Just how transparent is the expression of interest process for sale of council land in Maclean?

The Clarence Valley Council business paper for today's ordinary monthly meeting lists three businesses interested in leasing/purchasing public space in Maclean which is currently being used as free public car parking.

Expressions of Interest have been received from:

• Holder Baker Enterprises

• Woolworths Limited

• Buildev Development (NSW) Pty Ltd

But who is Buildev Development representing?

This is what this company says about itself:

The Buildev Group has extensive experience within all spectrums of the property development industry.

We manage the development process including recognising opportunities, securing development sites, approval processes, right through to marketing, finance and construction.

Our disciplined approach to site investigation and risk minimisation combined with an intuitive ability to realise development opportunities ensures positive outcomes for clients and stakeholders alike....

The Buildev Group is a growing force in the Australian property industry. A Newcastle based property investment, development and construction company investing in communities throughout New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria and Western Australia.........

The value on completion of current projects undertaken by The Buildev Group stands at over $1billion in Queensland

Key personnel

This is how ASIC describes this company:

Extracted from ASIC's database at AEST 08:28:49 on 30/09/2008
Name BUILDEV DEVELOPMENT (NSW) PTY. LTD.
ACN 115 089 122
Type Australian Proprietary Company, Limited By Shares
Registration Date 01/07/2005
Next Review Date 01/07/2009
Status Registered
Locality of Registered Office Raymond Terrace NSW 2324
Jurisdiction Australian Securities & Investments Commission

North Coast Voices has previously reported that Buildev Development (NSW) Pty Ltd has made political donations to the NSW Government and Crikey reports that this company donated $40,000 to the NSW Liberal Party.

Due to the fact that not all councillors appear to have declared their 2008 campaign contributions to the NSWEFA yet, the Clarence Valley electorate has no way of knowing if Buildev or either of its two fellow competitors made political donations to councillors.

The way in which corporations and/or their clients having business before council are described in business papers/attachments are a test for the newly-elected shire councillors who are meeting for the first time this morning.

Transparency demands that Clarence Valley residents and ratepayers be fully informed about all entities seeking to benefit from the lease/sale of public land.

They deserve to know if Buildev is acting on behalf of its shareholders, has another managed investment fund up and running or if it has been contracted by another party altogether.

If there is another party, is that party Coles or Target? If so, what would happen to the Coles and Target outlets at Yamba (which is only a 25-20 min ride away from Maclean) if Buildev were successful?

This is what Buildev proposes for Woolgoolga:

Clarence Valley Council Business Paper, 30 September 2008

Attachment giving summary of community opinion concerning sale of public space/car park

Dear Kevin, I second the sentiment......

With the Lowy Institute Poll 2008 being touted in the media as showing that we have rather taken our eyes off the climate change ball when that is not exactly the case according to its own survey(though listening to Lowy representative interviews I suspect that this particular think tank is not loathe for us all to believe so), it was gratifying to find that the Prime Minister had received the following letter with which I heartily concur.

OPEN LETTER TO THE PRIME MINISTER OF AUSTRALIA.

The Hon. Kevin Rudd, MP

Prime Minister of Australia

Australian Parliament

Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, 2600 September 26, 2008

Dear Prime Minister,

The 2007 IPCC report, compiled by hundreds of climate scientists and representing a consensus view of the best available peer-reviewed science, has unequivocally concluded that our climate is warming rapidly, and that we are now at least 90% certain that this is primarily due to human activities.

The concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere now far exceeds the natural range of the past 650,000 years, and it is rising at an alarming rate due to human activity - currently by over 2 parts per million per year. The concentration of several other important greenhouse gases is also increasing rapidly.

If this trend is not halted soon, many millions of people from around the world will be at risk from extreme events such as heat waves, drought, fire, floods and storms, our coasts and cities will be threatened by rising sea levels, vector-borne, water- and food-borne diseases will spread rapidly, food yields and water supplies will be impaired in many regions, and many ecosystems, plant and animal species will be in serious danger of extinction. Some of Australia's natural assets such as the Great Barrier Reef, Kakadu and the Daintree World Heritage areas, which bring great wealth and recognition to our nation, could be damaged for all time.

