An ecologist and an economist are swept off a tall building by a sudden gust of wind. The ecologist is horrified, but notices that the economist seems unperturbed as they plummet towards the ground. Why are you so calm, he asks? The economist replies, "because demand will create a parachute"? Economists, rather than ecologists, have been in the driver's seat concerning public policy for many years now, and I think there are plenty of signs that we are at risk of being swept off our tall building.
[This article contains the text of Kelvin Thomson MP's latest speech, to Protectors of Public Land Victoria Inc on the occasion of their 2016 AGM. It's full title is "Victoria, once the garden state, is now headed for population overload: how we are failing the next generation."]

According to the 2013 Victorian State of Environment Report the historic clearing of native vegetation in much of Victoria has resulted in the widespread loss of habitat and the decline of many species. Victoria is the most cleared state in Australia with nearly two-thirds of Victoria's landscape now modified for agriculture and urban purposes.

This, combined with ongoing pressures from further clearing, habitat fragmentation, altered hydrology, inappropriate land-use and fire regimes, and invasive species, puts enormous stress on land and biodiversity across Victoria.

Healthy land and biodiversity are essential for all Victorians. They provide vital services such as clean air and water, control of pests and fertile soil, and help to regulate our climate. These are necessary to support the production of water resources, food, fibre and timber. Healthy ecosystems are also important for our own health and wellbeing, providing places for cultural, spiritual and recreational activities.

Degradation of land and biodiversity resources impact on the services they provide. Biodiversity loss or decline can have significant consequences for natural processes such as pollination and nutrient cycling, decrease the availability of habitat, and impact on predator - prey relationships.

In severe cases, biodiversity loss can lead to significant alterations in ecosystem type and the functions ecosystems provide. It is important to maintain and, where necessary, improve the biodiversity and health of Victoria's ecosystems to ensure the continued provision of the services on which all Victorians depend.

The degradation of terrestrial ecosystems has far reaching consequences for many Victorian environments. Terrestrial ecosystems are intimately connected to aquatic ecosystems, including the marine environment.

Poor terrestrial health has implications for the condition of rivers, lakes, wetlands, estuaries and coastal waters.

Historic broad-scale clearing of native vegetation has also changed Victorian landscape functions in ways that are now presenting major challenges to land managers. Accelerated erosion, acidification, and salinity, as well as the loss of soil nutrients and organic content, are problems facing land managers.

Climate change is predicted to compound existing pressures on Victoria's biodiversity and ecosystem. Projections of significant shifts in local climates and increases in drought, bushfires and storms, will impact on Victoria's natural ecosystems and primary production industries alike.

Climate change is likely to threaten species with limited capacity to migrate, such as those restricted to particular habitats and fragmented landscapes, or those that tolerate only narrow ranges of temperature and rainfall. Ecosystems such as rainforest, wetlands, alpine areas and coastal and marine habitats have been identified as being at greatest risk in Victoria. Climate change will exacerbate current environmental pressures, and therefore the capacity of natural ecosystems to adapt to climate change will be improved if existing threats are addressed.

In addition to impacts on natural ecosystems, climate change also threatens agriculture and forestry through impacts on land health, water availability, agricultural yields, and increased damage from bushfires and storms.

A key driver of this environmental decline is rapid population growth. Victoria's population growth rate of 1.7 per cent last year was the fastest in the country, and Melbourne has continued its relentless 200 extra people every day, 1,500 per week, 75,000 each year growth for all of a decade now.

This rapid growth creates a pincer movement on the quality of life in our city. At the moment the most difficult issue in my electorate of Wills is the widening of the Bell Street ramp over City Link. Why is the widening happening? To accommodate increased traffic, which is of course a consequence of rapid population growth. What is the problem with the widening? The problem is that it brings the overpass to within 5 metres of the portable classrooms of Strathmore Secondary College, virtually overhanging the school, to the horror of parents and teachers alike. Why can't the portable classrooms be relocated? Because there is nowhere to move them to - all the available space has been taken up to cope with rising enrolments which are of course another consequence of rapid population growth. Is there a solution?
Yes, but it would involve a complete redesign and rebuild of the school, and the problem with that is that Strathmore has to compete for education capital works dollars with every other community in Melbourne agitating for a new school to cope with, you guessed it, rapid population growth.

It is noteworthy that the Property Council, Housing Industry Association, Real Estate Institute and other industry bodies who profit from rapid population growth have not been sighted putting their hands in their pockets to pay for the Bell Street widening, or a new Strathmore Secondary College, or any of the other things we need to cope with rapid population growth. There are more Elvis Presley sightings than there are of the property industry paying for the social costs of its activities.

The Queensland academic Jane O'Sullivan points out that maintaining infrastructure in a population growing at 2 per cent doubles, repeat doubles, the infrastructure cost for governments, who have only 2 per cent extra taxpayers to pay for it. No wonder we are seeing one term state governments and councillors getting chucked out every time there is an election. The task of keeping up with the infrastructure requirements of a rapidly growing population is basically impossible.

Another controversial issue in my electorate is planning. At the moment Moreland Council is proposing Amendment C159 to the Moreland Planning Scheme which would put in place 12 Neighbourhood Centres throughout the city. Developers would be permitted to go up to 4 storeys in these areas. Last week I went to a public consultation about this at the Pascoe Vale Swimming Pool. The fifty residents who were there were horrified at what is being proposed for the area around Pascoe Vale Railway Station, where they live. The artist's impression of it looked to them, and me, like some third world slum.

This amendment isn't coming forward because any residents have asked for it. I don't even think any local businesses have asked for it. It is the work of the Council planners themselves. They give the game away in an Information Sheet which states "Our population is forecast to grow by 41,504 to 214,320 people by 2036. New types of residential and commercial developments are needed to accommodate this growth" unquote. So as a result we will get high rise, and our backyards and vegetation will be quietly but relentlessly destroyed, at the very time when climate change means we need them most.

I do not accept that we should just assume and accept this extra 41,000 people for Moreland. If we build it they will come alright, and we will get the 41,000. But I think local residents are entitled to a real say in what happens in their street, and in their neighbourhood. We are not under any obligation to build it. These high rise buildings are making, and will make, the quality of life poorer in Brunswick, Pascoe Vale and Oak Park and beyond. We can and should say no to them.

Who are the advocates of rapid population growth? Well they are hiding in plain sight. Just last Monday the Australian Industry Group called on the Federal Government to increase immigration. It said this would boost the economy.What a lame idea. If more people come to live in your street, yes the total wealth of your street will be greater, but you personally won't be any better off at all. Indeed in terms of your amenity the chances are that you will be worse off. This shows the big end of town has pretty much run out of ideas and is bereft. They were the people who urged on us on the free market experiment.

For the past thirty years Australia has been undergoing an experiment. We have not been alone. Quite a few other countries have travelled the same path. Free market liberalism. It's hallmarks have been globalisation, privatisation, deregulation, free movement of goods and free movement of people. Its advocates said that it would strengthen the Australian economy, and make us more resilient to external shocks.

But far from making our economy more diverse and resilient, we have become narrow and vulnerable. We have much higher levels of unemployment than we did thirty years ago. We have much higher levels of youth unemployment, much worse long-term unemployment, and serious problems of underemployment. We have much larger foreign debt and much larger budget deficits. The distribution of wealth between rich and poor is becoming less equal. And the social problems generated by frustrated ambition - drugs, crime, mental health problems, homelessness - are on the rise too.

But the people who dug us into this hole are unrepentant. They want us to keep digging. They talk about the need for economic reform, which is code for more privatisation, more deregulation, and freer movement of goods and people. They talk about leadership, which is code for demanding that politicians do what they want, rather than what the voters want.

That is why I am so concerned that we are failing future generations, and why I have started talking a lot about intergenerational equity. I believe we have an obligation to pass on to our children and our grandchildren a world in as good a condition as the one our parents and grandparents gave to us, and I fear that we are failing in that task.

If our parents and grandparents did a better job than we are doing, how did they do it? Well in the first place Australia's population was much smaller, and growing more slowly. That made it easier to focus on solving problems, on making sure that people didn't fall through the cracks. But I also want to talk about the Australian Settlement, the economic and social model that we developed in the lead up to and following the years of Federation.

The dominant political debate at the time of Federation was the argument over free trade versus protection. Many of the arguments of the time sound familiar to our ears and ring true today. Bob Birrell writes in his book "A Nation of Our Own" that free trade was seen as the policy of the pastoralists. That is still true. It is the agribusinesses that push hardest, by a mile, in favour of the free trade agreements
that Australia has entered into in recent years.

And back then, as now, the protectionists were people who wanted to promote a diverse industrial base. Protection was also seen as crucial to the well-being of the working class. In 1901 the great Liberal Alfred Deakin - who the modern Liberal Party reveres in name while implementing policies that he was absolutely opposed to - declared that "If federal protection increases the manufacturers' profits, state laws
must provide that the employee shall secure his share, perhaps by means of special boards for wages and hours, according to the plan partly adopted by Victoria".

A similar insight into why the protectionists did not support free trade comes from the Bulletin's leader writer, James Edmond, in his 1900 tract "A policy for the Commonwealth". He says "No country ever became a great industrial state under free trade unless it had cheaper labour than its neighbours, and cheap labour means degradation and slavery... Nor can any nation, in these days of cheap freights,
remain a great industrial state under free trade unless it pays as low wages as the cheapest of its rivals, or unless its workers can hold their own by exceptional skill".

Observers watching the way in which nowadays the rich get richer while low paid workers are becalmed or going backwards might think Mr. Edmond just as relevant today.

The view of many protectionists and particularly the social democrats among them was that Australia should learn from the mistakes of the 'old world' and become a 'new world', free of both the social divisions and the strong class boundaries of the United Kingdom, and the slavery which had blighted the United States. We were to do our own dirty work rather than expect someone else to do it. Australia was not to be like America, where competition reigned supreme at the expense of workers' long-term well-being. This outlook was egalitarian, and helped give the Australia of the Federation era a democratic culture - that Jack is as good as his master, and down with "tall poppies", or at least those who give themselves airs.

Bob Birrell concludes that the Federation era and the "Australian Settlement" offers ideals directly relevant to our present dilemmas, and that it is a shame that it has been disparaged by Australia's cultural gatekeepers. It has been fashionable for years to deride the Australian economic and political institutions and culture of the Federation era, often referred to as the Australian Settlement. And the Settlement
itself was effectively torn up several decades ago. But I believe that many of the things done at that time served Australia well and indeed are key reasons why we developed a more egalitarian, more prosperous, fairer society than many other countries were able to accomplish.

Alfred Deakin expressly set out to make Australia a more diverse and self-reliant industrialised economy. He and his supporters were worried that Australia could become, in his words of 1905, an economy of "hewers of wood, drawers of water, shearers of wool, and growers of wheat". In addition the Deakin Government linked receipt of tariff protection to the payment of fair wages, establishing the Commonwealth Arbitration Court, which incorporated the principle of a living wage into its determination of industrial awards. Australia developed a reputation as a working man's paradise.

Australia was hit hard by the Depression, but the Australian Settlement and the Federation-era institutions survived the test. There was little social unrest, and after the Second World War Australia's manufacturing exports expanded and we enjoyed a golden age of prosperity.

The prospects for today's young people are nowhere near as rosy. We have fitted them up with an axis of financial evil - job insecurity, housing unaffordability, and student debt. So what might a new Australian Settlement look like? What might intergenerational equity in the twenty-first century look like?

I think five steps are crucial. First we should wind back our migrant worker programs, which have skyrocketed in the past decade. As recently as the year 2000 the then Immigration Minister Phillip Ruddock said that net migration may average out at 80,000 per annum. A funny thing must have happened on the way to the Forum, because his government subsequently increased it to 200,000 per annum, where it still sits. In a stable or slowly growing population, workforce ageing will help solve
unemployment. As workers retire unemployed workers or young people entering the labour market get job opportunities. This is how things used to be. But when we are running massive permanent and temporary migrant worker programs, the unemployed and young people entering the market find themselves up against ferocious competition from new arrivals.

Second we should focus on education, skills and training. Just this morning the OECD warned that Australia needed to do better on education, saying our high school proficiency in science and reading is only around the international average, with a "high variation across students." And what has happened to technical and further education is a scandal. Back in 2008 political parties promoted the deregulation of vocational education. Competition between the TAFE colleges and new private providers became the name of the game. It has been a disaster. The private training colleges have been quite unscrupulous. Their interest has not been in the students, it has been in making money. They get students in and they churn them through. They have no interest in whether the students get the skills to find work afterwards. As long as the students, or taxpayers, pay them, they're alright jack.

Then there are the Universities. Labor Governments introduced student fees and uncapped student places. Now the Liberal Government wants to deregulate student fees. This would be a disaster. When I went to University there were no fees and places were allocated on the basis of academic merit. If fees are deregulated, the system will have been turned on its head. Academic performance and merit will
count for nothing. Your capacity to pay large fees, or more commonly your parents capacity to do so, will count for everything. How are academic standards and quality expected to survive such an onslaught? Some of the many billions of dollars we now spend on family payments would be better directed towards reducing, with a view to eliminating, post-secondary student fees.

Third we need to back science. There have been massive, short-sighted cuts to the CSIRO.

And we should rebuild engineering expertise in government, and insist that companies building infrastructure invest back into the engineering profession, for example through Cadetship graduate programs.

Fourth we need to back manufacturing. During the mining boom we acted as if it didn't matter if all our manufacturing went offshore. But to have all our eggs in the mining and agriculture baskets is foolish and short-sighted. We need a diverse economy, and manufacturing provides good jobs in the middle of society - not rich but not poor. It brings with it research and engineering expertise; the kinds of things
that distinguish successful nations from unsuccessful ones. We should be wary of entering into trade agreements that kill off manufacturing and render our economy narrow and vulnerable.

Finally, we should back the home team - Australia. Our personal buying habits, our government buying habits, and our foreign takeover laws should support Australian jobs and Australian industry. We should have food labelling laws that spell out what food is Australian and what is imported, so consumers can make an informed choice.

We should not enter into Trade Agreements that contain Investor State Dispute Settlement clauses or other provisions which act as a barrier to governments carrying out the wishes of the electorate.

I do not believe future generations will look on us fondly, if we leave them a legacy of a degraded environment, of weather extremes, of cities which are soulless concrete jungles, of job insecurity, housing unaffordability and student debt.

There is a lot that we can do to foster intergenerational equity, and create a new Australian Settlement, and it needn't involve trashing the environment. We have an obligation to give future generations the kind of opportunities that so many of us have had.

We need to do more to address the stunted circumstances that rob too many boys of the chance to become responsible, independent men, and too many girls of the chance to become responsible, independent women.

I know the Protectors of Public Lands have a particularly strong understanding of the importance of protecting our public open space assets for the enjoyment of future generations. In doing so you make an important contribution to intergenerational equity. I congratulate you on what you have achieved, and wish you every success in your ongoing work.

Washington’s intention to overthrow Syria's legitimate and democratically-elected President Bashar al-Assad results from his refusal to back a Qatari gas pipeline project, an attorney says. Article first published by Iranian Press TV at http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2016/03/03/453669/Washington-Bashar-alAssad-Qatari-gas-pipeline-project

According to an article published by Politico on Thursday, American attorney and nephew of US President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., wrote that the US decided to topple Assad after he declined to back a gas pipeline project of the Qatari government.  Article first published by Iranian Press TV at http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2016/03/03/453669/Washington-Bashar-alAssad-Qatari-gas-pipeline-project

The project was aimed at building a gas link from Qatar through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey to Europe.

The $10 billion pipeline project first surfaced in 2000 and the CIA went ahead with the plan until nine years later Assad announced that he would not support the pipeline initiative, a move that could grant Qatar direct access to European energy markets via terminals in Turkey.

“Soon after that the CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria," said Kennedy.

“If completed, the project would have had major geopolitical implications. Ankara would have profited from rich transit fees. The project would have also given the Sunni kingdoms of the Persian Gulf decisive domination of world natural gas markets and strengthen Qatar, America's closest ally in the Arab world," he noted.

Kennedy added that the pipeline would have also strengthened Saudi Arabia by giving the kingdom additional leverage against Iran.

In a separate interview with Sputnik, Kennedy said, “If we study the history of America’s relation with Mideast and looking at the US’ violent intervention in Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt over time and the extraordinary and astonishing thing is the solid record of the cataclysmic failure every time we venture there in violent fashion. Most Americans are completely unaware of us attempting to overthrow the democratically elected government in Syria, contrary to our own state department policy and contrary to American values.”

Since March 2011, the United States and its regional allies, in particular Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, have been conducting a proxy war against Syria. The years-long conflict has left somewhere between 270,000 to 470,000 Syrians dead and half of the country’s population displaced.

Read comments on the original article here: http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2016/03/03/453669/Washington-Bashar-alAssad-Qatari-gas-pipeline-project

The globally unique and lovable Carnaby's Cockatoo exists only in the South West of WA. They are a totem for Noongar people and a part of our shared cultural and natural heritage. But the cockatoos are endangered and we are at risk of losing them forever.

Instead of helping the cockatoos to recover, the State Governments own analysis shows the Government's Green Growth Plan would further drastically reduce the population of these beautiful birds, intelligent, social and long-lived birds.. By locking in the clearing of thousands of hectares of bushland that the birds rely on, numbers of these already rare birds would be reduced by half and the long-term survival of the population would be placed in question.

While the State Government has hailed this Plan as a great environmental initiative, the grim reality is that it will result in the deaths of thousands of cockatoos through starvation as their vital food sources are bulldozed to make way for more unsustainable urban sprawl.

The public submission period for this plan is open now. Tell them to send it back to the drawing board.
See also an ABC report on the problems associated with this WA land-grab by a developer-government. "Carnaby's Black Cockatoos at risk if Perth-Peel land-use plan goes ahead, says leaked report." Note, however, that the ABC is part of this problem because it promotes the idea that mass immigration and population growth in Australia is inevitable.

Mention in your submision that we don't need the massive human population growth, or urban sprawl, and there's nothing "green" about it.
Please visit: https://ccwa.good.do/cockatoos/stopcockatoodisasterplan/"& and see candobetter.net's other pages on the Carnaby's cockatoo and previous efforts to save it in Perth - which these plans will wreck.

The Curse of the British invasion lives on?

