So what has Facebook Inc been up to lately?

Everything from admitting to further data breaches, to altering images, to supressing legitimate content, to considering payment for access, to shareholder revolt, it seems......

The Herald Sun reported on 9 June 2018 at p.59:

Facebook is ­embroiled in another data privacy scandal, confirming a software bug led to the private posts of 14 million users being made public.

According to Facebook, the bug was active from May 18 to May 27 and changed the privacy settings of some users without telling them.

“Today we started letting the 14 million people affected know — and asking them to review any posts they made during that time,” Facebook chief privacy officer Erin Egan said.

“To be clear, this bug did not impact anything people had posted before, and they could still choose their audience just as they always have.” It was unclear yesterday how many Australian users were affected. Facebook said the bug occ­urred during the development of a new share function that ­allowed users to share featured items on their profile page, such as a photo.

“The problem has been fixed, and for anyone affected, we changed the audience back to what they’d been using before,” Ms Egan said.

Facebook has urged affected customers to review posts made between May 18 and May 27 to see if any private posts had been automatically made public.

The latest issue comes as Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg faces the prospect of a public grilling before the Aus­tralian parliament’s intelligence and security committee.

Facebook admitted this week it had struck data partnerships — where it shares the personal data of people on the social media platform — with at least four Chinese electronics companies, including Huawei Technologies.

Huawei has been barred from a series of major projects in Australia over concerns about its close links to the Chinese government.

Members of the parliamentary intelligence and security committee want Mr Zuckerberg to come to Australia and answer questions about the data-sharing pact.

On 18 June 2018 The Sun reported that Facebook Inc had begun to manipulate images – effectively producing ‘fake images’ that were being passed off a real.

Then on 20 June 2018 Facebook Inc. declared its intention to charge certain private group users for participation on its platforms:

Today, we’re piloting subscriptions with a small number of groups to continue to support group admins who lead these communities.

This world-wide social platform apparently expects that if it formally launches this access fee (reportedly up to $360 a year) then these costs to be passed on as subscription fees – with Facebook  letting administrators charge subscription fees from $4.99 to $29.99 each month to join premium subgroups containing exclusive posts.

Presumably, if the market responds in sufficient numbers then Facebook will change the rules and demand that private groups hand over a percentage of subscription fees collected.

The Guardian, 24 June 2018:

George Orwell wrote in his essay Politics and the English Language: “In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues.” 

When Facebook constructed a new archive of political advertising, had it thought a little more about this concept of what is “political”, it might have more accurately anticipated the subsequent Orwellian headache. As it is, journalists are finding their articles restricted from promotion because they are lumped in with campaigning materials from politicians, lobby groups and advocacy organisations.

The new archive of ads with political content, which Facebook made public last month, has become the latest contested piece of territory between platforms and publishers. The complaint from publishers is that Facebook is categorising posts in which they are promoting their own journalism (paying money to target particular groups of the audience) as “political ads”. Publishers have reacted furiously to what they see as toxic taxonomy.

Mark Thompson, the chief executive of the New York Times, has been the most vocal critic, describing Facebook’s practices as “a threat to democracy” and criticising the platform in a recent speech to the Open Markets Initiative in Washington DC. “When it comes to news, Facebook still doesn’t get it,” said Thompson. “In its effort to clear up one bad mess, it seems to be joining those who want to blur the line between reality-based journalism and propaganda.”

At a separate event at Columbia University, Thompson and Facebook’s head of news partnerships, Campbell Brown, fought openly about the initiative. Thompson showed examples of where New York Times articles, including recipes, had been wrongly flagged as political. Brown emphasised that the archive was being refined, but stood firm on the principle that promoted journalism ought to be flagged as “paid-for” political posts. “On this you are just wrong,” she told Thompson.

Publishers took to social platforms to question the labelling and representation of their work. One of the most egregious examples came from investigative journalism organisation Reveal. Last week, at the height of the scandal around the separation of undocumented migrant families crossing the US border, it published an exclusive story involving the alleged drugging of children at a centre housing immigrant minors. It was flagged in the Facebook system as containing political content, and as Reveal had not registered its promotion of the story, the promoted posts were stifled. Facebook did not remove the article, but rather stopped its paid circulation. Given the importance of paid promotion, it is not surprising that publishers see this as amounting to the same thing.

