Tweet of the Week

Here’s Peter Dutton, to the tune of DMX, advertising a car dealership. pic.twitter.com/Rv6PlxrXek

— SBS News (@SBSNews) September 6, 2019

No stranger to criticism, Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton has appeared to have embraced the title "the baddest MP". Mr Dutton features in a new online video for a Brisbane car dealership which resembles a music video, blasting US rapper DMX's X Gon' Give It To Ya in the background.

Cartoon of the Week

Cathy Wilcox

Water raiders want Clarence Valley communities to be "grown-up" and just let them go ahead and degrade the upper Clarence River water flow

This was Toowooba Regional Council in 2018 and the Clarence Valley's response.......

The Daily Examiner, 24 April 2018

This is Toowoomba Regional Council in 2019......

The Chronicle, 10 September 2019:

TOOWOOMBA Mayor Paul Antonio has called on his New South Wales colleagues to be part of a “grown-up discussion” over long-term water strategies, including a pipeline from the Clarence River.

Cr Antonio’s comments come amid a push-back from the Grafton community over discussions to connect the bountiful Clarence system to struggling areas in the Southern and Western Downs to combat the effects of drought.

Clarence Valley Mayor Jim Simmons said last week he was adamant no headwaters would be leaving the system in the near future, even as the multi-council water allocation plan collects speed.

But Cr Antonio said it was important that all options were explored to ensure the east coast of Australia was well-supplied.

“I think we’ve got to be grown up and have a discussion around that,” he said.

“The Maryland river system has a 21,000ML yield, would take a fraction of water from the Clarence, but make a profound difference.

“We need the state governments in Queensland and New South Wales to facilitate a conversation around water strategies, and I’m having some robust discussions with the mayor of Tenterfield (Peter Petty) at the moment about it.”

The council endorsed a motion early last year to investigate a pipeline from the Clarence River, and the Southern Downs Regional Council made a similar commitment late last week.

Cr Antonio said continuous consultations over water would become the reality for councils and state governments in the near future.

“Water is the new currency, water is the limiting factor in population growth and food production in this area and many other areas,” he said.

“Now is the time to reflect on where we are and put strategies in place and it will lift this nation and make it more productive.”

Clarence Valley Independent, 4 September 2019:

In a video on SDRC’s Facebook site, the [Southern Downs Regional Council] mayor says “we have letters of support from Toowoomba regional Council and Paul Antonio, mayor of Toowoomba, [who is] also the chair of the Darling Downs South West Queensland Council of Mayors”.

Mr Antonio said in his letter: “As chair of Darling Downs South West Queensland Council of Mayors … I write to give the strongest of support to your council’s submission to the Australian Infrastructure Audit regarding long-term water security on the Darling Downs and NSW Border Ranges.”

Mr Antonio referred to a “crisis meeting” held among each of the councils on May 16.

“It was agreed we will work together to spread resources through planning to interconnect our [water] supplies….” he writes.

“New sources of water can include diversion from the headwaters of the Clarence River basin, via the Maryland River, and access to recycled water from Brisbane.

“Both these options require major investment well beyond the means of the councils involved.

“They also will take a merging of political wills across all three levels of government.

“Nothing short of a visionary, nation-building initiative led by the Commonwealth will solve the problem.

This is a Clarence Valley resident's response in 2019.....

The Mayor of Toowoomba, Paul Antonio, claims to want "grown-up discussions" concerning a proposal to dam and divert Clarence River system water across the border into southern Queensland.

Yet strangely he has not been adult enough himself to notify Clarence Valley Council of this proposal or enter into dialogue with this council which represents the majority of people and communities living along the length of this NSW river system.

What Cr. Antonio also forgets or just chooses to ignore when touting his "nation building initiative" is that there in a legislated, carefully considered water sharing plan already in place - the Water Sharing Plan for the Clarence River Unregulated and Alluvial Water Sources 2016.

This plan covers the Maryland River and specifies the limits to granting water access licences, as well as limits to the maximum amount of water which can be drawn off this river which is set out as 995 ML/yr.

It also specifies when extraction should cease due to low flows; "Water must not be taken when the height of the water in Maryland River passing through the culvert pipes over the Rivertree Road near the southern boundary of portion 33, Parish of Reid, County of Buller, is less than or equal to 50 mm."

The plan defines the constraints on harvestable water rights as those set out in Water Management Act 2000 - Sect 53 & 54. This state act blocks supplying "any other land" with water that has been captured by landholders on the Maryland River.

Additionally, the plan limits the water extraction licence pool to an upper limit of 990 share components.

