I've just read The Punch......

......and I'm asking myself why I'd even bothered to have a looksee.
It abounds with journalists I've thankfully rarely heard of, a smattering of recovering pollies, a number of Coalition MPs, a cluster of minor academics, a smattering of meeja types, one or two students and all padded out with a couple of right-wing apologists for just about everything detrimental to life and limb.
I swear the bios in Punch's About Us are longer and more interesting than the opinion posts and probably contain more substance.
I expected Mike Rann to fall for the start-up hype from News Ltd. - but what on earth are Mark Abib, Anthony Albanese, Kate Ellis and Natasha Stott-Despoja doing in the middle of this disaster in waiting?

Greatest problem! Crisis! It's extravagation time at Tabloid City

Image from The Daily Examiner on 12 June 2009, page 14 and pointer on the front page

There is a reason why newspaper journalists were just two places off the bottom of the Roy Morgan June 2009 poll, which rated public perception of the ethics and honesty of Australia's main professional groups.

Here is a perfect example of modern gutter journalism - The Daily Examiner indulging in a little Ngaru Village bashing (calling it the shame of Yamba) and in the process telling us that no-one wanted to talk to the newspaper even though it was going though politically correct channels.

According to the editor's Comment article; an urban residential area, with no more than fifteen unit clusters/houses (about twelve occupied) and a handful of kids, is apparently causing the greatest problem facing the Clarence Valley community today.
In fact it's a crisis!

In increasingly breathless purple prose the editor expects that any car he travels to the village in will likely be pelted with stones and abuse will be hurled.

Yes, I can really see his point.
Disregard the fact that many of the Yaegl traditional owners live quietly in the wider 6,500-strong Yamba community and, that there are around 50,000 people living across the Clarence Valley on any given day which means that the combined weight of the dominant groups outnumber these original Australian families.
Forget that it is the personal experience of many Yamba residents that when travelling into Ngaru Village they are only met with a quiet and dignified politeness.
Completely ignore those indigenous families where a parent works full-time and the children go to school regularly.
A few kids in one area are allegedly busy turning our cherished, otherwise major problem-free, whitebread way of life to dust if the hyperventilating editor is to be believed.

The day Peter Chapman published this tripe I happened to pass a Yamba home mourning the recent loss of a young indigenous person to suicide - but blinked editors don't even think about the sort of conditions which cause this all too frequent tragedy, do they?

Oh, but I am remiss! I am forgetting to mention that the very next day after his Comment went to print the editor offered to 'help' Ngaru Village.
How did he do that? Why by splashing out on the entire front page of The Daily Examiner's Saturday issue with this supposed offer, in which his opening paragraph stated that the Yamba aboriginal community...is collapsing.

Then on Page Four filling the personally-penned article with hearsay, outright gossip and ill-formed opinion.

As well as admitting that he had sent an apparently uninvited photographer into the village at 6.15am the previous day (when the Yamba air temperature was 7 degrees Celsius according to BoM and sensible folk were still inside eating breakfast in front of a heater) to take surreptitious photographs of one of the three dwellings that had already been scheduled for demolition years ago and what appears to be one occupied house.

Which seems to encompass the entire range of spurious help the editor offered.

Peter Chapman is indeed the ugly face of Australian journalism.

Update:

A letter to the editor (very similar to this post) was sent to The Daily Examiner, which published same on 16 June 2009, along with a lengthy Editor's Comment attached.

The comment was a laugh and a half as it stated in part; you are so far wide of the mark you couldn't find your way back with a guide dog, a compass and a map.

The editor rather strangely went on to say that this [my] attitude of indifference was what has caused all the problems at Ngaru Village.

However, what produced the greatest laughter was Peter Chapman's assertion that when publishing the letter in question he was not deleting any of your diatribe.

Poor man just can't help himself, as this was yet another extravagation - he had indeed deliberately deleted eleven words in the middle of a sentence; the Yamba air temperature was 7 degrees Celsius according to BoM and.

Apparently the rest of the Clarence Valley was not supposed to know that he sent the photographer out in cold weather!

Just as that Saturday's frontpage story and Page Four article have not been posted on The Daily Examiner website to date.

Fair go, Andy!

I pulled my miserable cold-laden head out of a Vicks infusion last Friday long enough to read Google News for Australia and discovered that Andrew Fraser over at The Australian (helped along by that perennial attention seeker, Bernard Salt) was having a go at Prime Minister Kevin Rudd for his dated "folksy idiom".
Andrew complains "that only Australians over the age of 70 spoke like that these days".
Leaving aside the fact that 70 is really too high a bar for defining common use of Australian slang, the fact remains that older Australians now make up at least a quarter of the Australian population.
So if Rudders wants to occasionally pitch his song and dance routine to this demographic (which let's face it, is part of Liberal Party heartland) more power to him.
Andrew may not realise it but Baby Boomers like myself do use the odd "folksy idiom" or two and don't feel dated doing so.
As for Bernard Salt. Gawd, the chap thinks we are all channelling Chips Rafferty.
No Bernie - Rafferty was aping a mob just like us!

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.