And trust issues can be found both inside and outside Facebook's castle walls.....

Business Insider, 24 June 2018:

A Survata study, seen exclusively by Business Insider, asked US consumers to rate big tech companies from one (most trusted) to five (least trusted). Survata surveyed more than 2,600 people in April and May. It’s the first time Survata has carried out the survey.

The results show that Facebook is nowhere near as trusted as Amazon, PayPal, or Microsoft – but that people do trust it more than Instagram. Instagram, of course, is owned by Facebook.

Here’s the top 15 in order of most to least trusted:

1 .Amazon

2. PayPal

3. Microsoft

4. Apple

5. IBM

6. Yahoo

7. Google

8. YouTube

9. eBay

10. Pandora

11. Facebook

12. LinkedIn

13. Spotify

14. AOL

15. Instagram

Business Insider, 26 June 2018:

Shareholders with nearly $US3 billion invested Facebook are trying to topple Mark Zuckerberg as chairman and tear up the company’s governance structure.

Business Insider has spoken with six prominent shareholders who said there was an unprecedented level of unrest among Facebook’s backers following a series of scandals.

They are in open revolt about Zuckerberg’s power base, which gives him the ability to swat away any shareholder proposal he disagrees with.

 One investor compared him to a robber baron, a derogatory term for 19th-century US tycoons who accumulated enormous wealth.

Facebook says its governance structure is “sound and effective” and splitting Zuckerberg’s duties as chairman and CEO would cause “uncertainty, confusion, and inefficiency.”

Finally, it was reported on 29 June 2018 by IT News that, you guessed it, yet another Facebook sponsored personality test was allowing data to be extracted without the users knowledge or informed consent:

A security researcher has found that a popular personality test app running on Facebook contained an easily exploitable flaw that could be used to expose sensitive information on tens of millions of users.

Belgian security researcher Inti De Ceukelaire joined Facebook's bug bounty program, set up by the giant social network after the Cambridge Analytica data leak scandal and tried out the NameTests.com's personality test app developed by Social Sweethearts.

De Ceukelaire discovered that when he loaded a personality test, NameTests.com fetched his personal data from Facebook and displayed it on a webpage.

He was shocked to see that users' personal data was wrapped in a Javascript file by NameTests.com, which could be accessed via a weblink over the plain text HTTP protocol.

This meant that any website that requested the file could access the personal information retrieved from users' Facebook accounts.

The security researcher tested this by setting up a website that connected to NameTests.com and was able to access Facebook posts, photos and friend lists belonging to visitors.

Information leaked included people's Facebook IDs, first and last names, languages used, gender, date of birth, profile pictures, cover photo, currency, devices used, and much more.

Worse, De Ceukelaire found that NameTests.com doesn't log off users which means the site would continue to leak user data even after the app was deleted.

Political Cartoons of the Week

Nick  Anderson

David Pope

Cathy Wilcox

Quotes of the Week

"We have, as you know, taken a very strong line on national security and border protection here and when I was speaking with Jared Kushner just the other day, and one of your immigration advisers in the White House, we reflected on how our policies have helped to inform your approach," Mr Turnbull told the president. We are very much of the same mind."  [Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Bligh Turnbull speaking with US President  Donald J. Trump in early 2017, quoted by the Newcastle Herald, 21 June 2018]

"You ever notice they always call the other side 'the elite'…The elite! Why are they elite? I have a much better apartment than they do. I'm smarter than they are. I'm richer than they are. I became president and they didn't."  [US President  Donald J. Trump speaking at a Minnesota rally,  The Sydney Morning Herald, 21 June 2018]

“It's what Labor used to stand for, but no more. This privileged elite opposite wants to keep the workers in their place. I remember when the Labor Party had members that had really worked. I look at this group of university-educated apparatchiks and I don't see any Jack Fergusons there. I see an educated, privileged class that wants to kick the ladder out so that others can't realise their dreams.”  [Malcolm Bligh Turnbull in a moment of political projection, Hansard, 19 June 2018]

Apparently NSW Minister for Lands and Forestry Paul Toole thinks voters are gullible fools

When approached by ABC journalists sometime before publication of this online article concerning recent changes to regulations under the NSW Crown Lands Management Act 2016, a spokesperson for NSW Minister for Lands and Forestry, Minister for Racing and Nationals MP for Bathurst Paul Toole stated the new provisions were:

"substantially the same as the provisions in the existing Crown Lands By-law 2006."

