Young storytelling in the Clarence Valley: ‘Yaegl Biirrinba' (This Is Our River) and 'River to the Sea'

https://youtu.be/srBp_713-5g

‘Yaegl Biirrinba' (This Is Our River) was created in June 2018, the result of a five day Desert Pea Media storytelling workshop. Co-written by, and starring, an incredibly talented group of Indigenous young people enrolled at Maclean High School, community members and local Elders - with support from DPM staff and local services.

https://youtu.be/sHZlCtpbZgM

‘River To The Sea' was created in December 2018, the result of a five-day Desert Pea Media storytelling workshop. Co-written by, and starring, an incredibly talented group of young people, community members and local Elders from Maclean and Yamba NSW - with support from the DPM team and Maclean High School Staff.

Republican Super Pac hopes to defeat President Trump and Trumpism at the ballot box - one attack ad at a time

The Lincoln Project states that its mission is to: Defeat President Trump and Trumpism at the ballot box.

A fascinating aspect to this project is that it is a super PAC* which was created by conservative and registered Republican voters.

It has been running strong political attack ads since January 2020.

This one targets Trump and the evangelical Christians who support him.....

https://youtu.be/yoglNFN5-Js

While this ad targets a Republican senator who voted to acquit Trump of both articles of impeachment.......

https://youtu.be/PgmXzmwaDhU

NOTE
* According to the US Federal Election Commission; "Super PACs are independent expenditure-only political committees that may receive unlimited contributions from individuals, corporations, labor unions and other political action committees for the purpose of financing independent expenditures and other independent political activity."

Popular Yamba eatery Sassafras Pizza to re-open in March 2020

The Daily Examiner, 14 February 2020

Closed after fire gutted the premises in September 2019, the very popular Sassafras Pizza at 16 Coldstream St, Yamba, is to re-open early next month.

Operating 7 evenings a week from 5.30pm to 9pm. 

All its favourite menu items will return with the hottest pizza on the menu being renamed "Yamba 510" after the "fireys who threw everything they had at it".

Instragram

Has Australia lost another species to climate change?

The Guardian, 15 February 2020:

Drought, bushfires and rainstorms turn Australian rivers black

Luke Pearce had arrived at Mannus Creek for a three-day mission to rescue the Murray-Darling Basin’s last population of Macquarie perch.

For 10 years Pearce had visited this spot on the edge of the Snowy Mountains that, just weeks earlier, was ravaged by fire. There had been rain and the creek was flowing fast.

But as Pearce and his colleagues stood on the bank – nets at the ready – the water turned “to a river of black porridge”.

“We got there at about midday with two teams. But we were too late,” he says.

Pearce is a fisheries manager in the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries. A week earlier, he had caught nine of the endangered perch and taken them to the tanks at Narrandera Fisheries Centre.

But Pearce says nine was not enough to be confident they could breed enough in captivity to replenish the river. About 100 specimens would be be ideal, but Pearce says the fish are in such low numbers that he was hoping for 20. Hence the rescue mission on 20 January.

“It was a front of black water coming down,” Pearce says. “The water was pretty bad to start with, but it went from green to inky black.

“It was a moment of complete despair and, really, a feeling of a missed opportunity. Maybe if we’d got there four or five hours earlier we may have been able to get one or two more.”

An electronic probe in the water monitoring the oxygen levels dropped to show zero within hours, Pearce says.

“Watching those oxygen levels drop like that I had grave fears we could have lost all the fish in that system. It was devastating having worked there for such a long time to then potentially lose all this.”

The river was too black to see any fish, but crayfish, shrimp and mayfly larvae were crawling out.

What happened at Mannus Creek is one example of what scientists have described as a “triple whammy” hitting rivers on Australia’s east coast and inland.

Drought and a long-term drying has delivered a cascade of mass fish kills since late 2018, with low river flows, low oxygen and algal blooms. Authorities and politicians warned repeatedly in 2019 that ongoing drying would see more mass fish kills.

Then Australia’s bushfire crisis struck across catchments. Now heavy rain has washed sludge and ash into rivers, robbing the remaining fish of oxygen.

Hundreds of thousands of fish have died in multiple events – some caused by lack of water, and some caused by downpours running over burned catchments.

At one time, Macquarie perch was one of the most abundant native fish in the Murray-Darling system – prized by anglers and also commercial fishers.

But a NSW government assessment of the fish in 2008 wrote the building of dams and weirs had compromised spawning areas and blocked the fish’s movement. Overfishing, pollution and predation by introduced species like redfin perch had also caused numbers to plummet.

When Luke Pearce returned to Mannus Creek after the fires he was confronted with a scene of carnage. Photograph: Luke Pearce

Read the full article here.

Shorter Morrison Government on Climate Change: Get used to it!

https://youtu.be/6BmbvTvFQ3g

It's no wonder Facebook Inc earnings are falling

"Adverse outcomes such as suicide and depression appear to have risen sharply over the same period that the use of smartphones and social media has expanded. Alter (2018) and Newport (2019), along with other academics and prominent Silicon Valley executives in the “time well-spent” movement, argue that digital media devices and social media apps are harmful and addictive. At the broader social level, concern has focused particularly on a range of negative political externalities. Social media may create ideological “echo chambers” among like-minded friend groups, thereby increasing political polarization (Sunstein 2001, 2017; Settle 2018). Furthermore, social media are the primary channel through which misinformation spreads online (Allcott and Gentzkow 2017), and there is concern that coordinated disinformation campaigns can affect elections in the US and abroad."  [Hunt Allcott, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, and Matthew Gentzkow (November 2019) "The Welfare Effects of Social Media"]

BoingBoing, 10 February 2020:

Facebook is designed to make you anxious, depressed and dissatisfied, three states of mind that make you more vulnerable to advertising and other forms of behavioral manipulation. Small wonder, then, that people who quit using Facebook reporthigher levels of life satisfaction and lower levels of depression andanxiety. Bloomberg's article about the study is a few months old but one that should be revisited regularly between now and November.