"The Noongar people saw the arrival of Europeans as the returning of deceased people. As they approached from the west, they called the newcomers Djanga (or djanak), meaning "white spirits".^{#cite_note-5">[5]#cite_note-6">[6]} There were a number of reasons for this. Firstly their white complexion reminded the Noongar of corpses; their unclean odour of early 19th century Europeans was said to resemble the dead; the fact that the ships arrived from the west, the direction of Kuranup, the setting sun location of the soul in traditional beliefs;^{#cite_note-7">[7]} the fact that Europeans seemed to have no memory of kinship relations; and that Noongars who associated closely with Europeans were apt to die from European diseases over which Aboriginal people had little resistance, supported this claim."

And the devastation continues at an ever greater pace. We must stop this industrial savagery and civilise ourselves.

It is just possible that the terrorist attack warnings by both the PM and ASIO head, Duncan Lewis, and the announcement of a hefty hike in defence spending was just a coincidence. But for those cynics who claim otherwise, let me point out that at this very moment we already have more than 1000 (perhaps as many as 4000) terrorists running riot in Canberra and doing so with the full knowledge and encouragement of our government.

It is just possible that the terrorist attack warnings by both the PM and ASIO head, Duncan Lewis, and the announcement of a hefty hike in defence spending was just a coincidence. But for those cynics who claim otherwise, let me point out that at this very moment we already have more than 1000 (perhaps as many as 4000) terrorists running riot in Canberra and doing so with the full knowledge and encouragement of our government.

These agents of destruction are of course working undercover as lobbyists, but what ever their name tag, they do far more damage than their religiously inspired equivalent. Consider the onslaught on our country made by clients of the Minerals Council, projects that have laid waste to some of our best agricultural land and compromised our water supplies. ISIS would need nuclear weapons to inflict that sort of damage.

Lobbyists are a gifted body of saboteurs that have managed to infiltrate federal and state governments, turning successive environmental ministers into rubber stamps for whatever 'significant' project they want approved. Not content with having these ministers in their pockets, it seems to me that the big guns, Gina Rinehart, Clive Palmer and Andrew Forest were more than just instrumental in squashing both the mining super profit and the carbon tax, the proceeds of which would have gone a long way to fixing the budget. Now it appears they have the CSIRO in their sights, cutting funding into research into those areas which might embarrass fossil fuel advocates.

If the Mineral Council had a couple of environment ministers and ex PM Tony Abbott as unquestioning supporters, then their co-conspirator, the Property Council, have gone one better. It seems their undercover work has so emasculated the government's tax reform debate that the PM was forced to take their line on preserving negative gearing. This group of unelected influence-mongers have managed to usurp the state planning authorities and now have the power to abscond with public land, rail corridors, museums, and to beggar mortgage-stressed home buyers, leaving the nation with 1.6 trillion dollars in private debt.(http://www.dailyreckoning.com.au/why-has-australian-household-debt-tripled-in-the-last-25-years-cw/2015/06/18/) .

During this rampage their clients, the developers and financiers, easily managed to outperform the unions and are right up there with FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football). Some of the proceeds from a $10b ponzi scam in India have been directed into Gold Coast real estate market after, of course, the complementary political donations , doubtless more details will show who got what.

While discussing councils it would be unfair to dismiss the humble efforts of the Food and Grocery Council (F&GC). They don't have much to do with grocers but have a lot to do with food, particularly soft drinks and fast food, which pay more than the stuff farmers produce and which we call fresh food. The above groups have come under a lot of scrutiny because of their role in our obesity crisis which costs, according to who you believe, $21b/year in medical costs and lot more in the abstract, meaning not dollar-costed concept, of wellbeing . So it seems that the F&GC have been able to ward off the scientific studies done by health and medical experts and convince the government health ministers that, despite this high cost to health, cutting back our intake of fast food and sugery drinks would wreck havoc with the economy. To put their achievement into better perspective, about 70 Australians a week are having amputations as a result of preventable diabetes-related complications, a rate of injury that surpasses casualties in every war we have particapated in since WW2.

However before giving the F&GC an award for best lobbyists, it should be pointed out that the various state and federal health departments are less than enthusiastic to take on multi-national corporations even on health issues. This can be seen by their failure to act on the numerous health reports that have fingered coal as a major health hazard. One report that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald (The Coal and Health in the Hunter report by the Climate and Health Alliance (.pdf) ) put the health cost, just in the Hunter valley alone, as $600m per year, while the US government puts a social cost of $47 per tonne of CO2 admitted by coal combustion. The Australian report went on to note: "There's a total disassociation of who gets the benefits and who gets the pain,” which just about sums up the current attitude of governments. However if we lump coal into the rest of the fossil fuel industries, gas and oil, we get a better idea of their success at influencing government policy. A report by the Australia Institute (Why do we subsidise industry? | The Australia Institute) puts the cost of subsidies given to the fossil fuel industry at $10b per year, which compares favourably with the $1.5b the car industry received over a four year period. As part of our shrinking manufacturing industry this was one that, not only added to innovation, but employed about 1 million people. Perhaps the manufacturing organisation should change its lobbyists.

There of course many other lobbyists with a range of interests and influence including clubs, hospitals, private health funds, sporting organisations, private schools, business and hotels, that have all successfully challenged government policy and the public interest, notably in liquor and gambling, but also in other less noticeable ways, like drugs that are added to the PBS. And they do so in different ways. The Australian Centre for Independent Journalism found, in a survey of major metropolitan newspapers published in Australia in 2010, that 55 per cent of content was driven by public relations handouts from lobbyists and their associated public relations arms, and 24 per cent of the content of those metropolitan newspapers had no significant journalistic input whatsoever, relying heavily on public relations handouts. Many of the so-called economic experts we read, hear and see on our media are in the employment of the banks and accounting firms, or belong to so called 'think tanks' such as the Institute of Public Affairs, which are secretly funded and act as fronts for vested interests with their own self-interested agendas. Given the continued decline in media revenue and the loss of serious journalists, this situation can only get worse.

Australia's capacity to tackle important public issues – such as climate change, income inequality, tax avoidance, political donations, indigenous welfare, population growth, and housing affordability – is diminishing because of the power of vested interests, with their lobbying power to influence governments in a quite disproportionate way. Professor Ross Garnaut described it as a "diabolical problem" a sentiment echoed by Ken Henry, a former secretary of Treasury, and Martin Parkinson his successor, who has warned about "vested interests" who seek concessions from government at the expense of ordinary citizens.

But nothing is being done about it.

Introduction by candobetter.net editor: This article reflects interviews with Frankston natural scientist, Hans Brunner, who has spent decades of his life trying to save the southern brown bandicoot, as many of those who know Hans are aware. Here the ABC takes up Hans's argument about the $20m promised by the State Government to be spent protecting bandicoot habitat that was threatened by Peninsula Link was never used as promised for a fox-proof fence. "Peninsula Link dutifully spent $20 million of taxpayers' money on the underpass, and handed over $1.6 million to Parks Victoria for the fence. But Parks Victoria never built the fence. At the completion of the freeway in 2013, and with only a single bandicoot hair detected two years prior, Parks Victoria chose to direct the money intended for the fence to bandicoot programs near Cranbourne..." in an area now allocated for a projected housing development. This is totally outrageous by Parks Victoria and by the government with which it is too closely aligned. Surely the current Parks Victoria Board should be sacked. Planning documents from 2011 show wide reserves with predator-proof fencing. But a 2012 revision made them a dotted line — an option if Federal Minister for the Environment Greg Hunt required it. Mr Hunt failed to do so. His dereliction with regard to this unique creature in the world, the southern brown bandicoot, seems to be his support for by Melbourne's [over]development. A Dubai conference recently named Greg Hunt 'the best environment minister in the world' seems a reflection of extreme cynicism or a calculated insult to the Australian public. Good on the ABC for promoting this investigation. Article by Sara Phillips, first published on http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-02-28/survival-of-rare-melbourne-bandicoots-under-threat/7181580

Photo:
The southern brown bandicoot once thrived in the Melbourne region. Now the Melbourne population is down to the 400 or so inside the Cranbourne Botanic Gardens. (Supplied: Hayley Davis)

Map:
Cranbourne 3977

Wildlife corridors that experts say are crucial to the survival of Melbourne's last remaining population of southern brown bandicoots may not go ahead if documents from the Victorian State Government are any guide.

Revisions of state planning documents for a new housing development near the bandicoots' stronghold in the Cranbourne Botanic Gardens downgraded the wildlife corridors planned for the suburb to a "contingency project".

The Victorian Government's own bandicoot strategy said the corridors were not cost effective.

Development is yet to commence, but bandicoot lovers said the Government has all but written off the species within Melbourne city-limits.

The small brown marsupial is listed as nationally endangered. They were once abundant across Melbourne and they are found scattered throughout Victoria and South Australia in small pockets.

For bandicoot enthusiast Hans Brunner, the threat to the Cranbourne bandicoots is a case of history repeating.

Bandicoots once thrived at The Pines Flora and Fauna Reserve, a patch of bush in the back blocks of Frankston on Melbourne's urban edge, just 10 kilometres from the Cranbourne Botanic Gardens.

Mr Brunner campaigned to save The Pines' bandicoots as urban development, feral foxes and cats took their toll. When help finally came it was too late.

The Pines was split by a freeway in 2010. Federal environment laws aimed at protecting the bandicoot dictated that an underpass must be built for the bandicoots and a predator-proof fence installed around the 220-hectare reserve.

Peninsula Link dutifully spent $20 million of taxpayers' money on the underpass, and handed over $1.6 million to Parks Victoria for the fence.

But Parks Victoria never built the fence.

At the completion of the freeway in 2013, and with only a single bandicoot hair detected two years prior, Parks Victoria chose to direct the money intended for the fence to bandicoot programs near Cranbourne.

Chris Hardman, regional director for Melbourne for Parks Victoria said: "With so many pressures on that small parcel of land, it's really difficult to secure a species. And that's why I think the investment in [the Cranbourne area] will better secure the future of the southern brown bandicoot than we could possibly ever achieve than in such an impacted landscape as The Pines."

Mr Brunner was outraged that $20 million was wasted because of the failure to spend a fraction of that on a fence.

"$20 million of our money has been spent and now they've abandoned the bandicoot plan completely for The Pines and this money's just wasted. Public money's wasted."

But Mr Hardman said the area from the Cranbourne Botanic Gardens to Westernport Bay has a larger population of bandicoots, more space to work with and a fighting chance of securing their long-term survival.

Wildlife corridors were planned to run through the proposed Botanic Ridge housing development, aiming to allow bandicoots in the Gardens behind predator-proof fencing to breed, slip out through special bandicoot gates and spread into nearby suitable areas.

"Linking landscapes is a really important thing to do and that's one of the great opportunities with the Westernport reserves, that we are much easier able to link those landscapes with large parcels of land," Mr Hardman said.

Terry Coates, a bandicoot expert who works at the Cranbourne Gardens, agreed that corridors were key to the species' long-term survival.

"We've been very keen to see those corridors leading away from us out into the surrounding landscape, not to see our population isolated and locked up," he said.

But the corridors favoured by Mr Hardman and Dr Coates are looking increasingly unlikely, meaning the future for this endangered species is far from guaranteed.

Planning documents from 2011 show wide reserves with predator-proof fencing. But a 2012 revision made them a dotted line — an option if Federal Minister for the Environment Greg Hunt required it.

When asked whether the Minister had required the corridors, a spokesperson for the Federal Department of Environment said Mr Hunt had "endorsed the Program of the Victorian Government for Melbourne's urban growth".

These Victorian documents from 2014 included the option of corridors but noted that the corridors were "less cost-effective than alternative conservation measures".

The Victorian Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning was unable to provide further details on the future for the corridors.

Dr Pia Lentini, a research fellow at the University of Melbourne, said governments have a responsibility to protect Australian wildlife.

"They have a mandate to protect these species and make sure they don't go extinct. And in order to do that they need to consider more carefully what's going in Australian cities and towns," she said.

Cities are surprising refuges for endangered Australian species, according to recent research from Dr Lentini.

"If you pick a random point across Australia if it's in a city you'll find about 10 threatened species and if it's outside a city you'll find about three," she said.

"At the moment there seems to be a bit of a perception that cities are a bit of a write-off for threatened species conservation — that populations in cites are too far gone or a too small.

"But our analysis really shows that if we put in a bit of effort we can make a big difference just by focusing on cities."

Kenneth Eade is a legal thriller writer who chooses difficult and original subjects, of the kind that preoccupy candobetter.net readers and authors. This article foreruns the imminent publication of The Spy Files and is based on Kenneth's research for that novel. See also "Book Review: Kenneth Eade's Thriller faction series highlights GMO industrial politics in US and Ukraine conflict". Candobetter.net Editor.

Privacy today faces threats from an ever-growing surveillance apparatus that is justified in the name of national security or the war on terror. Agencies of the federal government, such as the FBI and the NSA intrude on the communications and activities of private citizens on a regular basis, using data they mine from our private resources to establish watch lists, based on what they perceive to be “suspicious behavior.”

These watch lists have, among other things, prevented people from entering the country, prevented them from flying on airplanes, barred them from certain jobs, and shut them out of financial accounts.

The founders of our [United States] government designed it to be transparent, so that the governing people could know what the governors were doing. One of the most important methods of making the government transparent, in their minds, was a free press.

The Freedom of Information Act, which was signed into law on July 4, 1966, is a tool which is available to anyone, but it is frequently used by reporters in order to obtain information from the government.

In 2012, Reporter Jason Leopold was working on a story about Hesham Abu Zubaidah, the brother of Guantanamo detainee and accused terrorist, Abu Zubaidah. Hesham signed a consent to allow Leopold to request documents on him under the Freedom of Information Act and was visited by an FBI agent. (Truthout.org article May 29, 2012 by Jason Leopold, “So Then the FBI Sent Out an Agent to Check Up on My FOIA Request”).

In 2006, the FBI claimed that it had inadvertently sent classified and privileged documents to the Washington Post, and requested the Post to return them. It claimed that any further “review, disclosure, retention, and/or dissemination of the classified document or the classified information contained in the classified document may be a federal crime.” The Post agreed to and did return the document, but only because it did not directly relate to the story it was working on (Editor & Publisher, March 3, 2006, “Post Did Not Feel it Had to Return Classified Document.”)

While there is currently no precedent of such a successful prosecution, The government has also been known to reclassify documents that it previously produced. This retroactive classification prevents public discourse of the information contained in the documents, even by congressional subcommittees and even when Congress is actually investigating alleged abuses by the FBI (Abel, “Do You Have to Keep the Government’s Secrets?” University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Vol. 163, 1038.)

This article reports that, in the National Archives Scandal, the CIA claimed that classified documents that were inadvertently disclosed gives the government the right to treat them as classified (without being reclassified.) While there is no law against publishing classified documents, The Espionage Act prevents the disclosure of information relating to national defense.

The article also notes that, while no journalists have ever been prosecuted for publishing classified information, two members of the public have been prosecuted for disseminating information given to them by a government source. I agree with the author of the article, who states, “A generation ago, one could be confident that the press would not be prosecuted. Now, such a prosecution is cause for concern, even for those who think the First Amendment would ultimately prevail.”

According to an article in the Fall 2013 issue of National Affairs, while the Bush administration merely threatened prosecution of journalists for espionage, the Obama administration has actually engaged in seven such prosecutions. The article further reports that, while, by law, most government secrets are required to be declassified after 25 years, as of 2013 there were over 58 million pages of documents that had not yet been reviewed for declassification.

The danger in the government using the Espionage Act and other tools to prosecute reporters, attorneys, and others is that its misuse is stifling freedom of the press and freedom of expression, and is making government opaque, instead of transparent as it is supposed to be. The federal government has so much power with regard to federal prosecutions that it is virtually impossible for an ordinary citizen to defend him or herself if they decide to charge or indict you.

As Judge Jed S. Rakoff observed in his article, Why Innocent People Plead Guilty, The New York Review of Books, November 20, 2014, fewer than 3% of all federal criminal cases go to trial. Because of sentencing guidelines, high bail, and the high cost of a defense, an accused often finds himself in jail, unable to defend himself, and succumbs to a federal prosecutor in a plea bargain agreement. In a federal criminal case, the prosecutor has all the advantages.

As is observed in my latest novel, The Spy Files, in the words of James Madison, ‘Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom, and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech, which is the right of every man.’ If the government is allowed to spy on the people, that means that the people have no privacy in their thoughts or speech, which means that the government has taken away their liberty. This is the same government that has sacrificed hundreds of thousands of lives in the name of liberty, and not just the lives of American servicemen. Patrick Henry said ‘give me liberty or give me death.’ I think his famous quote makes it crystal clear that the Constitutional framework of this country values liberty as an essential element of life, worth dying for. If something is worth such a sacrifice, how can the loss of it be justified for the argument that it will make us safer to give up our liberty and our civil rights? Are we to tell the mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers of all the soldiers lost in foreign wars that it was all a big lie? That they died for nothing?

Kenneth Eade is an environmental and political activist, and author, who has been called by critics ‘one of the strongest thriller writers on the scene.’ For more information on his political and legal thrillers, including the latest, ‘The Spy Files’ go to http://kennetheade.com

Estonian House, West Brunswick, 24th February
……………………………………………………………………………………
The crux of this meeting, as presented by Moreland planning staff, is that the previous agreement was voided root-and-branch by the State Government, and in the newly planned Neighbourhood Centres, the allocated zones have been changed somewhat (no-one seemed to recall being given prior notice) and also the previously agreed 3-storey limits (all achieved by quite verbally violent public activity!) have morphed into 4-storey. In the course of the meeting it turned out that 4-storey was not 4-storey mandatory but 4-storey discretionary! The council "hoped" they could make them mandatory. It was impossible despite direct and explicit questioning to find out what was the actual upper height limit is right now, or even if there is an upper height limit.

As previously, there was the muffled threat that this new version of suburban planning, which can only increase occupier density in a municipality with the highest or second highest density in greater Melbourne, was driven by State Government (of a different stripe, but the threat remained the same), and the heavy implication that it might be worse if we did not agree.

There was much volatile discussion around the apparently arbitrary re-drawing of new boundaries---there must always be unfortunate residents who end up next to or surrounded by, possible huge overshadowing apartment blocks whereas across the road it is different.