Adding words to the effect that the suggestion that new regulations were designed to ban protests was wrong.

It appears that the minister and his staff think that voters across the entire state (and particularly those living in the Northern Rivers region) never learnt to read, write or comprehend simple sentences.

What other reason could there be for such a bald-faced political lie?

This is the by-law referred to in the spokesperson's statement supplied to ABC News.

Excerpt from Crown Lands (General Reserves) By-law 2006:

Current version for 25 June 2018 to date (accessed 28 June 2018 at 00:26)

Part 3  Division 1  Clause 22

22   Conduct prohibited in reserve

(1)  A person must not, without reasonable excuse:

(a)  damage, deface or interfere with any structure, sign, public notice, descriptive plate, label, machinery or equipment in a reserve, or

(b)  obstruct any authorised person or employee of, or contractor to, the reserve trust of a reserve in the performance of the authorised person’s duty or the employee’s or contractor’s work in the reserve, or

(c)  pollute any fresh water, tank, reservoir, pool or stream in a reserve, or

(d)  bring onto a reserve any diseased animal or any noxious animal, or

(e)  walk over, mark, scratch or otherwise mutilate, deface, injure, interfere with, remove or destroy any Aboriginal rock carving, its surrounds or any other Aboriginal object in a reserve, or

(f)    (Repealed)

(g)  remain in a reserve or any part of a reserve or any building, structure or enclosure in the reserve when reasonably requested to leave by an authorised person, or

(h)  bring into or leave in a reserve any refuse, waste material, scrap metal (including any vehicle or vehicle part), rock, soil, sand, stone or other such substance.

Maximum penalty: 5 penalty units.

(2)  A person must not in a reserve for a cemetery:

(a)  interfere with any grave or monument, or

(b)  open any coffin, or

(c)  disturb or interrupt any service, procession, cortege, gathering, meeting or assembly, or

(d)  bury any human remains (whether cremated or not).

Maximum penalty: 5 penalty units.

Now spot the very significant differences in the new regulation.

Excerpts from Crown Land Management Regulation 2018 under the Crown Land Management Act 2016:

9 Conduct prohibited in dedicated or reserved Crown land

(1) A person must not do any of the following on dedicated or reserved Crown land:

(a) damage, deface or interfere with any structure, sign, public notice, descriptive plate, label, machinery or equipment on the land, or

(b) obstruct any authorised person or employee of, or contractor to, a responsible manager of the land in the performance of the authorised person’s duty or the employee’s or contractor’s work on the land, or (c) bring in or on to the land any animal that is diseased or a pest, or

(d) walk over, mark, scratch or otherwise mutilate, deface, injure, interfere with, remove or destroy any Aboriginal object in or on the land, or

(e) remain in or on the land or any part of the land or any structure or enclosure in or on the land when reasonably requested to leave by an authorised person, or

(f) bring into or leave on the land any refuse, waste material, scrap metal (including any vehicle or vehicle part), rock, soil, sand, stone or other similar substance.

Maximum penalty: 50 penalty units.

The list under the heading Activities that can be prohibited on Crown land by direction or notice under Part 9 of Act (1) contains 36 banned activities, including sitting on a picnic table.

However four in particular are activities often associated with community meetings, gatherings expressing local concerns and public information events.

