Regional Australia Committee offered usual tired old 'solutions' including Clarence water diversion

From A Clarence Valley Protest today:

It's more pipelines, bigger dams and inter-basin water transfers

The Inquiry into the impact of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan in Regional Australia is being offered a wide range of options to ensure sustainable Murray-Darling Basin river systems.

Few of which admit to any need to limit current water consumption by reducing diversion caps and, some follow that tired old route of more pipelines, bigger dams and inter-basin water transfers.

Here are a few examples.

One option put forward by Wakool Shire Council in its submission:

Look at alternative supply for productive use – i.e.pipeline from river systems to high value use.

Another viewpoint from Lodden Shire Council:

The Authority should also consider the construction of environmental dams in key sites to store significant volumes of water devoted purely to environmental benefits. The cost of such infrastructure projects could be borne by all Australians or at least by those who will receive a direct benefit from the health of the Murray Darling Basin.

Carrathool Shire Council offered this:

New infrastructure projects, including additional and/or expanded water storages……….

Harvesting and redirecting surplus water resources from northern Australia.

While Hay Shire Council complained:

There is no possibility of any harvesting of additional water for the environment by the construction of additional dams or further investigation of diversion schemes. Such water would be harvested in wet periods such as we are now experiencing to be used in providing environmental flows as required in drier seasons. Why as a country are we not investigating this alternative?

Leeton Shire Council put forward these 'solutions':

Harvesting and re-directing surplus water resources form northern Australia and the eastern seaboard in Queensland and New South Wales;………

New infrastructure projects, including additional and /or expanded water storages, for example a new storage at Wellington in South Australia, or expansion of storages such as Lake Buffalo and Lake William Hovell in north east Victoria.

The Citizens Electoral Council informed the Inquiry that:

The proposed Clarence River Scheme would add upwards of 1,000 Gl/y of reliable flows into the Murray‐Darling Basin, which would transform the Basin's productive power.

McDonald's Yamba: when promo goes awry

Finally popped in to see what the old Yes (1,511 members) and No (4,538 members) Facebook sites were saying about McDonald’s new fast food outlet in Treelands Drive Yamba and, I am beginning to wonder what the franchisee rates as busy if this is an example:

28 December 2010

Ange Pateman I just saw a post on the no groups wall saying that the town is full but maccas is empty. I'm not sure when they drive past (or came in!!) but we have been FLAT OUT the last two days while the rest of the town shut down. Which just goes to prove the point that if the rest of the food outlets in Yamba would step up and provide real service to the community, there would be no need for us. But they don't, so there is!! I even had a lady from out of town tell me today how glad she and her family is that we are open because she knows she is guaranteed a good coffee there, unlike most other places.
By the way, we love it when it's busy so keep on coming!!

28 December 2010

Dave Fleming Town busy, maccas empty nice one!

19 December 2010

Ange Pateman It's been a bit slow this morning... Where is everyone?

For the record, casual observation suggests that McDonald's car park usually has between 4 and 10 cars at any given time in its carpark during the traditional hours for eating lunch.

"No kudos for fooling Andrew Bolt -- that's like taking candy from a baby" says Lambert

If your day started badly and a pick-me-up is required - go to this post over at Deltoid and see Andrew Bolt decapitated, hung, gutted and filleted by an expert:

Andrew Bolt can get fooled again

Keneally bombs in NSW floods leadership stakes

In NSW Premier Kristina Keneally only rated 13 per cent in the good leadership stakes re floods according to Essential Report 110124 24th January 2011.

Floods - Leadership

Q. Thinking about the recent floods across Australia, how would you rate each of the following for providing leadership in dealing with the floods?

	Total good	Total poor	Very good	Good	Average	Poor	Very poor	Don't know
Prime Minister Julia Gillard	42%	23%	15%	27%	28%	10%	13%	7%
Opposition leader Tony Abbott	19%	32%	4%	15%	36%	19%	13%	13%
Queensland Premier Anna Bligh	77%	6%	52%	25%	11%	3%	3%	6%
Queensland Premier Anna Bligh (Qld)	71%	9%	48%	23%	17%	2%	7%	3%
Brisbane Mayor Campbell Newman	61%	4%	28%	33%	16%	2%	2%	19%
Brisbane Mayor Campbell Newman (Qld)	75%	7%	46%	29%	14%	2%	5%	4%
Victorian Premier Ted Baillieu	34%	8%	8%	26%	26%	4%	4%	32%
Victorian Premier Ted Baillieu (Victoria)	47%	12%	10%	37%	27%	6%	6%	14%
NSW Premier Kristina Keneally	21%	23%	4%	17%	28%	11%	12%	29%
NSW Premier Kristina Keneally (NSW)	13%	40%	4%	9%	30%	18%	22%	18%

Nationally, 42% think the Prime Minister Julia Gillard provided good leadership and 23% poor – while the Opposition leader Tony Abbott was rated good by 19% and poor by 32%. In Queensland Julia Gillard rated 42% good/26% poor.

