Wednesday 21 September 2011
A question in images - just who does this electorate staffer work for?
On 25 August 2011 the Federal Independent MP for Lyne Rob Oakeshott queried the employment status of the editor of Nationals supported The Port Paper citing this information:
On 26 August Clarrie Rivers did the same and posted this:
On the same day Federal Nats MP for Cowper Luke Hartsuyker went to the media with this statement:
Now I find that disgraced NSW Nat Steve Cansdell went public with his own claim on Facebook in March 2011:
Two of my hardworking staff, Deb & Sharon. Janet did the sensible thing and went home a tad earlier! Thanks guys, you've been a tremendous support.
How many times did this electorate staffer take annual leave or resign to end up being 'employed' by so many in the space of three months or is she just on permanent rotating loan within NSW North Coast National Party circles?
Wednesday 6 April 2016
How the Federal and Queensland Governments are betraying The Great Barrier Reef and the people of Australia
The bribery…..
GSPCB has issued show cause notice to MPT, M/s Adani Murmugao Port Terminal Private Ltd and JSW's South West Port Ltd after it was noticed that the dust pollution emanating from the coal handling has increased in the port town of Vasco, 40 kms from here.
Board Chairman Jose Manuel Noronha said the companies and the port administration have been asked why their consent under Water and Air Pollution Prevention Act should not be withdrawn.
"The show cause notices were issued when it was noticed that the coal handling terminals did not take mandatory measures to control the pollution emanating from the coal dust," Noronha said.
The poor choice of senior management…..
"If this was all done out of sheer ignorance, that is sort of understandable. It's like child porn – you might say you don't know it exists, but if you know it exists and you do everything to promote it, then that's evil."
The other danger….
The state government manoeuvres....
The solemn vow and plea for assistance....
Queensland Mines Minister Anthony Lynham wrote a letter to us in October, promising he would await the outcome of our Federal Court action against the Carmichael mine before considering issuing Adani with the mining leases. But today the Premier and the Minister double-crossed us.
Adani doesn't have our free, prior and informed consent to build their Carmichael coal mine on our land, and they never will.
The Queensland Government just rode roughshod over our rights and granted the mining leases anyway. They have given Adani the green light to ignore our opposition and to tear the heart out of our country. To destroy our rivers and drain billions of litres of groundwater. To leave a black hole of monumental proportions in our homelands.
This fight will define our people and be a landmark moment for Indigenous rights in Australia. Can you help us fight for our rights and our country in court?
Adani and the Queensland Government think they can walk all over us but they've never seen anything like this. Our lands and our way of life, and the legacy of our ancestors, mean too much to our people for us to roll over.
Our resolve is doubled. Minister Lynham can issue all the bits of paper he likes, hide behind false claims of jobs and benefits, and pander to big coal for an unviable project.
But our people's rights are not expendable. This act of infamy will be challenged all the way to the High Court if necessary, and we will continue to pursue our rights under international law.
Friday 3 November 2017
Reef destroying cruise ship given NSW Government permission to enter the Clarence River in October 2018
On this, Ms Pavey’s office said: “In October 2018, the Cruise Ship Caledonian Sky plans to stop off at Yamba as part of the Australian Coastal Odyssey.”
GPO Box 5341
SYDNEY NSW 2001
Saturday 9 January 2010
NSW North Coast councils & businesses that just have to lift their game in 2010
Not every local council or business on the NSW North Coast lives up to its promise (or for that matter its promises) and here is a short list of those who could do better this year.
Maud Up the Street wants me to lead this post off with her pet peeve so I'll oblige.
BUSWAYS - contracted by the NSW Government to supply transport across the Clarence Valley this was its inadequate response to holiday travel needs according to its own website:Friday 25th December: No services
Coffs Harbour and Port Macquarie had similar bus timetables for the 25th December. Great Lakes had one of its three bus routes operating on Christmas Day. Seems Busways management thinks that people without cars don't deserve to move around on Christmas Day unless they live in Campbelltown, Blacktown or on the Central Coast. The north-east of the state can go hang!
COLES - this large supermarket chain has a captive market in certain NSW North Coast towns because of the absence of any real competition. In some stores it shamelessly rides roughshod over its customers with frequently understocked shelves and an ever-diminishing range of brandnames\goods for sale. Now after years of being presented with bananas stored too long before being presented for sale, The Australian Banana Growers' Council tells us that "bananas must meet very particular length, girth and colour specifications before Woolworths and Coles take them".
