SOS Save Happy Paws Haven

Happy Paws Haven, Eatonville, NSW, 27 June 2016:

Dear Friends of Happy Paws Haven

Thank you so very much for your support it has really made a significant difference.

We very very much appreciate it!

We really need your help!

We have just re-launched today a crowdfunding winter appeal.

We are asking those who have supported us for a donation.

Every little bit helps us and goes directly to the animals in our care.

Could you also please share this email with your friends and those you know may have supported us in the past.

Please ask them to do the same as we are struggling financially.

We have approximately 70 dogs and puppies,  and nearly 130 cats and kittens in our care, at foster carers and at our shelter locations. 

We are also renovating the dog shelters and cat enclosures to make them warmer for the animals for winter!
We have so many mouths to feed!

We have 6 puppies and 20 kittens to desex and immunise.

The good news is that we have already rehomed over 80 animals this year since January 2016.

Please help us raise the funds we urgently need for us to continue!

We urgently need money to make sure the puppies and kittens, cats and dogs in our care are warm for winter, have the food and vet care they need as we are struggling financially!

Please, please donate to this very worthy cause.

To donate:

https://www.youcaring.com/happy-paws-haven-inc-570458

All donations over $2 are tax deductible! We have DGR status.

Our BSB 633000 Our account is 130786031, Our Account name is Happy Paws Haven Inc.

Regards

Sally Rogers

MBA Macquarie, BSc (Bio-Med),

Founder, President, Public Officer and General Manager

HappyPaws Haven

140 Tindal Road

Eatonsville NSW 2460

Your local animal welfare charity

Rescue Officer Belgian Shepherd Club, NSW

www.happypawsgrafton.com.au

www.happypawshaven.com.au

www.facebook.com/pages/Happy-Paws-Haven-Inc/76224320885

Just because it is beautiful......(12)

Green Sea Turtle, Kona Coast, Hawaii

What will happen to the more than 40,000 year-old fishing rights if the NSW Clarence River Estuary is industrialised?

Dredging activities impact on the marine environment by smothering benthic biota and habitats and degrading water quality through elevated turbidites and bioavailability of pollutants. In addition, alterations in seabed morphology and bathymetry, and consequently to wave energy and water circulation, result in modified patterns of littoral drift (NSW Fisheries 1999, Watchorn 2000). The effects of this can include progressive accretion of sediments on some parts of the coast, and erosion in other areas (Winstanley 1995). Biota are obliterated during dredge removal and may take months or years to recover (Coleman et al. 1999). Species directly affected include invertebrates, fish and seagrass, although mangrove and saltmarsh communities are indirectly affected through altered water flows within estuaries (Edgar 2001). Dredging has been implicated in the disappearance of some invertebrates from port environments, such as a number of hydroid species that have not been recorded in Hobsons Bay, Victoria, since the advent of dredging programs (J.E. Watson, pers. comm., cited in Poore and Kudenov 1978b). Studies elsewhere have shown that the long-term influences of dredging on benthic infauna occur through permanent modification of the sedimentary environment (Jones and Candy 1981). [Commonwealth Dept. of Environment, National Oceans Office, Impact from the ocean/land interface, 2006]

Many North Coast Voices readers will be familiar with reports that deep and/or sustained dredging of tidal rivers and ocean harbours negatively impacts marine biodiversity resulting in species richness and abundance declining over time.

Environmental problems in the Port of Gladstone around 794kms to the north of the Port of Yamba have been in the news for years.

The Clarence River estuary is the largest combined river-ocean fishery in New South Wales and home to the biggest commercial fishing fleet in this state.

It is also a river which for a significant part of its length is held under Native Title by the Yaegl people (Yaegl People #1 & Yaegl People #2) of the Clarence Valley - from the waters approximately half-way between Ulmarra and Brushgrove right down to the eastern extremities of the northern and southern breakwater walls at the mouth of the river.

Here are the official maps outlining in green Native Title officially held to date:

On 2 June 2016 the CEO of Australian Infrastructure Developments was careful to note that this speculative company - lobbying for heavy industrialisation of the Clarence River estuary via a mega port covering 36 sq. kms or 27.2% of the entire estuary area - was yet to approach the Yaegl community or the trust created by traditional owners to manage these native titles.

Surely, with indigenous fishing rights recognised at law as existing on the Clarence River since time immemorial, any responsible company with a plan to extensively alter the riverine and marine environment should have asked the Yaegl people first before approaching the NSW Government with this:

Based on preliminary mapping published by Australian Infrastructure Developments Pty Ltd, yellow block overlays indicate bulk, liquid & container cargo terminals and shipping berths with grey overlays indicating proposed industrial areas

But then, Des Euen and his small band of backers have not yet publicly approached any of the Lower Clarence communities most affected by this prime example of environmental vandalism.

Challenging revisionist claims concerning Australia's decision to go the war in Iraq

On 20 March 2003 the first of the Coalition of the Willing strikes against Baghdad occurred. What went down in Australia on that first day of the Iraq War is now part of official records.

As one can see below the contemporary quotes differ markedly from Liberal Deputy-Leader Julie Bishop’s post-Chilcot Report assertion that; “The Australian government - both Labor and Liberal - the Australian parliament would take responsibility….I recall very well at the time Kevin Rudd [who was then Labor’s foreign affairs spokesman] urging us to continue to support the United States. So it was a bipartisan position up to a point in relation to Iraq.” 