Each of the activities specified in the following Table is prescribed for the purposes of sections 9.4 (1) (b), 9.5 (1) (b) and 9.5 (2) of the Act:

3 Holding a meeting or performance or conducting entertainment for money or consideration of any kind, or in a manner likely to cause a nuisance to any person

4 Taking part in any gathering, meeting or assembly (except, in the case of a cemetery, for the purpose of a religious or other ceremony of burial or commemoration)

6 Displaying or causing any sign or notice to be displayed

7 Distributing any circular, advertisement, paper or other printed, drawn, written or photographic matter

Excerpt from Crown Land Management Act 2016 No 58:

 Note.

Clause 6 of Schedule 7 provides for certain land under Acts repealed by Schedule 8 to become Crown land under this Act. Section 1.10 then provides for this land to be vested in the Crown.

Land that will become Crown land under this Act includes land vested in the Crown that is dedicated for a public purpose. This land was previously excluded from the definition of Crown land in the Crown Lands Act 1989. See also section 1.8 (2).

So there you have it - very clearly set out.  

An extension of government power and, a wide delegation of that power given the extended definition of Crown land, which will see community gatherings challenged, shut down and people moved on if local police, council officers or representatives of government departments/reserve trusts decide either the message or the visuals are considered politically unpalatable by government.

Oh, and I hope North Coast Voices readers have noticed that the maximum fine which can be imposed on an individual has been increased from 5 penalty points ($550) to 50 penalty points ($5,500).

ABC News - ABC North Coast, 26 June 2018:

The new regulations will apply to all crown-owned land, which amounts to about half of all land in New South Wales.

The 35,000 crown reserve sites include parks, heritage sites, community halls, nature reserves, coastal lands, sporting grounds, government infrastructure and showgrounds.

Mr Ricketts said the new regulations were bigger and broader than those imposed under the Bjelke-Petersen era in Queensland in the 1970s.

In September 1977, then Queensland Premier Johannes Bjelke-Petersen proclaimed the day of the political street march was over.

"Anybody who holds a street march, spontaneous or otherwise, will know they're acting illegally," he said.

The statement was echoed by the acting police commissioner and was police policy until April 1978.

During the two-year ban, 1,972 people were arrested.

Mr Ricketts said he expected a similar reaction in New South Wales, if the new regulations were enforced.

"They banned street marches for the right to march — which led to violent policing," he said.

The Knitting Nannas protest group joined the chorus of concern.

Spokeswoman Judi Summers said she was shocked to learn about the new rules.

She said the group's strategy of holding weekly knit-ins outside the offices of local politicians might not be possible under the new regulations.

"Well it would have shut us down basically," Ms Summers said.

"We've been knitting outside of Thomas George and Kevin Hogan's [parliamentary] offices for the last sort of six years.

"Every Thursday without a miss, and if these laws had been introduced way back then, we would have been moved on right from the start."

Lawyer and NSW Greens candidate for Lismore, Sue Higginson, said over the years, she had represented hundreds of protestors in court, through her work with the Environmental Defenders Office.

"I see time and time again, the courts — generally speaking — have a real concern about having to penalise people who have found that they are in a position of having to break laws to stand up for an issue or to protect the environment or to protect a civil right," she said.

"So where we are criminalising really benign behaviour, and behaviour that people have a right to do, it becomes a real problem for the courts."

Ms Higginson said a good example was the role of town halls played during the coal seam gas protests on the Northern Rivers.

"If you look back to how the community in the Northern Rivers mobilised to protect the land and water here from coal seam gas, a lot of that organisation and the information and the those meetings — they were held in those town halls."

Ms Higginson said under the new regulations, meetings could be banned or dispersed from town halls.

"People should definitely be alarmed and the biggest problem about this kind of thing is it's difficult to understand the application these laws will have until you're impacted," she said.

Adani Group At Work: using backroom political deals & big money to make fools of us all

The Wangan and Jagalingou Peoples registered a Native Title application on 5 July 2004 and their interests are often presented to the media via the Wangan and Jagalingou Family Council. 

According to ORIC Kyburra Munda Yalga Aboriginal Corporation RNTBC was originally registered on 5 July 2011 as Kyburra Munda Yalga Aboriginal Corporation and its name changed on 6 March 2013 and, according to ASIC Juru Enterprises Limited was registered on 23 April 2012.  

