National Parks & Wildlife consulting over future of Wollumbin summit track

 

Wollumbin
IMAGE: Visit North Coast NSW

Echo NetDaily, 22 January 2021:

A number of traditional custodians of the sacred site have called for non-Indigenous people to refrain from undertaking the five-hour trek.

Up to 100,000 people climb the mountain each year, according to tourism data. However, some leave rubbish such as soiled toilet paper by the side of the track and at the stunning peak.

The track has been closed for much of the past year owing to COVID-19, and it now appears it may stay that way.

A safety audit and an engineering assessment conducted during the closure have identified significant safety issues with the final climb to the Wollumbin summit.

These include an ‘extreme risk of landslide, rockfall and failure of the chain section of the track’.

A spokesperson from the National Parks and Wildlife Service said the current closure had been extended, at least until May.

Tellingly, the spokesperson also said that the future of the summit track was now under consideration.

This was being done in consultation with various key stakeholders, including the traditional owners of the site.

‘We understand that locals and visitors may be disappointed by the extended closure, however our main priority must always be to ensure the safety of visitors and staff,’ the spokesperson said.

‘We will now consider the future of the Summit track, in consultation with key community and tourism stakeholders, including Aboriginal Elders and knowledge holders.’

Wollumbin, which means ‘cloud catcher’ in some Aboriginal languages, is a traditional place of cultural law, initiation and spiritual education for the people of the Bundjalung Nation.

Under Bundjalung law, only certain people can climb the summit.

The National Parks and Wildlife Service asks visitors to respect the wishes of the local Indigenous mob and ‘avoid climbing this very difficult track’.

STATE OF PLAY 2021: We live in dangerous times

Kentan Joshi, 17 January 2021:

In March 2019, an Australian white supremacist walked into a mosque, armed with a shotgun, and killed 51 people, including a two year old boy. The man who enacted those killings wanted to wipe out those he’d been told were replacing white people, and erasing white culture. The first thing on my mind when I saw that was this article published only a few months prior.

Though complaints were made to the Australian Press Council, no action was taken to remove the article or punish the media outlet. The reason this article prompted little outcry among the employees of News Corp is because white supremacy, racism and the deadly ideology of the ‘Great Replacement’ belief system are viewed as harmless thought experiments – rather than things that lead to children being murdered by Australians with shotguns.

I wrote, a few days after the Christchurch attack:

“Politics and media are each split into two factions: a large number of people who are explicitly racist, and a large number of people who refuse to accept that the other people could ever be explicitly racist. Together, they create an environment necessary, (though, on its own, insufficient) for the spawning of far-right terror and large-scale massacres”

People are already dying. Movements are coalescing. The broader media feedstock into this system hasn’t changed enough, certainly not in Australia. There are no more chances to fuck this up. Stubbornness means lives are lost. A tin ear means innocents suffer. There are no more chances, and there is no more time.

Bannon

in 2018, Australia’s national broadcaster aired a long interview between Four Corners reporter Sarah Ferguson and alt-right, Nazi-adjacent grifter Steve Bannon. Ferguson said she’d heard others call Bannon racist, and declared that “there’s no evidence that that’s what you are”. That’s the same Bannon who, prior to that interview, complained too many CEOs in Silicon Valley were Asian, and said of black Americans being murdered by police, “What if the people getting shot by the cops did things to deserve it? There are, after all, in this world, some people who are naturally aggressive and violent”.

The problem with that interview is that it provided a stream of content for Youtube videos of Bannon ‘owning’ establishment media and gave him legitimacy on Australia’s most trusted media outlet. Bannon’s goal is not making a good argument – it’s prominence and platform. The format of an interview simply gives liars a free substrate in which to deploy their craft. But the criticism of that interview was not received well by Australia’s journalists…..

Much of this problem comes from the simple fact that Australia’s media landscape is mostly white, and therefore free to see racism as a cute thought experiment. Seeing footage of police officers begging white nationalists to spare their lives because they have children hasn’t really changed that.