The Planning guy ( who seemed rather embarrassed; I felt a bit sorry for him) admitted the historically, and also recent, appalling standard of erections in Moreland and also said the Council wished to enforce more stringent standards of good design and superior build quality, but again admitted on questioning that these would also be discretionary.

Others raised the issue of the effect of massive 1-2 bedroom blocks on the current family demographic of this pocket of Moreland. And obviously the failure to account for parallel improvement in infrastructure, most notably public transport but also water, sewage etc. was acknowledged but this point was avoided because all this was a matter for the State and not the Council. Likewise the effect on rates was avoided.

Others had direct stories of fighting developers, achieving modifications on paper which were ignored in concrete, and achieving no redress because what standards there were could be flouted. The stress and anxiety caused by these fights at council and VCAT levels, and the necessity for constant vigilance, were raised quite emotionally by a couple of unfortunates.

An interesting but telling tiny detail was that there were a number of booths set up in Estonian House with Council brochures (the ones with the ridiculously scaled artist's impression illustrating the wide and gracious Boulevarde de Melville). Some residents (who had after all paid for the rent of the hall) also placed sheafs of counter-suggestions and blanks for letters of objection to the proposals in these booths. These disappeared immediately, some were replenished and again they vanished within a minute or two. The presumption is they were taken by council staff who were roving around at all times.

Another interesting detail was that, as far as was visible, we were not graced by the presence of a single councillor.

I went to the one [meeting] at Pascoe Vale neighbourhood Community Hall. People were hostile. They [Council staff] said they were seeking community input for their submission. One resident said;

'Is it going to be like last time when you had the Moreland Rezoning Community consultations. You didn't give an accurate account of our opinions in your submission. No mention how residents opposed increased density, wanted greater protection etc. Instead you said things like, residents wanted better quality apartments etc. What a load of bullshit, you lot are going to do what you want?'

Another lady… said:

'I'm reading through this handout. This is basically a bribe. You're telling us to accept the four storey height limit, because if we don't we'll end up with ten storeys. '

Council officer tried to deny it, but the lady kept pressing and pressing the point that this is a bribe, until the officer admitted in a round about way 'as it stands, developers can apply to build beyond 4 storeys, if we don't have height limits, so we have to put something in place. '

In the draft 1.1 of Neighbourhood Centres Strategy, it states that Plan Melbourne promotes density in defined locations to support a 20minute neighbourhood, where residents will have access to a wide range of local amenities and services. My husband (a Brunswick boy) stood up and said:

'This 20 minute concept was intended for new estate areas. Any residents living in Moreland can already access services and amenities within 20minutes. Within 20min I can be in Brunswick, Coburg, Hospitals in Parkville, Airport West, Essendon DFO, Northland, Moonee Ponds. We don't need density to support the 20min neighbourhood concept. We have it already.’

The artist impression showed block after block of 4 storey apartments surrounding the Pascoe Vale Station, where supposedly people will be able to shop and work near where there live. The station is at the bottom of Gaffney Street hill and commuters take up a lot of parking at the station and in surrounding streets. So where will people park to do their shopping and how many people will walk back up the hill with their shopping? Zilch! They'll go to supermarkets with big car parks. Someone asked if any of these shops and offices, beneath these apartments are going to provide jobs that can pay the mortgage or rent. Are they going to be big volume employers like manufacturing firms in the past, who employed a lot of local residents? Then the officer said:

'The nature of employment has changed from the manufacturing of the past. We're seeing more self employed looking for workspaces close to home. For example, there's a Brunswick artist who is renting a studio close to home.'

Someone sarcastically asked: 'so this artist is going to employ a lot of local people?'

In his Moreland Rezoning submission, Ernest Healy, a former researcher in planning and population at Monash University, has pointed out that 85% of Moreland residents worked outside the municipality. He questioned Council's ability to encourage Moreland residents to work locally.

Questions were also asked about where schools, infrastructure, waste management and services, for example ambulance and hospitals, came into play with all this density. They are becoming overstretched. Strathmore Secondary had to knock back 200 students, including those in the zone. Four portables had to be delivered to Strathmore Secondary and Pascoe Vale Primary, encroaching in playgrounds. Many schools are converting storage areas, locker bays and shelter sheds into classrooms. If density continues, the children won't have a playground. A paramedic I know said hospitals bypasses are increasing…

This madness has to stop. [The mess on] rubbish days in some streets around here is getting worse. So much for the Greens thinking high density is environmentally friendly.

Moreland residents are presently being treated to a new round of ‘consultations’ throughout the municipality, and being indoctrinated by Council staff on the assumed benefits of residential rezoning (radically increased residential densities) and of neighbourhood activity centres as a central feature of the ’20-minute city’. Under this new feudalism, it is expected that residents will access all of their basic material needs and services within a 20 minute walk, bicycle trip, or by public transport. Superficially this may seem a nice idea. On closer scrutiny it is fanciful, so expensive that the necessary additional infrastructure will never be provided, and little more than a pretext for an atrophied Australian business culture dependent upon population growth and capital widening; incapable of building a genuinely modern economy. Selling dirt to China and building a national ponzi economy based on population growth and making each other cappuccinos. Dumb and dumber dressed up as community building and environmental responsibility, but, very politically fashionable – so much so that the left enthusiastically does the economic right’s public relations for it. The Greens on the Moreland Council are a case in point.

That the Moreland Council is conducting a new round of ‘consultations’ on the new feudalism is curious. This is because of the abject failure of the previous round of ‘consultations’ on residential rezoning under the Napthine Coalition government and the subsequent betrayal of Moreland residents on the issue by the Andrews Labor government. The overwhelming message from residents to the pro-density fundamentalism of Council and the Victorian government the first time round was an emphatic rejection of higher residential densities. At the time, the resounding rejection of higher densities by residents served to expose the faux democratic sentiment of the Council planning elite, when Council was subsequently advised, in an official report on the rezoning consultations, that Council should not feel bound to follow mainstream opinion on the rezoning issue anyway.

The latest round of faux consultation is all the more curious because Council’s 2014 rezoning proposal (put to the Coalition government in mid-2014), which at best represented a compromise between the densities that the Moreland city planners were promoting and resident objections to higher densities, was subsequently rejected by the new Labor planning minister, Richard Wynne. As detailed below, the newly elected Victorian Labor government essentially gutted the Moreland compromise rezoning proposal of the key measures that would have preserved some semblance of low-density neighbourhood character in the Neighbourhood Residential Zone.

As thing stand, the current ‘consultations’ are being conducted in a climate of angry disbelief on the part of residents who carry feelings of insult from being treated contemptuously the first time round. Yet, Council and the Victorian Labor government simply proceed as if residents have the word ‘idiot’ tattooed on their foreheads.

Background:

From late 2013 to mid 2014, a drawn out and at times heated struggle took place between various resident groups within the municipality of Moreland and the Moreland City Council over the implementation of new residential zones, which foreshadowed a radical increase in residential densities within the City.
Prior to the demise of the Bracks/Brumby Victorian Labor government in late 2010, Labor had indicated that it would pursue a policy of limiting residential growth in some suburban locations within Melbourne, facilitating rapid residential growth in other areas, and allowing intermediate growth in others. On coming to government, the Coalition ran with this three zone residential policy approach, which became a source of heated, ongoing contestation in several local government areas. Moreland was amongst them.
Under the Coalition Government, local governments were charged with formulating proposals for the implementation of three residential zones largely differentiated by the levels of density that each zone would facilitate. Moreland city Council therefore also undertook this task. Generally, the Council and Council planning staff showed themselves to be enthusiastic advocates of increased residential densities, despite resident resistance, on the misguided premise that this would represent municipal progress.
After a series of exhausting public consultation meetings, conducted by the City of Moreland, where the overwhelming sentiment of residents was that increases in residential densities should be kept to a minimum, particularly in the ‘low density’ Neighbourhood Residential Zone, the Moreland Council lodged a rezoning proposal with the Rezoning Advisory Panel of the then Minister for Planning, Matthew Guy.

The proposal that was lodged was a significant compromise, which many residents considered unsatisfactory in so far as it allowed for residential density increases in excess of that considered compatible with the preservation of valued neighbourhood character. Nevertheless, key aspects of the Moreland Council proposal, which rendered this compromise acceptable in some degree to some residents, were the inclusion of minimum lot sizes for new dwellings and minimum private open space requirements in the Neighbourhood Residential Zones (the proposal formulated two variants of this zone – one for the North and one for the South of the municipality). These provisions would have facilitated a significant increase in housing stock within the ‘low-density’ Neighbourhood Residential Zones, while still preserving a semblance of neighbourhood character. In most cases, these provisions would allow single detached dwellings on a single lot to be replaced with two, and in some cases three dwellings.
As the Moreland Council proposal had not been accepted by the Napthine Government before it lost office in late 2014, the proposal subsequently came before the newly elected Andrews Labor government and Planning Minister, Richard Wynne.

Wynne accepted the Moreland Council proposal, but only after the minimum lot size and minimum open space requirements had been removed from the proposal. Therefore, what was already a tenuous compromise between the aspirations of the majority of residents and the pro-density predisposition of the Moreland Council proposal was substantially undermined.

Wynne’s removal of these provisions has effectively gutted the hard won compromise reached between Moreland residents and the Council by mid 2014.
A number of issues are raised about the Minister’s bastardisation of the Moreland residential rezoning proposal.

1. The removal of minimum lot size and minimum private open space provisions of the 2014 compromise rezoning proposal has essentially removed any meaningful protective measures against the type of residential density increases that the majority of residents see as an attack on their areas' liveability. Unwanted development will continue unabated, perhaps now even accelerated. It is simply insulting that Council now describes the Labor Minister’s prescription of 4 dwellings per lot (regardless of lot size) as a formula for ‘minimal’ change. Under these conditions, even in the lowest-density zone, the change will be drastic and destructive of the neighbourhood character that most residents seek to preserve. Such language is bureaucratic manipulation at its worst – again, taking the public for fools.

2. In Opposition, Labor Party figures at times aligned themselves with resident protests against proposed Coalition density increases. That a Labor Government should subsequently impose a rezoning outcome worse than many residents would have expected from the Coalition will almost certainly breed cynicism towards Labor in Moreland at a time when Labor should be presenting itself a Party of meaningful alternatives. This is a missed opportunity. One Victorian Labor parliamentarian was silly enough to add insult to injury to assert to a meeting of informed residents that Labor had saved them from the residential density excesses they would have suffered under a Coalition government.

3. Victorian Labor now represents a greater threat to suburban amenity in terms of density and over development than the Coalition had been. Residents may now begin mobilising against Labor in the same way they did against the previous Coalition Government. Labor party members and supporters will be amongst those mobilising against the Labor government on this issue.

4. Victorian Labor appears to have learned nothing from residents' fierce opposition to the proposed residential density increases under the Coalition government. Labor has just picked up from where the previous unpopular Labor minister, Justin Madden, had left off, as if there were no history in between. The take away message from Richard Wynne's treatment of the residential density issue in Moreland is that the Labor government offers no alternative to the Coalition and has no regard for the struggle of Moreland residents against the contempt of the Coalition government on this issue.

5. The negative impacts of rapid population growth on urban amenity, and growing metropolitan dysfunction, played a significant part in the downfall of the Brumby Labor Government in 2010. Given this, it is extraordinary that the current Labor Government had demonstrated a willingness to ignore the aspirations of residents in a way that will almost certainly reduce its chances of winning the seat of Brunswick at the next Victorian election. Some of the most fierce opposition to increased residential densities was from West Brunswick.

What is Minister Wynne’s attack on suburban amenity in Moreland likely to yield in terms of the built environment? Established separate detached dwellings in Moreland are now dropping like flies as small scale, medium-density developers run riot, reaping the windfall benefits of reckless policy. The photo below provides an example of what is likely to become the norm. This site is just under 570 square meters, which until recently had a modest single detached dwelling on it, with a small yard and garden. Whereas under the Moreland City Council’s original rezoning proposal, this site would likely have been allowed only a single double-storey dwelling, in keeping with Richard Wynne’s bastardisation of the Moreland rezoning proposal, permission has been granted for three double-story townhouses.

Despite the Minister’s fatuous claim that Labor’s rezoning provisions in Moreland will protect valued neighbourhood character against over development, Labor has now ensured the continued destruction of the neighbourhood amenity that the majority of residents wish to protect. Political sophistry at its worst. It is little wonder that many Australians rank politicians with used car salesmen.

Even given the irresponsible levels of population and household growth expected under current immigration settings, in all likelihood, the estimated increase in dwellings required for Moreland would have been achievable under Moreland’s original proposal to the Coalition government in 2014. Wynne’s decision seems to be pure ideology: increased residential density is ‘good’; low-density is ‘bad’.

It is not surprising that Wynne was a senior advisor to former Labor Deputy Prime Minister, Brian Howe, in the early 1990s. Howe was a zealous advocate of ‘urban villages’, the antithesis of low-density, garden suburbia. To ‘urban village’ ideologues, including those on the Moreland Council, resident wishes are an obstacle to be overcome, not something to be respected. Labor, it seems, is quickly digging itself into a political hole again on urban policy.

From the Minister for the Aged:

I need to let you people know that you have had it pretty good so far but you cannot expect things to continue as they are. You Baby Boomers are in fact an impending liability on the country. Having said that (and in a way, I wish I hadn't) you are probably mostly still in the workforce, but think what a drain you will be when you have finished your useful, paid, working life. I warn you that you will all need to pull in your belts, in the interest of Team Australia (pardon the expression but it is so very suitable in this context!)

Necessary reality check

There are the three areas where the expectations built up over your working lives will need to undergo a reality check.

1. Aged Pension

The first is superannuation. You thought that superannuation was a good way to save for your retirement and you have been saving in this way for at least two decades. Well, in fact, this has been very selfish of you as putting money away for 30 years (instead of using it for holidays or to buy a house) has given you a tax break. So although you are saving for your own retirement so as not to be on an Age Pension when you retire, there is no need to feel any satisfaction about this because you have been doing this at the tax payer’s expense! The country cannot afford this rort that you have been willingly participating in, thinking you have been doing the right thing. Your gains need to be clawed back! Just watch this space for what is in store for you,.... you greedy hoarders.

Now we don’t want you on the Age Pension and we don’t want you to accumulate too much money in "super" for your retirement either. At least not with the tax advantages (although without the tax advantages you probably wouldn’t want to tie money up in “super", anyway). We, the government actually don’t know what we want you to do so we’ll just do something to superannuation and see how you all react.

If, after all this, you can’t afford to go on living at any point , the problem will probably take care of itself.

2. Health insurance

This brings me to the second area of consideration, which is health insurance.

Many of you have been paying into Private Health Insurance for decades as well. As you know, Medibank Private is now living up to its name. It has now actually been privatised (November 2015). As a business and in the interests of its shareholders, it cannot afford to carry risky cohorts and I’m afraid that you people either are becoming or about to become too risky. It doesn’t matter that while you were young and healthy you kept paying premiums to Medibank Private and never made a claim. Your attitude, that you were happy not to make a claim and that you felt you were contributing so that others, less fortunate with their health, could, was very sporting. Once again, however, a reality check is needed. Medibank Private, and I’m sure, the other private health funds, need to assess their risks and charge appropriate premiums for certain risk groups. As I have just said, you, as the now aged or soon to be aged, are high risk!

Things go wrong more often with older people and this is a burden on the country. In the case of health insurance, it is also a burden on other policy holders and potentially to shareholders. You need to pay a price that reflects your risk as an aged or soon to be aged person to the insurer. If this means that you can no longer afford the premiums (they will be steep, I can tell you) then you will need to fall back on the public system and I can also tell you that the public system does not want you! No, the public system is overwhelmed with treating young locals and backpackers from all over the world in their emergency departments, not to mention stabbings, king hittings and other casualties of drunken or drugged youthful exuberance. As I have said, this problem may take care of itself: if you are lying on a stretcher in a corridor, having been triaged as low priority, you may not survive and that will be a blessing to the system.

Planning your Exit Strategy

It is so opportune that there is a group called “Exit” who are in favour of people being quietly assisted to exit this mortal coil ahead of their allotted moment. If they could get some more traction, I personally (and mark you I don’t speak for the government on this) feel that this could save billions from the national health bill. Think seriously about this as you could make your exit maybe even ten years ahead of schedule and it would do wonders for the median age of the population. You can be assured that you are very easily replaced with much younger people from other countries with many years of work left in them.

If there were a move for people to go for the ten year earlier exit, that would leave a lot of houses in the suburbs where people want to live and send their children to school. It would be a win-win. Of course you wouldn’t be here to win, but just before your exit, I’m sure you would have a feeling of satisfaction that you had done your bit.

3. Driving tests for over-70s

The third area where we need to trim the fat is on our overcrowded roads. Thus we are seriously thinking of making everyone over 70 do the drivers license test again. Now I must warn you that it won’t be the breeze it was when you were pretty and 18 years old. No, no-one will be charmed by you. In fact the police who test you may well be badly disposed towards you and enjoy the power of their position in the testing situation. They have all heard how greedy the Baby Boomers are and how they took more than their share and wouldn’t move out of their houses when gently persuaded by Bernard Salt, and not so gently persuaded by fast rising council rates!

Oh dear, I just realised that I am in fact a "soon to be elderly," myself at the age of 56. Oh Hell! But I don’t really have to worry as I will receive an enormous, very generously indexed taxpayer-funded Parliamentary pension for life. Because of my position I can probably avoid the driving test! Anyway, I have a chauffeur.

"Why are you picking on senior drivers?” I hear you ask. Well, you will have declined in ability, you might pass out at the wheel.

"But the percentage of drivers having accidents is actually lower in older people,” I hear you say. I don’t care, it’s intuitive and I’m sticking to it. It’s not always a matter of statistics but of common sense and economic rationalism. If all drivers of 70 and over are required to take a diving test, think of the revenue for State Road authorities, for the police, even perhaps for driving instructors. It would add to GDP. The possibilities are endless!

I see some very dissatisfied faces in the audience. Sir, you object to the need to go for your license again on the grounds that you run a company with $5 million per year turnover and that you have made some of your best business decisions in the last 12 months. Yes, you would be required to do your driver’s license test again. Whilst I will admit that your business achievements auger well for your cognitive abilities, in fairness we will have to include everyone - no exceptions...

...oh except for people like me of course!