On 11 July 2014 and 26 June 2015 the Juru People were granted Native Title by the Federal Court over land in north Queensland.

Then foreign multinational resources and energy corporation, the Adani Group, went to work...... 

The Sydney Morning Herald, 4 July 2015:

The Wangan and Jagalingou people gathered two weeks ago at a convention centre in Carseldine north of Brisbane.

They were there to vote on a proposal to make sure those responsible for their native title claim were truly representative of the Wangan and Jagalingou people. These are the traditional owners of the land in the Galilee Basin, precisely where Indian company Adani aims to build Australia's biggest coal mine, the controversial $16 billion Carmichael project.

Twice in three years, the Wangan and Jagalingou (W&J) had rejected Adani's advances to sign a land deal for the mine, and twice Adani had dragged them off to the Native Title Tribunal and sought approval for the state to override their opposition to the mine.

It was just after 9am on Saturday, June 20, when two charter buses turned up at the Tavernetta Function Centre in Carseldine. Adani had bussed in 150 people in a sly bid to force consideration of a new memorandum of understanding they claimed to have with W&J, despite the previous 'no vote' from W&J. It was an Adani ambush, and it must have cost a fortune: three days of food, accommodation and transport for 150 people.

"We saw the buses turn up and we were wondering what was going on," says traditional owner and W&J lead spokesman Adrian Burragubba.

"They tried to organise their own meeting after ours in order to get the people to agree to their MoU - a kind of tricked ILUA [Indigenous Land Use Agreement] when they knew they didn't have one. Right now we're in the Federal Court precisely because we refused an ILUA and they have tried to override us."

But Adani's cunning stunt backfired. They hadn't counted on their 150 voters changing their minds after impassioned speeches from the likes of Burragubba. W&J tribal elders are deeply concerned about the effect of the mine on their cultural heritage and the risks it poses to water and wildlife.

By the end of the day, Adani's reps had been asked to leave the meeting. Of the W&J's 12 "new applicants", or claim representatives, at least seven were against Adani, despite all the money flying about to skew the vote, and three were in favour. The views of the other two appear in the balance….

Its latest public missive on the subject came three days before the W&J meeting: "Adani deepens partnership with Traditional Owners."

As far as W&J are concerned nothing could be further from the mark. While Adani has signed up ILUAs with other Indigenous groups – the Juru, Birriah and Jangga Aboriginal people – whose land lies either on the rail corridors from the Galilee or on the coast at Abbot Point where the coal is to be shipped to India, there is only a draft memorandum of understanding intended for the W&J, and one which is not representative of the majority of families at that.

It is getting messy. W&J now has a claim before the Federal Court alleging Adani misled the W&J people. The Native Title Tribunal and the state of Queensland are also listed as defendants for failing to properly follow process…..

NITV, 1 April 2016:

In a stunning video, traditional owners Aunty Carol Prior and Andrew Morrell call on the Queensland government to protect their cultural heritage from the Adani Carmichael coalmine in the Galilee Basin.

Juru country sits to the east of the proposed mine, but the existing Abbot Point coal port resides on the Juru coast. This means the proposed rail line linking the mine and Abbot Point will go right through Juru country.

Traditional owners say the rail line will block access to ancient rock art sites and ochre ground near Mount Roadback, and an expansion of Abbot Point will be built just five metres from sacred burial grounds.

They’ve created a petition calling on the Queensland government to register their cultural sites under the Queensland Cultural Heritage Act as ‘significant Aboriginal areas.’

Green Left Weekly, 16 February 2018:

The Wangan and Jagalingou (W&J) traditional owners of the land on which Adani has approval to build its Carmichael coalmine are concerned that the Queensland government will act to extinguish their native title rights prior to a Federal Court hearing scheduled for March 12–15.

This follows the decision by the Federal Court to not extend an interim injunction, which had been in place since December 18, restraining the Queensland government from extinguishing native title under the terms of the purported Indigenous Land Use Agreement (ILUA).

The W&J traditional owners have never consented to the mine going ahead. They say the group has voted four times since 2012 to reject an ILUA with Adani, most recently on 2 December.