Australia is especially vulnerable as pointed out by Professor Garnaut in February when he says we "would be a big loser--possibly the biggest loser amongst developed countries--from unmitigated climate change. The pace of global emissions growth under "business as usual" is pushing the world rapidly towards critical points, which would impose large costs on Australia directly and also indirectly through the effects on other countries of importance to Australia." (Garnaut, February 20, 2008, Interim Report).

The critical next round of focused negotiations for a new global climate treaty is now underway. The prime goal of this new regime must be to limit global warming to no more than 2°C above the pre-industrial temperature, a limit that has already been formally adopted by the European Union, South Africa and a number of other nations.

Based on current scientific understanding, this requires that global greenhouse gas emissions be reduced by at least 50% below their 1990 levels by the year 2050. In the long run, greenhouse gas concentrations need to be stabilised at a level well below 450 ppm (parts per million; in CO2-equivalent concentration). In order to stay below 2°C, global emissions must peak and decline before 2015, so there is no time to lose.

As highlighted by the Garnaut Review: "... analysis suggests that a global objective of 450 ppm, with discussion of transition to 400 ppm once the 450 ppm goal is being approached with confidence, would better suit Australian interests." This statement, taken from the "Targets and Trajectories Report", is consistent with the climate science cited above. Indeed, there is broad agreement in the reputable science community regarding these targets.

The Garnaut Review concluded that an emission reduction target for Australia of 25% below 1990 levels by 2020 would be an equitable contribution to the international effort required to achieving this outcome. As a group of Australia's leading climate change scientists, we urge you to adopt this target as the minimum requirement for Australia's contribution to an effective global climate agreement.

Failure of the world to act now will leave Australians with a legacy of economic, environmental, social and health costs that will dwarf the scale of national investment required to address this fundamental problem. Other nations have taken action and have committed to further action. We urge you to act decisively to maintain global momentum and to protect Australia's future.

Sincerely yours,

Professor Nathan Bindoff, University of Tasmania

Dr John Church, Immediate past Chair of the Joint Scientific Committee of the World Climate Research Programme

Professor Matthew England, ARC Federation Fellow and joint Director, Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales

Professor Dave Griggs, Director, Monash Sustainability Institute, Monash University

Professor Ann Henderson-Sellers, Immediate Past Executive Director, World Climate Research Programme, Macquarie University

Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Director, Centre for Marine Studies, University of Qld

Professor Lesley Hughes, Director, Climate Risk Concentration in Research Excellence, Macquarie University

Dr Roger Jones, Co-ordinating Lead Author, IPCC Fourth Assessment Report

Professor David Karoly, ARC Federation Fellow, University of Melbourne

Professor Amanda Lynch, ARC Federation Fellow, Monash University

Professor Tony McMichael, NHMRC Australia Fellow, Australian National University

Professor Neville Nicholls, ARC Professorial Fellow, Monash University

Professor Graeme Pearman, Monash University

Professor Andy Pitman, Convenor, ARC Research Network and joint Director, Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales

Dr Barrie Pittock, Lead Author, IPCC Fourth Assessment Report

Dr Michael Raupach, Co-Chair, Global Carbon Project

Cc: Senator the Hon Penny Wong, Minister for Climate Change and Water;

The Hon Peter Garrett MP, Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts

Bravo to the boffins!

PETA loses credibility as it loses touch with reality

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has published this letter on its Media Centre webpage.

September 23, 2008

Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, Cofounders
Ben & Jerry's Homemade Inc.

Dear Mr. Cohen and Mr. Greenfield,

On behalf of PETA and our more than 2 million members and supporters, I'd like to bring your attention to an innovative new idea from Switzerland that would bring a unique twist to Ben and Jerry's. Storchen restaurant is set to unveil a menu that includes soups, stews, and sauces made with at least 75 percent breast milk procured from human donors who are paid in exchange for their milk. If Ben and Jerry's replaced the cow's milk in its ice cream with breast milk, your customers--and cows--would reap the benefits.

Using cow's milk for your ice cream is a hazard to your customer's health. Dairy products have been linked to juvenile diabetes, allergies, constipation, obesity, and prostate and ovarian cancer. The late Dr. Benjamin Spock, America's leading authority on child care, spoke out against feeding cow's milk to children, saying it may play a role in anemia, allergies, and juvenile diabetes and in the long term, will set kids up for obesity and heart disease--America's number one cause of death.

