Environmental Defender's Office holding workshops on reconnecting the community to the NSW EP&A Act, 14-28 November 2009

Click on flyer to enlarge

From mid to late November the Environmental Defender's Office (EDO) and Total Environment Centre (TEC) will be holding FREE workshops in Sydney and regional centres to collate community views regarding the NSW Planning System and how it can be improved.

These will be particularly relevant to anybody who has ever submitted to a major project, the Regional Strategies, Housing Codes, engaged with the 2008 Planning Reforms or been involved in a community consultation process with a developer.

Each workshop will include a brief overview of the Planning System and case studies specific to each region. Community feedback and views will be compiled into a report to be presented to the Minister for Planning and the Department early in 2010.

There will be capacity to interview groups and individuals who cannot attend or wish to give in depth feedback on particular experiences after each workshop.

EDO is also seeking feedback and views on indigenous engagement with the planning system.

* These workshops are funded by the Department of Planning NSW and will be jointly facilitated by the EDO and Total Environment Centre.

The Yamba Rod Run is on again 13-15 November and The Bridge to Breakers sail on 15 November 2009

Every year the small coastal town of Yamba at the mouth of the Clarence River plays host to hot rod enthusiasts from up and down the Australian east coast for the Yamba Rod Run.

Some splendidly restored modern and vintage rods can be seen tootling around Yamba streets adding an extra layer of colour to the sun and surf.

So if you want good clean fun and a chance to have a close up look at sparkling, well-loved cars presented by the Borderline Street Rodders this is the place to be next weekend.

Contact for information: falzonsofus at bigpond dot com or phone (02) 6685 0107.

On the Sunday the Harwood to Yamba Bridge to Breakers sail also takes place.

Photographs from Hot Rod Features

Target Australia isn't making Maud feel good....

Maud up the Street pointed out to me that some of the clothing she's brought from her local Target store (owned by Wesfarmers) is labelled "Target MADE IN CHINA from Australian fabric".

Seems the stuff her knickers are made of is probably grown and definitely woven here, rolled into bolts and shipped overseas - only to return as clothing items.

Can't think of any reason other than employee wages are in all likelihood much lower in China.

Bit naughty of Wesfarmers, isn't it.

Graphic from Wikipedia

Christine Hazell wins Grafton Art Club’s 41st Jacaranda Art Exhibition

Well done, Christine.

Photograph from The Daily Examiner 5 November 2009

I shouldn't read 'denialist' blogs.....

With global warming scepticism in full swing out in the blogosphere in the lead-up to the UN Climate Change Conference Copenhagen 2009 it is hard to resist opening some of the 'denialist' blogs referred to in passing by other bloggers.
A bad habit which can temporarily addle the brain.

This week I came across Denial Depot which apparently went online in April 2009 and boasts in its sidebar that:

We are not afraid to be called climate "deniers". In fact we embrace it as medal of honor bestowed on us by our alarmist foes. Galileo was a Denier. It is not an insult. I call this blog "Denier Depot" for that reason.
Welcome to my climate science blog.
I believe that one day all science will be done on blogs because we bloggers are natural skeptics, disbelieving the mainstream and accepting the possibility of any alternative idea.
We stand unimpressed by "textbooks", "peer review journals" and so-called "facts". There are no facts, just dissenting opinion. We are infinitely small compared to nature and can't grasp anything as certain as a fact.

The DD blogger Inferno (who has a twin blogging on Rouge Force with the occupation of Bum) comes out with confusing little gems which cast doubt on how well researched the main arguments being put forward in his posts are.

The latest brow furrow is this:

The difference between fraud and no fraud turns out to be about 0.4 degrees C ('C' means Cold, sometimes spoken in latin, 'Celcius').

Here I was thinking that C meant Celsius (named after the formulator of an early centigrade temperature scale, Anders Celsius) and that the usual Latin words for cold and very cold/icy are frigidus and gelidus respectively.

