NSW North Coast on its own when it comes to foreshore erosion and innundation of urban coastal land

According to The Sydney Morning Herald on 13 June 2009:

The Minister for Climate Change, Carmel Tebbutt, has outlined her views in a letter to the Mayor of Taree, Paul Hogan, who is under pressure from residents of Old Bar beach, on the Mid-North Coast, where properties are already threatened by natural erosion.

Signalling the scale of future problems along the coastline from rising sea levels, Ms Tebbutt told Cr Hogan the Government would give priority to protecting public works and public safety, not private property.

"Given the expected magnitude of requests for funding, government financial assistance to councils is unlikely to extend to protecting or purchasing all properties at risk from coastal hazards and sea-level rise," Ms Tebbutt said.

A senior official in her department, Simon Smith, bluntly told a federal parliamentary committee recently: "I do not think that many people have realised how significant it is and how much valuable land and property is going to be affected."

He also said: "The state's view is that the risk to a property from sea-level rise lies with the property owner, public or private - or, whoever owns the land takes the risk. They gain the benefit of proximity to the ocean and they bear the risk of proximity to the ocean."

This almost sound like a reasonable position to take until one realises that greedy developers and overly complacent local government are not the only villains (or seachange property purchasers the only fools), because successive NSW planning ministers have also given consent for coastal development and development within coastal deltas in full knowledge that such land will be impacted by rising sea levels and increasingly destructive storms and tidal patterns.

Indeed, the current NSW Minister for Planning Kristina Keneally is currently considering an amended Clarence Valley Council Local Environmental Plan for West Yamba which would place another 2,000-2,500 homes in the direct path of adverse climate change impacts and, position the NSW Government at the wrong end of any lawsuit which eventuates.

In light of the climate change/sea levels situation set out in Antarctic Climate & Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre June 2009 position analysis papers, I can feel little sympathy for the current stance of either state or local government:

Recent estimates, using a variety of new satellite measurements, provide strong evidence that the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are contributing more to present sea-level rise than was estimated by the IPC AR4.

and

The impacts of changing sea ice cover on Southern Ocean circulation could be significant.
Climate models show that the overturning circulation will slow over the coming decades as the Earth warms, sea ice formation decreases, precipitation increases over the ocean and melt-water runs into the ocean from the Antarctic ice sheet. This slowdown will contribute to a further reduction in sea ice extent around Antarctica and result in a decrease in the amount of CO2 absorbed by the Southern Ocean, both of which represent positive feedbacks and will tend to increase the rate of climate change (Rintoul and Church, 2002)...with flow-on effects both globally and in Australia.

Taking the temperature of the Grocery Prices website

North Coast Voices hasn't done an update on the Federal Government website Grocery Choice (now managed by Choice) recently, so here is the latest.

In June 2009 it's still on the sick list and the review continues. Little has changed though there are now a number of links on the home page to Choice articles.

The only price information available to NSW Northern Rivers residents is still a basic and barely differentiated average over the entire north east of New South Wales.

For what it's worth the June Basic Staples Basket price is:
Coles $78.32
Woolworths/Safeway $82.34
Franklins $85.68
Independents $90.01
Aldi $62.00

For all the initial hooplah, this site remains a waste of government money and the consumer's time.

Hues of blue and green at Grafton Art Gallery

Wave Breaking
by John Millington

Wren
by Julie Hunter

Wash Basin
by Cobie Kaptein


All works can be seen at the
Grafton Art Gallery.
158 Fitzroy Street, Grafton
Opening Hours:
10am-4pm Tuesday-Sunday
(closed Monday)

In-cin-er-ate! In-cin-er-ate!

Nick Broughall over at Gizmodo posted this pic for captioning - here's my effort.

Mercurius comments on the green lobby and climate change sceptics

Senator Stephen Fielding's descent into the absurd has certainly produced a reaction, as Mecurius writing at Larvatus Prodeo demonstrates in a comment on Senator Fielding goes wobbly on climate change.

Heartfelt sentiments with which I concur.

43 Mercurius
Jun 9th, 2009 at 1:49 pm

Well, one thing the climate change delusionists have got right is that the “green lobby” has a vested interest in pursuing action on climate change.