People who deactivated Facebook as part of the experiment were happier afterward, reporting higher levels of life satisfaction and lowerlevels of depression and anxiety. The change was modest but significant — equal to about 25 to 40 percent of the beneficial effect typically reported for psychotherapy.

Why are people willing to pay so much money for something that reduces their happiness? One possibility is that social media acts like an addictive drug — in fact, the people Allcott et al. paid to deactivate Facebook ended up using it less after the experiment was over. But another possibility is that people use services like Facebook because they’re compelled by motivations other than the pursuit of happiness.

Response to the 12th Annual Closing The Gap Report: "We die silently under these statistics"

The Monthly, 12 February 2020:

Northern Territory Labor senator Malarndirri McCarthy gave a devastating interview this morning, ahead of today’s annual Closing the Gap address, drawing a direct connection between the ongoing failure to meet targets to reduce Indigenous disadvantage and the policies of the Coalition government. 

Starting with the Abbott government’s decision to cut the Aboriginal affairs budget by half a billion dollars, McCarthy then cited the disastrous Aboriginal work-for-the-dole scheme (the Community Development Program), the cashless welfare card that “entrenches First Nations people in poverty in this country”, and the out-of-hand rejection by the Turnbull and Morrison governments of the First Nations voice to parliament requested in the Uluru Statement from the Heart. “All of these things are connected to Closing the Gap and improving the lives for First Nations people,” said McCarthy, who went on to slam as an “absolute disgrace” the abandonment of any referendum on constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians after a backlash [$] in the Coalition party room yesterday. 

The key findings of the 12th annual Closing the Gap report, tabled in parliament today, received blanket coverage this morning: only two out of seven targets have been met, on early education and Year 12 attainment, while the other five targets on child mortality, school attendance, literacy and numeracy, employment and life expectancy are all off track. The government has responded by seeking to adopt new targets expected in April, drawn up after a year’s consultation by the Coalition of Peaks representative body chaired by Pat Turner, from the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation, under a new national agreement to be signed by COAG. Both PM Scott Morrison and Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese gave set-piece addresses, and the debate continued into Question Time, with no real progress. Fine words every Closing the Gap day achieve nothing – as Crikey’s Bernard Keane writes [$], the sentiments are often the same, from PM to PM, from year to year. 

In a debate this afternoon, shadow Indigenous Australians minister Linda Burney gave a moving speech citing former social justice commissioner Mick Dodson, who said Australians suffered from an “industrial deafness” to the statistics of Indigenous disadvantage, accepting them as almost inevitable. “We die silently under these statistics,” Burney said, flagging that Labor looked forward to supporting new and ambitious Closing the Gap targets. Failure was not inevitable, she said, adding that “once again we offer bipartisanship from this side of the house”. In reply, Minister for Indigenous Australians Ken Wyatt also stressed the need for bipartisanship, saying: “All of us have failed in the Closing the Gap journey over the last 10 years. The intent has been good … but the model has been broken.” Then he veered into unconvincing management speak: a different paradigm, turning the dial, joint and shared decision making, better ownership at local level, and the engagement of mainstream Australia. 

While nobody is doubting that Wyatt is genuine about his portfolio, it will amount to little if his government colleagues are not behind him. It will be a tragedy if it turns out the first Indigenous minister for Indigenous Australians was appointed for cynical political purposes, and was nobbled from the start....

Read the full article here.

Closing The Gap Report 2020, exerpt:

Progress against the Closing the Gap targets has been mixed over the past decade. 

As four targets expire, we can see improvements in key areas, but also areas of concern that require more progress. 

• The target to halve the gap in child mortality rates by 2018 has seen progress in maternal and child health, although improvements in mortality rates have not been strong enough to meet the target. 

• The target to halve the gap for Indigenous children in reading, writing and numeracy within a decade (by 2018) has driven improvements in these foundational skills, but more progress is required. 

• There has not been improvement in school attendance rates to close the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous school attendance within five years (by 2018). 

• The national Indigenous employment rate has remained stable against the target to halve the gap in employment outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians within a decade (by 2018). 

Two of the continuing targets are on track. 

• The target to have 95 per cent of Indigenous four year-olds enrolled in early childhood education by 2025. 

• The target to halve the gap for Indigenous Australians aged 20–24 in Year 12 attainment or equivalent by 2020. 

However, the target to close the gap in life expectancy by 2031 is not on track. 

Jurisdictions agreed to measure progress towards the targets using a trajectory, or pathway, to the target end point. The trajectories indicate the level of change required to meet the target and illustrate whether the current trends are on track.

BACKGROUND

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics; The final estimated resident Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population of Australia as at 30 June 2016 was 798,400 people, or 3.3% of the total Australian population.

It has been estimated that the pre-1788 resident Aboriginal population could have been as high as over one million people, or 100% of the total Australian population.