Earth Hour, 8.30pm Saturday 26 March 2011 - will you be switched off?

From its debut in one city in one country in 2007 – Sydney, Australia – when 2.2 million individuals turned their lights off to take a stand against climate change, Earth Hour has become a truly global movement, embracing 128 countries and territories in 2010.

In four short years, Earth Hour has grown into the largest environmental campaign in history.

2011 marks a new phase for the initiative. The new campaign creative, 60+, will position Earth Hour 2011 as an hour of celebration where the community comes together and makes a pledge to do more to help the planet.

Sign up at earthhour.org.au

What political hypocrites!

What a week I picked to return home.

Today Tony Windsor decides that the Gillard Government made a mistake in announcing its plan to introduce a carbon price. "In a blunt warning to the Government, Mr Windsor accuses it of making strategic mistakes in the timing of the tax announcement, "putting the cart before the horse" because of "pressure from the Greens", and says a key reason Australians appear to have baulked at the plan is because it is too vague." Hello? Isn’t Saint Tony on the multi-party committee which recommended a carbon price mechanism to the government, didn’t he agree to the announcement of same ("Mr Tony Windsor and Mr Robert Oakeshott, have agreed that the proposal should be released for community consultation"), attend the joint press conference and the next day release his own media blurb in support of this announcement? As today’s prime example of political hypocrisy this about face takes some beating.

Yesterday Pauline Hanson was sprung registering as an Upper House independent candidate on a group ticket in the March 2011 NSW state election. Aw, the luvvie of the far-right must be running out of pin money and needs to top up the bank account. After all this has worked for her in the past – 3 weeks minimum campaigning and maximum reimbursement as an unsuccessful candidate to the tune of $150,000. This latest tilt at campaigning (which sees Hanson change both her mind on “goodbye forever” and the state in which she lives) garners her the title of über political hypocrite also.

On the importance of opinion polls

The Australian 7 March 2011

Click on image to enlarge

Something the media works hard to make us forget about most opinion polls………

@wolfcat Wolf Cocklin

One thing to remember about the polls there is not an election next week.. so they don't actually matter.

Feeling unwell? Take two aspirin and stay away from NSW hospitals

While bureaucrats are happily busy preparing to collate personal health information (supplied to them by everyone from doctors through to chemists and optometrists) in order to satisfy Federal Health Minister Roxon’s unnatural desire for a great big database on Australian citizens, this is one of the computer systems from which this data will be drawn. It is said to be installed in 59 hospitals having an estimated 80 per cent of all NSW public hospital beds.

The Sydney Morning Herald 7 March 2011:

THE computer system that runs emergency departments in NSW hospitals is compromising patients' care, according to the first systematic review of the troubled project that found it was crippled by design flaws.

The FirstNet system allows treatment details and test results to be assigned inadvertently to the wrong patient, according to the review. It is based on a technical study of the software and interviews with directors of seven Sydney emergency departments.

The system is so compromised it should be scrapped, a specialist doctors' group said yesterday.

Difficulties retrieving patient records could delay treatment, and the system - on which $115 million has been spent - automatically cancelled pathology and radiology requests if the person was transferred from the emergency department without checking whether these were still needed, according to the study by Jon Patrick, the director of the University of Sydney's health information technology research laboratory.

Sally McCarthy, the president of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, said Professor Patrick's findings confirmed that the system, loathed by doctors and nurses, was unsuitable for its purpose.........

The project, part of a 10-year electronic medical records plan intended to make patient histories, X-rays and test results accessible from any hospital in the state, had proceeded too fast - apparently because of contractual obligations - for clinicians' feedback to influence it, Dr McCarthy said.

The potential for records to be linked to the wrong patient raised a serious risk they would be given incorrect treatment, she said, and the inability to compile multiple patient records into reports meant doctors could no longer evaluate new treatments or disease epidemics. "Simple audits and research projects are just impossible now," she said.

Really inspires confidence doesn’t it?

These difficulties are not confined to large metropolitan areas as this 2010 quote from the North Coast Area Health Service indicates:

In response to the difficulties our small sites experienced in using FirstNet, NCAHS continues to work with HSS to develop a FirstNet work flow for small rural sites.

Little appears to have changed since the 2009 implementation of this e-health software on the NSW North Coast.

If the reader happens to live in communities covered by the Hunter Urban Division of General Practice this sick software system is probably informing e-discharge summaries etc. forming part of the data collection trial run currently underway in the Newcastle and Hunter Valley region.