On December 8 the Native Title Tribunal registered Adani’s ILUA documents. The validity of the purported ILUA is being challenged by W&J Traditional Owners in a Federal Court hearing scheduled for March. It will consider evidence that the meeting that is claimed to have authorised the ILUA was stacked with people who had no authority to authorise a deal and sign away W&J country.

Adrian Burragubba, Murrawah Johnson and Linda Bobongie for the Wangan and Jagalingou Traditional Owners Family Council said: “A substantial injustice may be done if we are denied an appeal and the interim injunction is lifted before the trial.

“Nothing can hide the facts that Adani has worked to divide our community, overturn our decisions, buy off individuals, split our claim group and engineer a sham meeting to ‘authorise’ a sham ILUA. And the Queensland government has aided and abetted them. This deal is illegitimate and should never have gone through.

“The Queensland Labor government has the power to do something about this, and it’s time they did!

“If we cannot restrain Adani with an injunction, then the Queensland Government must hear loud and clear that our land rights and culture cannot be surrendered for Adani’s profit.

“For us, this campaign has never just been about Adani. It has always been about protecting and conserving our land and culture so we can determine our own path forward for our people. One based on strong respect for our law and culture, the health of our Country and a resilient community — and clean enterprises and jobs in the new growth industries like solar energy generation.”

In a 24 May 2018 the Federal Court of Australia ruled that the Juru People themselves had not agreed that Kyburra Munda Yalga Aboriginal Corporation RNTBC should replace Juru Enterprises Limited as the nominated body negotiating an agreement with Adani Australia Pty Ltd. At time of judgment Kyburra Munda Yalga Aboriginal Corporation RNTBC was under administration.

The Guardian, 22 June 2018:

A north Queensland Indigenous organisation kept secret more than $2m in payments by the Adani mining company, federal court documents show.

Guardian Australia has obtained court documents that show the Kyburra Munda Yalga Aboriginal Corporation did not account for payments by Adani, then paid its own directors up to $1,000 a day cash-in-hand to conduct now-invalidated cultural heritage assessments for the Indian mining company.

The federal court last month delivered a ruling that may void the assessments, which are required to protect sacred sites from development.

It ruled that another Indigenous business, Juru Enterprises Limited, was the proper “nominated body” to represent traditional owners on a land-use agreement with Adani.

The impact of the decision could be wide-ranging. Traditional owners from near Bowen say they are “hugely worried” Adani has conducted work at its Abbot Point port based on improper or conflicted advice from the cultural assessment surveys.

Juru Enterprises could now demand Adani “redesign or reconfigure” any plans or works near sacred sites.

The court case has also exposed how Adani funding was central to alleged rorts conducted by Kyburra board members. Guardian Australia has seen letters, minutes of meetings, police reports, auditors reports and sworn affidavits that detail how Kyburra kept money paid by Adani off the books and then funnelled it to directors through “fees” and “loans”.

Kyburra declared only $50,000 total income in consecutive years: 2014/2015 and 2015/16. About $2m was paid to the organisation by Adani in 2014 and 2015, including an estimated $800,000 for cultural assessments. But none of it showed up in Kyburra’s annual financial statements.

Traditional owners said in a 2016 complaint letter they were suspicious about “secret payments by Adani”.

The issue before the federal court was whether Kyburra validly appointed itself as the Juru nominated body to represent traditional owners on a land-use agreement with Adani. The Indian company filed a notice submitting to any order the court might make, except as to costs.

Adani has rejected suggestions it should have been aware of mismanagement at Kyburra and alleged rorts by directors, and there is no suggestion the payments themselves were improper. The company said it was only made aware of “financial matters” through the court proceedings.

Guardian Australia can reveal that both the Office of the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations (Oric) and the Australian federal police were aware of concerns about Kyburra in 2015 and 2016….

In 2016, a lawyer representing disgruntled members of Kyburra wrote to Oric asking for an investigation into the organisation. The letter was also submitted to the court in the proceedings but not tendered at hearing.

