Twice a year the ocean off the NSW Coast becomes a busy highway.
Between May and July these gentle giants can be seen heading north towards their sub-tropical breeding grounds and then between September and November they pass along coastal waters heading south back to Antarctica.
Here are some scenes of the northern migration in 2023 and 2024 as the whales make their way through the waters off northern New South Wales.
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| IMAGE: The Guardian 11.06.24 Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP |
The 'when I am prime minister' comments and promises have increased recently.
To add context and keep track of what Dutton has been promising since becoming opposition leader, here is a list of promises made so far. Not all of which have stood the test of time.
Dutton’s super promise
The Mercury, 2 March 2023:
The Opposition Leader said the Coalition would not support the changes given Labor had declared it would not tinker with superannuation during the election campaign. “We’re dead against it, and we will repeal it. We’re not going to stand by and watch Australians attacked,” Mr Dutton said. Treasurer Jim Chalmers defended the changes on Wednesday morning, arguing while there would be some “political cost” to the move, overall it was a “modest” reform.
Dutton promises improved facilities for female sports participants during shire visit
St. George and Sutherland Shire Leader, 18 August 2023:
Mr Dutton, accompanied by the MP for Hughes and shadow sports minister, made an early election promise that a Coalition government would help sporting clubs improve facilities to help increase female participation.
He said $250 million would be provided over four years for community sporting infrastructure across the country.
Dutton promises another vote if Indigenous Voice fails
Brisbane Times, 2 September 2023:
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has promised to hold a referendum on constitutional recognition for Indigenous Australians if the Voice is defeated at the ballot box next month, and he wins power at the next election.
Setting out some of his alternatives to a Voice that is written into the Constitution, the opposition leader said he supported “regional voices” and the recognition of First Australians.
Cook returns fire over Dutton defund pledge
The Australian, 31 January 2024:
The federal Opposition Leader on Tuesday used an address to the WA Chamber of Minerals and Energy to promise to withdraw financial support for the EDO [Environmental Defenders Office]...
Dutton railroads PM in byelection: Campaign on Track
Sydney Morning Herald, 02 Feb 2024:
Dutton will travel to Melbourne's bayside today to pledge $900 million towards extending Melbourne's rail network to the booming suburbs south of the electorate.
The electrification of the Frankston-Baxter line, along which a diesel V/line service runs, would include new stations at Langwarrin and Frankston East, both of which sit within Dunkley.
Dutton promises more tax cuts under Coalition
The Sydney Morning Herald, 07 February 2024:
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton emerged from a Coalition party room meeting yesterday to admit he could not block the Labor tax cuts and would not roll them back if he won power, but he vowed to add to them with further measures announced before the election.
Dutton: 'I'll wind back regulation'
The Australian Financial Review, 3 April 2024:
Peter Dutton will promise business leaders cheaper energy prices and less government interference under the Coalition, pledging to stay out of the way of employment and profit growth through a simplified industrial relations system...
Invoking the vision of Liberal Party founder Robert Menzies in an address to the Council of Small Business Organisations Australia, Mr Dutton will pledge to better represent workers and business operators if the Coalition wins the next election, delivering a "back-to-basics economic agenda"....
A year out from the next election, Mr Dutton will to call for sustainable wage growth delivered through productivity enhancements....
He will tell attendees the Coalition is developing plans for a dramatic ramp-up in domestic gas production and will present policies for deployment of nuclear power technologies.
Campbell: Dutton’s migration promises a year too late to seize political initiative
The Daily Telegraph (Online),19 May 2024:
On Thursday night, in his budget-in-reply, speech Peter Dutton finally grabbed the political opportunity this represents by promising to cut permanent migration for two years from 185,000 to 140,000 – or by 25 per cent – and to work with universities to set a cap on foreign students.
He will also ban foreign investors and temporary residents from buying existing homes in Australia.
I’ll kick out any foreigner who commits serious crime: Dutton
The Australian, 7 June 2024:
Peter Dutton says no non-citizen who commits a dangerous crime in Australia should be allowed to stay in the country as a matter of principle, arguing they should be deported “immediately”
Dutton vows to ‘make Victoria great again’
Herald Sun, 8 June 2024:
Peter Dutton wants Victoria to return to its “manufacturing powerhouse” glory days — and he says with his strong economic leadership skills, he can get us there.