However, there is a rather large kernel of suspicion that Inferno and his {a presumption of gender} anti-global warming blog might actually be a giant leg pull.
The constant decrying of others cloaking identity behind a pen name, while continually doing the same on Denial Depot and repeated over-the-top boasting (along the lines of six impossible things to believe before breakfast) does make one wonder if he is having fun at the expense of others.

If Inferno is indulging in a little spoofing, I suspect that Britain, New Zealand or Australia might be where he hails from.

What is obvious from many of the comments attached to Inferno's posts is that he is taken very seriously by some readers.

Some of the most depressing online posts about the Internet this week - confirming that we're all just mushrooms to the powers that be

From Boing Boing:

Secret copyright treaty leaks. It's bad. Very bad.
The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad. It says:

• * That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.

• * That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet -- and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living -- if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.

• * That the whole world must adopt US-style "notice-and-takedown" rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused -- again, without evidence or trial -- of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.

From An Onymous Lefty:

Why shouldn't a US media company kick you off the internet with no right of appeal?
Do you remember voting for the government to force your ISP to spend your money sifting through your internet logs to check that you're not infringing a foreign corporation's potential copyright? No? That's weird

From Michael Geist:

The ACTA Internet Chapter: Putting the Pieces Together
The Internet chapter raises two additional issues. On the international front, it provides firm confirmation that the treaty is not a counterfeiting trade, but a copyright treaty. These provisions involve copyright policy as no reasonable definition of counterfeiting would include these kinds of provisions. On the domestic front, it raises serious questions about the Canadian negotiation mandate. Negotations from Foreign Affairs are typically constrained by either domestic law, a bill before the House of Commons, or the negotiation mandate letter. Since these provisions dramatically exceed current Canadian law and are not found in any bill presently before the House, Canadians should be asking whether the negotiation mandate letter has envisioned such dramatic changes to domestic copyright law. When combined with the other chapters that include statutory damages, search and seizure powers for border guards, anti-camcording rules, and mandatory disclosure of personal information requirements, it is clear that there is no bigger IP issue today than the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement being negotiated behind closed doors this week in Korea.

From The Huffington Post:

Transparency of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)
Unlike nearly all other multilateral and plurilateral discussions about
intellectual property norms, the ACTA negotiations have been held in
deep secrecy. This has led to a chorus of criticism, and demands that
the ACTA process be opened up, and that documents in ACTA negotiations
be disclosed, as they are routinely in intellectual property
negotiations at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) or
the World Trade Organization (WTO).
After a year of criticism over the secrecy of this negotiation, the
White House United States Trade Representative (USTR) recently began a
policy of offering some persons access to documents in this negotiation,
on the condition that they sign a non disclosure agreement (NDA) that
prevents any public discussion of the contents of those documents. The
opportunity to see the ACTA documents under the NDA was offered to a
large number of business interests, but very few public interest or
consumer groups, and there were no opportunities for academic experts or
the general public to review the documents.
USTR officials have indicated that this policy of access by invitation
and NDA fully addresses the legitimate demands for more transparency of
the negotiation, and it is being considered as a model for the future.
We are opposed to this approach because it creates a small special class
of citizens who have rights superior to the majority of the population,
and because it gives the government too much discretion in deciding who
can monitor and criticize its operations. We have no confidence in this
new approach.

And this pretence at transparency from the Australian Government's Dept of Foreign Affairs and Trade, in which we're given a short one page general summary and the meeting agenda:

Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA): Public information and consultations on the ACTA
The ACTA was first announced publicly by the US on 23 October 2007....
A detailed summary of all elements currently under discussion has been drafted by all ACTA negotiation participants, setting out the topics being addressed in ACTA discussions. This paper is intended to provide greater information to the public on the matters being negotiated, and guide stakeholders seeking to make submissions on ACTA negotiations...
As noted in Mr Crean's media release, Australia seeks an enhanced, practical international standard on IPR enforcement with broad international support, to compliment the existing international IP architecture. Australia regards the extent to which the ACTA can attract support from countries in our region as a critical issue in determining the real value of the ACTA for Australia. Taking part in the negotiations does not oblige Australia to join any resulting treaty.....
Australia will next participate in the sixth round of negotiations to be held in Seoul in November. The agenda for this meeting can be found here. We also intend to continue to promote enhancing the transparency of negotiations at this round, to ensure the Australian public is kept well informed and has further opportunities to give input. Australia expects negotiations to extend into 2010.