It's ROFL time to think that this supermarket chain likes to think it has fresh food standards!
CLARENCE VALLEY COUNCIL - under the leadership of Mayor Richie Williamson and General Manager Stuart McPherson certain council staff have been getting quite lax if mutterings round the traps are any indication. This Daily Examiner story of alleged council negligence is just icing on the cake and as usual council tries to squib out of responsibility.
There is also a persistent rumour circulating that councillors are not always aware that they're possibly allocating trust funds improperly on a regular basis, because management allegedly is careful to refer to funding sources in monthly meeting business paper items only by internal accounting codes in order to rob Peter to pay Paul in an irregular manner without challenge.
Monday 5 October 2020
Nationals MP for Clarence is jumping up and down about the Clarence Valley being left out of the NSW-Qld border bubble. Well the fact of the matter is that the O'Farrell-Baird-Berejilkian Government has had 9 years to reverse the error that led to the current problem & neither he, his party or the government have addressed the issue
Sometime in the 21st Century the New South Wales Government invited a bee into its bonnet concerning a need to amalgamate regional local government areas with a view to eventually creating mega-councils and, when that policy was not greeted with enthusiasm (indeed sometimes with open rebellion) it decided to create communities of interest containing clusters of local government areas 'sharing' resources.
Down in Sydney - somewhere between Macquarie Street and Macquarie Towers - the state government decided to overturn the genuine Northern Rivers community of interest built up over the last 179 years and reclassify the Clarence Valley as "Mid-North Coast".
Although many in the Clarence Valley fought back against being lumped in with 'southerners' who did not share a good many of our values, aspirations or concerns, the state government kept insisting.
By 2006 only the Australian Bureau of Meteorology consistently referred to the Clarence Valley as being in the Northern Rivers region and much later the valley was included with the other historical Northern Rivers areas in the one state health district.
When it came to NSW Government agencies generally, they tended to gather data about the Clarence Valley, its communities and residents as part of the newly defined "Mid-North Coast".
We were frequently merged with Coffs Harbour when it came to recording crime, unemployment levels, transport infrastructure and, at a regional planning level we were lumped with Coffs Harbour, Belligen, Nambucca, Kempsey, Port Macquarie-Hastings, Greater Taree and Great Lakes local government areas.
Now the National Party members of the O'Farrel-Baird-Berejiklian Government were well aware of the fact that Clarence Valley communities never considered the reclassification was anything but a political move by a city-centric government and were instinctively refusing to turn their eyes south.
However, I do not recall any individual or combined push by Chris Gulapatis, Geoff Provest or Ben Franklin to reverse that "Mid-North Coast" label before the global pandemic intruded into the state.
So it should not come as a surprise that when the Queensland Government began to look for information about where the Clarence Valley was both geographically and socially when considering its response to COVID-19, it found us in what appeared to be a large population cluster which was too close for comfort to the outer fringes of heavily populated areas like the Hunter-Newcastle and Central Coast.
Former surveyor Chris Gulaptis can go to the newspapers calling the Clarence Valley's exclusion from the Northern Rivers border bubble "ridiculous", "bizarre, perplexing and unnecessary" but he has sat on his hands for almost nine years happily ignoring what locals had been telling him during those years - that the time would come when we would all rue the day that the NSW Government on paper ejected us from the Northern Rivers.
Cartography based solely on political ideology is a b*tch, Mr. Gulaptis.
Wednesday 6 July 2022
In New South Wales 75 hectares of wildlife habitat and carbon storage is bulldozed or logged every day. Something to remember when filling in your ballot paper at the March 2023 state election
IMAGE: Macquarie Port News |
Nature Conservation Council (NSW), media release, 30 June 2022:
75 hectares of habitat lost each day in NSW
Latest land clearing data shows 75 hectares of wildlife habitat is bulldozed or logged every day in NSW, almost twice the average annual rate recorded before the Coalition overhauled nature laws in 2016. [1]
The annual Statewide Land and Tree Study (SLATS) data shows 27,610 hectares of native forest were destroyed for farming, forestry and development in 2020.
