When it's raining on the NSW North Coast......

One North Coast Voices reader who has been keeping rain gauge records since the mid-1980s emailed me this week to say that in 2009 he registered a total of 1937.5mm in the backyard rain gauge of his Yamba home and that the official BOM record for 2009 taken at the Pilot Station was 1777.6mm.

Yamba's official annual rainfall appears to have peaked in 1950 when 2716.8mm fell over the space of a year and it experienced its lowest annual rainfall in 1915 with 679mm.

Ballina doesn't have complete rainfall figures for 2009, but in 2008 in had a total of 2353mm and Byron Bay had 2205.6mm of precipitation in 2009.

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity"

The playful observation on life Hanlon's Razor is said to go something like this: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity".

It immediately came to mind this week when I read numerous blog posts and online comments concerning one Peter James Spencer who is currently sitting atop a pole after delivering his version of the Jerilderee Letter, the Saarahnlee Entreaty (with supplement), to the former Howard Government then firing off another letter of demand to a new Prime Minister while waiting for the world to deliver him from this current episode of foolishness.

Mr. Spencer's relentless self-promotion and hunger strike have managed to ignite the conspiracy theorists and wingnuts into a veritable passion of, well, wigging out and baying for Kevin Rudd's blood.

Peter Spencer is now seen by many as a victim of unfair conditions imposed on rural land, which robs farmers and graziers of their God-given right to clear native vegetation from any part of their property at will.
With encouragement from Mr. Spencer the finger is also being pointed at the United Nations and the Kyoto Protocol as the reason why he is burdened with debt and about to lose the farm.
To anyone who will listen he asserts that he has been denied just compensation for his alleged loss of property rights, as well loss of carbon storage values worth $35 million.

From what Peter Spencer has written in the past (eg., The war on farmers) or presented to various authorities one can deduce that here was a man with little or no personal farming experience who had a rather romantic notion to rekindle his family's connection with the land.
Something many others in his age group have done in the past, for after all most Australian families of that era are only one or two generations away from the farm.

In 1980 he purchased a block of agricultural land in the Cooma-Monaro district and then left it untended for (if my maths is correct) at least a decade. Somewhere along the line he seems to have leased adjoining lots until the property was in the vicinity of 5,000 to 14,000 hectares, a size which tends to vary depending on who Mr. Spencer is addressing at the time.

When eventually returning to live on the property he embarked on a number of rural business ventures which failed and by the start of the 2000s was finding matters rather difficult.
This again is not an unusual occurrence for a somewhat wet behind the ears farmer - a situation made easier for Peter Spencer to bear because he could point to NSW native vegetation law and blame that particular bogey man for his financial troubles.

However Mr. Spencer was made of stern stuff and, instead of looking facts squarely in the face and taking the avenues open to him which would relieve him of his mounting debts, he decided to soldier on with his 'farm'.

Things unravelled and sent Peter Spencer off on a most unusual tangent, when the shire council successfully obtained a judgment against him in the Local Court in February 2007 concerning the matter of his unpaid rates.

This man then decided to initiate legal action in March 2007 against the council and its solicitor with a claim for pecuniary penalty in the form of a liquidated demand for the lordly amount of $165,000.000 against the Shire Council, and $33,000.00 against Mr Angove - based on his being a victim of crime and the crime perhaps being that he had been asked to pay his council rates. Although he does not seem to have actually identified a crime or criminal conviction of any sort to the obvious puzzlement of the presiding judge.

At about the same time he was seeking a sizable penalty against council he began to initiate a slew of litigation in a scatter gun approach. At one stage seeking an interim payment from the defendants of $5 million and informing the court that no judge appointed and dependent upon any of the defendants for his or her livelihood, can bring a fair, just and impartial mind to this dispute, and consequentially I claim the tribunal of fact introduced into Anglo-Celtic law by the Magna Carta from 1295 [sic] until the present day, derived from the passage in the New Testament of the Gospel of Matthew verses 15-20 and I claim by s 116 Constitution and the appearance of either the word The Queen, or Her Majesty forty times in the Australian Constitution that the Coronation Oath 1688 (Imp) is thereby incorporated into the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900, and that the provisions of the Holy Gospels that Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second has agreed to uphold, are by that Act, incorporated into the law of Australia.
Needless to say such sentiments give a fair indication that his legal arguments would result in additional costs being awarded against him over the years.