This water sharing plan was not something that was created without "grown-up discussions". Because NSW stakeholders recognized that our rivers are markedly variable and there is significant competition for water (especially in dry times). So there had to be an evidence-based balance between the needs of users and the need for a sustainable environmental flow in this particular Clarence River tributary.

Because without a genuine environmental flow entering the Clarence River at the confluence of the Maryland and Clarence Rivers, the upper Clarence River would overtime become a degraded waterway.

Cr. Antonio is talking of building an in-river dam and, as the proposed amount of water to be held back from entering the Clarence River under this water raiding scheme is actually 55.5% of the average annual flow of the Maryland River and an est. 57% of its unallocated annual flow, it is hard to see how environmental flows below this proposed dam wall can be reliably met.

Especially given there are existing landholder water entitlements in the Rivertree region on which local farmers depend as they come to grips with changing rainfall patterns.

This Queensland local government councillor is yet to demonstrate that he has any understanding of the interconnective nature of hydrological processes at work along the more than 380 km length of the Clarence River from its headwaters to coastal estuary mouth.

Cr. Antonio appears to see the Clarence River system in terms of the potential for economic growth in his own region -  failing to see the very real aesthetic, cultural, social, environmental and economic values it holds for the people of the Clarence Valley.

He does not take into consideration that the Clarence River system already supplies the water needs of 128,198 residents in the Clarence Valley and Coffs Harbour City local government areas and, that this river underpins two regional economies which together were worth an estimated $5.58 billion in 2018. [See Clarence Valley Council Economic Profile and Coffs Harbour City Council Economic Profile]

One might suspect that Cr. Antonio (who will presumably be seeking re-election in a little over five months) views this water diversion proposal solely through the narrow lens of his own political and personal financial ambitions.

Background

1. Water Sharing Plan for the Clarence River Unregulated and Alluvial WaterSources: Background document, July 2016

2. ABC News, 7 December 2018:

A southern Queensland Mayor has been fined nearly $15,000 after he was found to have engaged in misconduct in his dealings with the Melbourne-to-Brisbane Inland Railway project.

In an interview with the ABC in 2017, Councillor Paul Antonio, who owns a gravel quarry near Millmerran on the route chosen by the Federal Government, conceded he stood to benefit from the inland rail project.

The ABC revealed, Cr Antonio personally paid $4,900 to have an alternate route for the project investigated, which took the line to the very edge of his quarry.

Cr Antonio told the ABC he paid for the map to find an alternative that did not go through prime agricultural land in Millmerran, to help affected farmers.

After initially telling the ABC he gave the map only to one Millmerran farmer, he later conceded he provided the map to former industry minister Ian MacFarlane, who is now the chief executive of the Queensland Resources Council, and the Federal Member for Groom, John McVeigh.

The matter was referred to the Local Government Regional Conduct Review Panel in April 2018 after a complaint was made by a fellow councillor and a member of the public.

The panel decided the complaint of misconduct was sustained.....

Cr Antonio was fined $14.360.50, ordered to undergo counselling, make an admission of error, and apologise at the next council meeting.

The panel also recommended the Local Government Department's chief executive officer monitor Cr Antonio for compliance with the Local Government Act.....

Morrison Government's aged bonus just a political shell game

The New Daily, 9 September 2019:

It was billed as an $800 aged bonus, with a million pensioners promised a cash splash under Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s deeming rate change.

But documents released under freedom of information laws to The New Daily have revealed that seniors will secure just $5 a week on average for singles.

The average windfall for aged pensioners is just $249 a year for singles – a fraction of the $800 pensioner bonus heralded across front pages in July.

For couples, the average payment under the deeming rate changes is $3 a week and $156 a year.

Thousands of pensioners not affected by the deeming rate changes because they don’t have investments will get nothing.

Nearly half of all pensioners who receive the couples rate – 46 per cent – will secure less than $130 a year.

Social Services Minister Anne Ruston has repeatedly refused to provide the breakdown of how many pensioners will secure the $800 maximum payout.

The FoI documents reveal that the percentage of pensioners who will secure the $800 aged bonus promised in front-page newspaper reports is indeed a rare breed.

According to the department’s data, they represent just less than 1 per cent of the one million pensioners who are better off under the changes.

The number of pensioners on the couples rate who will secure $780 to $910 under the deeming rate changes total just 191 couples across Australia.

Source: Department of Social Services

National Seniors Australia chief advocate Ian Henschke said it was clear only a tiny fraction of the community will receive the $800 spruiked by the government.

Mr Henschke said because the changes are backdated, the first payment will be more generous in September. It will then shrink back to $3 a week on average.

