the Belle Vue & Cloudland?
The bulldozers are already on the Yungaba site.

Come to Yungaba on Sunday December 13th at 10am to protest this blow to
Queensland History.

Let them not say that we didn't stand up for our History and our
Culture. Long Live Yungaba!

What else you can do: Sign the e-petition which calls for the immediate resignation of the Queensland Govenment and new elections on the grounds of not consulting public on privatisation.

#update2" id="update2">Update, 30 Jan 10: Yungaba sold, but fight not over

Delene Cuddihy writes:

Dear Yungaba Supporters and Friends,

As 2010 begins, I would like to wish you all the best for the coming year. And let us hope that reason and love of heritage prevail this year and Yungaba will be saved for the Queensland public. This dishonourable act against our culture and history by our own representatives will continue to be told in the annals of Queensland history for generations to come: see today's Q Section in The Courier Mail:

On December 15, the State Government finalized the sale - Yungaba now belongs to Australand. When I attended Yungaba for a television interview on December 15th, the television crew was not allowed to film the interview in front of the building. So much for the much vaunted claim that this development will retain the heritage of Yungaba and benefit the community! The alienation has started already!

Thanks to all those who attended the Rally on December 13th - it was a
big ask of our supporters at this time of year and in the heat of summer
- see Courier Mail article "Yungaba sale settles but action group fights on" of 15 Dec 09 by Margaret Wenham.

Approximately 70 people attended over the two hours of the Rally and after much discussion, decisions were made on two courses of action to continue to fight for Yungaba in spite of the impending sale:

1. to seek an urgent deputation to the Premier to ask for a stay of action on the gutting of Yungaba and to present alternative proposals for public usage;
2. to seek to explore the establishment of a community fund which would work to obtain financial pledges from the public in order to "buy-back" the main Yungaba building so that the unique 1800s immigration depot interior is not gutted but rather retained and developed as an immigration museum;

As regards 1. - unsurprisingly, the silence to our request is deafening.

In the meantime, Yungaba's cause has gained the support of many prominent Queenslanders and Australians. With the aid of these people, we are appealing directly to Australand to save Yungaba for the people. Australand have advised us that it will cost them $13 million to refurbish Yungaba, plus $5.3m to build an Auditorium in the Yungaba Carpark. Surely they will be interested in saving $19m for their shareholders, as well as saving Yungaba for the people of Queensland? Therefore, as regards 2. - if you are interested in the formation of a community fund - please contact me.

We have written again to the Lord Mayor suggesting that he can now deal directly with Australand to secure Yungaba for his Multicultural and Indigenous Museum. So could you contact him again on lordmayor [ AT ] brisbane.qld.gov.au to let him know that there is widespread community support for this? Many people continue to sign the petition on our website and to tell their Yungaba story.

Please encourage your family and friends to sign the petition and to tell their Yungaba story - http://www.yungaba.org.au/stories.html

These stories and petitions are invaluable - as they are the bedrock that reassure us that Yungaba is a just cause and worth fighting for - and add strength and momentum to our cause.

It's not over yet!

Delene Cuddihy
dc [ AT ] yungaba.org.au
Ph: 040 2597259

Australia's native Brushtail Possum is a small mammal which in nature lives in forests and woodlands and like many Australian mammals; they are marsupials, meaning they carry their young in a pouch.

Lanamania is a distributor for possum yarn from New Zealand. Its website boasts: "Our passion for knitting, our love of nature and our New Zealand heritage all come together in one product...Possum handknit yarn of Zealana -the light and soft touch of New Zealand."


Lanamania promotes: "Our luxurious natural handknit yarns include 'KAURI' - 60% fine merino wool / 30% possum wool / 10 % silk, in 11 different brilliant colours. A luxurious blend. The silk fibre stabilizes the yarns and gives it a light shimmer.

In 'KIWI' - 40% fine merino wool/ 30% possum wool / 30% cotton, in 10 different natural colours. The cotton smoothes the yarn and adds elasticity and lightness.

In 'RIMU' - 60% fine merino wool / 40% possum wool, in 11 different brilliant colours. A very soft and nevertheless hardwearing yarn. Very minimal or no skin irritation.

and 'Zealana Eco' or 'Eco Merino Possum' - 80% Eco fine merino wool / 20% possum wool, in 16 different natural colours."

"...our ecological yarn."

But let's see what Australian children have to say about Australian Brushtail Possums from Anderson's Creek Primary School north of Melbourne in Australia:

"The Common Brush tail possum is hunted by many predators such as owls, Tasmanian devils, Dingoes, Foxes, Cats, Feral dogs, Large Pythons and goannas. If a possum is attacked it will climb up the nearest tree or it will its nest. If it gets caught it will kick, scream, scratch and bite. The Common Brush tail possum uses sound and smell to communicate. They hiss, growl, cough and scream to tell other possums to get off the property. In breeding season the mother possum uses a soft calls to round up her young."

"Brush tail possums eat different kinds of leaves .They also eat fruit that we grow which is a nuisance and they eat flowers. Common brush tail possums mainly are plant eaters (herbivores) some times they eat insects, grubs, moths, birds eggs and baby bids. They spend 4 hours eating at night."

But Lanamania thrashes out fur trader eco-spun yarn to its prime German export market:

"Possum yarns help to maintain the unspoiled New Zealand environment. Possum are not native to the islands and in proliferating very quickly they are a real danger to the ecological system. Using our luxury yarns you help to preserve the pure nature of New Zealand. The World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) supports especially the sales of possum products.

So lets go and check with the World Wildlife Fund on this and see what they have to say about this endorsement? ...'Through the Habitat Protection Fund, WWF has distributed more than NZ$ 1,400,000 to over 150 local conservation projects in New Zealand since 2000. “We'd like to see all possums as dead possums. From a conservation perspective, they are New Zealand's number one pest problem.” Eric Pyle, conservation director - WWF-NZ.'

Yet dozens of NZ possum fur traders are making a killing from the 1837 introduced immoral trade. Possum numers are not going down, they are sustaining an immoral international fur trade out of New Zealand just like the 19th century fur seal trade of Canada.

Oh and by the way "We sell possum yarn from New Zealand" is translated into German for die German export market:

'Wir verkaufen neuseeländische Possumwolle'

"By buying possum yarns you will help to maintain the environment."...and our 1837 immoral fur trade profits, danke schoen!

Then shopping online in Germany one reads at http://www.possumfur.co.nz/

"Possum fur has a similar feel to mink. Possum were introduced to New Zealand from Australia approximately 150 years ago to establish a possum fur industry. They thrived in New Zealand to the point that they are now considered a pest and a threat to the native bird life and flora."

So New Zealand is perpetuating its disgraced 1837 fur trade. What message is New Zealand sending to the world about its natural environmental image?

Australian Possum Habitat
"The Brush tail possum lives in a hollow branch of a tree trunk. They sleep in the day and come out at night. They are located in most outskirts of Australia. The common brush tail possums are found through out Australia and Tasmania. Common brush tail possums live in a variety of habitats. They prefer open forests and woodlands but also they live in thick forests in wet areas. Many brush tail possums live in cities too." [Chloe and Kathleen, Anderson's Creek Primary School, Victoria, Australia].