These are details of some of the court cases which can be accessed online at AustLII Databases:
Spencer v Australian Capital Territory and Ors [2007] NSWSC 303 (4 April 2007) [90%]
(From Supreme Court of New South Wales; 4 April 2007; 71 KB)
Spencer v Cooma Monaro Shire Council Anor [2007] ACTSC 42 (29 June 2007) [90%]
(From Supreme Court of the ACT; 29 June 2007; 11 KB)
Spencer v Commonwealth of Australia [2007] FCA 1415 (31 August 2007) [93%]
(From Federal Court of Australia; 31 August 2007; 17 KB)
Spencer v Commonwealth of Australia [2007] FCA 1787 (1 November 2007) [94%]
(From Federal Court of Australia; 1 November 2007; 18 KB)
Spencer v Commonwealth of Australia [2008] FCA 1256 (26 August 2008) [25%]
(From Federal Court of Australia; 26 August 2008; 214 KB)
Spencer v Commonwealth of Australia (No 2) [2008] FCA 1378 (28 August 2008) [92%]
(From Federal Court of Australia; 28 August 2008; 15 KB)
Spencer v NSW Minister for Climate Change, Environment and Water [2008] NSWSC 1059 (10 October 2008) [88%]
(From Supreme Court of New South Wales; 10 October 2008; 55 KB)
Spencer v Commonwealth of Australia [2009] FCAFC 38 (24 March 2009) [93%]
(From Federal Court of Australia - Full Court; 24 March 2009; 88 KB)
Spencer v Commonwealth of Australia [2009] HCATrans 95 (1 May 2009) [87%]
(From High Court of Australia Transcripts; 1 May 2009; 10 KB)
Spencer v Commonwealth of Australia [2009] HCATrans 126 (5 June 2009) [87%]
(From High Court of Australia Transcripts; 5 June 2009; 44 KB)

Now forgive me if I seem to smile at the absurdities found both within this over-hyped situation and amongst the arguments put forward by Peter Spencer's supporters, for no matter how hard I try I cannot see a legitimate figurehead for rural concerns in the person of this man - all I see is a cranky old mount determined to kick the horsestall down just for the hell of it.

Photograph from the Cooma-Monaro Express

Update:

From The Australian on 8 January 2008:

Graham Spencer said his brother owed "more than a million dollars" to a family member after being given a loan to prevent the bank seizing his farm. "Peter doesn't owe money to the bank, but to the family," Graham Spencer said.
"One of the family members lent him the money, and I think the arrangement was he would make the interest payments."
Graham Spencer said the family had made numerous attempts to accommodate Peter Spencer's failure to pay the debt, which had been outstanding for some years.
But in October the family had been forced to seek a writ of possession that could force the sale of the property.
"It's nothing to do with the banks - it's a straight family dispute, and that's where it should stay. Let the family sort this out," Graham Spencer said.
He emphasised that the family wanted only to recover the debt, and said that any extra money raised from the sale of the property would go straight to Peter.

Who's searching for whom on the Australian political scene as we enter the mother of all election periods

Over the next eighteen months Australians will go to the polls across Australia to elect a Federal Government (probably in 2010 but by April 2011 at the latest) and electors will be voting at state level in South Australia (March 2010), Tasmania (May 2010 at latest), Victoria (November 2010), and New South Wales (March 2011).

According to the Australian Elections Timetable the Northern Territory won't hold a state election until August 2012, the Australian Capital Territory is next at the polls in October 2012, West Australia does not have to hold an election before June 2012 at the earliest and Queensland does not go have to go to the polls until June 2012.