“They will be tricked because when they open up their payment they will get a lump sum,” Mr Henschke said.

“Nobody has actually got the money yet. What we’ve got here is a classic case of a government not doing the right thing.”

The government uses an income and asset test to determine aged pension payments and the deeming rate is part of the income test.

Seniors have claimed the deeming rate is unfair because it assumes some pensioners are getting a better return from savings deposits than they do because interest rates are low......

On July 23, Ms Ruston’s office emailed The New Daily claiming the data did not exist to explain how many people got the maximum amount of $800......

The FoI documents provided to The New Daily outlining the exact data requested, not including redacted documents, runs to more than 30 pages.

Previous freedom of information requests lodged by The New Daily revealed hundreds of pages of emailed correspondence back and forth between the minister’s office and the department over the original request for the information on how many pensioners get the $800.

If you are a welfare recipient in any shape of form - be afraid, be very afraid

It appears in his profound ignorance and overwhelming arrogance Australian Prime Minister and Liberal MP for Cook Scott Morrison intends to privatize the welfare safety net....... 

Patreon, “Testing the limits of welfare in the age of the Prosperity Gospel”, 9 September 2019, excerpt:

Morrison has a very particular view of how welfare should be approached. On one level, it is a sort of neoliberal/austerity view, entirely at one with the direction of government policy since the 1980s.

But it is more complex that. Morrison seems to want to move to what we might call a post-neoliberal approach, with welfare built around financial instruments such as so-called Social Interest Bonds (SIBs)…..

“To put it another way, there is no money in ending poverty, but there is profit to be had in meeting metrics that break 'the intergeneral cycle of poverty and disadvantage.'

Regardless, the whole approach ties in completely with Morrison's view that, 'welfare must become a good deal for investors' and that 'we must make it a good deal' (emphasis added).

That is to say, to be a good deal for investors, various forms of control and discipline must be enacted upon welfare recipients in order to help ensure targets are met and profits are realised via instruments like SIBs.

Drug testing and cashless welfare cards are two ways of doing that, and that is why Scott Morrison is advocating them. He is laying the groundwork for the introduction of instruments such as SIBs.

In the meantime, he is more than happy for the State to be an 'enforcer' without them.

Remembering Terania......

ABC News, 17 August 2019:

VIDEO: Looking back on the legacy of Terania Creek (ABC News)

It has been 40 years since the first images emerged of protesters blocking the path of bulldozers to stop the logging of rainforest at Terania Creek on the New South Wales north coast.

The protest is regarded as a watershed moment in Australia's environmental movement and cited as the first time people physically defended a natural resource.

While the fight to save the rainforest reached its climax in August 1979, the story began several years earlier when a young couple from Melbourne moved to a single-room cabin bordering the rainforest in Terania Creek.

PHOTO: Protesters Falls in Nightcap National Park are named after the demonstrations. (ABC North Coast: Leah White)

Hugh and Nan Nicholson said they were drawn to the incredible beauty of the area and were shocked to learn the following year that the Forestry Commission planed to clear-fell the forest.

"Our involvement was very sudden, very abrupt," Mrs Nicholson said.

"We had no experience, we were very young, but we felt we couldn't let this go, we had to try to do something."

Over the next four years, the Nicholsons said their efforts to halt the logging escalated from writing letters and submissions and lobbying politicians to hosting hundreds of protesters and being at the coalface of the fight.

"We found there were many other young people who had just moved to the area and they also were appalled at the idea of this beautiful forest being flattened," Mrs Nicholson said.

"So we quite quickly got into a group that was going to fight it, and that was the start of years and years of battle."

'Not so peaceful' protest say loggers

While the demonstrators' intentions were "non-violent, peaceful protest", not everybody held to that ideal.

Death threats were made and received by each side.

Even though Hurfords Hardwood had nothing to do with the Terania logging operation, the family's South Lismore mill was burnt to the ground.

The company who held the licence for the coupe at Terania Creek was the Standard Sawmilling Company from Murwillumbah.

John Macgregor-Skinner, the production manager at the time, said the toll from protests put an "astronomical" strain on his workers and family.

"We had tractors sabotaged, people threatened [with] chainsaws, trees spiked, bridges sabotaged and the like," he said.

"From a personal perspective, we received telephone calls to say that my wife was going to get raped, they knew where the kids were going to school and they weren't going to come home tomorrow.

PHOTO: Loggers say protesters sabotaged equipment during the Terania Creek protest. (Supplied: David Kemp)

"That happened on several occasions to the point that we had police protection and I had a direct line to the police inspector.

"Nothing did eventuate, but by gee you don't know."