Nationally the Queensland Premier Anna Bligh was rated 77% good/6% poor and in Queensland 71% good/9% poor. The Mayor of Brisbane Campbell Newman was rated a little lower nationally (61%/4%) but slightly higher in Queensland (75%/7%).

In Victoria, the Premier Ted Bailieu was rated 47% good/12% poor and in NSW, Premier Kristina Keneally was rated 13% good/40% poor

NSW Electricity - Christ on A Bike!

Christ on a bike! Now The NSW Upper House inquiry into the Keneally Government fire sale of electricity assets has been told that taxpayers will probably come out of the deal with next to nothing!

Now the Keneally-Roozendaal "gen-trader" model in which retailers and generation trading rights have been sold might yield just $2-3 billion.

The Government's sales team admitted yesterday that billions could be ripped from the proceeds because of a web of contract deals.

The Government will spend $1.3 billion building the Cobbora coal mine from the proceeds, which it promised to private sector bidders to supply power stations. It will subsidise the price of coal coming from that mine to the tune of up to $1 billion.

But it also risked losing hundreds of millions out of the $1.3 billion it has been paid by Origin Energy and Tru Energy for the rights to trade power generation.

Former Labor minister Kim Yeadon told the parliamentary power inquiry that, under the bizarre "gen-trader" deal, should power stations fail, some of that money will have to be handed back.

The hundreds of millions it cost to put together the sale will also be deducted.

A senior Government source confirmed there may be "not much money" available to pay for roads and rail.

Seeing Red & Voting Green
Yamba

* Guest Speak is a North Coast Voices segment allowing serious or satirical comment from NSW Northern Rivers residents. Email ncvguestpeak at gmail dot com to submit comment for consideration.

A U.S. job offer for Wikileaks?

This is the latest U.S. attack on Wikileaks reported in The Age on 22 January 2011:

WASHINGTON: WikiLeaks, condemned by the US government for posting secret data leaked by insiders, may have used music- and photo-sharing networks to obtain and publish classified documents, according to a computer security firm.

Tiversa Inc, based in Pennsylvania, has evidence that WikiLeaks, which has said it does not know who provides it with information, may seek out secret data itself, using ''peer-to-peer'' networks, its chief executive, Robert Boback, said.

The company, which has done investigative searches on behalf of US agencies including the FBI, said it discovered computers in Sweden were trolling through hard drives accessed from popular peer-to-peer networks such as LimeWire and Kazaa. The information obtained in those searches had later appeared on WikiLeaks, Mr Boback said. WikiLeaks bases its most important servers in Sweden.

''It would be highly unlikely that someone else from Sweden is issuing those same types of searches resulting in that same type of information,'' he said.

Tiversa's claim was ''completely false in every regard'', said Mark Stephens, WikiLeaks's London lawyer.

So this should put a smile on a few faces this morning courtesy of a mention on @BernardKeane:

Joint Request for Statements of Interest: Internet Freedom Programs

January 3, 2011
Department of State
Public Notice

Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor and Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs Joint Request for Statements of Interest: Internet Freedom Programs

SUMMARY

The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) and the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs (NEA) announce a Joint Request for Statements of Interest (SOI) from organizations interested in submitting proposals for projects that support Internet freedom under the “Governing Justly and Democratically” Foreign Assistance program objective. This solicitation does not constitute a formal Request for Proposals: DRL and/or NEA will invite select organizations that submit SOIs to expand on their ideas via full proposal at a later date.

PLEASE NOTE: DRL and NEA strongly urge applicants to access immediately http://www.grants.gov/ in order to obtain a username and password. It may take up to a week to register with grants.gov. Please see the section entitled, “DEADLINE AND SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS” below for specific instructions.

REQUESTED STATEMENT OF INTEREST PROGRAM OBJECTIVES

DRL and NEA invite organizations to submit statements of interest outlining program concepts and capacity to manage projects that will foster freedom of expression and the free flow of information on the Internet and other connection technologies in East Asia, including China and Burma; the Near East, including Iran; Southeast Asia; the South Caucasus; Eurasia, including Russia; Central Asia; Latin America, including Cuba and Venezuela; and Africa. Programming may support activities in Farsi, Chinese, Russian, Burmese, Spanish, Vietnamese, Arabic, French, and other languages spoken in acutely hostile Internet environments. Concepts may be global in nature, regional or country-specific.