Animals will also benefit from the switch to breast milk. Like all mammals, cows only produce milk during and after pregnancy, so to be able to constantly milk them, cows are forcefully impregnated every nine months. After several years of living in filthy conditions and being forced to produce 10 times more milk than they would naturally, their exhausted bodies are turned into hamburgers or ground up for soup.

And of course, the veal industry could not survive without the dairy industry. Because male calves can't produce milk, dairy farmers take them from their mothers immediately after birth and sell them to veal farms, where they endure 14 to17 weeks of torment chained inside a crate so small that they can't even turn around.

The breast is best! Won't you give cows and their babies a break and our health a boost by switching from cow's milk to breast milk in Ben and Jerry's ice cream? Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Tracy Reiman
Executive Vice President

The response from Ben and Jerry and others came via the media:

While co-founders Mr Cohen and Mr Greenfield are famously environmentally and ethically aware – they established a "Climate Change College" which encourages grass-roots action on climate change, and go by the slogan "Milking happy Cows, Not the Planet" – they baulked at the suggestion. "We applaud [the group's] novel approach to bringing attention to an issue, but we believe a mother's milk is best used for her child," said a Ben & Jerry's spokesperson.
And then there is, as Mr Locher found, the problem of supply. As 50 per cent of each 500ml tub of ice cream is made from milk and cream, finding enough human milk to sustain production of Ben & Jerry's would be a challenge.
The suggestion that cows' milk has a detrimental effect on health provoked anger this weekend among dairy farmers, who have been hit by falling prices and the increasing popularity of non-dairy alternatives such as soy milk.
"Dairy foods have been in the diet for thousands of years," said Dr Judith Bryans, director of the Dairy Council. "The reality of chronic diseases is that they are an interaction between genes, the environment and the diet, and these negative stories about dairy are a misrepresentation of science."

It is truly sad to see an animal rights lobby group disintegrating to the point of suggesting the bizarre proposition that women should become commercial cows.

Wrong side of the great divide perpetuated by Rudd Government

Rudders and Jackboot Jenny Macklin still haven't got the message it seems.

Despite Kevin Rudd's public apology to the stolen generation, there is a very ethnocentric view of Australia alive and well in the corridors of Parliament House and no amount of solemn prime ministerial 'air-chopping' in front of the cameras will change that sad fact.

On Monday The Sydney Morning Herald ran this story which illustrates the point:

"The Laynhapuy Health Service told the intervention review panel it was "beyond belief" that Centrelink came into the communities and signed people up for welfare quarantine programs.

"Residents travel up to 210 kilometres, paying $1400 for a return [taxi] trip to town, to buy groceries," the service said. "Taking into account that most people on CDEP and Centrelink benefits earn less than $20,000 a year and that grocery prices in Nhulunbuy [the nearest supermarket] have recently been reported as being 25 per cent above those in Darwin, it is a wonder that children get fed at all."

In its scathing submission to the intervention review panel, Laynhapuy Homelands said the intervention was not based "on an accurate understanding of the situation on the ground or the real issues that affect child welfare and wellbeing in many areas, especially homelands/outstations". Yananymul Mununggurr, the Laynhapuy Homelands' chief executive, told the Herald that the intervention had tackled the wrong issues and was "making life harder for us". "We want to develop education resources, our ranger programs and business enterprises in our homelands and create our own opportunities out here," she said. "Our land is who we are and it is important for us to remain there."

The Laynhapuy submission said the intervention had created "a sense of disempowerment and confusion and therefore stress among Yolngu about where things are heading". It said the income management imposed hardship and did not effectively handle issues of substance abuse, child neglect or gambling. "The ban on investment in new housing in homelands will prevent the welfare of children and others in overcrowded houses being addressed."

The submission said direct Commonwealth involvement in the intervention should be wound up and resources transferred to the Territory Government to expand its "closing the gap strategies".

We drove with Barayuwa Mununggurr for 90 minutes from Yirrkala along a dirt road to Garrthalala, a cluster of seven neat houses overlooking the sea.

The Yolngu leader and traditional owner, Multhara Mununggurr, told us her people were fed up with indigenous leaders from elsewhere speaking on their behalf and influencing government opinion. One leader did not speak for all Yolngu, she said."