Mr Macgregor-Skinner said the protest also had a detrimental impact on jobs on the NSW north coast.

"Terania Creek was only a very, very small part of our operations," he said.

"But what eventuated out of Terania Creek closed down the mill."

Mr Macgregor-Skinner estimates 600 jobs were lost in the region when Neville Wran, then New South Wales premier, made the historic 'rainforest decision' in October 1982, removing about 100,000 hectares of forest from timber production.

Legacy of saving the 'big scrub'

Bundjalung woman Rhoda Roberts was only young when the Terania Creek protests took place, but she can remember her late father, Pastor Frank Roberts, talking about the new arrivals who were eager to save the environment.

She said at the time traditional owners were living under the Protection Act.

"We didn't really have a voice. You've got to remember there were curfews, they were taking kids.

PHOTO: Rhoda Roberts remembers her father talking about the significance of the Terania Creek protest. (Supplied)

"People were very frightened, so to have a group of people who arrived on country and were determined to love that environment, from our perspective, was incredibly new."

Ms Roberts said the big scrub, which includes Terania Creek, is a 'storybook' place where knowledge is exchanged among generations.

"I'm indebted now because my children and the coming children … when we travel our territories, we still have a sample of land that we know has been there since time immemorial," she said.

"I pay my greatest respects to everyone who was involved in Terania Creek because you saved country for us, and we are all benefiting from that.".....

Read the full article with more images here.

Northern NSW likely to remain in drought for the foreseeable future

With the Clarence Valley hinterland in drought and water in the upper reaches of the Clarence River system already low, the following article is not good news for valley communities.

Indeed if the comparison with 2002 holds, then there is a possibility that freshwater entering the tidal pool just below the Lilydale gauge will eventually fall from around the current 286 megalitres daily (less than 10% of historical est. average daily flow) to around 50 megalitres a day.

ABC News, 6 September 2019: 

A rare event that took place 30 kilometres above the South Pole last week is expected to impact upon Australia's rainfall outlook. 

The upper atmosphere above Antarctica warmed by as much as 40 degrees Celsius in the course of a few days — and it is continuing to warm. 

This rare phenomenon, known as sudden stratospheric warming (SSW), could deepen one of the worst droughts in Australian history. 

The Bureau of Meteorology's Harry Hendon warned of dry weather ahead. "We will typically see conditions across most of Australia, but primarily concentrated in the eastern part of Australia, become warmer and drier through spring and into early summer," Dr Hendon said. 

SSW is rare in the southern hemisphere with only one major event ever identified, in 2002 — one of Australia's driest years on record.... 

Sudden stratospheric warming over Antarctica causes westerly winds south of Australia to track further north, a pattern meteorologists refer to as a 'negative SAM'. In spring and summer, this negative SAM pattern brings warmer, drier air into southern Queensland and New South Wales. 

"Unfortunately, these are areas already in drought," said a lead author of the BOM's spring climate outlook, Andrew Watkins. 

Dr Watkins said cooler than normal water in the Indian Ocean, a phenomenon meteorologists call a 'positive IOD', has led to a lack of moisture drifting over the continent. 

"This has certainly been a big factor in why winter has been so dry in virtually all of Australia," he said. 

"On top of that, we have the likelihood of prolonged periods of negative SAM, which also brings drier conditions to New South Wales and southern Queensland. 

"So it's a bit of a double whammy in those locations." Dr Watkins said the impact of the SSW may be felt in Australia through to the end of the year. 

"These sudden stratospheric warming events and the patterns that we see from them can go from September [to] October, sometimes persisting through to January," he said. 

Dr Hendon said he was gratified the Bureau of Meteorology's computer models were able to predict the event. 

"In 2002 we didn't even know about it until after it happened, and we didn't know if we would ever be able to predict it," he said. "It's exciting for us now that we have predictive capability that we didn't have in 2002."

NSW Department of Primary Industries, Combined Drought Indicator:

BACKGROUND

Bureau of Meteorology, 29 August 2019, media release, excerpt: 

FAST FACTS NEW SOUTH WALES 

Spring outlook shows: 

 • Daytime temperatures are likely to be warmer than average across the entire state. Overnight temperatures are also likely to be warmer than average across most of the state, with the highest likelihood in the north. 

• A higher likelihood of drier than average conditions in the coming three months across most of the state. 

Preliminary winter summary shows: 

 • Temperatures in New South Wales have been above average. Daytime temperatures are likely to rank among the warmest 10 winters on record. 

• Rainfall has been below average. 

• Likely to be among Sydney's three warmest winters on record for daytime temperatures, while rainfall was close to average.