Building on these shifting sands, on 1 March 2011 Roxon’s baby, the National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA), awarded IBM a $23.6M dollar contract to develop nation-wide authentication system for electronic health records.

Facebook allows freedom of speech to degenerate into abuse

Once again Facebook is being used to support persons currently before the courts and, in this example the language used is beyond colourful.

Names have been redacted before the following comment is displayed here on North Coast Voices:

Wouldn't Justice Wood of Royal Commission fame (sic) cry into his wig if he knew about all the police corruption in the valley. These police are crims in blue - *****, thief, liar, *****, liar, woman basher, racist, *****, liar, kid basher, racist, *****, liar, racist, *****, liar, racist, kid basher! I'm not too well *****, liar, racist, incompetent . *****, liar, kid basher, racist. I WANT TO BE ELECTED ***** should buy all the scum bottle openers. REDNECK! Such is life NED

When is Facebook Inc going to take some responsibility for allowing pages containing such content to remain online?

The more things change the more they stay the same when it comes to gender inequality

It would be comfortable to say “Could only happen in America” when reading this study, which indicates that it is not only developing countries which favour male children. However one cannot escape the thought that the finding of this study might easily be mirrored in Australia.

Do parents have preferences over the gender of their children, and if so, does this have negative consequences for daughters versus sons? In this paper, we show that child gender affects the maritalstatus, family structure, and fertility of a significant number of American families. Overall, a first-born daughter is significantly less likely to be living with her father compared to a first-born son. Three factors are important in explaining this gap. First, women with first-born daughters are less likely to marry. Strikingly, we also find evidence that the gender of a child in utero affects shotgun marriages. Among women who have taken an ultrasound test during pregnancy, mothers who have a girl are less likely to be married at delivery than those who have a boy. Second, parents who have first-born girls are significantly more likely to be divorced. Third, after a divorce, fathers are much more likely to obtain custody of sons compared to daughters. These three factors have serious negative income and educational consequencesfor affected children. What explains these findings? In the last part of the paper, we turn to the relationship between child gender and fertility to help sort out parental gender bias from competing explanations for our findings. We show that the number of children is significantly higher in families with a first-born girl. Our estimates indicate that first-born daughters caused approximately 5500 more births per year, for atotal of 220,000 more births over the past 40 years. Taken individually, each piece of empirical evidence is not sufficient to establish the existence of parental gender bias. But taken together, the weight of the evidence supports the notion that parents in the U .S. favour boys over girls…….Our findings are important for several reasons. First, regardless of how one interprets ourfindings on family structure and fertility, we show that child gender matters. The results on the educational and economic outcomes indicate that the negative effects on children living in families where the first-born child is a girl are substantial. While our findings indicate that some o fthe negative consequences of a first-born daughter affect younger siblings of both genders, girls are overall more likely to be exposed to these negative effects. Moreover, if there is evidence of parental sex bias in family living arrangements and fertility decisions, it may be indicative ofother ways in which parents treat boys and girls unequally. For example, even in families where the parents are married, parents who prefer boys may give less attention and nurturing to their daughters. They may also devote fewer financial resources to their education and health. In this sense, our results are related to the existing literature that documents an unequal intra-household allocation of resources. [The Demand for Sons, GORDON B. DAHL University of California, San Diego, and NBER and ENRICO MORETTI University of California, Berkeley, and NBER,2008]

WetlandCare Australia launches $2.5 million Coastal 20 project in Ballina today

WetlandCare Australia proudly announces the local launch of the $2.5 million Coastal 20 wetland restoration project

Come along and join us at Meldrum Park in Ballina. Janelle Saffin, Federal Member for Page will officially announce the launch of this exciting new project.

This project, funded under the Australian Government's Caring for Country program, will work in partnership with community, government and industry bodies to undertake the restoration of 20 important coastal wetlands from Kempsey to Gladstone. The wetlands located in the local area are: Cudgen Lake, Tyagarah Swamp, Belongil/Cumbebin, North Creek, Tuckean Swamp and the Clarence Broadwater.

When: Tuesday 8th March at 10.00am
Where: Meldrum Park (the northern end of Norton St) Ballina

Wetland Care Australia's other projects

More Gems from The Fitz Files - Sunday's Sun Herald

Source: The Sun Herald, 6/3/11

A little fur flies in Senate koala inquiry

On 17 November 2010 the Senate Standing Committee on Environment and Communications was asked to conduct the Inquiry into the status, health and sustainability of Australia's koala population which is scheduled to report in June 2011.