'The Australian' & Melbourne Institute's Road to Recovery Conference apparently was a doozy

The Melbourne Institute currently has the The Road to Recovery: Restoring Prosperity After the Crisis 5-6th November 2009 conference program (along with speech and presentation downloads) available on its website.
Almost everyone who is anyone in the field of economic and social policy appears to have been there.
Below is a slide that Access Economics put up during the presentation Will the Budget recover alongside the economy?
Now it's been obvious for a while that Chris Richardson loves to craft statements which toss a live one to the meeja, but this is getting a bit over the top even for him:


















Oh, and thanks Malcolm for that universal tweet alerting all us plebs to this conference - from Richardson's power points to your next sound bite I'm guessing.

Animalia......

Click on image to enlarge
The Daily Examiner,
Letter to the Editor
October 2009

Yet another plan for the proposed new Iluka jetty and pontoon

Cross section visual impacts of proposed Iluka Pontoon and Jetty options at high tide,
Clarence Valley Council, November 2009

The Daily Examiner, 5 November 2009:

AFTER months of wrangling over a site, design and cost of a public jetty for Iluka, another proposal has hit the streets.
The Clarence Valley Council has now put on display plans for a pontoon thatwould be substantially cheaper than the original jetty proposal, but could provide extra mooring spaces for boats............
It was estimated the original proposal would have cost about $165,000. The pontoon would cost an estimated$120,000, with NSW Maritime expected to meet close to half the cost.
If the owners of the Sedgers Reef Hotel agree to the new plan, their pledged contribution of $50,000 will leave ratepayers with a bill of only $10,000.
The proposal will be on public display at the council offices until November 13.
Sedgers Reef Hotel owners were unavailable yesterday.

Deep in my heart I always suspected that Americans.......

I've always suspected that Americans were just a touch pixie-led, loopy,barkers,crackers,looney - a breed apart.
This LA Times media report goes some way towards confirming it:
"A little-noticed measure would put Christian Science healing sessions on the same footing as clinical medicine. Critics say it violates the separation of church and state.
Backed by some of the most powerful members of the Senate, a little-noticed provision in the healthcare overhaul bill would require insurers to consider covering Christian Science prayer treatments as medical expenses.......
The Internal Revenue Service allows the cost of the prayer sessions to be counted among itemized medical expenses for income tax purposes -- one of the only religious treatments explicitly identified as deductible by the IRS. Some federal medical insurance programs, including those for military families, also reimburse for prayer treatment."

The database of ruin coming to your town soon.....

Time marches inexorably on and each day government bureaucracy at every level, health services, financial institutions and even retail outlets are all squirreling away information about each and every one of us in data bases both large and small.

Whenever one inquires about the safety of such databases the assurance received usually goes along the line that there is nothing to worry about - a high level of data security surrounds personally identifiable information and, it would be hard to identify individuals from those information blocs held in long-term digital storage (for comparison/research purposes) because the data has been anonymized.

However, this is apparently not the case.
Due to the large number of public databases accessible on the Internet and by application to various institutions/agencies, it really isn't all that anonymous because most information can be mined and/or manually cross-checked.
Thus potentially allowing re-identification of an individual and the information held concerning that person or family.