How do we know it hasn’t changed? Charlottesville based activist Molly Conger received a long direct message on Twitter from (at the time) unspecified journalists seeking to “interview members of the far-right”; right after Four Corners reporter Sarah Ferguson announced her departure to the US along with Tony Jones, to cover the white nationalist terrorist attacks. After some wry jokes from Twitter folks, Conger confirmed that it was indeed Four Corners and Sarah Ferguson asking to interview white nationalist terrorists. In her original post she included her reply, pleading with the team not to provide a platform.

“Don’t lend them the legitimacy of your institution. Don’t publish their words uncritically. Don’t’ publish them at all unless you have a subject matter expert to dissect them and present them as the falsehood they are. This is life and death for us”.

That last sentence has a grave and terrifying reality to it, given Conger lives in Charlottesville. “I get so many death threats I can catalogue them by the gunmaker mentioned”, she wrote in 2019. Of course, it’s completely baffling why they wouldn’t ask for Conger’s perspective. More telling is that they expect her to happily pass on the contact details of people who explicitly want to kill her.

In fact, many American anti-racist activists now refuse to speak to journalists if those same journalists are giving a platform to white supremacists (in much the same way climate scientists had to deny comments if those stories also featured deniers).

A smattering of Australian journalists are tuned into the tactics of white supremacists, the alt-right and terror groups, and are figuring out new approaches to dealing with the rising terror threat of white supremacists…..

This comes at a time when these terror groups are beginning to ramp up in Australia: “Far-right violent extremism constitutes up to 40% of the Australian domestic spy agency’s counter-terrorism caseload, up from 10-15% before 2016″. A teenager from Albury in New South Wales was planning a “mass casualty attack” just prior to being arrested. Australia’s anti-terror regimes are failing to do much of anything about it. An inquiry will focus on social media, but has no mention of television, print or legacy digital media: Andrew Bolt is free to write about the white race is being wiped out by dirty ethnics, as much as he pleases.

These terror groups aren’t growing in the widespread air of suspicion and paranoia that surrounded Islamic terror in the 2000s. They’re free and unhindered. They have the support of sympathetic voices in police, political and media establishments, and they have the support of people who can’t process that they’re a direct threat to our safety. They have journalists hunting tirelessly to find ways to elevate their voices to larger audiences……

Journalists: please, don’t wait until a mass casualty attack in Australia before you decide to stop playing directly into the hands of white supremacists. There are no more chances. We are here now, and we are in danger.

Read full article here.

An American perspective on the last 78 days of Donald J. Trump's destructive presidency

Donald Trump in defeat
IMAGE: www.afr.com, 8 November 2020

AXIOS, Off the rails: Behind Trump's post-election meltdown, 18 January 2020:

Beginning on election night 2020 and continuing through his final days in office, Donald Trump unraveled and dragged America with him, to the point that his followers sacked the U.S. Capitol with two weeks left in his term. This Axios series takes you inside the collapse of a president.

Episode 1: A premeditated lie lit the fire

Trump’s refusal to believe the election results was premeditated. He had heard about the “red mirage” — the likelihood that early vote counts would tip more Republican than the final tallies — and he decided to exploit it.

"Jared, you call the Murdochs! Jason, you call Sammon and Hemmer!”

President Trump was almost shouting. He directed his son-in-law and his senior strategist from his private quarters at the White House late on election night. He barked out the names of top Fox News executives and talent he expected to answer to him.

“And anyone else — anyone else who will take the call," he said. “Tell these guys they got to change it, they got it wrong. It’s way too early. Not even CNN is calling it.”

As the clock ticked over into the first minutes of Nov. 4, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani ranted to top campaign aides: "There's no way he lost; this thing must have been stolen. Just say we won Michigan! Just say we won Georgia! Just say we won the election! He needs to go out and claim victory." Trump’s campaign manager Bill Stepien later told associates: "That was fucking crazy."

For weeks, Trump had been laying the groundwork to declare victory on election night — even if he lost. But the real-time results, punctuated by Fox’s shocking call, upended his plans and began his unraveling.