Dutton to pull Australia out of Paris Agreement if elected
The Sydney Morning Herald, 8 June 2024:
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has signalled he will scrap the nation’s legally binding 2030 climate target and risk Australia’s membership of the Paris Agreement on climate change, following his vow to deploy nuclear energy to reach net zero by 2050.
Dutton declared on Saturday that a Coalition government would not pursue Australia’s legally binding climate target to cut emissions by 43 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030.
To be continued.....
No-one who lived through the catastrophic combination of weather systems which flooded est. 600 kilometres of Australia’s east coast in 2022 would be in doubt that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) was failing in its primary function.
Particularly here in the NSW Northern Rivers region, where the erratic & contradictory forecasting by BOM during the eight days of 23 February to 2 March 2022 saw at least four people drown in preventable deaths.
Months after that record-breaking flood event ABC News reported on the findings of a NSW parliamentary inquiry:
information from the State Emergency Service (SES) and Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) was "incorrect and out of date", leaving the community with "no other option but to ignore government advice and save lives"....It urged the weather bureau to review its rain data infrastructure and flood modelling tools.
However, the worry began for me long before that, when in 2016 I read this:
Dr Johnson has a Bachelor of Agricultural Science (Honours) and PhD from the University of Queensland and a Masters in Public Administration from the John F Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University where he was a Rotary Foundation Scholar. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technical Sciences and Engineering and the Australian Institute of Company Directors.
And realised there was no indepth formal meteorological training in his background.
Worries about BOM under Dr.Johnson have been bubbling to the surface in the media since his installation as Director and this below is only the latest.....
"I'm told a nationwide data centre outage on Friday affected observations ~across the entire country~ Missing min and max temps, wind speeds for Friday and Sat at every single obs. station with the exception of the airports which are not yet auto" [Rick Morton
@SquigglyRick, 10 June 2024]
The Saturday Paper, June 8 – 14, 2024 | No. 503:
Inside the Bureau of Meteorology’s forecast failings
As the Bureau of Meteorology pulls back on its international obligations, increasing automation and a lack of experienced staff has made forecasts less reliable.
By Rick Morton
Bureau of Meteorology chief executive Dr Andrew Johnson turned up to Senate estimates last month without his right-hand man, Peter Stone, many of the bureau’s other executives and, apparently, his briefing notes.
Johnson, who is also the director of meteorology, appointed to the now $533,000 a year job in 2016 by former environment minister Josh Frydenberg, claimed not to be able to answer basic questions about BoM processes. At one stage, he even attempted to prevent his chief operating officer from speaking.
“So, you have no familiarity? Don’t you come prepared for Senate estimates?” Liberal Senator Jonathon Duniam said after asking basic questions alongside Greens Senator Barbara Pocock about how the BoM handles cost overruns and contract delivery delays.
“I am shocked at the lack of capacity to answer questions of that nature even in a general sense. This is astounding.”
It was less astounding to senior Bureau of Meteorology staff who have watched a $1 billion-plus technology transformation project at the agency, called ROBUST, slide off the rails over several years. And less surprising still to the meteorologists at the forecaster, who have witnessed a centralisation of the BoM’s remaining qualified staff to a “national production” model based in Melbourne and Brisbane while being told not to change automatic local forecasts they know to be wrong.
“The philosophy was ‘near enough is good enough’,” a former meteorologist says.
“When the director would come around spruiking the centralisation, that was the actual quote. You know, if you’re saying it’s going to be wet and it’s super wet, that’s not life-threatening. He wants to focus on ‘high-impact events’ but they are not going to be a problem because they’ve got specialised teams.
“But, for a farmer, five millimetres [of rain] as opposed to 20 millimetres is a massive big deal.”
The noticeable slip in forecast quality, especially where meteorologists have been prevented by resourcing constraints or internal policy from correcting known errors in the automatic model outputs, was first confirmed by The Saturday Paper and stems in part from a broader cultural shift at the Bureau of Meteorology. According to sources, this shift has seen a massive restructure of talent and the removal of internal voices of dissent.
“You can warn them about quality but they will straight up tell you black is white and then move on, expecting you to get with the program,” one forecaster says. “And then they wonder why the wheels are falling off.”