This is Paul Ohm Associate Professor of Law from the University of Colorado and author of the research paper Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization :

Computer scientists have recently undermined our faith in the privacy-protecting power of anonymization, the name for techniques for protecting the privacy of individuals in large databases by deleting information like names and social security numbers. These scientists have demonstrated they can often 'reidentify' or 'deanonymize' individuals hidden in anonymized data with astonishing ease. By understanding this research, we will realize we have made a mistake, labored beneath a fundamental misunderstanding, which has assured us much less privacy than we have assumed. This mistake pervades nearly every information privacy law, regulation, and debate, yet regulators and legal scholars have paid it scant attention...

In an Ars Technica post Paul Ohm is quoted as stating:

"For almost every person on earth, there is at least one fact about them stored in a computer database that an adversary could use to blackmail, discriminate against, harass, or steal the identity of him or her. I mean more than mere embarrassment or inconvenience; I mean legally cognizable harm. Perhaps it is a fact about past conduct, health, or family shame. For almost every one of us, then, we can assume a hypothetical 'database of ruin,' the one containing this fact but until now splintered across dozens of databases on computers around the world, and thus disconnected from our identity. Reidentification has formed the database of ruin and given access to it to our worst enemies."

With the Rudd Government seemingly stacked with politicians in love with the idea of big data bases and, Health Minister Nicola Roxon's e-health card (with its unique personal identifier within each chip) bearing down on ordinary citizens going quietly about their business in 2010-11, this is a problem we all need to consider carefully. As government legislation will not stop personal privacy being invaded (it can only provide mechanisms to rectify or penalise after the fact) and the hope that IT software will dam the information outflow is fast receding.

Life's like that sometimes.........

........for many an older blogger like me.

NSW Hansard and a case of 'but, butt, but, butt, but'!

Sometimes I wonder how those hardy souls sitting patiently in the NSW Parliament recording for Hansard can actually bear the job, with exchanges like this often being the order of the day:

Mr MATT BROWN (Kiama) [3.53 p.m.], in reply: I acknowledge all those members who made a contribution to the debate, particularly the positive words spoken by my parliamentary colleagues the member for South Coast, Shelley Hancock, and the member for Shellharbour, Lylea McMahon. I was very pleased that the member for South Coast gave the road between Dunmore and Oak Flats, which is the matter we are discussing today, a big tick. The member for Bega asked why I did not acknowledge the Federal money in the project. I want to make it very clear that not one cent of Federal money has gone into the Dunmore to Oak Flats section of the road. They were his words. I do not think the member for Bega understands how this funding works. I agree with the member for South Coast, who said that she would be happy to see that southbound lane opened. I certainly will be because it is still creating a little traffic congestion. However, motorists can see that things are moving ahead extremely well. The member for South Coast then put her big "but" in the debate.
Mrs Shelley Hancock: Point of order: I ask the member to withdraw that remark. It is highly offensive. It is not that big!
Mr MATT BROWN: To the point of order: The member was going along positively and then she said "but".
Mrs Shelley Hancock: I ask the member to withdraw that comment.
Mr MATT BROWN: I am not withdrawing because it is a part of my argument. I did not mean any offence but after a big "but" the debate became negative.
Mrs Shelley Hancock: Madam Deputy-Speaker, I ask you to rule on the point of order I have raised. I take offence at that comment.
Mr MATT BROWN: It is a one "t" but.
The DEPUTY-SPEAKER: Order! The member for Kiama has indicated he is not prepared to withdraw the word "but".
Mr Andrew Constance: Point of order—
The DEPUTY-SPEAKER: Order! I hope the member for Bega rises on a valid point of order.
Mr Andrew Constance: Madam Deputy-Speaker, based on your facial expressions you knew full well what the member for Kiama meant in that remark. Therefore, I ask you to direct the member for Kiama to withdraw that sexist remark.
Mr MATT BROWN: You are wasting time. If I offended the member for South Coast I apologise. It was not my intention. I was referring to the member for South Coast saying "but".
The DEPUTY-SPEAKER: Order! The member for Kiama has indicated that he was referring to the word "but". The member has the call.

NSW Parliament Legislative Assembly 27th October 2009 Hansard transcript