Trump had planned for Americans to go to bed on Nov. 3 celebrating — or resigned to — his re-election. The maps they saw on TV should be bathed in red. But at 11:20 p.m. that vision fell apart, as the nation’s leading news channel among conservatives became the first outlet to call Arizona for Joe Biden. Inside the White House, Trump's inner circle erupted in horror.

Over the next two months, Trump took the nation down with him as he descended into denial, despair and a reckless revenge streak that fueled a deadly siege on the U.S. Capitol by his backers seeking to overturn the election. This triggered a constitutional crisis and a bipartisan push to impeach Trump on his way out the door, to try to cast him out of American politics for good.

But in four years, Trump had remade the Republican Party in his own image, inspiring and activating tens of millions of Americans who weren’t abandoning him anytime soon. He’d once bragged he could shoot another person on Fifth Avenue and not lose his voters. In reality, many of them had eagerly lined up to commit violence on his behalf.

As Trump prepared for Election Day, he was focused on the so-called red mirage. This was the idea that early vote counts would look better for Republicans than the final tallies because Democrats feared COVID-19 more and would disproportionately cast absentee votes that would take longer to count. Trump intended to exploit this — to weaponize it for his vast base of followers.

His preparations were deliberate, strategic and deeply cynical. Trump wanted Americans to believe a falsehood that there were two elections — a legitimate election composed of in-person voting, and a separate, fraudulent election involving bogus mail-in ballots for Democrats.

In the initial hours after returns closed, it looked like his plan could work. Trump was on track for easy wins in Florida and Ohio, and held huge — though deceptive — early leads in Pennsylvania and Michigan.

But as Bill Hemmer narrated a live "what if" scenario on his election telestrator from Studio F of Fox’s gargantuan Manhattan headquarters, the anchor sounded confused. "What is this happening here? Why is Arizona blue?" he asked on camera, prodding the image of the state on the touch screen, unable to flip its color. "Did we just call it? Did we make a call in Arizona?" Because of a minor communication breakdown, Hemmer's screen had turned Arizona blue before he or the other anchors, Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, found out that Fox’s Decision Desk had called it.

Trump was steaming and he wanted to see his top aides immediately. His son-in-law Jared Kushner, chief of staff Mark Meadows, campaign manager Stepien, senior strategist Jason Miller, and data cruncher Matt Oczkowski took the elevator up to the third floor of the residence at the White House. They met Trump and the first lady halfway between his bedroom and the living room at the end of the hall. Trump peppered them with questions. What happened? What the hell is going on at Fox?

Oczkowski told Trump that based on the campaign’s modeling he thought Fox was wrong and “we’re going to narrowly win” by maybe 10,000 votes or less, “razor close.” But the reality was, hundreds of thousands of votes were outstanding in Maricopa County and the picture was too cloudy to be sure. Then Trump told Kushner to call the Murdochs…..

Read the full segment here.

Episode 2: Barbarians at the Oval

President Trump plunked down in an armchair in the White House residence, still dressed from his golf game — navy fleece, black pants, white MAGA cap. It was Saturday, Nov. 7. The networks had just called the election for Joe Biden.

In the Yellow Oval Room, the same room where FDR learned of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, stewards brought hors d’oeuvres on trays while Trump gathered his closest political advisers to assess what options he had left.

Top aides including campaign manager Bill Stepien, senior adviser Jason Miller, conservative political activist and external Trump adviser David Bossie, and Justin Clark, the deputy campaign manager, leveled with him. As they saw it, he had one last long shot at victory. It would require them to win enough outstanding votes in Arizona and Georgia to squeak home in those two states, and to win a legal challenge to election practices in Wisconsin.

"You have a 5% to 10% chance of this happening," Clark told the president. "But all of these things have to go right.” Trump listened calmly and told them their plan was worth a shot.

But it would never get off the ground. Plan B, driven by Rudy Giuliani and a parallel track of conspiracists, was already coming together, unfolding before the original advisers' own eyes.

It would soon overtake the campaign's legal operation, feeding the president false claims including the idea that the election could be overturned.

On the day after the election, Nov. 4, top staff including Stepien, Clark, Miller, general counsel Matthew Morgan and Jared Kushner had gathered at Trump campaign headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. They believed this would be a serious search for a path to 270 electoral votes through credible legal challenges.