Submissions have now closed with only 69 received and they hint at widely divergent positions bordering on the combative in some instances:

Koala Research Centre of Central Queensland

The status of the koala is uncertain, nationally. Local and regional populations are declining. There is not adequate data to address the IUCN criteria in any consideration of the formal status of the koala. Delaying any reclassification until data meets IUCN criteria produces a crisis driven response with limited capacity to recover the species. A proactive approach from the Commonwealth is recommended including: a move away from the IUCN criterion based assessment of the koala's status, proactive implementation of the actions of the national koala strategy within the Commonwealth's sphere of influence, Commonwealth resourcing of research and community organizations pursuing the objectives of the national koala strategy, support for the establishment of a network of koala sentinel sites monitoring trends in population and habitat status. A strategic review of the approach to managing the koala and its habitat is required taking account of the distinctly different needs in (a) the over abundant, genetically depauperate race of the koala in South Australia and Victoria, (b) the expanding urban and industrial footprint in predominantly coastal eastern Australia, and (c) the rural and regional western and northern habitats affected by climate extremes, fire and drought.

Board Member, NSW Northern Rivers Catchment Management Authority

When questioned about this practice recently, DECCW’s Director of Landscapes and Ecosystem Management Tom Grosskopf commented in the local newspaper (Advocate 29 Dec. 2010) that “the Coffs Harbour (Koala) Plan of Management did not fall under the NSW environmental planning policy but rather the council had its own detailed plan and had written themselves out of the state plan.”
Far from writing itself out of the state plan, between 1996 and 2000, Coffs Harbour City Council(CHCC) undertook the preparation of a comprehensive Koala Plan of Management (KPoM)according to NSW State Government guidelines: “Procedures for Preparing Comprehensive Koala Plans of Management under State Environmental Planning Policy 1995 (SEPP) No.44-Koala Habitat Protection.

Ms Paulette Oldfield

A development was approved by my local council in Daisy Hill, Qld, 2007 which sat in the middle of prime habitat. http://thesanctuarydaisyhill.com/index.html (See attached articles) Over 5000 residents voiced their disapproval of this decision but the council ignored their constituents and forged ahead. Illegal clearing then occurred on this site with the developer NOT being held accountable or forced to pay any recompense (RIX Developments, Gold Coast). Rix Development also did not follow council orders with regards to spotter/catcher resources on site at the time of clearing. Again, nothing was done about this. A bulldozer waited until a Koala came out of the tree before the bulldozer knocked it down. This tree was over 80 years old. The Koala had nowhere to go.

Rix Developments

Firstly thank you for forwarding the comments in relation to our development at Daisy Hill, Queensland and the opportunity to reply. The information supplied by the submitter is grossly inaccurate and misleading.

Name Withheld

Lord Mayor and Councillors, my name is <?> and I am not a Greenie. I am also not an Activist. Up until now you could probably have described me as one of the masses. Up until now I would have been quite happy to mind my own business, raising my family in quiet peace in the suburbs of Brisbane.This all changed for me about six months ago when a newly created company gained approval from Brisbane City Council to develop the parcel of land on the up hill slopes adjacent to my home.

Property Council of Australia

The Property Council is strongly opposed to the continuation of the listing of endangered species on a jurisdictional basis. This is in part due to the fragmented review of endangered flora and fauna which fails to deliver a national snapshot of the sustainability and health of these species.

Urban Development Institute of Australia

UDIA (Qld) does not make claims as to present Koala population numbers or other scientific aspects. We do however seek that any decision is made on sound scientific information. It is clear to us, that at least in Queensland, issues around Koala population protection are very substantially affected by emotional or other views based on values which can lead to incorrect outcomes. It is critical that this hyperbole is stripped away and true scientific measures utilised.

National Association of Forest Industries

In addition, the relative scale of activity and landscape connectivity of ‘managed’ and formal conservation reserves (e.g. national parks) should be taken into account at a landscape level. The sustainable harvesting of forests represents less than one per cent annually of the forest estate potentially available for wood production in any one year (in all states and territories) and may enhance the habitat for a range of species through the provision of a diversity of mixed age classes, forest structure and food resources across the landscape.