I’ll declare my vested interests right now:
1) I have a vested interest in living in an Australia that doesn’t face an influx of 100 million Bangladeshis looking for somewhere new to live circa 2070.2) I have a vested interest in living in an Australia that isn’t adversely impacted by an ozone hole, depleted rainfall and depleted soils throughout our agricultural belt.3) I have a vested interest in living in an Australia that doesn’t face economic collapse through dependence on carbon-based fuels long after the point those fuels have ceased to be economically viable or recoverable.4) I have a vested interest in living in an Australia that can grow enough food and supply enough water to feed my grandchildren after I’m gone.

Yep, that’s me — I’m the selfish, vested-interested “green lobby”.
If only I could be more like those altruistic “sceptics” who ask for nothing more than to be left in peace to consume every last available skerrick of food, water, oil and clean air — and just every so often to be lavished with gentle praise and admiration for being such open-minded, enlightened beings.

My favourite quote this week on climate change

My favourite quote comes from SBS Dateline this week:

"GEORGE NEGUS: The sceptics are still out there - the people who believe that science could be wrong about this. Are they still getting in your ear?

LORD NICHOLAS STERN: No. They're totally marginal now. I mean, do they object to the laws of thermodynamics or gravitation? It is just absurd. The greenhouse gases are there, they're going up and greenhouse gases trap heat - that's been known since the 19th century. So it's really only in bar rooms, I think, that this kind of discussion takes place. I don't think anybody would regard that as serious anymore."

Does this mean that media tartlet Senator Steve Fielding has taken to frequenting pubs?

The Greens leader declares able to meet Forestry Tasmania's demand for full payment of court costs

Tonight Australian Senator Bob Brown has sent out an email which reads:

Dear Friend,
Just over a week ago I received a letter from Forestry Tasmania threatening me with bankruptcy (which would disqualify me from serving in the Senate) if I failed to pay $240,000 in legal costs by 29 June 2009.
The legal bill arose when the full bench of the Federal Court overturned Justice Marshall’s finding (in my favour), that logging of Wielangta Forest should stop because it threatened endangered species like the Swift Parrot, Tasmanian Wedge-tailed Eagle and the Wielangta Stag Beetle.
After serious consideration, I made the letter public on Monday.
Following an overwhelming public response, I am pleased to tell you I will be able to pay the bill by the deadline.
Donations of up to $20,000, for which I am extremely grateful, have been reported on the news.
The unreported generous donations of $10, $20, $50, $100 and $500—given by more than a thousand Australians from across the country— have also been essential and these donors have my enormous gratitude.......

Well done, Australia.

So this is what passes for NSW regional news these days?

Snapshot from The Daily Examiner, Grafton NSW

It wasn't that many days past since The Daily Examiner editor Peter Chapman was sounding off about ABC North Coast Radio's limited news coverage.
In fact I commented upon his views in this recent post Chapman uses Chaser blunder to hit back at Media Watch.

Well, Mr. Chapman continues to exceed himself, with blatant advertisement masquerading as reporting turning up in the newspaper under his stewardship yet again on 11 June 2009 at page 6 of a 32 page issue.

So enchanted is the editor with this no-brainer form of faux news that the article is also on the newspapers website, where one can happily learn that the principal dealer is committed to taking Clarence Valley Auto well into the future and that he will look after the local community and offer the best possible deals I can on Ford and Hyundai, as well as the best service.

One cannot help wondering if all these not so stealthy advertisements are paid for or if they are freebies for friends.

What they are definitely not is news reporting.

In painful strains that left a sting.....

Typing is not activism picked up on this version of the Australian national anthem, by indigenous artist Adam Hill, in The Age at the beginning of June:

AUSFAILURE NATIONAL TANTRUM

Australians all let us remorse

For we are blind can't see

We've golden soil that we all spoil

Our home washes into sea

Our land abounds in racist gits

Of whom we really can't bear

In history's cage recompense the slaves

Do Australians really care?

In painful strains that left a sting

Do Australians really care?

I can almost hear Gert sigh with relief that this time she didn't get a mention.

OMG Frank Sartor wants NSW's top job?

This week the spectre of Frank Sartor running New South Wales raised its ugly head once more.
Sartor has the hide to push his - ahem- expertise in planning law and reform as an example of why he has the right fibre for the top job.
Sartor as NSW Planning Minister was bad enough - Sartor as NSW Premier determined to create new planning policy is the stuff of nightmares.
On the NSW North Coast we still have his large development consents languishing for lack of investment money or buyer interest while the same development companies push even more grand plans under the nose of the current minister.
Francesco, you left behind an utter mess last time you held the reins.
The mind boggles at what you would do with a second bite at the apple and before we have to again endure your overbearing arrogance it might be wise if everyone on the coast permanently crosses the nearest state border!

