Excerpt from NSW Ombudsman March 2008 submission to the Special Commission of Inquiry into Acute Care Services in NSW Hospitals.
Monday, 27 July 2009
Remember when? Seattle 1999

It is ten years ago this November that the World Trade Organisation convened its 1999 ministerial conference in Seattle ,Washington USA and, what the media dubbed The Battle of Seattle anti-globalisation protests began.
Sunday, 26 July 2009
Blistering blizzards, Batman! Turnbull wants weak national emissions trading scheme just like Rudd - who would've guessed?

If you thought that the Rudd Government's plan to compensate industry super polluters was a fizzer (to such a degree that a national emissions trading scheme would see virtually no significant change for the better in relation to Australia's greenhouse gas pollution) then hang on to your hats as Leader of the Opposition Malcolm Turnbull and the Liberal Party pretend to engage with the thorny issue of climate change by putting forward these nine demands:
Specific Issues
1. An Australian Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) should offer no less protection for jobs, small business and industry than an American ETS which is being developed and is presently in the form of the Waxman Markey Bill which has been approved by the House of Representatives but is yet to pass the US Senate. The final form of any legislation may be materially different from Waxman Markey and will not be known until later in the year.
4. Fugitive methane emissions from coal mining should be treated in the same way as they are in the United States and Europe.
5. As in the Waxman Markey legislation agricultural emissions should be excluded from the scheme and agricultural offsets (eg. biosequestration or green carbon) should be included. Australia's greatest near term potential of reducing its CO2 emissions are to be found in the better management of our own landscape.
6. The scheme design must ensure that general increases in electricity prices are no greater than comparable countries to minimise the impact on all trade exposed industries, to reduce the need to compensate for households and to avoid a needlessly high increase in taxation.
7. In order to ensure continuity of electricity supply, electricity generators should be fairly and adequately compensated for loss of asset value to ensure capacity to invest in new abatement technology and to fund maintenance of existing facilities for energy security purposes.
8. Effective incentives and/or credits must be established to capture the substantial abatement opportunities offered by energy efficiency, especially in buildings.
9. There must be adequate incentives for voluntary action which can be added to Australia's 2020 target.
Besides simply restating some of the broad aims already expressed by government, it appears that Turnbull would like Australia to adopt certain aspects of the proposed U.S. Clean Energy and Security Act 2009.
Yet another watered down climate change bill.
Just as importantly, he does not want to enact our own emissions trading scheme until after the Americans have theirs in place.
Now attempting to tie Australia's legislative response to an American timetable is a nice time waster, as this yet unborn act only passed the U.S. lower house by 7 votes and is facing a hostile upper house before it can be become legislation, with no guarantee that the eventual act will even remotely resemble the current bill or that its final provisions will be seen in a favourable light by the rest of the world.
Indeed (like the Rudd Government's proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Act here in Australia) in America there are citizens who believe that the proposed Clean Energy and Security Act is so weak that it should never become law, others who simply see it as better than nothing, Republicans in the U.S. Senate who won't rule out blocking it and, many Americans who see it as a free give-away to major polluters.
While Turnbull obviously hopes that he can put off the evil day when he actually has to genuinely address emissions trading, his principle aim appears to be to further increase protection and compensation for Australia's super polluters under any national scheme.
Which may please his mates at Goldman Sachs whilst ever that group is involved with energy and mining industries, but may not appeal to the international community generally because Turnbull's solution seems to favour tariffs.
Turnbull's favourite climate change bill.
Graphic form The Wall Street Journal online.
Bless their cute curly heads! Monsanto blogs on morality

Leaving aside the ungainly stretch inherent in likening perpetual seed patents to music copyright, the irony of Monsanto blogging about morals is readily apparent.
This is the same company which spent years happily spreading dioxin/PCB contamination across the world. Here is a brief potted history of its recent transgressions and another about heavy metal contamination due to Monsanto mining operations.
Sadly Monsanto does not appear to see that its recalcitrant past concerning environmental degradation and denial of human rights makes a mockery of its current claim that; The law is the law.
Picture from Google Images
* This post is part of North Coast Voices' effort to keep Monsanto's blog monitor (affectionately known as Mr. Monsanto) in long-term employment.
Saturday, 25 July 2009
Fairfax misleading digital headline of the week
First Australians were Indian: research was the headline posted on The Sydney Morning Herald website on Thursday 23 July 2009.
Now that isn't exactly what is in the body of the newspaper article (which rather looks to be based on a media release) and it's definitely not what is in the published research Reconstructing Indian-Australian phylogenetic link.
What the researchers appear to be asserting is that early Australians were descended from out-of-Africa migration.
The complete mtDNA sequencing indicate that both Australians and New Guineans exclusively belongs to the out-of-Africa founder types M and N, thus ultimately descended from the same African emigrants ~50 to 70 kyBP, as all other Eurasians.
The researchers, who based their finding on the particular mtDNA sequences of 8 Indians and 6 Aboriginals, are postulating a migration journey which took the ancestors of Australia's traditional owners along what is known as the southern route (Horn of Africa to the Persian/Arabian Gulf and further along the tropical coast of the Indian Ocean to southeast Asia and Australasia) ~ 60 to 50 thousand years before the present day and that migration likely occurred before or at the beginning of N group population growth in pre-history India.
Pity that The Sydney Morning Herald decided on the colourful headline, the published research deserved better.
A new version of events.....
Friday, 24 July 2009
Unimpressive polling at The Daily Examiner, Grafton