Since Johnson came to the role eight years ago, eight members of the small executive team who report directly to him have left. The turnover in management ranks below has been much greater.
Meanwhile, forecasters – including those who work on floods or bushfires in addition to the meteorologists – have increased by just five positions. The work required of these highly qualified people, however, has become more demanding and more complex.
Poor planning and management practices at the weather agency have exacerbated resource constraints. Like the weather they forecast, these issues operate in a tightly interconnected system of feedback loops.
Take the now abandoned plan to move the national forecast grid to a three-kilometre resolution. After years of effort, the project was deemed “too hard” and shelved in late 2021, returning the nation to a six-kilometre grid in every state and territory, including Victoria and Tasmania, which were already successfully running at the sharper resolution.
At the same time, however, a new Australian Fire Danger Rating System (AFDRS) was already in development with prototypes tested by the BoM and the New South Wales Rural Fire Service. The royal commission into the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires recommended it be fast-tracked.
Among other features, this new system was designed on a three-kilometre grid. The race to have it launched suffered as “all Graphical Forecast Editor (GFE) development resources” were dedicated to making the grid change happen, pushing back delivery timelines on the new fire-warning system.
At the other end of delivery, new delays were added. Aborting the three-kilometre grid project resulted in the need to translate BoM’s six-kilometre resolution data to the fire grid via additional “workarounds” from forecasters.
Testing of the AFDRS has now also been compromised by a six-year delay in upgrades to the Bureau of Meteorology supercomputer, Australis II.
“The attitude there now seems to be ‘what’s in it for us?’ despite the fact the BoM is a big player in the Pacific region with climate change and tropical cyclones.”
Last month, BoM researchers led by Paul Gregory and Naomi Benger released a report analysing the seasonal outlooks produced as part of the new rating system.
“Currently the outlooks cannot be verified in realtime as there are no sources of gridded, realtime, AFDRS observations,” the paper says.
“This lack of realtime observations also prevents the Bureau from providing any post-event analysis using AFDRS. This service gap can be filled by integrating the AFDRS computational modules into the Bureau’s National Analysis System (NAS), and the realtime BARRA-2 reanalysis system.
“Both of these systems are currently in trial and are awaiting the upgrading of the Bureau’s supercomputer (Australis II) for deployment.”......
Forecasters who spoke to The Saturday Paper, on condition of anonymity because they feared reprisals, have attributed at least some of their deep unhappiness at the BoM to the management culture.
One persistent issue is the decision to launch the massive Public Services Transformation project alongside the ROBUST technology investment. While the former might have had some appeal from an efficiency point of view, the parallel nature of the two vast projects created substantial backlogs and catastrophic delays.
“To be honest, we have never recovered from either program,” another employee says.
“We have just been crunched. And at the same time, the country has faced some of its worst ever flood and fire events one after another. I feel like the accountability has gone out the window.”
ROBUST was in part inspired by a cybersecurity incident, and its funding, provided by the former Coalition government, was labelled “cabinet in confidence” and has never been officially revealed.
At Senate estimates late last month, Andrew Johnson told the parliament his executives were accountable to him but that he did not have a performance agreement personally.
“My performance agreement in a sense is the corporate plan that I table to the minister and which is tabled to the parliament, but I personally don’t have a performance agreement, and I’ve not had one since I commenced in 2016,” he said.
Under Johnson’s leadership, the Bureau of Meteorology has stopped meeting all of its World Meteorological Organization obligations, cutting back substantially on the frequency of upper atmosphere soundings.
Content now removed from the BoM website states the “benefits” in data sharing under the World Meteorological Organization are “substantial but also impose a responsibility for Australia to also contribute to the international system”.
As one meteorologist told The Saturday Paper: “The attitude there now seems to be ‘what’s in it for us?’ despite the fact the BoM is a big player in the Pacific region with climate change and tropical cyclones.”
Domestically, quality suffers in subtle but important ways. Overnight shifts on the national production desk can shrink to four people who are responsible for an entire country’s forecasting. Almost all of this is model output, but changes still need to be made and there are only so many available to perform the work.