At last we have a new epoch........

Even with our communal love of labelling things and delight in buzz words, this term appears to have been around for the last eight years but doesn't seem to have really taken off.
Perhaps because in creating a new 'age', 'period' or 'epoch' it implies that global warming is here for a long, long time and (although realistic) that is a very uncomfortable thought for many.

Robert Cahalan, climatologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center speaking to Science Daily in May 2008:

"Over recent decades, however, we have moved into a human-dominated climate that some have termed the Anthropocene. The major change in Earth's climate is now really dominated by human activity, which has never happened before."

According to Encyclopaedia Britannica online:

Anthropocene Epoch
geologic time unofficial interval of geologic time characterized by the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere resulting from the onset of organized human industrial activity. Although the modern period of Earth's history is conventionally defined as residing within the Holocene Epoch (11,800 years ago to the present), some scientists have argued that the Holocene terminated in the relatively recent past. They contend that Earth currently resides in a climatic interval during which humans have exerted a dominant influence over climate. The onset of the Anthropocene Epoch, so-named by Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen, is said to be coincident with the creation of the steam engine by Scottish inventor James Watt in 1784.

Stephen Conroy needs to remember that half-truths are as bad as outright lies

The Federal Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy Central Propaganda , Senator Stephen Conroy, has reached the stage where he will say almost anything to shepherd his mandatory national ISP-level Internet censorship into being.

It is hardly believable that he imagines that any sensible person believes that the Rudd Government will spend over $44 million dollars on such a limited filtering scheme (as set out in media quotes below) and the possible re-implementation of a government free filtering software offer.

Given the number of half truths Senator Conroy has already uttered concerning his Internet filtering plan, I would not trust him not to be secretly relying on regulatory provisions to widen his net, once legislation was passed, and implement the wider form of censorship many legitimately fear.

According to The Sydney Morning Herald on 2 June 2009:

Results of the trials are due to be published in July but, in response to a freedom of information request, the Government has admitted that "there are not success criteria as such"...............
The ACMA blacklist of prohibited URLs, which forms the basis of the Government's censorship policy, contained 977 web addresses as at April 30, according to ACMA.
The Government initially planned to censor the entire blacklist but, after widespread complaints that the list included a slew of legal R18+ and X18+ sites, the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, backtracked, saying he would only block the "refused classification" (RC) portion of the blacklist.
According to ACMA, 51 per cent of the blacklist, or 499 URLs, is RC content.
Based on the Government's budgeting of $44.5 million to implement the filtering scheme, this means the policy will cost $90,000 per URL.

Smart Company reports:

Conroy's office also confirmed that "unwanted content" - which the Government previously said it would block under the scheme - will now be blocked on a voluntary basis by internet service providers. The "unwanted content" refers to some material that is rated R18+ or X18+.
"ISPs can offer to filter additional content if they choose to, as an optional service for families," the spokesperson said.
"The Government is also considering optional ISP content filtering products for those families who wish to have such a service."
The decision comes after Conroy said last week in a Senate estimates hearing that the list of sites to be blocked may be submitted to an independent body for regular review, a decision welcomed by the ISP industry.
Conroy's office also confirmed that "unwanted content" - which the Government previously said it would block under the scheme - will now be blocked on a voluntary basis by internet service providers. The "unwanted content" refers to some material that is rated R18+ or X18+.
"ISPs can offer to filter additional content if they choose to, as an optional service for families," the spokesperson said.
"The Government is also considering optional ISP content filtering products for those families who wish to have such a service."
The decision comes after Conroy said last week in a Senate estimates hearing that the list of sites to be blocked may be submitted to an independent body for regular review, a decision welcomed by the ISP industry.

Some of Conroy's misleading statements entered into Hansard about his original plan:

1. On 10 November I released an expression of interest, seeking the participation of ISPs and mobile telephone operators in this live pilot. The pilot will specifically test filtering against the ACMA black list of prohibited internet content, which is mostly child pornography, as well as filtering of other unwanted content.

2. The list could contain 10,000 potentials. When you look around the world at Interpol, the FBI, Europol and other law enforcement agencies and you look at the size of the lists that they are actually using at the moment, 1,300 would not be sufficient to cover the URLs that we would have supplied to us with the purpose of blocking. So let me be clear about this: the pilot will seek to test network performance against a test list of approximately 10,000 sites.

Stop it or they'll go blind!