I am shocked at the number of cane toads in Brisbane and wonder why the residents of Brisbane have allowed this to happen. Two years ago, in Roma Street Parklands (an exotic garden with high-rises towering at one end) I saw a cane toad riding a water dragon. A small group of bystanders gasped in horror. The pink toad, with its robust thighs and humanoid arms, looked like a naked imp in an Hieronymous Bosh Judgement Day. Obviously it was attempting to copulate with the lizard, in an ecologically blasphemous act. But Brisbane is an ecologically blasphemous state in an ecologically insulted Australia. What does it tell us about the progress paradigm to have to live with a constant plague of ugly flesh-pink toads like helpless Biblical Egyptians?

Back in Brisbane for a while

We used to have a lot of articles from Queensland on candobetter.net. That is because the person who built candobetter.net, James Sinnamon, lived, networked and campaigned politically there. Due to a severe injury when his bicycle collided with a car, he now lives in Melbourne. However he still has to travel to Brisbane from time to time and we are down here on business again. The dogs are with us this time. They are becoming grey nomads.

From Melbourne to Brisbane we drove down or up or round (depending on your orientation) via the Newell Hwy and sadly saw nearly 50 kangaroo corpses and only two live kangaroos on the way. We also encountered a herd of cattle grazing the long paddock with only a temporary sign warning us 'Cattle on Road', yet no-one had skittled them. It was a long time since I had met cattle this way and I felt nostalgic to see the pleasant way they negotiated our passage. The Newell Hwy is old fashioned country compared to the coastal route to Brisbane. There was almost no traffic day or night Sunday and Monday until late afternoon of Monday, when trucks appeared. We entered Brisbane via the vast martian-like canals of the Ipswich Motorway, where everything natural vanished.

Scarce Brisbane parkland and waterways full of poisonous toads

Brisbane presents fewer opportunities for dogs than Melbourne still does. Despite the superficial leafy appearance of this overpopulated, overdeveloped city of once-was-beautiful-Queensland, parks are small and far between. Creek banks may be privately owned by householders and so, disastrously, Queensland lacks Victoria's saving grace of many paths along creeks and rivers. Lack of access to the privately owned banks of waterways cannot help in controlling this pest.

Cane toads in Woolcock Park, Ashgrove in Enoggera Creek Catchment

We took the dogs for a walk on Tuesday evening to diminutive Woolcock Park, Ashgrove, fifteen minutes away. Woolcock Park is on Ithaca Creek, part of the Enoggera catchment. The dogs were off their leashes for less than a minute when we realised that dusky pink cane toads dotted the lawn and pathway with the density and regularity of motifs on a green Axeminster carpet. Movement in any direction threatened a squelching collision with a motionless toad. They waited like chess pieces, staring into middle distance, apparently oblivious of other forms of life. They moved sluggishly away only if you jumped up and down right next to them.

Fortunately the dogs (from Victoria) entirely failed to react to the toads, maybe due to the lack of movement, or maybe because they are so far outside their concept of local ecology. They seem not to notice fruit bats either or the highly decorative and varied presence of lizards and geckos here. But then their eyesight and hearing is appalling. They are both 15 this year.

I've seen cane toads in Brisbane before. They were very visible in 2006-7 when I first started visiting the city frequently, but then the numbers seemed to die down. I was last here about a year ago and looked out for them but saw none. I have often walked in Woolcock Park before.

No accurate count of cane toads in Brisbane

On June 27, 2015, Natalie Bochenski reported that they might be on the decline, but cited Professor Rick Shine, who admitted that we are not collecting any useful statistics on their numbers.

"We don't really have good data to tell us just how much their numbers have dropped," he said. "But it is clear that in many of these areas where they were once very common, the numbers are much lower than they once were."

Seemingly hedging his bets, the professor also suggested that perhaps locals are simply becoming used to the multitude of cane toads and noticing them less.

This year, February 2016, however, it seemed to us, as regular visitors, that the population has jumped by an order of magnitude on the visible plague of 2006-7. This is alarming when you think of the harm to local wildlife, as well as to pets. What does it tell us about the progress paradigm to have to live with a constant plague of ugly flesh-pink toads like helpless Biblical Egyptians? Granted, we were reacting to the plague we saw at Woolcock Park Ashgrove, but Enoggera Creek flows from Brisbane's main tropical forest and wildlife park, on Mount Nebo through a variety of suburbs that include Ashgrove and then into the Brisbane River. What would you think?

It seems to me that in a functional, healthy society this ongoing plague could not occur because school children and elderly people would be out there with spiked sticks and lidded buckets, removing the toads fifty at a time, then five at a time, then one at a time, scooping up their egg-slime, and placing barriers to their movement, until they were all gone. As the numbers dropped the many natural predators on their eggs would assist their decline. But Australians are coached by their top-down governments into passivity with the expectation of industrial solutions to any crisis or epidemic like this.

The dead weight of 'authorities'

When no industrial solution occurs, because we have no local chains of cooperation between neighbours or more widely, between citizens, we simply retreat from the problem. Even where a local group does begin to fight back, it is very hard for them to persist, since all kinds of authorities will tell them that their efforts are useless. Such as:

"Myth 8: We can control cane toads by catching them and killing them.

I’m sure you’ve seen all the well-meaning toad control groups that go out in their numbers to catch the toads. Unfortunately, it is all to no avail. The only way to eradicate a species by this means is to remove them beyond a rate at which they can reproduce. This works well for species with a long gestation (e.g., horse, camel, etc), but not for toads. A female can produce 30,000 eggs in just one clutch, and a single one of those eggs can yield a mature toad in just a few months. Miss just a few toads and the number will bounce back just as quickly. In fact, as you have just removed all their competitors, it makes it that much easier for those left to survive. Despite all the hard work that goes into it, population surveys have revealed that the rate of expansion of the toads is just as fast as before any control measures were taken." http://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/sciencecommunication/2011/04/18/myth-busting-monday-cane-toads/

Government policy vs Government action

Conversely, a Commonwealth Government policy statement on the toads, tells us:

It is possible to control cane toad numbers humanely in a small area, such as a local creek or pond. This can be done by collecting the long jelly-like strings of cane toad eggs from the water or by humanely disposing of adult cane toads. Control is best at the egg or adult stages because cane toad tadpoles can easily be confused with some native tadpoles. Adult cane toads are also readily confused with some of the larger native frogs. Care should be taken to ensure you can correctly identify your local frog fauna before you become involved in projects to remove cane toads from the environment. This approach to cane toad control requires ongoing monitoring of the creek or pond. Fine-mesh fencing can also assist in keeping cane toads from ponds that are in need of special protection. http://www.environment.gov.au/biodiversity/invasive-species/publications/factsheet-cane-toad-bufo-marinus

But, for all such policy statements, does any government continue to actively educate, support and promote local people to carry out these controls? No. A paltry couple of million was spent in 2009-10; some on research, a little on funding local eradication efforts. Maybe it actually worked and that is why the numbers seemed to some people to go down. How would we know if there is no careful monitoring? Although the impacts of the cane toad are listed as a key threatening process under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act), it is clear that Commonwealth, State and local governments remain effectively indifferent to this scourge.

Queenslanders thus appear to leave their parks, gardens and naturestrips to be overrun by cane toads, just as they have left their political system to being over run by Liberal, Labor and Green political parties representing developer-interests. It's easy to flog real-estate to overseas investors even if Brisbane itself is becoming unlivable due to its colonisation by cane toads and developers. Beautiful one day, built-over the next.

It is more likely that someone will find a way to sell cane toad hallucinogens and profit from the plague than that we will defend nature from the cane toad. Similarly, corporate profit from housing inflation is so much better organised than any democratic efforts to defend Australian civil society from the growth lobby by countering the engineering of human population numbers upwards. We are encouraged to believe we are helpless in the face of Australia's increasing numbers, as if it had always been so, as if immigration were a right to move anywhere that overwhelmed all civil rights once you got there. 'Industrial' solutions are proposed: negative gearing for new housing in order to meet the 'challenges'; more immigrants' rights in order to overwhelm the faint protests of squeezed out residents.

The link between these various plagues is not all that obvious, but it lies in a systemically induced passivity - a loss of self-detirmination on an ecological and a political level.

Brisbane Council relies on one small cane toad dog to defend Morton Island from the encroaching plague

Brisbane Council proudly announces that Morton Island is still free of cane toads and it apparently employs one small dog to keep it that way. Enough said. We obviously need a new government here.

Brisbane Council's policy on cane toads.

Cane toads

2pm, Saturday 27 February 2016, Flemington Community Centre, Victoria, Australia. Guest Speaker: The Hon Kelvin Thomson MP, Federal Member for Wills, will speak on : "Victoria, once the Gardens State, is now headed for population overload. How we are failing the next generation." We would like to use the occasion to thank Kelvin for his work over many years as a leading spokesperson for sustainable population and as an environmental advocate, including his support for many groups, including PPL VIC and those in his electorate of Wills. As you are probably aware he will be retiring from Parliament at the next election.

Time: 2 pm for 2:15 pm start

Date: Saturday 27 February 2016

Venue: Flemington Community Centre, Mt Alexander Road, Flemington. See Melways Map Reference 29 B12 (The Centre is on Debneys Park.)

Transport:

Carpark - in front of Centre (turn in off Mt Alexander Road.) If full parking is usually available in Victoria Street round the corner off Mt Alexander Road. Tram - down Flemington Road to Mt Alexander Road. Train - nearby Flemington Bridge Railway Station. Cyclists - the Capital City Trail is nearby for cyclists.

Guest Speaker: The Hon Kelvin Thomson MP, Federal Member for Wills, will speak on : "Victoria, once the Gardens State, is now headed for population overload. How we are failing the next generation." We would like to use the occasion to thank Kelvin for his work over many years as a leading spokesperson for sustainable population and as an environmental advocate, including his support for many groups, including PPL VIC and those in his electorate of Wills. As you are probably aware he will be retiring from Parliament at the next election.

Afternoon tea: Stay for a cup of tea after the meeting. We plan to finish by 5 pm.

Contact: Julianne Bell Secretary Protectors of Public Lands Victoria Inc. Mobile: 0408022408 Email; jbell5[AT]bigpond.com

Mark O'Connor, co-author of Overloading Australia talks on population fallacies and the IPAT equation and touches on Greens politics at the Sustainable Living Festival in a Sustainable Population Australia event.

Why does the mass media support false government narratives that justify our support or participation in deadly wars? Media analyst, Jeremy Salt and Susan Dirgham of Australians for Reconciliation in Syria, explore this perplexing question that shapes our times and our future.

Why does the mass media support false government narratives that justify our support or participation in deadly wars? Media analyst, Jeremy Salt and Susan Dirgham of Australians for Reconciliation in Syria, explore this perplexing question that shapes our times and our future.

This article is summary plus transcript from the video of Part Two of Politics and war in Syria: Susan Dirgham interviews Jeremy Salt. Susan Dirham is convener of Australians for Reconciliation in Syria (AMRIS) and Jeremy Salt is a scholar of Media propaganda and the Middle East.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Explains how Syrian society is secular, how women have freedom there, and that it is predominantly secular. For her it is very comparable to Australian society. So why don’t Australians know this? Furthermore, the Sunnis in Syria, who are in the majority, do not welcome the extremism that is being brought into the country.

Mystery of mass media’s motivation in supporting false government narratives

JEREMY SALT: Relates the problem back to the mass media again, ( as in Part One of this series). What people know about Syria is what the media chooses to tell them. There is a huge question about media ethics. Balance, objectivity are very big questions, which relate to media-ownership and the way the media operates generally. If we think about Australia, something close to 70 % of the print media is owned and operated by Rupert Murdoch. And we saw from what happened in England, how corrupt the Murdoch organisation can be, with the wire-tapping, the phone-tapping and all the rest of it. Murdoch himself is ultra, ultra conservative, very pro-Israeli. He is anti all the things we’re talking about and Murdoch runs his newspaper in the same way. The Australian newspaper, for example, is more or less like a free market Pravda.. It’s tightly controlled. There are gate-keepers. So all of this fits into the general context of the questions you are asking about why the media does what it does. The media will not say those things you are talking about - of course it won’t – because it disrupts the narrative. It doesn’t want people to know that women have freedom in Syria and that Syria is way ahead of most Middle Eastern countries in terms of women’s individual freedoms. Of course, if you are involved in political activity against the government, you’re in trouble. We know that. Well there is a good reason for that. Syria has been under siege for a long, long period of time. So the media is not going to bring out those positive aspects. But the interesting thing is, why does the media pick up a government narrative and reproduce it? Why? This is the real mystery. Why? I mean they did this over the Iraq war. It was seamless. 2003. It was very obvious that what Bush, Blair, Colin Powel were saying was without any factual basis. It was all propaganda. Blair’s dodgy dossier, all the statements they made about weapons of mass destruction, had absolutely no evidentiary basis. And, if you were a journalist, you should have been able to see that. I mean, a child could have seen it. So, where is the truth here? There is no truth. They couldn’t prove it, and yet they went with this government narrative. And then we have a war, which resulted in the destruction of a country, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and dispossession of many, many others. And at the end of it, when they’ve hunted for their weapons of mass destruction, and haven’t found them – because they weren’t there – the two papers I know of, the New York Times and the Washington Post, said, ‘Oh, we were wrong. We’re sorry.’ But this was another lie. Because they weren’t wrong. That wasn’t the explanation. The reason was they did not ask questions about the government narrative.

And so, after that incredible propaganda operation, I thought, well, that’s got to be it. Then along comes Syria – and they do the same thing all over again!

Why does the media do it? How does it interest the media to portray the Syrian war in such a fashion? The Guardian, for example, which is one of the worst culprits, why was the Guardian’s reporting up to this point so shocking? Anything a ‘rebel’ (so-called) or ‘activist’ said, the Guardian would snap up and publish. So why is the Guardian doing this? Does the Guardian have the same kind of antagonism towards Syria that the British Government has for its own strategic reasons? Because England lies with [?is allies with] America and America wants to bring down the Syrian Government, partly because Israel wants to bring down the Syrian Government – all these reasons. But why is the media going along with it? What are they getting out of it? Are they getting money? Why? How is it in their interests.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Is it because it’s a 9-5 job and …

JEREMY SALT: No, it’s not that. It’s something to do with the culture. It’s very hard for me to put my finger on it. Why they would do this. But it’s a pattern. That’s the whole point. It’s a pattern. It’s not an incidental thing. It’s not an aberration [….] And [they] will do the same thing with Iran. It’s like they have bought the government line in America and in England, on a whole range of issues.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Do they also help determine the government line?

JEREMY SALT: Well, there’s always interplay. […] But we have to ask the question about responsibility in the media. What is their responsibility? Where does it lie? What is the media there for? Well, it’s there to make money. To make a profit. If it doesn’t make a profit, it’s not going to survive. That’s one thing. But what else is the media supposed to be doing? The old-fashioned idea is the media was the watchdog of the public interest. And possibly that was more true up to about the 1970s, 1980s, than it is now. And then the newspapers started to go downhill, partly because of the internet, because people weren’t reading so much. They were watching television. They were doing social media, and all the rest of it. So, the quality of newspapers declined and they started – to keep up sales – they were doing different things. Infotainment. Celebrity gossip. All the rest of it. The quality of analysis and reporting fell. But we’re not really talking about that so much as we are talking about what should be reasonably good quality newspapers, like the Guardian, like the Washington Post. Why do they run this line on Syria? Why? Obviously what they’re saying is not true and, at the very least, is not balanced. Why did the Washington Post or the Guardian never report what the Syrian Government was saying?

SUSAN DIRGHAM: It gets back to money?

JEREMY SALT: I don’t know. I don’t know. I seriously don’t know why. And with a paper like the Guardian I have to ask questions. Well, the Guardian can’t make all that much money. Maybe it does. I don’t think so.
SUSAN DIRGHAM: Sponsors?

Mass media as a business

JEREMY SALT: I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on. I really can’t explain this: why the media does this all the time.
So, when we talk about the media, what we are actually talking about is media as business. Business is money. And, you know, the diversification of ownership of the media. Like in America, for example, a number of very large corporations have media ownership. Like Westinghouse. Westinghouse is one of them, only one of them. Murdoch’s interests go all across the print media into film, into cable television, into fibreoptics – the whole thing. And the media has always worked closely with government because of this give and take. The media wants things from the government. It wants licences. And the media will give things to the government. It will give them [government] favourable publicity. In Australian or in England we know that politicians are very very quick to try to curry favour with the media magnates – with Murdoch, for example. They might fall out, but they do their best to stay on side with him. So the media functions as part of the business sector – fundamentally. And the business sector has close relations with the government. So there are interlocking systems, of which the media is part. I think this partly explains the kind of narrative we see about Syria and what we saw about Iraq. It’s pumping out a line.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Also, I was an activist during the Vietnam war – we’ve got some other activists here – and what we spoke of about then was the ‘military industrial complex’. That’s still alive and active. Can we also talk about the ‘media industrial complex’ and are there links?

JEREMY SALT: Are you talking about America?

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Generally, but America in particular, of course.

JEREMY SALT: The media industrial complex. Can you just explain what you mean by that?

SUSAN DIRGHAM: It means that people don’t really have a voice; that you do have – as you are suggesting – companies that have this power that can determine what the narrative is. For example, on Syria. So you don’t get that balance. Journalists don’t have the freedom to present a balanced picture.

The ‘free’ press.

JEREMY SALT: They don’t. If you work for a big news corporation, you cannot write what you want. It might be just coincidental that your views are the same as Rupert Murdoch’s. That’s really nice. But if they are not the same as Rupert Murdoch’s, you’ve got to make sure that, pretty much, they are. Otherwise you’re not going to have much of a future. You can’t just wander off and write whatever you want. But the thing about the media is – a lot of people take these phrases for granted – like ‘free press’ – so forth and so on. Well, free for whom? Who has the right to speak? Who has the right to write in the media?