Now even the capital city airports – a fiercely protected domain by aviation forecasters at the BoM – are subject to automation with a $3.3 million, one-year contract issued by the weather agency in the middle of May.
Last weekend, in Perth, the BoM’s Saturday night forecasts were accurate but the Sunday forecast predicted “armageddon” – despite the fact the weather had all but cleared.
“And the issue that comes out early in the morning, that’s the four o’clock issue, it’s done from Melbourne,” a meteorologist says. “The forecasters come in at 6am and then have to look at what mess they’d been left with, basically, and try and make sense of it.”
Early Sunday morning, the BoM was still predicting 25 to 50 millimetres of rain in Perth, with thunderstorms that were possibly severe.
“It had all gone overnight Saturday and into Sunday morning,” the forecaster says.
“So by eight o’clock Sunday, you were left with a few residual showers before the forecast got changed at nine o’clock, and reflected what it should have been. They had the rainfall totals down to about seven millimetres, but the app continued to show 20 to 50 millimetres.”
Such an approach to forecasting nationally is not without consequences. Farmers in the Western Australian wheat belt were furious. Organisers of a WA Day celebration event in Burswood cancelled the festival in advance, based on forecasts that showed “even heavier rainfall” throughout the long weekend.....
The Bureau of Meteorology said in a statement that Peter Stone, who earlier this year was found by a Federal Circuit Court judge to have engaged in a deliberate attempt to mislead the court regarding a BoM workplace case, was sick during the week of Senate estimates.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 8, 2024 as "Inside the BoM’s forecast failings".
Read the full article at:
Bushfire survivors call out Peter Dutton’s abandonment of communities on the frontline of climate change
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Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action
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June 8, 2024
BUSHFIRE SURVIVORS FOR CLIMATE ACTION (BSCA) has spoken out in response to Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s statements in The Australian today that the Federal Liberal Party would dump Australia’s interim emissions reduction targets. The organisation, founded and led by bushfire survivors, has labelled the move reckless and devastating.
“Here we are watching communities face climate-fueled disasters roll around again and again, with insurance costs rising and homes in some regions becoming uninsurable, yet the Opposition Leader is prepared to delay climate action until the 2040s. To say our members are distraught is an understatement,” said Serena Joyner, Chief Executive Officer of Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action.
“What’s particularly hard to understand is how the Coalition can justify the ever growing expense of worsening climate disasters. The bushfires of 2019-2020 and the 2022 Northern Rivers floods each cost insurers more than $4 billion, and the cost to farmers of the Black Summer fires was $5 billion. Nearly 60% of all local government areas were disaster-declared in 2022 and councils everywhere have been unable to keep up with repairs to local infrastructure.
“And insurance costs are just beginning when accounting for the personal financial and emotional costs to people and communities across the country from more frequent and destructive fires and floods. There’s only so much we can take. Does Peter Dutton expect our regions to just give up and move to the city?
“Scientists tell us if we delay urgent climate action we guarantee that global temperatures will keep rising. That would condemn Australia to face summers like Black Summer on a regular basis, if not worse. It is beyond belief that the Opposition Leader thinks that is an acceptable future for this country.”
About Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action:
BushfireSurvivors for Climate Action (BSCA) is a non-partisan, community organisation made up of bushfire survivors, firefighters and their families working together to call on our leaders to take action on climate change. BSCA formed shortly after the Tathra and District fire in March 2018, and its founding members were all impacted by bushfires, including the Black Summer bushfires in 2019-20, Blue Mountains in 2013, Black Saturday in 2009 and Canberra in 2003.
BSCA has been at the cutting edge of legal reform to reduce climate emissions and hold governments, agencies and companies to account. In 2023 the NSW Environment Protection Agency was the first such agency in the country to introduce a climate policy, which it was required to do as a result of landmark court action taken by BSCA.
Peter Dutton proposes decades of delay on climate
Federal Liberals still with no climate plan
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Solutions for Climate Australia
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8 June 8 2024
National climate group Solutions for Climate Australia expressed extreme disappointment and concern at the Opposition Leader Peter Dutton proposing further decades of delay in tackling climate change, despite increasing climate disasters.
This follows a statement by Peter Dutton today, in an interview with The Australian, that the Federal Liberal Party wants to reject current targets and plans to reduce Australia’s climate pollution this decade.