It outlined what Oric later confirmed in an audit – that Kyburra failed to declare significant income each year from land-use agreements, including the lucrative deal with Adani. By declaring only $50,000 annual income, the organisation was exempted from having to provide audited financial statements. Money from Adani, notionally “for the benefit and use of the Juru people”, was not accounted for.

 “In our submission Kyburra actually received monies from Adani Mining Pty Ltd ... in the amount of $1,225,000. In addition ... Adani transferred $825,000 to Kyburra for cultural heritage survey activities,” the letter says.

“Further, our clients advise that the surveys are conducted by directors alone – about six directors would be present at any survey – with a daily rate of approximately $1,000 paid individually to them.

 “Our clients are suspicious of similar secret payments by Adani on behalf of Kyburra.”…..

Morrell[ traditional owner] told Guardian Australia on Monday he could not explain why Kyburra moved in 2015 to replace Juru Enterprises as the “nominated body” representing the Juru people on a land use agreement with Adani. He also questioned why Adani had simply accepted the switch.

 “I really could not tell you that one. That one really has me baffled.”

He said the court ruling meant any work carried out by Kyburra for Adani had “not been carried out under the agreements” and was voided.

“We’re happy to do the work again. Kyburra and Adani have never forwarded or allowed anyone to see any of the work being carried out, any of the reports on the work being carried out. That’s left all the Juru people wondering what was going on.

“We’ll work with them, but everything that has been done will need to be revised and reviewed and we haven’t had the opportunity to do that yet……

“We’re hugely worried. Throughout the state development area at Abbot Point alone there’s numerous places where we have burial sites, rock art, rock carvings, sacred sites. If any of those areas are being impacted they need to have that impact removed from that area.

IT'S TIME TO #standup4forests AND TELL THE NSW GOVERNMENT TO LEAVE OUR FORESTS ALONE, Community Meeting, 5pm Saturday 30 June 2018, Grafton District Service Club

Conservationists Alarmed at NSW Government Plans for our Forests

Conservationists are alarmed about the NSW Government’s proposals to increase logging intensity in our public forests.

And while the Government is proposing drastic changes weakening logging rules, it is avoiding holding meaningful public consultations about their plans. North Coast conservationists had wanted to the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) to visit local forests to see first hand the damage that has already resulted from the current logging practices. The EPA refused to participate.

This is probably not surprising given that the EPA, which is charged with monitoring and ensuring compliance of logging operations in the State Forests, has failed in ensuring that the current regulations have been adhered to.  And on those occasions when it has determined that there have been breaches, the penalties it imposed have been of the “slap on the wrist” nature. So it is no wonder that the current rules have frequently been ignored.

The North Coast Environment Council (NCEC) and the North East Forests Alliance (NEFA) are countering the Government’s current consultation failure by holding their own meetings to explain to the community exactly what the Government has in mind for the future of our public forests. Several meetings have already been held on the North Coast with more planned, including one for Grafton at the Grafton District Services Club (upstairs) on Saturday June 30.

In a recent statement NCEC Vice-President Susie Russell outlined the consequences of the Government’s proposed changes.

“If the proposed rules are implemented, every population centre on the north coast will see its water yields drop as intensive land clearfell logging dries out the catchments. There will be increased erosion and sedimentation of streams from decreased stream buffers.

“The extinction cliff for many of our native animals and plants will be reached faster as there will no longer be a requirement to look for them prior to logging.

“The carbon storage capacity of our forest estate will be greatly diminished as logging intensity increases and the dense, young regrowth is more flammable than the mature forests it replaces.

“All this at a time when climate change is accelerating and the planet's temperature is rising. We need now to be protecting our future by maximising the shade, natural water and carbon storage, while connecting habitats to enable animals to move to more suitable areas,” she said.

The NCEC is concerned that areas that have been off-limits to logging for 20 years - old growth forest, stream protection buffers, and high quality koala habitat – will be sacrificed to meet wood contracts.

Our state Government needs to be reminded that State Forests belong to the people of this state – not to the timber industry or to a Government that seems hell-bent on damaging as much of the natural environment as it can while it is in office.

            - Leonie Blain