It’s very carefully controlled. It does vary a little bit from news organisation to news organisation, but basically it’s controlled. Some people have access. A lot of people don’t have access. I mean a lot of people in Australia who don’t have any access at all to the mainstream media at all. They’re very well informed, they’re very intelligent, they’re articulate, they’re experienced, they know their area, but they’re not going to be given any space in the mainstream media. Because they’re going to say things that the mainstream media – for whatever reason – doesn’t want people to hear.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: If you worked in the mainstream media today, and you wanted …

JEREMY SALT: Well I couldn’t –

SUSAN DIRGHAM: …and you’re a person of courage, what would you do …

JEREMY SALT: Well, I wouldn’t last. I wouldn’t last. I couldn’t last.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Even moving to another area? You wouldn’t be an ABC Middle East correspondent if you …

JEREMY SALT: I don’t … no, I wouldn’t …

SUSAN DIRGHAM: …integrity and courage…

JEREMY SALT: No, I wouldn’t because I would go to Syria and I’d want to go to the Syrian Government and get their take on what’s going on.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Or the people…

JEREMY SALT: …and I’d want to go to the West Bank …

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Or the women. Don’t forget the women.

JEREMY SALT: Alright, okay, I’d talk to the women.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: The women of Syria…

JEREMY SALT: If I were in Palestine, I’d go to the West Bank and I’d talk to people there and I’d do it in a much more forceful way than the ABC would allow. So, therefore, someone like me – well, let’s not talk about me – someone like me is not going to be given the freedom to speak. Right? You’re sidelined. I know lots of people here, in this country, who are very well informed about the Middle East, about Syria, about Iran. They’ve no place in the media – and they’ve tried, but they’re shut out. And so the space is given to Greg Sheridan, for example, in The Australian, and… who was it, who wrote… Derryn Hinch!

SUSAN DIRGHAM: (Laughs softly).

JEREMY SALT: In the Age, wrote this silly piece about…

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Comparing Assad to …

JEREMY SALT: Yes!

SUSAN DIRGHAM: To Pol Pot!

JEREMY SALT: Yes! So what is a quality, so-called ‘quality’ newspaper doing with Derryn Hinch on the Middle East? When there are many, many people in this country well-qualified to talk sensibly, and they use Derryn Hinch.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: I think Derryn Hinch was probably using his heart and he was going to the shallow analysis…

JEREMY SALT: But

SUSAN DIRGHAM: … of the mainstream media, and he just thought, well, Assad’s the criminal; he’s a brutal criminal; he’s killing his own people; he must be like Pol Pot.

JEREMY SALT: But why use Derryn Hinch for this anyway?

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Yeah.

JEREMY SALT: He can write a letter to the editor…

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Yeah.

JEREMY SALT: ‘Derryn Hinch of Armadale, Worried Reader’, whatever he wants to describe himself.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Why don’t they ask you and me to write about it?

JEREMY SALT: Well, not me. Forget me. Just leave me out of it. There are a lot of other people who can write intelligently about it. Why do they go to Derryn Hinch? And the whole thing about the media is that the news is an artefact …
SUSAN DIRGHAM: (Joking) We’ll have a fight soon.

JEREMY SALT: No, we’re not going to fight. News is an artefact. It’s something that people who read newspapers might not necessarily be fully aware of. I mean they do generally or not. The newspaper is one dimensional. There it is, but there is a whole kind of, like, hive of activity befor that. So the raw news is shaped by the reporter, by the editors. It’s shaped according to where it’s placed in the paper. It’s shaped according to the headlines. It’s honed and whittled and refined. Until it gets to you. And you’ve got to think of the mass of information that comes into the media every single day, whether you’re talking about newspapers or television, immense mass. And what you are seeing is a tiny fraction. So ‘news’ should be put in quotes. News is something that the newspaper or television station wants you to know; chooses for you. It’s not unmediated. And then, the other part of that, of course, is the politics of it and the way that things are reported. For example, in the case of Syria, why Syria is reported in such a negative fashion and such an unbalanced fashion. Why have none of these news organisations seen as their business to try to be fair? This is what the so-called rebels are saying – let’s hear what the Syrian Government and people who support the government have to say and what the families of the soldiers have to say. We’ve seen nothing of that. Nothing whatsoever. So, it’s completely lopsided.

And, we go back to that basic question: Why do they [the mainstream media] do it? What’s in it for them? What’s in it for them? And there’s something grey here that I can’t really put my hands on.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: At the moment, and the people in this room know this, because I’m asking them to help me, I’m working on a complaint letter to the ABC because they had a program on in December, on Radio National Earshot program, ‘The Drawers of Memory, Ahmed’s story.’ And the protagonist in this program was a ‘freedom fighter’ in Syria; someone who was running round …

JEREMY SALT: Described as a ‘freedom fighter’?

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Well, he says he supports freedom, and his ‘friends’ the insurgents based in Damascus, who support ‘freedom,’ he reckons they will win in the end. And maybe they will; they’ve got so much ‘support’ from Saudi Arabia, from Qatar – Apparently he was a money-runner, with Saudi Arabia and Qatar’s money. But he is presented on the ABC as someone that’s credible. And the victims of these insurgents – ordinary people like us that live in the suburbs of Damascus – are just ignored. But, what I discovered when I did a little bit of research on this story is that this is basically an unofficial ABC policy, to present this side of things. As we’ve been discussing, basically. So you get MediaWatch saying, ‘Assad is a brutal dictator. Assad is a war criminal. Assad has used chemicals against his people …’ So, if Mediawatch says this, what mainstream journalist dares present another narrative, dares present the side of the Syrian people?

JEREMY SALT: Why should we use the word ‘dare’? What is the problem in reporting Syria in a more balanced way? I mean, Australians would like to know for sure. They would like to have a different picture. Why does the media pump out this completely lopsided view? Why are they doing it? What are they frightened of? Why are they buying this narrative in this fashion? This is really what I can’t understand. You know, they’re not being told to do it by the government. The government’s not issuing an edict, ‘Please report this situation like this’. No-one’s doing that. So, exactly, how does it work out like that? That they will just report the situation in this kind of grossly unbalanced fashion.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: People get intimidated. They don’t realise their power. Individuals don’t realise the power and influence they have.

JEREMY SALT: If you were – I imagine that if you were an editor of a mainstream newspaper and you suddenly had a rush of blood to the head and decided to report Syria what you or I would call ‘fairly and objectively’, you probably wouldn’t last. But why? Why would they not allow you to report Syria in a more balanced fashion? This is the mystery that we keep coming back to. Why does the media do this? I mean, no-one’s going to punish them if they report the Syrian war – I would think – in a more balanced fashion. Why do they do it? And this is happening all the time. This freedom fighter: ‘I’m a freedom fighter’, ‘I love freedom.’ Oh, great. Okay. Well, so do I.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: So do the Syrian people.

JEREMY SALT: Congratulations. We all love freedom. Freedom’s a really nice thing.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: But what is freedom? What is free?

JEREMY SALT: It’s a word. That’s what it is. It’s a word: ‘I love freedom’.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Freedom to live.

JEREMY SALT: Yes. ‘I’m going to kill people, but I love freedom.‘

SUSAN DIRGHAM: ‘And I’m going to kill them for Saudi Arabia, for America.’

JEREMY SALT: And this has just one on and on for the last five years. And it doesn’t stop. And the latest thing we have is this situation in this town of Madaya, north of Damascus. And the media is reporting Assad forces, or Assad loyalists, or Syrian Army – what are they saying – usually the first two – besieged this town. And we have the reports of the civilians starving – and all the rest. I’m quite sure they’re having a terrible time.

“So, increasing the population – fast population growth and poor planning – they’re like a vicious circle. When I worked as a planner, I’d go to VCAT and, quite often, development applications would be turned down by councils and the developer’s argument would be, ‘I know, ideally, this isn’t the best place to build this development, but you do know that Melbourne’s population is going to double by 2040-something and so, therefore, we’ve got to start building high-density in areas where we wouldn’t normally build it, because, you know, unless we’re just going to sprawl outwards forever…’. But both are going to happen, so we’ve got to understand that rapid population growth and developers who are making sure that they’re taking control of the planning system - they’re intertwined.” Mark Allen, former planner, of Population, Permaculture and Planning in a speech at the Sustainable Living Festival in Melbourne, 14 February 2016.

Mark Allen of Population Permaculture and Planning asks: Is it possible to accommodate a growing population without unacceptably high density living and urban sprawl? If so, what rate of population growth should we be looking at and what types of community should we be creating? This workshop discusses the merits of village style living in combination with permaculture principles and asks the question, where do we go from here?

The gradual rise in oceanic acidity is weakening the shells of shellfish, corals and sea urchins, making them vulnerable to predation and damage from oceanic movements.

Many marine animals produce protective shells and exoskeletons from calcium carbonate from seawater, but higher CO2 concentrations absorbed into seawater from the environment is lowering the oceanic PH.

The gradual rise in oceanic acidity is weakening the shells of shellfish, corals and sea urchins, making them vulnerable to predation and damage from oceanic movements.

Many marine animals produce protective shells and exoskeletons from calcium carbonate from seawater, but higher CO2 concentrations absorbed into seawater from the environment is lowering the oceanic PH.

This makes conditions more acidic and is affecting the strength of shells making the animals weaker against predators such as crabs and other marine life. But new research at the University of Glasgow shows the humble mussel is fighting back by adapting and evolving to the sea changes.

In a new paper, published February 15, 2016 in Scientific Reports, researchers from the University of Glasgow found mussel shells grown under ocean acidification produce more amorphous calcium carbonate as a repair mechanism, compensating for the impact of environmental changes.

With growth in global industrialisation, the surface pH of the oceans has declined form pH 8.1 to pH 8.0, meaning the water is less alkaline. Increasing CO2 leads to ocean acidification and scientists expect a further reduction in alkalinity from pH 8.0 – pH ~7.7 by the end of the 21st century.

Dr Susan Fitzer, from Geography and Earth Sciences at the University of Glasgow, who led the research, said: “Many marine organisms are being directly affected by these changes. They need calcium carbonate to produce their shells and exoskeletons from calcium carbonate, but higher acidity reduces the concentration of carbonate ions available for shell formation and subsequently their shells are becoming more brittle which makes them more vulnerable.

“Our study found that mussel shells grown under ocean acidification produce more amorphous calcium carbonate and had less crystallographic control over shell growth. This shows the mussel shell composition is changing in response to the environmental change."

Mussels were found to have reduced growth and altered material properties when grown under future projected ocean acidification conditions. The shells became harder and less elastic resulting in them being more prone to fracture in stormy environments and more vulnerable against predation.

Dr Fitzer led the research with a team of scientists at the Diamond Light Source. The team used synchrotron X-ray Microscopy to investigate the influence of ocean acidification on amorphous calcium carbonate formation within mussel shells. Marine organisms, such as mussels, producing calcium carbonate shells, mould a solid crystalline structure from the natural disorder of amorphous calcium carbonate.

Dr Fitzer said: “Research suggests that mussels induce amorphous calcium carbonate as a repair mechanism to combat shell damage under ocean acidification.”

“These phase transitions from amorphous calcium carbonate to a crystalline structure are important to understand how marine organisms such as mussels produce their protective shells. Mussels use amorphous calcium carbonate to transport insoluble materials to crystalisation sites for growth and repair.”

Despite the findings, the mussels’ adaptation may be insufficient. The impact of rising oceanic acidification on the crystalisation of mussel shells still raises concerns for the protective function of shells, in order to protect animals against predation and stormy environments.

Dr Fitzer’s research was funded as part of a four year Leverhulme Trust study examining ‘Biomineralisation: protein and mineral response to ocean acidification’, awarded to the research team including Professor Maggie Cusack, Dr Nick Kamenos and Dr Vernon Phoenix. The common blue edible mussel Mytilus edulis was the focus of this study as a globally and economically important food resource.

The paper, titled ‘Biomineral shell formation under ocean acidification: a shift from order to chaos’, is published in Scientific Reports.

Susan Dirgham of AMRIS talks with Middle East and propaganda scholar, Jeremy Salt, about the history of western interventions in the Middle East and in Syria. She asks why the mainstream press don't tell westerners how Syria is secular and has good women's rights; women got the vote there in 1947. This article is summary plus transcript from the video of Part One of Politics and war in Syria: Susan Dirgham interviews Jeremy Salt. Susan Dirham is convener of Australians for Reconciliation in Syria (AMRIS) and Jeremy Salt is a scholar of Media propaganda and the Middle East

Jeremy Salt begins by talking about 19th century history of interventions in the Middle East, then about intervention in Iraq in 1990s. The UN ran this nominally, but really England and United States did. Two UN humanitarians objected to the inhumanity of economic sanctions against Iraq, possibly even mentioned ‘genocide’: they were Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck. [1] To Susan’s question, Dr Salt agrees that UN personnel no longer speak out. On the subject of the 2003 ‘weapons of mass destruction’: The use of no-fly zones to conduct aerial bombardments. [2] Libya. No-fly zone fig leaf. Syria: they wanted to get a UN resolution for a no-fly zone, but Russia and China blocked this with the UN. Next best thing [sic] was to pull down the government of Damascus by using armed gangs – mercenaries. From 2011 until now and still [the west]have not reached their main objective, which is the destruction of the government in Damascus, but they have destroyed a large part of Syria. This is similar to the Sandinista template of mercenaries used in Nicaragua.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Why do these people choose to fight for/align themselves with western governments when they can see as clearly as you and I can see that these western governments are out to destroy Arab societies?

JEREMY SALT: [Ed: Not exact quotes always; some paraphrase] But we don’t know who these people are. Initially some of them were Syrians, but a lot were from Iraq. Because, in many ways, the war in Syria is the Iraq war exported. The Saudis and other Gulf states have pumped money into Sunni Muslim groups in Western Iraq to destabilise the government in Bagdad, which they didn’t like.

The whole protest movement in Syria was wildly exaggerated [by external war-mongering forces] who were waiting to seize just such an opportunity to make their move against Syria. We’ve seen this happen in Latin America, the Middle East over many, many decades. It happened in Chili, Iran, Ukraine. When the people begin to protest, you come in from behind and you turn those protests to your advantage.

So, for the question of why local people would support western-aligned interventions, the level of true support is unknown. This is not a civil war. This is a campaign against Syria orchestrated by outside governments, who want to destroy Syria and are using a protest movement. Infiltrating it.

You might remember the first week of that protest movement in Dada, in Southern Syria. We are told that the Syrian military started firing into peaceful protesters.

What the media didn’t report was the number of civilians and police who were killed by armed men in that week. And we were told by the same media that there were snipers on rooftops firing into peaceful demonstrators. They said, ‘government snipers’. Almost certainly, they were not. They were provocateurs, stirring as much trouble up as they could. Since those days, we know full well, that the number of foreigners coming to Syria has turned into a flood.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Jeremy, the thing you mention about snipers; I was in Damascus in April 2011, just one month after the start of the crisis, and I met a young man who had been to an anti-government rally just that morning and he said that two people were killed at the rally and others were shot. There were police at the rally with arms, but they did not draw their weapons. So it was just a mystery, who killed these people and Syrians know this.

Taksim Square Massacre template

JEREMY SALT: Once again, this is part of a template. This happens in many situations like this. Where you send your undercover agents into a situation. They open fire from a rooftop or from round a corner. No-one really knows who does it, but that’s the opportunity that the enemy wants, and its media wants, to portray the government as being brutal and oppressive – to killing its own people.

So, what we are seeing in Syria is just another repeat of what we have seen in many, many other countries. We had this in Istanbul, in the Taksim Square Massacre. There was a Mayday march and people started firing into the crowd. They were obviously agent-provocateurs. Turning the whole demonstration – disrupting it – turning it into a panic-stricken kind of riot. 'Cause people didn’t know what was going on.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: One thing that people don’t know is that there was the CIA-orchestrated coup in Syria in 1949. The first CIA coup ever. The CIA had just been recently set up. This was in Syria. So Syrian people know their history, know their enemies –

JEREMY SALT: The whole thing is people in the Arab world generally have a very strong grasp of history and, you know, the people who suffer, who are the victims, remember the history. The people who do bad things to them; they want to move on, want to forget it.

So, of course there is a [?known] history. And it’s not just 1949; This goes back to the end of the first world war.

Syria has been ‘under siege’, effectively, all that time, up unto the present day. So, 1949, yes, that coup, Husni al-Zaim was put there by the CIA, and then he’s followed by a second man, Sami al-Hinnawi, then Adib Shishakli. And Shishakli, whether he was actually put-up to it by the Americans, is not clear. He probably wasn’t, but what he did, the Americans liked. Because, one thing that he didn’t like was a proposal to unite the fertile crescent. To bring Syria and Iraq together.

Iraq was under the domination of the British, so, if that had happened, it would have held a wonderful advantage for Britain – and the Americans didn’t want that. Because, beneath all of these things that we are talking about, all through the 20th century, up to the present day, there were these subterranean tensions between these outside powers.

Britain and France were wartime allies in 1914. Once the war was over, they were rivals.

And the British did what they could to limit French gains. And why did the French leave Syria in 1946? Because the British put pressure on them. Made them leave, because France was, relatively speaking, in a weak position. Britain was weak, but not as weak.

And we see, in the 1950s, Britain and the United States, this same sort of subterranean tension playing up because Britain’s fading as an imperial power, America’s moving into the region and doesn’t want the British to regain lost ground. So this is all part of the picture.

Secular society and women’s rights in Syria: if people knew the truth…

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Another bit of history going back to those times, is that women were given the vote in Syria in 1949. And what disturbs me greatly is we [Australians/westerners] don’t really know what Syrian society is like. It’s hidden behind that ‘brutal dictator’. So our media is presenting a ‘brutal dictator’ versus ‘rebels’ and, behind that ‘brutal dictator’, you’ve got the army - a secular army - and you’ve got a secular society, and you’ve got women, who have extraordinary freedoms. Do you think, if we knew …?

Western governments and media do not want us to know the truth

JEREMY SALT: Yes, of course, if we knew; if people went there. I mean Syria had a quite reasonable tourist industry before this war broke out. We all know that Syria’s a fantastic country. A wonderful place, right. So, a number of people who go there would see that for themselves, but what the others have to rely on is what the media tell them. And the media doesn’t tell them the things that you’re saying. And the media wasn’t saying these things about many, many other countries.

The media will pick up a story, a narrative, which fits in with what they and the government wants. As it did over Iraq, as it has done with many other situations. So Syria becomes a target to be destroyed, therefore it’s not in the interests of the government or much of the media to talk about positive things about Syria. Not to talk about a secular society, freedom for women, and all the rest – because people would say then, ‘Well, why are we taking Syria? Why are we going for Syria?