Statements should clearly address a) support for digital activists and civil society organizations in exercising their right to freedom of expression and the free flow of information in acutely hostile Internet environments, or b) support for ongoing evaluation and research to enhance global Internet freedom policy and diplomacy. (my emphasis)

Supporting digital activists:

1. Statements of interest should address one or more of the following potential program activities:

Counter-censorship Technology: Development and support of web-based circumvention technology to enable users in closed societies to get around firewalls and filters in acutely hostile Internet environments. DRL and NEA will consider projects that support the deployment of individual technologies in specific environments, as well as projects that identify a lead organization to provide sub-grant and contractual support to non-profit organizations and for-profit companies that develop and maintain circumvention technologies. Statements of interest proposing a consortium of technologies under a lead organization should clearly identify potential technology partners and include an indication of those organizations’ interest in participating in the proposed project. In all cases, preference will be given to peer-reviewed technologies……..

For Gillard & Roxon: A lesson in one easy sentence on the folly of a nation health information database

A server storing sensitive patient information for more than 230,000 people was breached by unknown hackers so they could use its resources to host the wildly popular Call of Duty: Black Ops computer game. [The Register, 14 January 2011]

I can almost see the demand for bigger, better Clarence River levee walls starting

On 21 January 2010 The Daily Examiner ran articles pointing to the findings of a paper presented at 47th Annual Floodplain Management Authorities Of NSW Conference on 27 February–2 March 2007 at Gunnedah, titled BIG LEVEES – ARE THEY A GOOD IDEA?, authored by Drew Bewsher & John Maddocks of Bewsher Consulting Pty, Ltd, Sydney and Ian Dinham of Clarence Valley Council, Grafton.

One of these newspaper articles was careful to inform Clarence Valley residents that overtopping existing levees would have a warning period of only hours:

The paper states that the amount of time communities had to respond varied from town to town. In Maclean, modelling suggests the 100-year flood would overtop the levee there within just three hours.
Grafton comes out a bit more fortunate, taking about 10 hours before the town became inundated with water.

While the conference paper in question did point to some levee wall risk factors (see below), it finally came out in favour of the idea of levee walls in the final paragraph; This is not to say that we shouldn’t build big levees. Depending on site limitations.

Almost as a matter of course it totally ignored the fact that these upriver levee walls make unprotected downriver small villages like Iluka and Yamba more vulnerable during major flooding.

I think it was no accident that at least one Clarence Valley shire councillor made a rather gullible local journalist (renowned for rarely seeking alternative viewpoints) aware of this conference paper – it certainly paves the way to lengthen or create new upriver levees, despite the numerous qualifications it contains.

The former of these two gentleman would be well aware that community pressure on the back of national debate will demand more, not less, physical protection as populations unrealistically squat on ancient floodplains and, it is highly unlikely that either he or his fellow councillors will deny these demands with that last paragraph cop out just waiting to be quoted in any debate within the Chamber.

The Impact of Levees on the Flood Risk

Levees are built to reduce the flood risk to a community. They may be particularly useful in eliminating small or nuisance floods, and depending on their height, may also havesome success in mitigating larger floods. The flood risk to the community ‘protected’ bythe levee is reduced – up to the point that the levee is overtopped or it fails. After thispoint, there may be rapid inundation of the previously ‘protected’ area and deep inundation depths, resulting in a very high flood hazard to residents and occupiers of the area. In some cases, evacuation routes may be cut at an early stage, leaving occupants isolated and trapped in extremely dangerous conditions. In smaller catchments, there may be little warning that the levee will overtop, and virtually no time for the community torespond. There is also the threat of catastrophic levee failure, either before overtoppingor shortly afterwards.When the levee does overtop, the risk and threat to life will nearly always be greater (and often significantly greater) than when there was no levee. When the probabilities and consequences of all sizes of floods are considered, those thatovertop the levee and those that don’t, it may be that in some levee situations where the consequences of overtopping are disastrous, that the levee actually represents a netincrease in flood risk, not a reduction. Clearly where high levees are already ‘protecting’ extensive urban areas andcommunities are complacent about the consequences of overtopping, public awarenessinitiatives are essential to initially establish, and to then maintain the community in a ‘floodready’ state so that the flood risks can be mitigated.

If Baby Boomers were worried aged care might be stuffed by the time they turned 75 - worry no more

Read and enjoy current aged care recommendations in the Caring For Older Australians: Draft report presented to the Gillard Government by the Productivity Commission and released on 21 January 2011.

Less direct accountability for government, less transparency if that is actually possible, a freer hand for aged care providers (including the ability to palm-off aged care bed categories with low profit margins) and the potential for all manner of agencies to increase costs on a whole range of services (including removing the cap on high care accommodation charges), ‘supported’ beds for low-income frail aged eventually assigned to the lowest tenders, a more market-driven provision of aged care services for special needs groups, and as an added bonus, the continuing option of being faced with no nursing home bed available in the area in which you live in your retirement – I give you A framework for assessing aged care: draft recommendations.

However, as has been the case down the centuries, if you enter old age with significant assets and investments you will still be able to afford the best on offer and probably do a little better out of those same proposed aged care provisions.

The entire report can be found here.

We have all been invited to examine this report and make written submissions to the Productivity Commission by Monday 21 March 2011.
Email agedcare@pc.gov.au for further information