“This astounding rate of deforestation is a disaster for wildlife and the climate. We call on the government to take urgent action to reverse the trend,” Nature Conservation Council Chief Executive Chris Gambian said.
“In just one year we have lost an area of native forest nearly double the size of Royal National Park. It is simply unsustainable.
“Using widely accepted data on wildlife population densities, clearing on that scale would have killed up to 4.6 million animals - mammals, birds and reptiles – in just 12 months. [2]
“Native forests in NSW can absorb up to 44 tonnes/hectare of C02 annually [3].
“Protected from logging, NSW public native forests could store an additional 900 million tonnes of CO2 - equivalent to six years of NSW emissions.
“These forests are a critical carbon sink that we need to protect to pursue meaningful action on climate change.
“After the government weakened land clearing laws in 2016, deforestation rates doubled and have remained at these dangerously high levels ever since.
“The Coalition promised it’s new laws would enhance protections for bushland and wildlife.
“These figures, and the rising number of threatened species, shows the laws completely fail to deliver on that promise.
“More than 1,040 plants and animals are now threatened with extinction in NSW, about 40 more than when the scheme was introduced.
“The government must stop uncontrolled deforestation on private land and in state forests if it is going to tackle the extinction crisis.”
The SLATS data show a 43% increase in the amount of vegetation cover lost in production forests, presumably due to the 2019-20 Black Summer Bushfires.
“Native forests in NSW can absorb up to 44 tonnes/hectare of C02 annually,” Mr Gambian said.
“Protected from logging, NSW public native forests could store an additional 900 million tonnes of CO2 - equivalent to six years of NSW emissions.
“These forests are a critical carbon sink that we need to protect to pursue meaningful action on climate change."
REFERENCES
[1] Land cover change reporting, DPIE, June 2022
[2] Native Animals Lost to Tree Clearing in NSW 1998-2015, WWF-Australia, 2018
[3] Green Carbon report, The Wilderness Society, 2008 (figure of 44 tonnes/hectare of CO2 arrived at by multiplying the figure of 12 tonnes of Carbon a year by 3.67)
Tuesday 1 March 2011
Barry O'Farrell and electoral priorities on the NSW North Coast
BABY BOOMERS taking a seachange in their dotage face the prospect of widespread shortages in aged care, revised projections of the impact of dementia show.Australia will be 279,000 aged care places short by 2050 without significant policy changes, and hardest hit will be coastal areas popular with retirees, a study by Access Economics has found.The heavier than expected demand for aged care results from the failure of official projections to take account of the increased prevalence of dementia that has emerged from the growing number of people aged 85 and over, the report says.At present, aged care projections are based on numbers of people aged over 70.The expected growth points in elderly populations show that sea-change locations such as Port Macquarie, Tweed Heads and the NSW south coast would experience shortages of 2000 or more aged-care places by 2050 without a change in policy. In the Paterson electorate in the Hunter region, the shortfall would be just under 3000 places. [The Sydney Morning Herald, 26 February 2011]
Erosion due to higher sea levels is also a key risk for coastal areas. In New South Wales there are approximately 3,600 residential buildings located within 110 metres of ‘soft’ erodible shorelines, of which approximately 700 are located within 55 metres of ‘soft’ coast. [NSW Parliament, Briefing Paper,June 2010]
So what is NSW Opposition Leader Barry O’Farrell focusing on as he begins election campaigning?
Mr O'Farrell on Thursday said that, if he wins government at the March 26 state election, he will take his fight against the introduction of a national carbon price to Canberra. [The Sydney Morning Herald, 24 February 2011]
While at the regional launch of the Coalition election campaign last Sunday O'Farrell endorsed the possibility that speed limits would be increased on country single lane highways.
That’s right. O'Farrell appears to believe that one size fits all. That on the NSW North Coast where we are on the climate change front line in many small towns and villages, where highway deaths are a constant concern and where an aging population is a big issue; ignoring the coming dementia care crisis, adding another 10k per hour to traffic speed and actively fighting against climate change mitigation measures will win over local voters in March.
Can’t you just tell that his focus groups are probably all in metropolitan areas and that the North Coast comprises very safe state Nationals seats this time around.
Sunday 10 July 2016
Post-Australian Federal Election 2016: feel the angst rising
ABC News, 8 July 2016: