An increasingly desperate Australian Liberal Prime Minister on the faux election campaign trail in March 2017

Shorter version of most of the dire warnings Australian Prime Minister and Liberal MP for Cook Scott Morrison has been yelling at Australian voters as he faces the prospect of a 51st negative Newspoll in April.

Meme supplied

Rate of land clearing in the Orara Valley causes community concern

Orara Valley NSW: Image from Trip Advisor

The Daily Examiner, 13 March 2019, p.4:

Communities across the Orara Valley have expressed outrage at the loss of mature trees in their neighbourhood.

Fed up with tongoing clearing, a community meeting has been organised for 3.30pm this Sunday at Nana Glen Community Hall.

Posts on a number of Facebook pages including the Glenreagh Community page reflect the growing anger at the seemingly unregulated clearing taking place to make way for intensive agriculture.

Tania and Gerry O’Connor live nearby a stand of blackbutts recently taken down north of Nana Glen and are concerned at how rapidly and irreversibly the landscape of the valley is changing.

“The local council does not seem to be keeping up with the fast-paced changes. It is sad to see 100-year-old trees bulldozed. When the first trees were cut across the road we contacted council who informed us there was nothing they could do,” they said.

They contacted the Environmental Protection Agency which stated that due to the zoning, the clearing was legal.

“We are not against farming, we know we live in a rural community but the system of checks and balances seems to be outdated or non-existent.”.....

Tweet of the Week

When the dog whistling in Parliament House works a little too well pic.twitter.com/dRpzAwJXE9

— Andrew Brown (@AndrewBrownAU) March 10, 2019

Quote of the Week

“1 Cardinal George Pell, on 11 December 2018 you were convicted by a jury of five charges of sexual offending by you against two young boys in 1996 and 1997 in St Patrick’s Cathedral, East Melbourne. You were convicted of one offence of Sexual Penetration of a Child under 16 years and four offences of committing an Indecent Act with or in the presence of a Child under 16 years………

Sentence

219 Cardinal Pell, will you please stand.

220 All things considered, I impose the following sentences upon you…..

Total effective sentence

226 I direct that the sentence of 4 years imposed on charge 2 is the base sentence.

227 I further direct that 12 months of the sentence imposed on charge 1, 4 months of the sentence imposed on charge 3, 2 months of the sentence imposed on charge 4 and 6 months of the sentence imposed on charge 5 are to be served cumulatively upon charge 2 and upon each other.

228 This means that I sentence you to a total effective sentence of 6 years’ imprisonment.

Non-parole period

229 I set a non-parole period of 3 years and 8 months. That means you will become eligible to apply for parole after serving this non-parole period. 

Your release on parole will be a matter for the Parole Board.

Pre-sentence detention

230 I declare that the 14 days’ imprisonment you have already served in pre-sentence detention, is reckoned as time already served against the sentence I have just imposed.”  

[County Court Victoria, [2019] VCC 260, DPP v George Pell (Sentence), excerpts]

Tweed, Ballina, Lismore & Clarence candidates standing in the NSW State Election on Saturday, 23 March 2019

These are the Far North Coast sitting members in the NSW Legislative Assembly (Lower House):

Geoffrey Keith PROVEST, NSW Nationals MP for Tweed 

Tamara Francine SMITH, NSW Greens MP for Ballina

Thomas GEORGE, NSW Nationals for Lismore - not standing for re-election 

Christopher GULAPTIS, NSW Nationals MP for Clarence

These are all the candidates standing in the four state electorates and the positions they drew on ballot papers for the 23 March 2019 NSW State Election:

TWEED 

BALLINA 

LISMORE

CLARENCE

See: https://www.elections.nsw.gov.au/Ballot-paper-templates-for-2019-NSW-State-election

Something to think about - Part Three

@drkerrynphelps, 9 March 2019

The Sydney Morning Herald, 10 April 2018:

Sixty-eight per cent of the current federal parliamentarians are men, and that’s the best statistic we can squeeze out of them. Eighty per cent of the government MPs and 78 percent of cabinet ministers are men. Seventy-nine per cent are of Anglo-Celtic background  and 70 per cent of the parliament are between 40 and 60 years of age.

Most of the state parliaments aren’t much better. South Australia is the worst, at 67 per cent men. NSW is not far behind at 61 per cent. Tasmania and the two territories are the only ones close to parity.

Interestingly, in every state and territory, except South Australia and New South Wales, the Labor Party is close to an even gender split. The Liberals and Nationals, however, hover between 75 and 80 per cent men in every state but Tasmania, middle aged white men, being only one tenth of the population, are over represented at a ratio of about six to one in government.

Climate Change creates risks for Australia’s financial stability warns Reserve Bank deputy governor

The Guardian, 12 March 2019:

A deputy governor of Australia’s central bank has issued a stark warning that climate change poses risks to financial stability, noting that warming needs to be thought of by policymakers and business as a trend and not a cyclical event.

As a debate over coal and energy fractures the Morrison government, Guy Debelle warned a forum hosted by the Centre for Policy Development on Tuesday that climate change created risks for Australia’s financial stability in a number of different ways.

“For example, insurers may face large, unanticipated payouts because of climate change-related property damage and business losses,” he said. “In some cases businesses and households could lose access to insurance.

 “Companies that generate significant pollution might face reputational damage or legal liability from their activities, and changes to regulation could cause previously valuable assets to become uneconomic.

“All of these consequences could precipitate sharp adjustments in asset prices, which would have consequences for financial stability.”

Debelle noted Australia had traditionally come at the climate change debate largely through the prism of its impact on agriculture, but he said the changing climate created “significant risks and opportunities for a broader part of the economy than agriculture – though the impact on agriculture continues to be significant”.

He said policymakers and businesses needed to “think in terms of trend rather than cycles in the weather”.

“Droughts have generally been regarded, at least economically, as cyclical events that recur every so often. In contrast, climate change is a trend change. The impact of a trend is ongoing, whereas a cycle is temporary.”

He said there was a need to reassess the frequency of climate change events, and “our assumptions about the severity and longevity of the climatic events”.

He said the insurance industry had already recognised the frequency and severity of tropical cyclones and hurricanes in the northern hemisphere had changed, and this reassessment had prompted the sector to reprice how they insure and reinsure against such events.

“We need to think about how the economy is currently adapting and how it will adapt both to the trend change in climate and the transition required to contain climate change,” Debelle said.

He said the transition path to a less carbon-intensive world was “clearly quite different depending on whether it is managed as a gradual process or is abrupt”.

“The trend changes aren’t likely to be smooth. There is likely to be volatility around the trend, with the potential for damaging outcomes from spikes above the trend.”

Debelle noted the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had provided “strong evidence” that another half degree of warming was likely in the next 10 to 30 years.

He said work from the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO pointed to an increase in the frequency of extreme weather events, and noted “extreme events may well have a disproportionately large physical impact”.

“There is also a greater possibility of compound events, where two or more climatic events combine to produce an outcome that is worse than the effect of one of them occurring individually,” Debelle said.

“Combined with the increased volatility, this increases the likelihood of nonlinear impacts on the economy.”

Debelle said assessed through that lens, climate change-induced shocks to the economy would be “close to permanent” if droughts were more frequent and cyclones happened more often. “That situation is more challenging to assess and respond to.”

On 13 March 2019 ABC News reported that a leading climate analyst warns that extreme weather risks mean nearly 1 in 10 Australian houses may be uninsurable due to climate change within the next few generations, that is in est. 30-90 years.