All in all, somewhere in the country voters will be having campaign spin forced down their throats (with varying degrees of resistance) for some time to come.

Google Trends comparison of Internet searches for Leaders of Government and their Opposition counterparts - Kevin Rudd & Tony Abbott (Federal), Anna Bligh & John-Paul Langbroek (QLD), Mike Rann & Isobel Redmond (SA), David Bartlett & Will Hodgman (TAS), John Brumby & Ted Ballieu (VIC), Colin Barnett & Eric Ripper (WA), John Stanhope & Zed Seselja (ACT), Paul Henderson & Terry Mills (NT) and Kristina Keneally & Barry O'Farrell (NSW).

Langbroek, Redmond, Hodgman, Ballieu, Ripper, Selselja, Mills and O'Farrell all rate low on a search query scale at home or overseas, but although still battling against an incumbent with a higher profile Tony Abbott tracks fairly steadily against the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and interest in him has shown a spike since he became Leader of the Opposition.

Only in Tasmania and the ACT did there appear to be sustained and vaguely comparable levels of search term disinterest in both government and opposition leaders.

It will be interesting to see if how these politicians trend on the Internet bore any relation to how they fared at the next elections.

From the 2010 Antarctic Whaling Hall of Shame

New Zealander Glenn Inwood of Omeka Public Relations
Allegations here.

The King Canute of Cyberspace! (Yes, I'm laughing at you, Kevin Rudd)

For a man who appeared to hold some promise when he became Australia's prime minister in November 2007, Kevin Rudd is now descending into absurdity with the eager assistance of Communications Minister Stephen Conroy.

Their plan to impose mandatory ISP-level filtering on Australian Internet access via a URL blacklist is an expensive joke perpetrated by the right-wing of the ruling Labor Party.

A scheme allegedly created to protect children by partially blocking access to the world wide web for 21 million or so citizens - many millions of whom don't appear to have dependant children living in their homes.

This pathetic ACMA-inspired blacklist currently stands at around a thousand website/page addresses and is expected to grow once national digital censorship is imposed.

However, there is not hardware or filtering software available to Australian servers with which to blanket filter the entire indexed Web before it reaches Australian citizens, without either these servers malfunctioning dramatically or just quietly letting most of those supposed 'nasties' slip through their nets.

This is what the Google Inc. official blog said in 2008 about the number of URLs already out there in cyberspace:

We've known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we've seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days -- when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!

How do we find all those pages? We start at a set of well-connected initial pages and follow each of their links to new pages. Then we follow the links on those new pages to even more pages and so on, until we have a huge list of links. In fact, we found even more than 1 trillion individual links, but not all of them lead to unique web pages. Many pages have multiple URLs with exactly the same content or URLs that are auto-generated copies of each other. Even after removing those exact duplicates, we saw a trillion unique URLs, and the number of individual web pages out there is growing by several billion pages per day.

So how many unique pages does the web really contain? We don't know; we don't have time to look at them all! :-) Strictly speaking, the number of pages out there is infinite -- for example, web calendars may have a "next day" link, and we could follow that link forever, each time finding a "new" page. We're not doing that, obviously, since there would be little benefit to you. But this example shows that the size of the web really depends on your definition of what's a useful page, and there is no exact answer.

We don't index every one of those trillion pages -- many of them are similar to each other, or represent auto-generated content similar to the calendar example that isn't very useful to searchers. But we're proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine, and our goal always has been to index all the world's data.

To keep up with this volume of information, our systems have come a long way since the first set of web data Google processed to answer queries. Back then, we did everything in batches: one workstation could compute the PageRank graph on 26 million pages in a couple of hours, and that set of pages would be used as Google's index for a fixed period of time. Today, Google downloads the web continuously, collecting updated page information and re-processing the entire web-link graph several times per day. This graph of one trillion URLs is similar to a map made up of one trillion intersections. So multiple times every day, we do the computational equivalent of fully exploring every intersection of every road in the United States. Except it'd be a map about 50,000 times as big as the U.S., with 50,000 times as many roads and intersections.

