American Politics: Opening lines to remember

From "Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About The Worst President Ever" by Rick Wilson, published in 2018.

Another federal Coalition Government ‘epic fail’

Seems whatever our neigbour to the west, the National Party’s Barnaby Joyce, touches turns to dross……

The Sydney Morning Herald, 6 April 2019:

A phone tower that Barnaby Joyce fought for ended up on the northern NSW property of long-time friend and mining baron Gina Rinehart, who gets an annual fee to host the tower. Locals are baffled why the tower was put there over another location, as it's plagued with reception problems.

The Northern Daily Leader reports that Kingstown's community in Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce's New England electorate campaigned hard for the tower, switched on two weeks ago, to be co-located with a police and emergency services tower at the highest point in the district.

But it was built instead at Sundown Valley Pastoral Company, bought by Ms Rinehart's pastoral arm Hancock Prospecting in August last year. Landowners are paid a yearly fee by telecommunications companies to have towers placed on their property.

Kingstown resident Jeff Condren led the charge for a tower to be funded by the federal government's Mobile Blackspot Program and called it an "epic fail".

"Now that the tower has been in operation for several weeks it's evident the community concerns relating to the location and the service was well-justified," he said.

"Service levels drop to nothing just a couple of kilometres in any direction.....

Who will be to blame if Essential Energy cuts down koala trees in Lawrence, NSW?

Koala habitat within Lawrence, NSW

Essential Energy is a NSW state-owned corporation supplying ‘poles and wire’ infrastructure to communities on the North Coast.

One of those communities is the small village of Lawrence on the Lower Clarence River.

An attractive feature of living in this village is that it is one of the ever diminishing small regional/rural urban areas which still have resident koalas.

Koalas like this one sitting in a tree line marked by Essential Energy for felling.

Photograph of Lawrence koala supplied

Koala mid-canopy & circled in black
Photograph supplied

Apparently those surveying the short new route for a section of poles and wires in Lawrence neglected to look up into the trees – what else can explain the fact that known koala trees have been marked for destruction?

So who is it that employs such incredibly blind staff?

Well Essential Energy has a Board of Directors (very comfortably remunerated from $60,600 up to $764,200 pa) and all apparently living far from this particular group of koalas.

These board members are:

Patricia McKenzie – Chair, Non-Executive Director

Robyn Clubb – Non-Executive Director

Jennifer Douglas – Non-Executive Director

John Fletcher – Non-Executive Director

Peter Garling – Non-Executive Director

Patrick Strange – Non-Executive Director

Diane Elert – Non-Executive Director

John Cleland – CEO and Executive Director.

The shareholders are represented by the NSW Treasurer and Minister for Finance, Services and Property. Current Treasurer is MP for Epping Dominic Perrottet.

With the exception of the Treasurer all these people belong to what might be called the professional directors class and, between them are associated with a number of other businesses and a research facility:

APA Group, Health Direct Australia,

Australian Wool Exchange Ltd, Craig Moyston Group Ltd, Elders Ltd, NSW Primary Industries Ministerial Advisory Council, Rice Marketing Board of NSW,
Hansen Technologies Limited, Opticomm Pty Ltd, Peter MacCullum Cancer Foundation,

Charter Hall Funds Management Limited, Charter Hall Limited, Energy Group Limited, Downer EDI Limited, Newcastle Coal Infrastructure Limited, Tellus Holdings Limited,

Auckland International Airport Limited. Chorus Limited, Mercury Energy, NZX Limited.

Annotated image; photograph supplied

A fair number of people in Lawrence have told Essential Energy that they want these koala trees to be left standing and the corporation states it has taken its plan under review.

So if Essential Energy does decide these koala trees are to be cut down in the next few months, don’t blame the men with chainsaws, blame these eight professional directors and the successive NSW Coalition governments who appointed them - from the O'Farrell Government in 2013 through to the Berejiklian Government in 2018.

Because state government is clearly appointing directors who cannot even ensure that Essential Energy’s environmental policy (for which they are responsible) is comprehensive and actually mentions vulnerable and threatened flora and fauna.

It is a policy which (aside from a brief mention of greenhouse gas emission reduction) fails to give clear direction to staff, given there is only a single broadly worded line in its 12 point health, safety & environmental policy to cover all manner of environmental issues ie., "Comply with relevant legislation, regulations, standards, codes, licences and commitments"

These directors appear so divorced from real life that they apparently never thought that their regional/rural staff need to be trained to look up into tree canopies before they decide to mark a tree line for destruction.

The bottom line is that the Koala as a species is at risk of localised extinction across the areas in which populations still survive and, sadly is at risk of total extinction across the entire country by as early as 2050 if  those in positions of power continue to be deliberately blind to the fate of this Australian icon.

Morrison Government caught out attempting to retrospectively censor native bird export information

The Guardian, 4 April 2019:

The Australian government has attempted to retrospectively censor critical information related to exports of rare and exotic birds to a German organisation headed by a convicted kidnapper, fraudster and extortionist.

Guardian Australia revealed late last year that Australia had permitted the export of 232 birds, some worth tens of thousands of dollars, to the Brandenburg-based Association for the Conservation of Threatened Parrots (ACTP) between 2015 and November 2018.

Conservation groups and federal politicians had repeatedly expressed concern about the group, which is headed by Martin Guth, a man with multiple criminal convictions.

The Guardian’s investigation relied on internal government documents secured through freedom of information laws, released in August.