20 March 2003 Quotes

Robert ‘Bob’ BALDWIN (Liberal Member for Patterson), Hansard, 20 March 2003:

Members opposite have been completely silent on these atrocities, but many Australians heard this week a broadcast on the John Laws program when he read a report that was published in Britain by a group called Indict. Indict were recent 13120 REPRESENTATIVES Thursday, 20 March 2003 observers in Iraq and their report details some of the most abhorrent abuses of humans known to man. One example is of opponents of the Iraqi regime being placed alive, head first or feet first, into a shredding machine and the remains of bodies later being used as fish food. Not only is it terrifying that a regime could subject its own people to this sort of treatment, but it is also terrifying to think that a regime like this has weapons of mass destruction.

Prime Minister John Howard, Address to the Nation, 20 March 2003;

Another point I'd make to you very strongly is that we're not dealing here with a regime of ordinary brutality. There are many dictatorships in the world. - but this is a dictatorship of a particularly horrific kind.

His is an appalling regime: its torture, its use of rape as an instrument of intimidation; the cruelty to children to extract confessions from parents. It is a terrible catalogue of inflicting human misery on a people who deserve much better.

This week, the Times of London detailed the use of a human shredding machine as a vehicle for putting to death critics of Saddam Hussein. This is the man, this is the apparatus of terror we are dealing with.

Excerpt from Federal Labor Opposition Leader Simon Crean’s Address to the National Press Club, 20 March 2003:

As I speak, we are a nation on the brink of war.

A war we should not be in.

A war to which 2000 of our fighting men and women were committed many months ago but were told about last Tuesday.

A war to which we are one of only four countries prepared to join the U.S. in putting troops on the ground, despite claims of a coalition of up to thirty.

A war which, for the first time in our history, Australia has joined as an aggressor.

Not because we are directly threatened.

Not because the UN has determined it.

But because the U.S. asked us to.

A war our troops will engage in when Commander Tommy Franks of the United States gives the order.

A war which exposes them to great risk.

A war which will cause great humanitarian damage to innocent men, women and children in Iraq.

A war unnecessary to achieve the disarmament of Iraq because there remained an alternate way.

Saddam Hussein must be disarmed, but this is not the way.

I speak to you today, not only as Labor leader and Leader of the Opposition, but on behalf of millions of Australians who share opposition to this war….

John Howard in the House of Representatives at a later date:

https://youtu.be/8R9eZ8c1EDo

Take a bow Twitter in Australia - a large part of the reason Turnbull & Co weren't unconditionally loved by the electorate on 2 July 2016 is your fault!

Excerpt from Sky News Australian Agenda 3 July 2016 interview with Liberal Senator for Tasmania George Brandis:

PAUL KELLY:

Can I just ask, do you think we are seeing deeper changes in Australian politics? We have now gone for a decade and the evidence is that it's very hard for a first-term government to it be re-elected. The electorate seems to be more impatient and more critical. Do you think that's right?

ATTORNEY-GENERAL:

I do, and there are a lot of reasons for that. I think one of the drivers of this is the increasing velocity of events. Another is the trivialisation of political communication through Twitter and things like that. There are a lot of phenomena that sociologists and political scientists will no doubt write about, but I do think that the velocity of events, the increasing accelerating velocity of events and the trivialisation of political discourse have a lot to do with it.

Take a bow, Aussie twerps.

QLD Western Downs Alliance takes Turnbull Government to court over requirement to consider water trigger legislation

NSW Environmental Defender’s Office, 24 June 2016:

Western Downs Alliance v Minister for the Environment & Santos Limited

We are acting for Western Downs Alliance in its challenge to a decision by the Federal Minister for the Environment to approve the Santos GLNG Gas Field Development Project in Queensland.  

This is the first CSG case brought under national environmental laws to challenge the application of the Water Trigger, and is an important test case.

The Minister’s approval allows Santos to develop 6,100 coal seam gas (CSG) wells across approximately 1 million hectares of land in the Surat Basin in South-Central Queensland. This represents a substantial expansion on the 2,650 CSG wells approved for an overlapping (but significantly smaller) area in 2010.

Over the project’s predicted life of more than 30 years, Santos is proposing to extract up to 219 billion litres of water, with potential impacts on the Great Artesian Basin. The Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the project outlines proposed methods of managing the extracted water, one of which is to release water from the wells into surface water systems such as rivers and lakes.

Western Downs Alliance argues that the approval of the project was unlawful because the Minister did not properly assess the project’s impacts on surface water.

The EIS notes that the project is likely to have a number of surface water impacts, including:

* increased sedimentation;

* erosion of stream banks;

* surface water contamination, including toxicity to aquatic ecosystems; and

* altered surface water flow.

In November 2014, the Independent Expert Scientific Committee, which was set up in 2012 to provide scientific advice to decision makers on the impact that coal seam gas and large coal mining development may have on Australia's water resources, advised the Minister that there is ‘considerable scientific uncertainty about potential impacts [of this project] on surface water and groundwater and associated ecosystems’. The Committee specifically stated that the potential impacts of discharging water into the Dawson River, including ecological impacts, should be assessed.

This case raises the question of what is required of the Minister under the ‘Water Trigger’, which was added in 2013 as a ‘matter of national environmental significance’ to Australia’s national environmental law, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act). Under the Water Trigger, any proposed CSG development that has, will have, or is likely to have a significant impact on a water resource requires comprehensive assessment and approval at a national level by the Minister under the EPBC Act.

Western Downs Alliance argues that the Minister incorrectly formed the view that it was not necessary to assess the impacts of releasing CSG water to surface waters as part of the project approval, and that as a result the approval was unlawful.

The case has been listed for a case management hearing in the New South Wales Registry of the Federal Court of Australia on 27 June 2016.

We are grateful to barristers Geoffrey Kennett SC and Ashley Stafford for their assistance in this matter.

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Australian Federal Election 2016: state of play on the morning of 6 July 2016

Inching towards a result.....

Australian Electoral Commission, 6 July 2016 at 1am