Then Giuliani, Sidney Powell and a swelling conspiracy crew marched into the room — literally.

These two groups — the professional staff and the Giuliani cabal — filled in around one long, rectangular table in a conference room walled in by frosted glass. The pattern repeated itself the day after that and the day after that….

Read the full segment here.

Episode 3: Descent into madness ... Trump: "Sometimes you need a little crazy"

The conspiracy goes too far. Trump's outside lawyers plot to seize voting machines and spin theories about communists, spies and computer software.

President Trump was sitting in the Oval Office one day in late November when a call came in from lawyer Sidney Powell. "Ugh, Sidney," he told the staff in the room before he picked up. "She's getting a little crazy, isn't she? She's really gotta tone it down. No one believes this stuff. It's just too much."

He put the call on speakerphone for the benefit of his audience. Powell was raving about a national security crisis involving the Iranians flipping votes in battleground states. Trump pressed mute and laughed mockingly.

"So what are we gonna do about it, Sidney?" Trump would say every few seconds, whipping Powell more and more into a frenzy. He was having fun with it. "She really is crazy, huh?" he said, again with his finger on the mute button.

It was clear that Trump recognized how unhinged his outside legal advisers were. But he was becoming increasingly desperate about losing to Joe Biden, and Powell and her crew were willing to keep feeding the grand lie that the election could be overturned….

Read the full segment here.

Episode 4: Trump turns on Barr

Trump torches what is arguably the most consequential relationship in his Cabinet.

Attorney General Bill Barr stood behind a chair in the private dining room next to the Oval Office, looming over Donald Trump. The president sat at the head of the table. It was Dec. 1, nearly a month after the election, and Barr had some sharp advice to get off his chest. The president's theories about a stolen election, Barr told Trump, were "bullshit."

White House counsel Pat Cipollone and a few other aides in the room were shocked Barr had come out and said it — although they knew it was true. For good measure, the attorney general threw in a warning that the new legal team Trump was betting his future on was "clownish."

Trump had angrily dragged Barr in to explain himself after seeing a breaking AP story all over Twitter, with the headline: "Disputing Trump, Barr says no widespread election fraud." But Barr was not backing down. Three weeks later, he would be gone.

The relationship between the president and his attorney general was arguably the most consequential in Trump's Cabinet. And in the six months leading up to this meeting, the relationship between the two men had quietly disintegrated. Nobody was more loyal than Bill Barr. But for Trump, it was never enough.

The president had become too manic for even his most loyal allies, listening increasingly to the conspiracy theorists who echoed his own views and offered an illusion, an alternate reality…..

Read the full segment here.

Episode 5: The secret CIA plan

Trump vs. Gina — The president becomes increasingly rash and devises a plan to tamper with the nation's intelligence command.

In his final weeks in office, after losing the election to Joe Biden, President Donald Trump embarked on a vengeful exit strategy that included a hasty and ill-thought-out plan to jam up CIA Director Gina Haspel by firing her top deputy and replacing him with a protege of Republican Congressman Devin Nunes.

The plan stunned national security officials and almost blew up the leadership of the world's most powerful spy agency. Only a series of coincidences — and last minute interventions from Vice President Mike Pence and White House counsel Pat Cipollone — stopped it.

The ploy to rattle Haspel and perhaps intentionally trigger her resignation unfolded in a lurching and incompetent way, like a bad Monty Python skit, on one chaotic day in early December.

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was ordered to fire — and then immediately unfire — the CIA's Deputy Director Vaughn Bishop.

In his place, Trump planned to install Kash Patel — a former top Intelligence Committee staffer to Nunes who had served on Trump's National Security Council but had no agency experience. In Trump's mind, this could potentially lead to Patel running the agency without needing to get Senate confirmation.

Trump had spent his last year in office ruminating over Haspel. Some of Trump's hardcore allies, including Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, had been publicly raising doubts in his mind about her. He grew to distrust her and instead wanted a loyal ally at the top of the CIA.