“It is a tragedy that the Federal Liberal Party has no plan to stop the increasing climate disasters which are directly killing Australians, and damaging communities, agriculture and businesses across the country, and globally,” said Dr Barry Traill, Director of Solutions for Climate Australia.
“We need decisive action on climate pollution this decade to protect farmers, our food supply, businesses and trade. From uninsurable houses, to declining crop yields, to direct threats to life and property, we are all now being hurt by climate disasters.
“Australians voted decisively for action on climate in the 2022 election. Mr Dutton’s weak, do-nothing approach on climate is out of step with the electorate. The community showed it expects all political parties to adopt strong, science-based targets to reduce pollution.”
“The federal Coalition has not heeded the message of the nation on climate. They must do better.”
ENDS
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Dutton's nuclear policy a disaster for Australia
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Climate Council
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8 JUNE, 2024
Responding to reports today that Opposition Leader Peter Dutton would rip up Australia's 2030 climate targets if elected, Climate Council CEO Amanda McKenzie said:
“Dutton’s climate policy is a disaster, and the consequence for Australians would be more extreme heat, fires and floods. Instead of ripping up Australia’s 2030 climate targets, Peter Dutton must listen to the communities already ravaged by worsening climate disasters.
“There are 195 countries signed up to the Paris Agreement. Opting out would make Australia a global laughing stock.
“The Liberals haven't learned the lesson Australians gave them at the last election: this is more of the same from the party who already gave us a decade of denial and delay on climate.”
Head of Policy and Advocacy Dr Jennifer Rayner said: “Peter Dutton is now promising Australians more climate pollution and a more dangerous future for our kids.
“This is the make-or-break decade to slash climate pollution by accelerating Australia's move to clean energy. This is what it takes to keep our kids safe from escalating climate change and set Australia up for our next era of prosperity.
“Australia is already making great progress, with 40 percent of the power in our main national grid coming from clean energy, and one in three households having solar on their roof. Doing a massive u-turn on this momentum makes no sense when we can accelerate it instead.”
ENDS
The Climate Council is Australia’s leading community-funded climate change communications organisation. We provide authoritative, expert and evidence-based advice on climate change to journalists, policymakers, and the wider Australian community.
For further information, go to: climatecouncil.org.au
Or follow us on social media:
facebook.com/climatecouncil and
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Nuclear reactors a disaster for climate: Climate pollution would blow out by more than two billion tonnes
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Solutions for Climate Australia
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9 June 2024
New analysis has found the impact on climate change of attempting to adopt nuclear reactors in Australia would be the equivalent of emitting double the 2022 annual emissions of the resource state of Oman, every year for the next 25 years.
That equates to an additional 2.3 billion tonnes of climate emissions between now and 2050 when compared to the Australian Energy Market Operator’s Integrated System Plan ‘Step Change Scenario’ that models the most likely energy transformation scenario under current policy settings.
The federal Coalition has not released the full details of their nuclear reactors plan. This analysis by Solutions for Climate Australia is based on public statements from Coalition leaders, Peter Dutton, Ted O’Brien and David Littleproud, including: a halt to utility-scale renewable energy projects; continuing to roll out rooftop solar; and using gas-fired electricity to cover the gap between coal closing and the proposal for nuclear reactors to come online.
“This analysis demonstrates that nuclear reactors in Australia would contribute to worse climate outcomes. Nuclear is a worrying distraction from getting on with the urgent job at hand: replacing polluting coal and gas with the sun and wind technology we have right now,” said Elly Baxter, Senior Campaigner at Solutions for Climate Australia.
“Reducing emissions this decade is critical to tackling climate change, but this analysis shows that instead Dutton is presenting us with a nuclear fantasy that would add more than two billion tonnes of carbon emissions.
“The Coalition needs to show us a real plan for getting on with replacing polluting coal and gas with urgency.
“At the 2022 Federal Election, Australians voted overwhelmingly for more action on climate change. The Federal Coalition lost government in large part because they presented very poor climate policy. What they have proposed with nuclear reactors is doubling down on this mistake, taking a policy to the next election that would not reduce carbon emissions in the current, critical decade,” said Baxter.
ENDS
ACCESS THE FULL REPORT HERE