Guardian Australia made subsequent freedom of information requests and received further documents in January. But the federal department of environment has now attempted to retrospectively redact parts of the documents, saying it accidentally released information it shouldn’t have.

Some of the inadvertently released information could “facilitate fraudulent export applications”, the department said. The department had also accidentally released “personal information, such as birth dates and name, and confidential business information”.

The department has asked Guardian Australia to destroy its copies of the documents, and not further disseminate the newly redacted details.

“While we understand that the FOI decisions have already been made, and that you are under no obligation to follow the department’s wishes, we kindly request that you either: destroy the documents that the department has previously released to you and instead, use the redacted documents attached to this letter; or otherwise ensure that the information in question … is not further disclosed or made publicly available,” the department said in a letter emailed to the Guardian on Wednesday, but dated last month.

The documents have not been published on the department’s online FOI disclosure log. The department’s stance suggests that other parties – journalists or conservation groups, for example – would be subject to the newly introduced redactions if they requested the same documents.

Freedom of information experts say the government’s actions have “no legal basis”……

The new redactions remove details that made it possible for Guardian Australia to establish that the operator of ACTP’s Netherlands facility was convicted in 2015 of involvement as a buyer in a trading ring that was illegally selling protected exotic birds.

The department has also removed identification numbers for the birds that were exported to Germany, arguing that its original decision to release that information could lead to “fraudulent” exports of Australian birds overseas.

It has also blacked out permit numbers from the export permits issued in Australia, the names of individuals who operate other ACTP facilities in Germany and in other countries, and removed information relating to ACTP’s exemption status from corporate tax.

The redactions remove images of ACTP’s main breeding facility and maps that illustrate its layout.

In recent months, Guardian Australia has been trying to establish whether the department undertook adequate due diligence to ensure that all of the birds sent to ACTP were legally captive bred.

But the department has refused to release names of suppliers in Australia that would show the chain of custody for each of the birds before they were exported to Germany. Those details were redacted from FoI documents released to the Guardian in January and from documents tabled after an order for the production of documents in parliament.

Attempts by government agencies to retrospectively recover or redact FOI documents have previously been found to have no lawful basis under NSW freedom of information law. Landcom, the NSW government’s land and property development organisation, attempted to retrieve documents it had accidentally released to a school committee group in 2005, and took its case to the NSW Administrative Decisions Tribunal.

The tribunal found it had no power whatsoever to retrieve previously released FOI documents.

Tweet of the Week

During the last LNP gov, Centrelink required my blind son to have vision tests to see if his sight improved. He was born without eyes. https://t.co/cSCjxsPmvt

— EggShellBlonde (@HeyMum3) April 9, 2019

What a difference twenty-two months makes to that textbook hypocrite, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison

A little over twenty-two months out from a federal election this was then Australian Treasurer Scott Morrison's voting down the creation of a Royal Commission into the abuse and neglect of people with a disability........ 

Less than six weeks out from a federal election Morrison will have to fight very hard to win we have tears being shed by the Prime Minister.....

* Snapshots by Highlighter‏ @tvdc99

Is NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian intending "to make it a priority to finish off effective protection of the natural environment – something started years ago under the Coalition State Government"?

On Thursday 4 April 2019 the local Knitting Nannas held a protest knit-in outside the electoral office of NSW Nationals MP for Clarence, Chris Gulaptis.

Below is the text of their letter to Mr. Gulaptis dated the same day.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 Knitting Nannas Against Gas

Grafton Loop

c/- PO Box 763

Grafton 2460

knaggrafton@gmail.com

4th April 2019

                                                                        C O P Y

Mr C Gulaptis MP

Member for Clarence

11 Prince Street

GRAFTON  NSW 2460

Dear Mr Gulaptis

Dissolving of Office of Environment and Heritage

The Grafton Nannas are very concerned about your Government’s recently announced intention of doing away with the Office of Environment and Heritage as an independent entity.

We have long been worried about the Government’s lack of concern about protecting the natural environment for current and future generations of humans as well as for other life forms.

Government policies over recent years have been seen by many in our community and elsewhere as being a de facto war on the natural environment.

For example:

• Changes to vegetation laws which have led to a large increase in clearing of habitat which is important to the survival of native flora and fauna.  This weakening of the former laws is also likely to lead to increased topsoil loss and general land degradation.

• Changes to logging regulations which threaten the sustainability of native forests which belong to the people of NSW – and not to logging interests. These changes include limiting pre-logging fauna surveys, an inevitable increase in clear-felling, and reduction in the width of buffer zones along streams.  

• Failure to protect the health of rivers, particularly those in the Murray-Darling Basin.  For years the NSW Government, as well as the Federal Government, has been pandering to the irrigation industry while ignoring the need to protect river health by ensuring that flows are adequate for river health.  The drought is not an excuse for this folly.

• Other examples include the cutting of funding to the National Parks & Wildlife Service and penny-pinching changes to its structure as well as the failure to ensure that the existing weak environment laws are enforced and appropriate penalties imposed on those who breach them.

We are aware that the Premier recently stated that her Government would make the environment a priority. 

Since hearing that OEH was to lose any of the limited independence it currently has and is to be pushed into a mega-Planning Department, we are left wondering about what the premier actually meant about “priority”.  Did she mean that she intended to make it a priority to finish off effective protection of the natural environment – something started years ago under the Coalition State Government?  It looks very much like that to the Nannas.

Yours sincerely

Leonie Blain

On behalf of the Grafton Nannas

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