And so the narrative over Syria has been shocking from the beginning. There has been no balanced reporting whatsoever about Syria. I mean, one or two reporters file reasonable reports from time to time, but 95, 97% of the coverage has not conformed in any way to the standards of proper journalism. It’s been completely biased. You haven’t seen the other side.

If you are a journalist the primary responsibility is what they call ‘balance’. You’re never going to achieve perfect balance, but in a situation like this, even if you want to report what the rebels are saying and doing - even if you and I don’t think they really are rebels – let them have their say. Let people think about it. But you have to report what the others are saying. You have to go to the Syrian government.

You’ve got to go to the victims of the rebels. They are very good – the media – for the last five years has talked about the ‘victims of the Syrian army’ – as they say it – but they haven’t paid any attention at all to the victims of these armed groups. And if they did, then naturally, people would get a very different idea.

If they [journalists] talked to the government and were able to see what happens in families who’ve lost young men. I mean, how many young men have died in Syria fighting these [‘rebel’] groups? Sixty thousand? Something like that. Plus all the others – tens of thousands – wounded.

If that were shown, the whole narrative would be disrupted. But it can’t be shown. It can’t be shown. You cannot really show the victims of war. This is common in all wars. They don’t like to show the gruesome detail.

We saw the other day how Obama was wiping away tears for children who had been shot dead in America. Well, this is the same Obama who has been ordering missile strikes in Yemen that have killed children.

Now if you show the victims of those missile strikes in Yemen – actually show the bodies – well then, the American public would do a double-take: ‘What on earth are we doing? Dead children! We’re killing children in Yemen.’

No, you don’t see those photographs. And the same in Syria. You don’t see the gory detail of what the armed groups are doing. It will be played down. But when the government does something, or the military does something, it’s magnified to the ultimate degree.

So there can’t be any trust in the mainstream media now, there cannot be. After the absolute pinnacle of propaganda about Iraq; Syria is even worse.

NOTES

[1] Denis Halliday - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Denis J. Halliday (born c.1941) was the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq from 1 September 1997 until 1998. He is Irish and holds an M.A. in ..."

Economic Sanctions "Hit Wrong Target," Says Former U.N. ...
" “Economic Sanctions “Hit Wrong Target,” Says Former U.N. Humanitarian ... Iraq,” warned former United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator Hans von Sponeck, .... Commonwealth Club of California held at the swank Westin St. Francis Hotel in .."

[2] Use of ‘No Fly Zones’: The way this works is to accuse a government of bombing its own citizens then for external powers to declare a ‘no fly zone’, which is somehow interpreted to mean that those powers can enter the zone and bomb government planes which may actually be trying to defend themselves against armed takeovers that imperil citizens. So this stops a country from defending itself militarily and enables outside powers to take over, beginning with the airspace.

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Dr Shaaban says UN Report claiming to uncover torture and murder by the Syrian government has no more credibility than the 'weapons of mass destruction' that the US used as an excuse to invade Iraq and which were later shown not to exist. "Everybody who is carrying arms against civilian and against the Government is a terrorist. The Russians are here according in response to the requests of the Syrian Government. The Russians are coordinating with us every single step and they are only fighting terrorists"; "The Security Council Resolution 2254 asked for one broad delegation from the opposition to represent the opposition in Geneva. Let us wait to see when that delegation is going to be made. The reality, Tony, again, is that these oppositions are paid by Turkey, by Saudi Arabia, by Qatar. [They] represent the countries who are paying them, but they do not represent the Syrian people. However, we are ready to sit with them whenever they are ready for a dialogue as Security Council resolution say"; "President Assad has been elected by the Syrian people and it is the Syrian people who decide [whether he will go"; Transcript and link to videoed interview inside article.

Transcript of Interview

TONY JONES, PRESENTER: It's almost impossible to imagine what life is like for ordinary Syrians caught up in the multi-sided conflict where the rules of war are routinely ignored. This week the world got a rare glimpse into what conditions are like for those detained in Syria's official prisons and makeshift detention centres. UN investigators accused the Syrian Government of murdering and torturing prisoners on a scale so grand it amounts to extermination. Government soldiers have even filmed the abuses they're accused of.

The UN report also accused Islamic State extremists and other rebel groups of torturing and executing their detainees. It's estimated thousands have been killed over the past five years.

PAULO PINHEIRO, IND. COMMISSION OF INQUIRY ON SYRIA: Prisoners are routinely tortured and beaten, forced to live in unsanitary and overcrowded cells with little food and no medical care. Many perish in detention.

TONY JONES: Meanwhile, Russian air strikes continue to pound rebel positions. This amateur video shows just how devastating the conflict in Syria has become with civilians increasingly in the firing line. The video shows what's said to be a series of Russian attacks on Aleppo, the city where 50,000 people have been displaced.

Well as the war on the ground continues to escalate, there's a second track: a hard road towards peace through United Nations-mediated talks in Geneva which have stalled several times. Delegates from the Syrian Government and the opposition arrived in Geneva last week for the peace talks which will take place in two weeks' time at the end of February. Each side blamed the other for the collapse of the talks.

Well let's go live to Damascus now. Dr Bouthaina Shaaban is the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's top advisor and she joins us now.

Thanks for being there.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN, ADVISOR TO SYRIAN PRESIDENT: Hello.

TONY JONES: Is your government prepared to return to the UN Syrian peace talks in Geneva on February 25th?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Well, if you allow me first just to say that unfortunately what the UN report has mentioned at the beginning of this program is totally unfounded. They have never been to Syria, they haven't been talking to Syrian people, they have been making such a statement as means of targeting the Syrian people and Syria, part of this war on Syria, I consider that report. However, to answer your question, Tony, the Syrian Government has been prepared right from the beginning of this war to respond to every single effort that was made by Kofi Annan, by General Moon, by Lakhdar Brahimi, by General Dhabi and now by - by de Mistura. The problem is not with the Syrian Government; the problem is with the agents who had been created by other parties, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, claiming that those people represent the Syrian people. And I will put this question with your viewers, Tony: do Western people believe that Saudi Arabia is an example to bring an opposition that would make democracy and the freedom and the human rights? Is Saudi Arabia the example that the West looks up to?

TONY JONES: Dr Shaaban, I'm just going to interrupt the flow here to go back to what you said at the beginning because you took umbrage with the UN Human Rights Commission report into the deaths in detention.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Yes. Yes. Yes.

TONY JONES: Now the reports includes accounts from more than 500 survivors of the Government's detention centres. It of course goes on to talk about other deaths in militia-controlled detention centres. But you are the Government, so it says that some of the worst of the detention centres were controlled by the Syrian intelligence agencies. Almost all of the people, these 500, describe being the victims of or witnesses to torture and inhuman and degrading treatment. Are you saying that they're all liars?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: I will answer you in two points, Tony. The first point is that this report, first Paulo Pinheiro was not allowed to come to Syria because we know how biased he is, but I will tell you that this report is as reliable as the claim that there was nuclear and mass destruction open in Iraq before occupying Iraq. And it is as - targeting Syria as a claim on Iraq was and we can see after 13 years of targeting Iraq what happened to Iraq and what happened to the Iraqi people because of all these unfounded claims that were targeting on Iraq. This is the first point. The second point: I will ask the UN, did they mention that millions of children that are being killed in front of our eyes in Yemen and Yemen did not do anything - isn't the obligation of the UN to question Saudi Arabia about this aggression, this horrible war on Yemeni people? What I'm saying is that ...

TONY JONES: Dr Shaaban, I'm going to - I'm sorry to ...

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: ... the UN report has no - has no credibility. One word, one word: the UN report has no credibility. It has not been done in Syria.

TONY JONES: The UN report, if I may say so ...

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: It has not been - yes. No credibility.

TONY JONES: Dr Shaaban, if I may say so, the UN report, as I say, sets out 500 witnesses who say they've all been in detention and they've witnessed horrors in detention in Syrian detention centres. More than 200 of those survivors say they witness one or more deaths in custody.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Those people ...

TONY JONES: They describe - if I can just finish. They describe their cell mates being beaten to death during interrogation or dying in their cells after being tortured. Have you taken the time to read the accounts of these individuals?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: I did. I definitely did. And I will remind you of the first Geneva when we went to Montreal and there were pictures published in London claiming to be pictures of people who are dying of hunger in Syrian prison and later the whole world discovered that these pictures were made up by a cuttery - a company to be broadcast. I tell you, these people interviewed, if they were people who are interviewed, they are - they haven't been in Syrian prisons, they were not in Syria. This report was made in the Turkish and Jordanian camps of the supporters of the terrorists who had been targeting Syria for the last five years. It is another way of targeting the Syrian people and Syria,

TONY JONES: Well I'll just bring one particular case to your attention because there's so much detail around it. In 2014 a man held in the centre under the control of the Fourth Division of the Syrian Army had his genitals mutilated. There are case after case of torture and murder in this report and whether you believe the witnesses or not, can I ask you, how are you going to respond to it?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: I - I would have believed a report that would be balanced and that would speak about ISIL crimes, about the moving of Syrian people from anywhere that terrorists occupy to God and the Syrian Government. If the Syrian Government is as this report describes, could you - could you tell me or could the UN tell me why 85 per cent of the Syrian population are in the areas controlled by the Government? Why wherever there is a terrorist organisation in any part of Syria, the whole Syrian people move to the areas where the Syrian Government is in full control? You know, I answered you, Tony ...

TONY JONES: Dr Shaaban - Dr Shaaban, can I just make the point that's not entirely true as we see hundreds of thousands of Syrians fleeing the country and going to places like Turkey and making their way to Europe. Now this report calls for your government to take urgent action, to make direct orders to the military and the intelligence personnel associated with these prison camps, to order them to cease the arbitrary killing of prisoners. Will you do that?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: My government is not working for the UN to tell our government its duties. We are a responsible government, our people are extremely important to us, and as I said - I repeat again: such a report, plus the sanctions, plus all the measures that had been taken against the Syrian people to present food and medicine to arrive to the Syrian people, plus the terrorists - all these are different ways of targeting our country and our people.

TONY JONES: Alright.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: And this is why we have been suffering for five years from this war. It's about time that the world looks for the truth rather than for falsified accusations that are totally unfounded. It's about time. It's about time.

TONY JONES: OK. Bouthaina Shaaban, let's go back to these peace talks in Geneva which you say you are prepared to return to. The key condition for the peace talks to actually succeed is for there to be a ceasefire. Do you agree to that?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Well, the least thing that the world and the UN could have said is that the Syrian delegation arrived as scheduled by the - by the - by the Vienna group. The Syrian delegation was there ready with no pre-condition. The Syrian Government was - was - the Syrian delegation was positive and forthcoming. While the other side were fighting with each other and they were so irresponsible and they are the ones actually who brought the talks into an end. So, as I said, it is ...

TONY JONES: Yes, no, that is true. Dr Shaaban, I'm sorry to interrupt you. Dr Shaaban, that is true, they were squabbling amongst each other. But I'm actually asking if when you go back to the talks, you're prepared without conditions to offer up a ceasefire?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: You know, there is no - no such thing as this question. We are prepared to go back with no pre-condition and the other side should go back with no pre-condition. But then what the subject or the timetable of the talks is left up to the Syrian. This is what Security Council Resolution 2254 says. It says it is the Syrian people who decide what is the agenda, it is the Syrian people who discuss the agenda and it is the Syrian people who agree on the agenda.

TONY JONES: Yes.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: No-one should impose any agenda on the Syrian people.

TONY JONES: That is true, but there is also a plan to end the conflict which has been endorsed by Russia, by Iran, by the United States and many others. It's that the peace talks would establish a transitional government in Syria which would rule the country for 18 months, after which ...

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: You know ...

TONY JONES: I'll just finish the point. After which point there would be elections. In 18 months there would be elections. Do you agree to that plan?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Tony. Tony, Tony, I am here to be informative to your viewers and I respect your viewers. I'm speaking from thousands of miles away. The only way and the best way to end this war on Syria is to have Western countries truly wanting to fight terrorism, to join the Syrian Army and the Russians in fighting terrorism. You know at Ramadi in Iraq, they said that the American coalition liberated Ramadi. 90 per cent of Ramadi is destroyed. Our ecology is destroyed, our factories are destroyed, our country is destroyed, our agriculture is destroyed and yet Western countries say (inaudible) ... how to stop the conflict. It's very simple. Join us in fighting terrorism. That's how we stop the war on Syria. But not to speak about ceasefire and the human, etc. with the - with terrorism speeding in our country and with the Army financing and facilitating terrorism from Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar with the full support of the US and the West. This is the reality of the situation, believe me.

TONY JONES: Well, I mean - well, one other - one other harsh reality is that the Russian air strikes that you're talking about, it said 90 per cent of them are not hitting ISIS terrorists, but they're hitting the Free Syrian Army and other opposition groups backed by the United States. This is a huge problem, isn't it? I mean, if you're fighting terrorists rather than opposition groups, why are you bombing so many of the opposition groups?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: (Laughs) This is one problem with the language that the West is using. What is the difference between someone who kills in Nubl and Zahraa and someone who kills in Hama? Everybody who is carrying arms against civilian and against the Government is a terrorist. The Russians are here according in response to the requests of the Syrian Government. The Russians are coordinating with us every single step and they are only fighting terrorists, and Tony, allow me to give you one example. When 60,000 people in Nubl and Zahraa were liberated by the Syrian Army supported by Russian aircraft, the Turkish and the Western media said that all the roads to support the opposition had been cut. They did not speak about 60,000 people who were liberated. They were speaking about the ability of the Syrian Army to stop the financing and the arming of the terrorists. This is the truth, Tony, honestly.

TONY JONES: Do I take it ...

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: I am Syrian. I have been here throughout.

TONY JONES: Can I interrupt you for another question?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Please.

TONY JONES: Can I take it from what you're saying that a ceasefire is not even close, that there's no chance of a ceasefire while any opposition group is still fighting against your government? Is that what you're saying?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: No, no, that's not what I'm saying. Please don't let me say what I don't want to say. No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying the agenda of the talks would be put by the Syrian people with no pre-condition. But I'm saying the Western interpretation of what is going on on the ground does not at all correspond with reality.

TONY JONES: Alright. OK.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: We are fighting terrorists.

TONY JONES: OK.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: We are trying to liberate Aleppo.

TONY JONES: Yes,

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: We are trying to liberate Aleppo. Why the West doesn't want Aleppo to be liberated from terrorists? Why? This is the question. Why don't they want our city to be liberated?

TONY JONES: Can I ask you this - Can I ask you this then because it is a fundamental question strategically?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Please, please, please. Please, please.

TONY JONES: Taking Aleppo back for the Government would be a huge win for the Government.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Ya.

TONY JONES: This could take a very long time and it does seem to me that you're saying the fighting will continue backed by the Russians at least until that happens.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Liberating the people of Aleppo is the most important thing. It is not taking Aleppo to Government. The Government is the Government of the entire Syria. There are two million people in Aleppo who have been without electricity, without water and missiles are falling on them, killing children, civilians. The historic city of Aleppo has been destroyed by these terrorists and yet there is someone in the West who would say why should Aleppo be liberated of terrorism? Is this something good to say?

TONY JONES: Well, I mean, once again I'll just make the point that the images that we just saw a moment ago were from Russian air strikes on Aleppo which were hitting civilians.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: That's not true. That's not true. Russian air strikes, they are only striking to help the Syrian Army to strike terrorists and the Russians do not do a single thing without co-operating with the Syrian Army. The so-called American coalition is not coordinating with Syria. They did not even strike one oil truck three years they were here before the Russians. Why did the Russians were able to discover that ISIL is the one who is selling the oil to Turkey and to Europe through Turkey. Why the Americans did not discover that before the Russians came?

TONY JONES: I'm sorry to interrupt you again, but there is one fundamental question that I need to ask you ...

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Please. Yep, please.

TONY JONES: ... and that is that the pre-condition of the opposition groups and of the United States and other countries for any transitional process is that President Assad steps out of it, steps aside and removes himself from the process. Will that ever happen?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Well, you know, this - what you call opposition group, the Security Council Resolution 2254 asked for one broad delegation from the opposition to represent the opposition in Geneva. Let us wait to see when that delegation is going to be made. The reality, Tony, again, is that these oppositions are paid by Turkey, by Saudi Arabia, by Qatar. They are not nationalists who grew up in the country, who have political parties, they are not like Australian opposition.

TONY JONES: OK.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: I came to Australia and I visited the Opposition.

TONY JONES: Alright.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: There is a political party, there is government, there are representatives of people. Those represent the countries who are paying them, but they do not represent the Syrian people. However, we are ready to sit with them whenever they are ready for a dialogue as Security Council resolution say.

TONY JONES: And we're nearly out of time, but I've got to get you to answer this critical question: will President Assad agree to stand aside or will he put his own power ahead of the interests of his people?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: I'm - President Assad has been elected by the Syrian people and it is the Syrian people who decide.

TONY JONES: Dr Shaaban, thank you very much for agreeing to speak to us again.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Thank you.

See new ABC report about this here. The ABC has interviewed Hans Brunner about the problems of bandicoots in Victoria. The interview will be screened on Sunday 22 February 2016 on the 7pm news, we believe. (The schedule changed from this Sunday.) Hans Brunner is well-known to professional ecologists and wildlife enthusiasts in Frankston and the Mornington Peninsula, where he has continually championed the rights of bandicoots to safe habitat in the face of ever-increasing obstacles and stone-walling by government. Hans continues to be involved in the defense of preserving a full natural ecology in Frankston.

The inventor of a revolutionary hair identification system, Hans is known nationally as a key expert witness on dingo hair identification in the Azaria Chamberlain appeal case which freed Lindy Chamberlain. Among other cases, Hans is known internationally for his work to identify the nature of hair samples linked to the Orang Pendek, a mysterious upright ape or hominid sighted in Sumatra.

Hans is the author of Hans Brunner and Brian J. Coman, The identification of mammalian hair, 1974 and Hans Brunner and Barbara Triggs,Hair ID : an interactive tool for identifying Australian mammalian hair, 2002.

Pictures in this article were provided to Hans by the ABC.

This article contains a speech by Kelvin Thomson, critical of a motion to change environmental law by George Christensen, Member for Dawson, Queensland. Monday, 8 February 2016, House of Representatives, Chamber Speech, page 22 Hansard proofs.

KELVIN THOMSON I do not support this motion by the member for Dawson. The environmental law is there to protect the environment and to protect endangered species. The member for Dawson's own party brought it in. All environmental groups ask is that mining companies, agribusiness and so on do not break the law, just as environment groups and ordinary citizens are expected to abide by the law.
If companies abide by the law, there is no issue. All the provisions that the member for Dawson complains about do is give people a right to take action if the environment law is not being complied with. The implication in the member for Dawson's motion is that mining and other companies should not have to comply with the environmental law—that they should be able to break it with impunity.

The member for Dawson may not care about the black throated finch, but I do. It is a beautiful little bird. We should not push it to the edge of extinction in our quest for ever-increasing material wealth. Mining booms come and go but black throated finches do not. If the black throated finch becomes extinct, there is no way to bring it back. We have the EPBC Act precisely because we have learnt from the mistakes of the past and we should support it and strengthen it, not undermine and white-ant it.

Since being passed by the Howard government 16 years ago the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act has been the overriding national environmental protection law, including throughout the mining boom, and environment groups are required to operate within this law. Since the act commenced in the year 2000 there have been approximately 5,500 projects referred to the minister under the environmental impact assessment provisions. Of those projects around 1,500 have been assessed as requiring formal assessment and approval.

Around 33 actions have been commenced in the Federal Court by third parties in relation to the EPBC Act's environmental impact assessment process. The proceedings taken by third parties have related to only 22 projects that had been referred under the environmental impact assessment process, so this means that third-party appeals to the Federal Court affected only 0.4 of one per cent of all projects referred under the legislation.

Environmental advocacy is in the public interest. Environmental advocacy enhances environmental decision making and accountability and drives policy reform to protect the environment. The Australia Institute conducted national polling and found that 68 per cent of Australians support environmental advocacy. While 27 per cent said environmental groups had too much influence in public debates, 34 per cent said they had not enough influence.
By contrast, most people—62 per cent—said big business and 58 per cent said mining companies had too much influence.
While six in 10 Australians are concerned that big business and mining companies have too much influence, the coalition enthusiastically promotes them and even encourages them to become political activists and fight government policy. In the last five years the mining industry has spent $340 million on lobby groups and more on registered lobbyists and in-house lobbyists. The government is arguing to silence environmental activists while on the other hand it wants industry lobbyists to become activists—the irony, the double standard!

Section 487 was designed to address issues of standing, a legal term that broadly means an individual's or group's right to challenge an approval on the basis that they are either affected by it or have a special interest in the outcome. It does not provide for open standing, whereby anyone can bring an action for review, but it does authorise representative standing in which groups can act on behalf of an affected community. This is a crucial component of a national environmental act that seeks to promote rigorous and effective environmental review for approvals that, potentially, affect matters of national environmental significance, such as the development of Queensland's Galilee Basin coal deposits.

Removing section 487 will stop environmental groups from acting on behalf of affected communities and performing their important function as a watchdog. As The Australia Institute has highlighted, advocacy is essential for a well-functioning democracy, providing for those most affected by government decisions to be involved in policy formation, helping keep government accountable to the wider community and counterbalancing the influence of corporate organisations over government decision making.

Robust environmental review by focused, engaged, representative organisations, like the Mackay Conservation Group and the Australian Conservation Foundation, has never been more important. Rolling back the legal provisions that allow this to happen would be a backward step.

Population is a big issue happening in the world today, with our numbers having increased massively from around 1 billion in 1850 to what now looks like 11 billion at the end of the century. Right now, the numbers of the world’s poor increase by 80 million each year and the number of unwanted pregnancies are 210 million per annum. Considering that human population predicts 88% of impact to other animal and plant species (according to the International Union for the Conversation of Nature) human population remains a huge, yet very controversial concern. (This article was written by Michael Bayliss as part of an information booklet with Mark Allen (founder, Population Permaculture and Planning) entitled: 'Why We Need To Talk About Population.' This booklet is designed to engage with a younger, left leaning generation including environmentalists and activists. It will be available at the Sustainable Living Festival Big Weekend at Federation where Mark Allen will also present on town planning and population issues. To find out more, click here.

Australia's population numbers

It almost seems absurd to extend these world population concerns to Australia. Australia's a population of just under 24 million (at time of writing) and a density of around 3 people per square kilometre seems minuscule when compared to the demographics of other (mostly densely overpopulated) countries. Surely with miles and miles of free uncharted space, Australia could take its fair share of the world’s load? Isn’t Australia one of the highest per capita fossil fuel guzzling and carbon emitting countries in a society awash with consumerism and materialism? Couldn’t we all consume less, replace those coal industries with renewables, and open up our borders to take in our fair share?

Ecological and logistical considerations

The problem is that when you look at our continent more closely, our vast land of plenty starts to look a bit wanting. Only around 6% of our soil is arable by world standards, with 80% of the land-mass arid or semi-arid. This means that we have an incredibly fragile ecosystem with a very low carrying capacity that has struggled with white occupation for the last 200 years and it is about to get another wallop through climate change. There is every good reason why the south-east coast of Australia is populated and the central and north-west are nearly vacant, and that having large numbers of people live in the interior of Australia makes almost as much sense as populating the Sahara.

Academy of Science opinion on our population

The Australian Academy Of Science has suggested that our capacity to sustain ourselves will be maximised by not exceeding 23 million (whoops, we’ve just done that!) with Jared Diamond and Tim Flannery, painting a bleaker picture - that Australia can only support around 8 million people in the long term for our society’s current level of per capita footprint. This means that to be sustainable, we need to find ways of reducing our per capita and overall consumption by 1/3 at our current population to be sustainable, according to these predictions. However, our population is also growing at a rate of an Adelaide every 3 years, and at this rate our population will double in 35 years time. This will mean reducing our per capita output by 1/6 of current levels in a very short amount of time. What happens after then?...

Breaking taboos

The topic of population has become a taboo in Australia over the past 20 years, partly due to the ongoing perception of us living on an empty continent, and partly due to the mass media promoting the social-demographic arguments of Pauline Hanson, One Nation and others to drown out rational ecologically-based discussion. While there are educated people with no xenophobic agenda currently championing for a sustainable population such as Kelvin Thomson and Dick Smith, there is still confusion in many people's minds between population numbers concerns and racial prejudice. When I ask my friends in the environment movement why they don’t think more about population, the typical reply is: ‘Every time we discuss it, it always ends up with a white guy in his 60s ranting about immigrants.’

Rational discussion

I would like a rational discussion about population to return to the conversations of progressive and socially minded people. Population numbers are intrinsically linked to our economy, and manipulated by our government to fast-track GDP growth (as I shall explain soon) so it is really difficult to talk about the end of neo-liberal capitalism without talking about population numbers at some point. It is hard to talk about cooperative self-resilient communities and eco-villages as the way of the future whilst our town planning system is trying to keep up with an Adelaide’s worth of growth in our major cities every few years. It is hard to share our environment with our native plants and animals for much longer if an end point to our population growth is never debated and if our only option to reduce our per capita footprint infinitely lower is unrealistic. Finally, higher population growth does not automatically mean greater diversity and better outcomes for refugees and asylum seekers. Under our currently societal structure, it can even be the other way around!

Three models and three ideologies

Below are three models of possible population growth in Australia, representing three ideologies, where I want to table the pros and cons with each model. The first is the ‘business as usual’ approach of our current system. The second is an open borders policy, and the third is a sustainable population model.

Model 1: Business as usual:

Business as usual with ~1.5% growth per annum, majority of growth policy regulated to raise GDP, and with a current tax system that allows people to pay less tax from owning property (negative gearing).

As can be seen from the chart, our current model of population growth is beneficial for government to raise money through more people paying tax. It is also very beneficial for employers, as it allows an environment for more applicants for jobs, placing downward pressure on wages and conditions. It is most certainly of benefit for those in the property and construction industries, especially for those who invest in property, where a growing customer base ever drives up the demand for the price of properties in established suburbs (for now).

Unfortunately, things become pretty much worse for everyone else. Whilst it is easy enough to deduce the negative effect of this kind of population growth policy has on young job seekers (for example) and in raising general costs of living, it may be surprising to note that refugees, both past and present, are adversely affected by this type of population growth. For example, past generations of migrant market gardeners have been priced out of their area as the urban boundaries of Melbourne and Sydney expand. Likewise, refugee immigrants are being pushed out due to the increased gentrification that comes with high density living in inner city Melbourne suburbs such as Footscray, Carlton, and Richmond that have traditionally been very viable hubs of strong migrant communities. In recent years, new arrivals through the humanitarian program have tended to settle in areas around Broadmeadows, Deer Park, Heidelberg Heights and Dandenong. A far cry from (say) Victoria Street in Richmond, current generations of refugees face social isolation and difficulties in accessing essential services, which makes establishing community or assimilation more difficult. The Multicultural Development Association has reported that refugees in current times are lacking access to essential information, such as what the swimming flags mean on Australian beaches! The fact that Broadmeadows has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country is telling.

Most people are surprised to find out that our humanitarian intake has gone DOWN since the Howard Era, as proportion of our intake, from 25% prior to 1996 down to current levels of around 5-10%. As Howard himself said on 2014 on live radio:

“One of the reasons why it’s so important to maintain that policy is that the more people think our borders are being controlled the more supportive they are in the long term of high levels of immigration. Australia needs a high level of immigration. I’m a high immigration man. I practiced that in government. And one of the ways that you maintain public support for that is to communicate to the Australian people a capacity to control our borders and to decide who and what people and when come to this country.”

In other words, the asylum seeker fiasco during the Howard Government era, Tampa crisis et al, was politically engineered so that people would be complacent to another kind of population growth that the government (and big business) prefers!

Imagine if we traveled to another planet and witnessed and alien society where the government, swayed by big business, had an immigration policy that was based almost entirely on making money for small sectors of society. Imagine this was at the expense of refugees, or people in desperate need from other countries. Imagine the government engineered a border crisis so that refugees were seen as a huge problem so that, once a tough stand seen to be taken towards them, the government used that ruse to bring in population growth policies from other avenues. Imagine, in this society, the the former leader could basically state this word for word and pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. Imagine, in the society where the left were disinclined to call the government out on these policies, for fear of sounding anti-refugee and xenophobic, even when the population policies themselves are discriminatory towards asylum seekers. Imagine if keeping silent perpetuated this growth as a component of the neo-liberalist growth-at-all-costs agenda and if keeping silent on this was a liability on environmental objectives. From an outsider point of view, I’m sure the whole situation would seem more than a little illogical and farcical.

Population has been a very prickly issue for us on the left, particularly in recent decades, with the shadow of Pauline Hanson and One Nation/Reclaim Australia, and particularly when population growth is generally equated in our minds to refugees and open borders policies. However, if we choose to not debate population at all, then our current social and politically engineered population growth policy will continue, the same one that unfairly disfavours refugees and asylum seekers in favour of migration programs that generate short term increases in GDP. This is, to my mind, a very cynical neo-liberalist ideology. We, on the left, have the obligation at the very least to be educated on population policy as it currently stands, and at very least, lobby for a change in policy in favour of the humanitarian program again, even for those of us who are pro-growth. There is also a strong argument that it is very important to support the anti-war movement to prevent the formation of refugees in the first place and that refugee crises are generated by arms manufacture, neo-colonialism and global conflict.

Even if one were recipient to the short-term benefits of this kind of population growth, it must be recognised that the positives are just that - short lived. Eventually, property becomes so expensive that it is not worth investing in anymore. This is called a housing bubble, and has happened to Japan in the late 80s early 90s and currently China and the USA. Coupled with an infrastructure deficit and environmental overshoot, this can only affect everyone in the long term.

So if the current model sounds unfair to most, one might consider a more egalitarian open borders approach. Let’s explore that below, with its associated pros and cons.

Model 2: Open Borders policy:

Open borders policy, no cap on humanitarian intake, no policy to mitigate natural birth rate or GDP fuelled migration (This is in spirit the policy of the Greens Party). This model assumes growth of 600 000 per annum (250 000 humanitarian, 250 000 GDP, 100 000 natural growth).

This model is conducive to the ideal for many who identify with the social left, as an open border policy provides an unbiased avenue of entry into Australia regardless of race, religion, socio-economic status etc. An opens border policy means that industralised countries such as Australia can play a more definite role in accommodating displaced people from abroad and the idea that everyone is free to move wherever they wish to worldwide. The idea of border restriction or control can be uncomfortable for many as this implies an exclusion from those living in the majority world from the relatively privileged position of Australia. From the political field, many Labor-Left and Greens politicians support this ideology, with perhaps Sarah Hanson-Young of The Greens being the most vocal and well-known advocate of this position.

However, in trying to write the above table objectively, I tried to come up with tangible Pros that were practical rather than ideological. This proved to be more difficult than I was anticipating, and had to put in a few question marks in the pros column as the practical benefits are either tenuous or are a double edged sword with associated cons.

Speaking of the Greens, I’ve observed that many Greens policies cry out for more and more infrastructure (trains, trams, social services, public housing etc). At the same time they generally do not support environmentally destructive mining practices, not least unconventional mining such as fracking. But then, where will all our infrastructure come from? Trains lines, schools, public housing, plumbing - these all require raw materials that need to be dug up from the ground, and processed into tram lines by use of fossil fuels. There really is no way around this unless we learn a way of making train lines out of renewable resources, which isn’t likely. So much of Australia’s per capita consumption is embedded within the town planning system - suburbia and high density apartment living are both inherently resource hungry. Separation of homes and workplaces, and our physical and economic separation from our food sources result in a reliance of our earth’s resources that no amount of wilful reduction of our per capita consumption will mitigate, unless our town planning system changes substantially. If it doesn’t, there is no way we can really put much of a brake on our dependency on resources, and with model 2’s annual growth rate at 600 000 per annum, this could only escalate within our current town planning system. Instead of being able to plan to change the town planning system to accommodate more people in a sustainable way, any government would probably be doomed to play an endless cycle of infrastructure catch up under our current system - at the environment’s expense, even more-so than under our currently system.

I doubt an open borders policy would be practical for any government in the long term. Without an opportunity to transition large scale to a better town planning system, the housing, services and infrastructure costs would be huge. This means either a steep decline in quality of life for residents, or huge taxes or government debt (most likely a combination of all the above). Voters tend to not like those things. Voters on the left would also feel alienated and lied to by a government that would be forced to continue to mine for resources to build the infrastructure with, even if the economy was completely powered by renewable energy. Finally, the huge population growth would have a massive and unavoidable impact to the environment, particularly habitats and water supplies near to the large urban conurbation, even if our per capita footprint were to go down. Any government being elected on an environmental platform would soon let down many of their voters. This is probably a realistic prediction of the Greens if they won government on an open borders platform - they’d soon be shot down. This is also a conundrum that I’m sure many of the left deep down struggle with. That environmental, as well as anti-capitalist objectives, are at odds, at some point, with a human population growth that is not sustainable. Government would survive better, in the long term, if there was some compromise and balance between open borders ideology and the realities of environmental objectives.

Open borders policy only works in the long term if we can work with the world to address the root causes of conflict and displacement that generate high numbers of refugees and asylum seekers. Without this, an open borders policy is great at helping individuals in immediate need for asylum, but can only serve to diffuse the larger problem into the long term. One example is the island of Tuvalu, which made a strong case for evacuating many of its people to Australia and New Zealand in 2003, due to land loss as sea levels rose. New Zealand now has a relocation policy which is very reasonable in those circumstances, however their population is expected to more than double from 12 000 to 28 000 in by 2050. This will mean an endless cycle of relocating people, unless there is a way for Tuvalu to be sustainable in its population growth. Fortunately, according to the UN, non-coercive population sustainability strategies work if women are empowered and educated, and when there is access to family planning and contraceptive strategies (often at odds with the predominating patriarchal religions in host countries). No need for one-child policies or for coercion by the west to the majority world! Mostly grass-roots foreign aid and proactive international cooperation is key.

One final concern with an open borders policy is consideration of the original custodians of our land. My instinct is that any policy to promote population growth without consultation of aboriginal people can be easily argued as more unsolicited colonization of Australia. This belief was certainly shared by some my Noongar identifying friends and community back when I lived in WA, many of whom would be very welcoming to a generous refugee intake, if only their people were consulted on policy. If aboriginal perspective on population issues is hard to find, I imagine this can be attributable to the many other uphill battles that their communities are fighting daily, and poor representation of both aboriginal perspective and the population issue in Australian society. For those willing to search however, there are references in the literature, perhaps most poignantly expressed in the Deaths In Custody Watch Report (1994):

‘Since 1788 the non-Aboriginal powers within our lands have taken upon themselves to increase the population by many millions, meanwhile our population became near to extinction...Australia’s population is bearable at this point in time but further ecocide of this country will leave nothing for no one...Ecologically our land is on its knees: with help it can survive and resuscitate itself, but with any major increase in population this land will die, and we will die with it.’

Model 3: Sustainable Population policy:

A medium term sustainable population numbers policy that promotes (1) fiscal policies that do not encourage large family sizes and (2) promotes policies where immigration = emigration (e.g. Between 70 - 80 thousand per annum), with priority given to the humanitarian program (intake of at least 20 000 per annum, with flexibility in times of crisis). An emphasis on foreign aid funding would go to empowering women to make their own life choices, including career decisions, earning capacity and family size.

No model is perfect, and although it is probably self-evident that I advocate for this third model, it would not be objective of me if I did not acknowledge the cons associated with the model. However I would like to highlight that most of the negatives are either risks arising from poor management of the model, or from short term changes as our society goes through adjustments. On balance, this model of population sustainability strikes me as one that allows for the best balance of long term economic objectiveness, environmental and pollution goals, town planning goals, whilst allowing for a defined but generous humanitarian intake. Keep in mind that refugees and asylum seekers would be better off adjusting to a country that had the capacity to provide them with the services that they required to participate fully in their new home. They would not need so much the additional burdens of suburban sprawl, un-affordable housing, and an unforgiving job market that many refugees, along with other disadvantaged groups, face in today’s growth-at-all-cost system. That’s not to say that these problems will disappear, but they will be less and so much easier to address and manage. Currently, many migrants who come to Australia in recent times report feeling very socially isolated in the outer suburbs and miss the greater sense of community that they had back home.

Not that immigration is the only way to a sustainable population - far from it. I envision a future where families with no children are seen as societal norms just as much as families with children, and where adoption is seen as a viable and accessible alternative to couple of all sexual and gender identities. The key, as always is through education, empowerment, and allowing people to make their own choices. High schools, for example, should educate young people into the pros and cons of having children, and with consideration of the environmental impacts of having children, and the implications for future generations with worsening environmental conditions. I do not advocate fiscal policies that reward large family size, instead this money should be spent on children’s services, such as schools and and medical subsidies.

With a sustainable population, more money and energy could go into grass-roots foreign aid instead of more and more infrastructure and more investment could go into transitioning our society and economy into one that less focused on growth and more focused on social and environmental resilience. If our town planning system were to reflect the ideals of eco-villages, intentional communities, and permaculture principles, we would be in a better position to accommodate our current population longer term. We may also be in a better position to assist people in need of asylum or refuge into the future.

Final Words:

I hope this article has helped to disentangle some of the confusion and assumptions that have been barriers for further discussion on population issues for Australia and abroad. Although my own views are currently for population sustainability at this stage, I acknowledge that there will be many differing views and ideas on this topic and I hope my ideas may help to stimulate further thoughtful discussion and debate. I have not yet heard a successful argument for long term high rates of population growth that can also account for positive outcomes for our cities, towns, environment and asylum seekers, however that does not mean that one doesn’t exist! Please let me know if you have any ideas =).

Going Underground's Afshin Rattansi interviews the former British Ambassador to Syria on the irony of London hosting a Syria conference to aid refugees while Cameron drops bombs to create more. "This week London hosted the Syrian Donor conference in an attempt to raise money for the people UK bombs continue to displace to the shores of Europe. But as Philip Hammond mulls sending guns to Libya to quell the rise of Isis - made possible by the British toppling of Gadaffi - should we really even believe his claims that Russia is helping ISIS/Daesh by bombing Cameron's supposedly 'moderate' rebels." (Afshin Rattansi) First published at https://www.rt.com/shows/going-underground/331567-assange-detainment-syria-conference/

Below is the video of the full show, embedded. The Peter Ford interview sequence starts at 17minutes 40 seconds into show:

National Party member for the Victorian seat of Lowan Emma Kealy has called on the state government to extend a kangaroo culling trial to West Wimmera Shire.

(Click link to vote on poll).

The government introduced a two-year trial to cull kangaroos for pet food in 2014.

A State Government trial involving Ararat, Horsham, Northern Grampians, Yarriambiack, Southern Grampians and Pyrenees local government areas is due to conclude in June.

Ms Kealy wants to see the program introduced permanently or the trial extended to include West Wimmera Shire. “It’s created 12 jobs at the Hamilton abattoirs, where they are processing the meat for pet food,” she said.

This article was first published by the Australian Wildlife Protection Council.

Ms Kealy wants to make it permanently open season.  “Culling” should be for old, or sick, animals.  This would not be a “cull”, but be a slaughter.  It would be all out war against our Australian animal icon.

The trial had only occurred in areas where kangaroos were in plague proportions.   Since the start of these trials the number of permits has increased dramatically, from 30,000 per year, to 70,000 and now 100,000, probably in an effort to justify the slaughter.
Ms Kealy said while there were environmental concerns about the issue, the trial had only occurred in areas where kangaroos were [purportedly] in "plague proportions".

To soften her killing plans, Ms Kealy said shooters were trained to kill kangaroos with a single shot to the head to make the process as humane as possible.  That’s almost impossible, due to the size of the head, and the accuracy needed!

AWPC member, Šime Validži?, says that:

…kKangaroos are not in plague proportions but their populations are self-regulating. They are not “the environment” to be “managed” but native, sentient beings who have the right to live in their native homeland. It is humans who are spreading into the habitats of native species.  Australia has the worst record in the world when it comes to species extinctions and it is the result of genocide against indigenous peoples. Since I did not wish to be part of such a country, having emigrated to Victoria, Australia with my parents in 1970, I returned to my country of origin, Croatia, in 1992 and encourage others to do the same. I never saw a kangaroo in the wild even though I travelled a lot and did some farm work, picking potatoes and peas.

#linkToPoll"> POLL: Should kangaroos be culled in the Wimmera for pet food?

I was unable to find the poll on that page. Was anyone able to find the poll and to vote? - Ed

Great advances this week by the Syrian army and Russian air force have broken the rebel siege of two towns, and broken their umbilical link with Turkey. But they have also revealed the truth about Western media 'journalism'...

Something really significant happened this week. It wasn’t the last-ditch attempts to find a peaceful solution to the Syrian conflict in Geneva, or their failure. Neither was it the game-changing developments on the ground in Syria and the tightening of the noose around the foreign-backed terrorist armies – though this was certainly ‘significant’.

What happened was that the mask of ‘humanitarian relief’ fell off the Western interventionists and their media cheer squads like so much dirty linen, exposing the naked self-interest behind the whole rotten Syrian conspiracy.
While the ridiculous deliberations over what style of terrorist was an acceptable participant in the Geneva talks may have been a vexing spectacle for Syrians, and the attention paid by the Western media to the ‘High Negotiations Committee’ an affront to their senses, it didn’t really surprise anyone.

Perhaps Syrians weren’t surprised either by the rapid gains of the Russian-Syrian offensive and moves to cut the last convenient border crossing west of Aleppo – something which so many had been hanging out for for so long and specially in rebel-besieged Aleppo. Unlike all those ignorant souls unable to see out of the Western media bubble, they had been watching it all unfold for weeks, as well as being conscious of the strategic significance and urgency of cutting Turkey out of the Syrian war – thanks in no small part to the Russian military’s free supply of information.

But as a collective cheer echoed around Syria when it was announced that the border had been cut, a collective spasm engulfed Western media commentators and government spokesmen, rapidly spreading to UN representatives and Aid agencies, Foreign Ministers and leaders.

“Rebel supply lines have been cut!” they cried indignantly, as if Russia had cut them by accident, not realising the rebels depended on these ‘supplies’ that came in from Turkey just to survive.

It may be a struggle to understand how it can be that all these people ‘just don’t get it’- don’t understand that the Syrian army and the Russian air force, Hezbollah and Iran are targeting their ‘rebels’ intentionally; that they are trying to kill them or drive them out, or trap them so they are forced to surrender. This is after all what military campaigns do, and it is abundantly clear that only a military solution is now possible against these murderous militants.

But perhaps they do understand it, and this is just ‘wilful ignorance’ – an attempt to maintain the sham reality of the ‘revolution’ and the ‘Free Syrian Army’ so they can go on using it to conceal their unrelenting campaign to seize power from Damascus.

What the falling of the ‘humanitarian mask’ has revealed is that all these drivers and accomplices to the armed insurgency have lied and obfuscated and spun their dirty conspiracy from the start. But now that Russia has ripped off their cover they are shameless about what they’ve done.

What is more, the admissions of complicity in this illegal armed insurrection against Syria’s elected government have come first from Western reporters and commentators, such as the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s Matt Brown, who framed the news on the breaking of ‘rebel supply lines’ like this:

MATT BROWN: "It's substantial because of that supply line. It demonstrates the power of Russian air strikes because the UN says that they were unprecedented in this operation.

It's also cut the rebels off from supplies of food, fuel, ammunition, weapons and fighters that they were getting down that supply route from Turkey."

That’s right – the ‘rebels’, who we have been told for years need our ‘aid’ because they are being massacred and starved by the Syrian government have not been doing so badly after all.

Every time there was a new ‘massacre’ we have listened to earnest discussions on supplying ‘non-lethal aid’, and humanitarian aid, and demands that ‘humanitarian corridors’ must be opened.

And when the Syrian government has opposed these plans on the grounds that arms and ammunition might be smuggled in with the humanitarian aid, it has then been blamed for the failure and the ongoing war.

How astounding it is then to hear this admission from someone like Brown – who despite his record of advocacy for the rebel cause, has never revealed his knowledge of its umbilical connection to Turkey. In fact this reality has been concealed from his Australian audience at all costs, even though it’s been plain as daylight to the rest of us.

Back in 2013 Matt Brown made a documentary called ‘Ibrahim’s war’, which told the story of a 11 year old boy living in the rebel-occupied part of Aleppo, whose father had abandoned his job and went out every day to fight ‘on the front’. That this was actually with the Front – the Al Nusra Front – was never admitted by Brown, even less what this terrorist group was actually doing – targeting neighbouring residential areas with snipers and indiscriminate rocket and mortar fire.

Brown related his experience at the time he made his ‘UN award-winning’ documentary in the report above:

"In 2013, I drove down to Aleppo from the north, a little further to the east than where this has happened in what is now territory controlled by the Islamic State group; and earlier I had hiked in further to the west across the border into the towns west of Aleppo.

We slept in the same houses as foreign fighters actually, who were also crossing in, and the government is now pushing in that direction.

So, it just gives you some idea of how cut off the rebels in Aleppo are becoming. That's underlined the power also of Iranian advisors, the pro-government militias and those Russian air strikes and the rebels say it proves that the government isn't serious about those peace talks."

It might sometimes be a narrow line between journalism and political advocacy, but for Brown and his media colleagues this line has evidently now become invisible. But whether they identify themselves as political actors has almost ceased to matter, because as far as their audience is concerned they are only journalists, award-winning ones. When they report what 'the rebels say' - how would this audience know they are hearing dangerous nonsense?

As is was, proof that the rebels aren't serious about peace talks was just provided by the ABC's sister state TV channel, SBS in its evening news bulletin about the latest developments around Aleppo. Opinion was sought from the Syrian Opposition's 'Chief Negotiator', who turned out to be none other than Mohammed Alloush, the new leader of one of the Saudi's most favoured terrorist groups in Syria.

Do they really believe that the Syrian government could 'negotiate' with this man?

Article first published in Russian Insider. Check the comments out there too.

On 4 December 2015, the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) adopted Opinion No. 54/2015, in which it considered that Mr. Julian Assange was arbitrarily detained by the Governments of Sweden and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. In that opinion, the Working Group recognized that Mr. Assange is entitled to his freedom of movement and to compensation. The application was filed with the Working Group in September 2014. The Opinion 54/2015 was sent to the Governments of Sweden and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland on 22 January 2016 in accordance with the Working Group’s Methods of Work.

In addition to this short working group statement, Download the inedited text of the opinion and legal argument.

Given that Mr. Assange is an Australian citizen, one of the members of the Working Group who shares his nationality recused herself from participating in the deliberations.  Another member of the Working Group disagreed with the position of the majority and considered that the situation of Mr. Assange is not one of detention and therefore falls outside the mandate of the Working Group.

In mid-2010, a Swedish Prosecutor commenced an investigation against Mr. Assange based on allegations of sexual misconduct. On 7 December 2010, pursuant to an international arrest warrant issued at the request of the Swedish Prosecutor, Mr. Assange was detained in Wandsworth Prison for 10 days in isolation. Thereafter, he was subjected to house arrest for 550 days.  While under house arrest in the United Kingdom, Mr. Assange requested the Republic of Ecuador to grant him refugee status at its Embassy in London. The Republic of Ecuador granted asylum because of Mr. Assange’s fear that if he was extradited to Sweden, he would be further extradited to the United States where he would face serious criminal charges for the peaceful exercise of his freedoms.  Since August 2012, Mr. Assange has not been able to leave the Ecuadorian Embassy and is subject to extensive surveillance by the British police.

The Working Group considered that Mr. Assange has been subjected to different forms of deprivation of liberty: initial detention in Wandsworth prison which was followed by house arrest and his confinement at the Ecuadorian Embassy.  Having concluded that there was a continuous deprivation of liberty, the Working Group also found that the detention was arbitrary because he was held in isolation during the first stage of detention and because of the lack of diligence by the Swedish Prosecutor in its investigations, which resulted in the lengthy detention of Mr. Assange.  The Working Group found that this detention is in violation of Articles 9 and 10 of the UDHR and Articles 7, 9(1), 9(3), 9(4), 10 and 14 of the ICCPR, and falls within category III as defined in its Methods of Work. 

The Working Group therefore requested Sweden and the United Kingdom to assess the situation of Mr. Assange to ensure his safety and physical integrity, to facilitate the exercise of his right to freedom of movement in an expedient manner, and to ensure the full enjoyment of his rights guaranteed by the international norms on detention. The Working Group also considered that the detention should be brought to an end and that Mr. Assange should be afforded the right to compensation. 

5 February 2016

Check the Working Group’s Opinion on Julian Assange’s case (No. 54/2015), adopted in December: http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Detention/A.HRC.WGAD.2015.docx

See press release by the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention:
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=17013&LangID=E

Inside is the text of the public statement issued by the UN expert panel on Arbitrary Detention, which you will not find in most mainstream publications, which are seeking to obfuscate the UN opinion and its importance, with their own opinions. Julian Assange is a Victorian-born Australian citizen and asylum-seeker, recognised as a refugee by the UN. The Ecuadorian Embassy in London granted him refugee status, but the UK government stopped him from going to Ecuador by taking his passport and surrounding the embassy with police, day and night. What did Assange do? Assange famously published, on his Wikileaks, authentic film of US soldiers hunting down civilians with helicopters and machine guns as if they were in a video game. (Film: 'Collateral Damge' inside this article.) The US was so furious at this (and other very relevant exposures of its criminal secrets) that it mounted an international persecution of Assange. The mass media helped the criminal US by defaming Assange and they are still doing it because their owners support war and propaganda. Assange has been openly threatened with assassination by at least two US politicians. It is clear that in the biased US justice system, he does not stand a chance. To their great shame, successive Australian Governments have done nothing to help Assange. To my knowledge, only Senator Scott Ludlam in South Australia has criticised this abject failure to defend a great leader in the fight to stop wars by forcing transparency in government. (Please let me know of any other politician who has spoken up.)

GENEVA (5 February 2016) – WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been arbitrarily detained by Sweden and the United Kingdom since his arrest in London on 7 December 2010, as a result of the legal action against him by both Governments, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention said today.

In a public statement, the expert panel called on the Swedish and British authorities to end Mr. Assange’s deprivation of liberty, respect his physical integrity and freedom of movement, and afford him the right to compensation (Check the statement:  http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=17012&LangID=E)

Mr. Assange, detained first in prison then under house arrest, took refuge in Ecuador’s London embassy in 2012 after losing his appeal to the UK’s Supreme Court against extradition to Sweden, where a judicial investigation was initiated against him in connection with allegations of sexual misconduct. However, he was not formally charged.

“The Working Group on Arbitrary Detention considers that the various forms of deprivation of liberty to which Julian Assange has been subjected constitute a form of arbitrary detention,” said Seong-Phil Hong, who currently heads the expert panel.

“The Working Group maintains that the arbitrary detention of Mr. Assange should be brought to an end, that his physical integrity and freedom of movement be respected, and that he should be entitled to an enforceable right to compensation,” Mr. Hong added. 

In its official Opinion, the Working Group considered that Mr. Assange had been subjected to different forms of deprivation of liberty: initial detention in Wandsworth Prison in London, followed by house arrest and then confinement at the Ecuadorean Embassy.

The experts also found that the detention was arbitrary because Mr. Assange was held in isolation at Wandsworth Prison, and because a lack of diligence by the Swedish Prosecutor’s Office in its investigations resulted in his lengthy loss of liberty.

The Working Group established that this detention violates Articles 9 and 10 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and Articles 7, 9(1), 9(3), 9(4), 10 and 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Check the Working Group’s Opinion on Julian Assange’s case (No. 54/2015), adopted in December: http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Detention/A.HRC.WGAD.2015.docx

NOTE TO EDITORS:
The Opinions of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention are legally-binding to the extent that they are based on binding international human rights law, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). The WGAD has a mandate to investigate allegations of individuals being deprived of their liberty in an arbitrary way or inconsistently with international human rights standards, and to recommend remedies such as release from detention and compensation, when appropriate.
The binding nature of its opinions derives from the collaboration by States in the procedure, the adversarial nature of is findings and also by the authority given to the WGAD by the UN Human Rights Council. The Opinions of the WGAD are also considered as authoritative by prominent international and regional judicial institutions, including the European Court of Human Rights.

ENDS

Mr. Seong-Phil Hong (Republic of Korea) is the Chairman-Rapporteur of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. Other members of the Working Group are Ms. Leigh Toomey (Australia); Mr. José Antonio Guevara Bermúdez (Mexico); Mr. Roland Adjovi Sètondji (Benin) and Mr. Vladimir Tochilovsky (Ukraine). Learn more, log on to:  http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Detention/Pages/WGADIndex.aspx

The UN Working Groups are part of what is known as the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council. Special Procedures, the largest body of independent experts in the UN Human Rights system, is the general name of the Council’s independent fact-finding and monitoring mechanisms that address either specific country situations or thematic issues in all parts of the world. Special Procedures’ experts work on a voluntary basis; they are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their work. They are independent from any government or organization and serve in their individual capacity.

The Universal Declaration on Human Rights: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Library/Pages/UDHR.aspx
The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights:
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CCPR.aspx.

In a public statement, the expert panel called on the Swedish and British authorities to end Julian Assange’s deprivation of liberty, respect his physical integrity and freedom of movement, and afford him the right to compensation.

Mr. Assange, detained first in prison then under house arrest, took refuge in Ecuador’s London embassy in 2012 after losing his appeal to the UK’s Supreme Court against extradition to Sweden, where a judicial investigation was initiated against him in connection with allegations of sexual misconduct. However, he was not formally charged.

“The Working Group on Arbitrary Detention considers that the various forms of deprivation of liberty to which Julian Assange has been subjected constitute a form of arbitrary detention,” said Seong-Phil Hong, who currently heads the expert panel.

“The Working Group maintains that the arbitrary detention of Mr. Assange should be brought to an end, that his physical integrity and freedom of movement be respected, and that he should be entitled to an enforceable right to compensation,” Mr. Hong added.

In its official Opinion, the Working Group considered that Mr. Assange had been subjected to different forms of deprivation of liberty: initial detention in Wandsworth Prison in London, followed by house arrest and then confinement at the Ecuadorean Embassy.

According to a press release issued by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the experts also found that the detention was arbitrary because Mr. Assange was held in isolation at Wandsworth Prison, and because a lack of diligence by the Swedish Prosecutor’s Office in its investigations resulted in his lengthy loss of liberty.

The Working Group further established that this detention violates two articles of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and six articles of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.