She wasn't the only national security official the president wanted out…..

Read the full segment here.

Quote of the Week

"Morrison has been unmasked. His refusal to openly condemn Trump’s behaviour and legacy is the deliberate act of a weak, spineless and character-free Prime Minister. At a pivotal time in world history, Morrison retreated. He didn’t want to tell the truth for one reason – politics.”  [Former press officer to Liberal PM Malcolm Fraser, Alistair Drysdale quoted in The New Daily, 16 January 2021] 

Tweet of the Month

And that’s that. pic.twitter.com/PKwLPv1Sxf

— Jimmy Kimmel (@jimmykimmel) January 20, 2021

Due to illness North Coast Voices will not be posting again until 23 January 2021

 

Sincere apologies to regular and occasional readers of North Coast Voices. Back on 23 January 2021.

The Northern Rivers region is becoming tired of illegal campers

 

Byron Shire Council, media release, 11 January 2020:

Illegal camping continues to be a significant problem in the Byron Shire, with Council’s Enforcement staff working seven days a week patrolling and fining van-packing freeloaders parking at beaches, parks and in residential areas. 

“Camping on the streets of the Byron Shire is prohibited and illegal and yet we have experienced unprecedented numbers of people arriving in their vans and blatantly camping overnight in our towns and our streets and out the front of our houses these holidays,” Acting Mayor, Michael Lyon, said. 

“Last year was a challenging year and I understand we are not experiencing a normal holiday season but I think the vanpackers forget that when they park somewhere and set up for the night that the community is all around them, having to step over their pots and pans on their morning walk, or around the bit of park or footpath being used as a toilet. 

“It’s not okay and residents in Brunswick Heads, Mullumbimby, Broken Head and Byron Bay are sick and tired of it,” he said. 

“A freeloader is someone who takes something and gives nothing in return and that is just what these vanpackers are doing,” Acting Mayor Lyon said. 

Over the Christmas/New Year period there were 12 Enforcement staff working seven days a week on two shifts, starting early and finishing late in the night targeting illegal camping and parking, as well as other issues including uncontrolled dogs. 

 From 24 December 2020 to 2 January 2021, a total of 1,454 infringement notices were issued with the majority being for illegal camping and parking. One third of the fines (480 fines) were issued between 6pm and 9am. 

In recent years Council has changed ‘No Camping’ signage in problem areas of the Shire to ‘No Parking’ to enable staff to use number plate recognition technology to record offences meaning a fine will issue automatically. 

“Illegal camping is not a problem unique to the Byron Shire – other coastal areas including Tweed and Clarence Valley are also struggling. 

“In fact our staff have been contacted by councils in Western Australia and Queensland hoping to get some ideas on how to tackle their illegal camping problems,” Acting Mayor Lyon said. Illegal camping is often confused with homelessness and rough sleeping. Byron Shire Council is one of the most proactive in NSW when it comes to homelessness, employing two Public Space Liaison Officers and currently advertising for a Rough Sleeping project officer. 

Byron Shire is the first area in NSW, outside Sydney, to pilot an internationally-renowned project aimed at drastically reducing and hopefully ending rough sleeping. 

The Ending Rough Sleeping Byron Shire project is a community-initiated collaboration that is supported by the state-wide organisation, the End Street Sleeping Collaboration.

Clarence Valley Council, Facebook page, 8 January 2021:

Spread the word. It doesn't pay to camp illegally in the Clarence Valley.

50 people have been issued with $112 infringement notices after breaching overnight parking restrictions in Yamba and Angourie since the holiday season started. 

Dozens more were moved on by rangers.

Tweed Shire Council, 7 January 2021:

Camping or overnight stays in parks and reserves is prohibited. 

Overnight camping in some coastal areas is also prohibited, with no parking between 11 pm and 5 am. This includes areas in Cabarita Beach, Chinderah, Fingal Head, Hastings Point, Kingscliff, Pottsville and Tweed Heads. 

Rangers and police patrol these areas, including early morning and at night. On the spot fines are issued to anyone ignoring these restrictions. 

See Overnight prohibited parking zones - View Maps