Now I've heard everything! The Rudd Government is reducing the Medicare rebate for cataract surgery from $831.60 to $409.60, according to the Minister for Aging and Member for Richmond Justine Elliott.

There are already quite a few worrying out-of-pocket expenses associated with eye surgery for those pensioners without savings or investments (as well as waiting lists which can still see a older person wait up to a year for publicly-funded eye surgery) and now the federal government is about to put such surgery almost out of reach for people living below the poverty line.

Right now if you have the money up front or private health insurance a cataract operation can usually be performed within 6 to 8 weeks on the NSW North Coast (by the same specialists and hospitals which make the poor wait and wait for exactly the same medical procedure), so the health system is already biased against those poor sods with no money in the bank.

Bluddy Kevin Rudd and his merry troop have just made this unfair state of affairs even worse and their piddling little national grant for rural & regional areas will go nowhere.
This counter-productive cost cutting stupidity ranks alongside the Clayton's public dental system - obviously those in power won't be happy until pensioners and those on low incomes are blind as well as toothless!

Federal Labor and Health Minister Roxon crossing a bridge too far

The Federal Minister for Health Nicola Roxon has announced a national health data base which can be accessed by hospitals, doctors, paramedics, dentists and chemists - every Australian will be assigned an individual identifying number attached to their digital medical history.
Eventually a special hi-tech Medicare card will hold an access chip/key.

Access to this data base will only allegedly be allowed with the freely-given permission of the person seeking medical treatment, dental work or a dispensed prescription.

I use the word allegedly because the voluntary nature of this data base access plan will not last more than a day or two after legislation is effected.

Public hospitals and medical practices will in short order insist that a person cannot be seen unless permission is given to access digital medical records and, as the Minister has little or no control over state area health service policy practices she will be rendered impotent.

Indeed Ms. Roxon statements to the media this week indicate that she will enable any bar an individual may have in place to be overriden at will by hospitals and ambulance services.

This scheme is in effect information acquisition and dissemination by stealth, as Ms. Roxon would be well aware that she is unable to contain the genie the Rudd Government is determined to let out of the bottle.
In fact her statement about the voluntary nature of this new health information scheme is almost a bare-faced lie.

So many Labor election promises made in the lead-up to the November 2007 election has either been inadequately legislated, so poorly funded that they are only window dressing, resulted in both new and amended policies either running on the spot or being studious delayed - now it seeks to implement a policy before the next federal election which will eventually see every medical Tom, Dick and Harry trawling though personal health information.

What is it with Labor? Don't they want a second term in federal government? Is it trying to alienate its 2007 support base because the Opposition benches are beginning to look nostalgically oh, so comfortable?

eHealth? eDisaster.

Amnesty International Media Award 2009 winners deserve a mention

2009 Amnesty Media Award Winners

GABY RADO MEMORIAL AWARD
Aleem Maqbool, BBC News

INTERNATIONAL TELEVISION & RADIO
World's Untold Stories: The Forgotten People, CNN, Dan Rivers and Mary Rogers

NATIONS & REGIONS
The Fight for Justice, The Herald Magazine by Lucy Adams

NATIONAL NEWSPAPERS
MI5 and the Torture Chambers of Pakistan, The Guardian by Ian Cobain

NEW MEDIA
Kenya: The Cry of Blood - Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances, Wikileaks, Julian Assange

PERIODICALS - CONSUMER MAGAZINES
The 'No Place for Children' campaign, New Statesman, Sir Al Aynsley Green, and Gillian Slovo

PERIODICALS - NEWSPAPER SUPPLEMENTS
Why do the Italians Hate Us? The Observer Magazine, Dan McDougall and Robin Hammond

PHOTOJOURNALISM
No One Much Cares, Newsweek, Eugene Richards

RADIO
Forgotten: The Central African Republic, BBC Radio 4 - Today Programme, Edward Main, Ceri Thomas, Mike Thomson

TELEVISION DOCUMENTARY & DOCUDRAMA
Dispatches: Saving Africa's Witch Children, Channel 4 / Red Rebel Films / Southern Star Factual, Mags Gavan, Joost Van der Valk, Alice Keens-Soper, Paul Woolwich

TELEVISION NEWS
Kiwanja Massacre: Congo, Channel 4 News / ITN, Ben De Pear, Jonathan Miller, Stuart Webb and Robert Chamwami

SPECIAL AWARD
This year's Special Award for Journalism Under Threat was awarded to Eynulla Fәtullayev, from Azerbaijan. Find out more.