Google Inc. gets hot under the collar over California's Proposition 8

It's Goggle Inc's 10th birthday and, apart from explaining the birthday logo and a brief post on the presidential debate, the only Press Center release on its blog site last Friday is about California's Proposition 8 (Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry Act) on the ballot for the November general election which seeks to remove the right to same-sex marriage in that state.

Our position on California's No on 8 campaign

9/26/2008 03:23:00 PM

As an Internet company, Google is an active participant in policy debates surrounding information access, technology and energy. Because our company has a great diversity of people and opinions -- Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, all religions and no religion, straight and gay -- we do not generally take a position on issues outside of our field, especially not social issues. So when Proposition 8 appeared on the California ballot, it was an unlikely question for Google to take an official company position on.

However, while there are many objections to this proposition -- further government encroachment on personal lives, ambiguously written text -- it is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8. While we respect the strongly-held beliefs that people have on both sides of this argument, we see this fundamentally as an issue of equality. We hope that California voters will vote no on Proposition 8 -- we should not eliminate anyone's fundamental rights, whatever their sexuality, to marry the person they love.

Posted by Sergey Brin, Co-founder & President, Technology

As there does not appear to be majority support for this proposition among Californian voters, one wonders exactly how this issue might affect Obama and McCain.

It appears that Obama has publicly opposed Proposition 8. However, this runs contrary to attitudes to gay marriage among demographic groups which are his strong supporters.

McCain flatly rejects gay marriage.

Another curly one for candidates in the run up to November 2008, which makes for an interesting national poll.

Remember when palm oil and the patriarchal society went hand in hand?

Advertisement displayed at Duke University Library digital collections

Palm Oil is found in a wide variety of cosmetics, personal hygiene items, foods and other products.

On average it is an ingredient in 1 in every 10 items found on supermarket shelves.

Palm Oil production is responsible for massive land clearing in Borneo, Malaysia and Indonesia which has resulted in a dangerous decline in Orangutan habit and numbers.

You can do your bit to help by reducing the number of groceries you purchase which contain palm oil or palm oil derivatives.

Fielding crows atop the muck heap

Like a skinny rooster crowing on top of a muck heap, the unrepresentative Senator Steve 'I'm the boss of you' Fielding, uses his balance of power position to redraft the already shonky Medicare logo until it begins to look like the one on the left.

This lone Family First member of the federal parliament is becoming a figure of fun because of his juvenile publicity stunts and truly loathed for his frankly ill-informed stance on many issues.

The Age captures him nicely:

"FAMILY First Senator Steve Fielding seems the least likely figure to become a one-man government.
He is gaunt and harried-looking and darts from newspaper office to TV studio in Canberra's Parliament House with the urgency of a man pursued by the terror of letting a chance slip by."

Elsewhere it points out that Fielding brought a pup when he brought the argument put up by the Coalition and medical insurers to fight the Rudd Government's Medicare bill:

"The Howard government introduced three principal measures to boost the coverage of health insurance. The levy surcharge was introduced on July 1, 1997, (when coverage was 32%) but did not stop its membership decline. Two years later (June 1999) coverage was 30.6%. The taxpayer-funded rebate on the cost of private health insurance was introduced on January 1, 1999, with additional rebates for those aged over 65 from April 1, 2005. The rebate managed to persuade only an additional 0.8% of the population to take out private health insurance in its first year. Lifetime health cover was introduced from July 1, 2000, under which people joining funds are penalised an additional 2% of the premium for every year they delay joining above the age of 30. Of all these measures, it was lifetime health cover (the one that cost taxpayers nothing) that had the biggest impact — health insurance cover rose from 32.2% in March 2000 to 45.8% in September 2000. If the surcharge didn't encourage anyone to take up health insurance, why would its adjustment induce an exodus?"

For some strange reason known only to himself Fielding appears to believe that the only thing which will raise the cost of medical insurance in the immediate future is the raising of the surcharge threshold to $75,000 for singles and $150,000 for couples.

The medical insurers are laughing all the way to the bank now he has needlessly locked around 330,000 people into private insurance schemes, but their retention on the books will not stop insurance rates rising because in the end they are not an expansion of business.

Perhaps Steve should remember that in much of this country skinny roosters end up in the Sunday pot.

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