Now how is your pathetic little blacklist going to keep up with that, Prime Minister?
Or are you intending (once this censorship becomes Australian law) to approach Google Inc. with a view to this corporation creating a censored google.com.au for Australia, as it did for its search engine in that notoriously authoritarian regime China?

Photo from Google Images

Classic Bob Ellis musing about the so-called War on Terror

Bob Ellis starting the year well over at ABC The Drum:

We bomb Afghanistan so well-educated Nigerians don't blow up aeroplanes over Chicago. Or that's the theory, it seems.

We bomb Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan so well-educated American-born Muslims don't shoot up their fellow soldiers in Fort Bragg. We bomb Iraq, and Gaza, and Afghanistan and Pakistan so well-educated British Muslims don't blow up Glasgow airport.

We have no alternative to this, it seems, in this necessary war, this just war on terror. This is why we're in Afghanistan, and why we have to be there for five or 15 more years, to stop well-educated people with exploding powder in their underpants from getting on planes in Oslo, or Paris, or Shannon, or Kingston, or Honolulu, or Cairns.

Makes a lot of sense, doesn't it. They clearly go to Afghanistan to learn how to put exploding powder in their underpants, and unless we bomb them there, they'll come over here, they'll get on a plane in Oslo...and they'll... Well, they'll...So we have to bomb them in...We have to bomb them in...Let me read that again.

Why are we in Afghanistan?

Is Hartsuyker in danger of losing his Cowper seat?

For months rumour has been saying that the Nationals Luke Hartsuyker is in danger of losing his seat at the next federal election.

Possum Comitatus' seat rankings (based on a proposition that an election was held sometime in the last 3 months) appears to verify that all is not well in Cowper.

Extreme Risk – being those Coalition held seats that would almost certainly have fallen to the ALP. It would have taken an historical anomaly for any of these seats to have been retained by the Coalition.
High Risk – being those seats that would probably have fallen to the ALP. A large majority of these seats would have changed hands.
Moderate Risk – being those seats which would have been in some danger of falling to Labor. For nearly every High Risk or Extreme Risk seat which did not fall, there would most likely have been a seat in this Moderate Risk group that would have taken its place.

* Click on list to enlarge

Neal gets called a nosey parker :-)

Someone finally wrote a letter to The Daily Examiner on 1 January 2009 voicing what quite a few have been quietly thinking about this photo snapping little man:

Parking rights

NEAL MORRIS, of Maclean Neighbourhood Watch, seems to think that he is a ranger, parking inspector or a police officer. (Neighbourhood Watch Column, Coastal Views 18/12/09).
Parking in Maclean or anywhere in the Valley has absolutely nothing to do with him.
Absolutely none of his business.
Whilst we all agree that many people are breaking the law re parking, it is not up to him to scrutinise it.
It is the job of the expert authorities such as police or council employees.
I think maybe your unpaid voluntary neighbourhood 'watching' has gone to your head, Neal.
Leave the job of parking patrol to those who are legally authorised and paid to do so.

S Aloi,
Yamba

Update:

Neal goes feral in his letter to editor in response on 6 January 2010.........

Crime watch is for all

I HAVE received a copy of a letter (DE 1/1/2010) from an inane scribbler under the possible pseudonym of 'S Aloi' welcoming the New Year.
It is quite normal for the guilty conscience to appeal against the law, if this appears to be the case and it is to remain anon, please send a photo of.the vehicle concerned so we can relate to the offence and recognise the individual with whom we deal.
For your information, the reason all crime exists in your area is simply because of this attitude shown in the letter which clearly states that it is only the responsibility of the police and or council.
This is so far from the truth it's unbelievable, as it is a normal requirement that all residents should watch out for any unsociable or criminal acts for their own and their neighbour's welfare and have the intestinal fortitude to act immediately.
The police are far too undermanned and the rangers due to workload are unable to watch for such things as the writer apparently commits, and as a consequence if we are unable by our actions to get a staff increase to cover all aspects which is our aim. Then we are all in trouble.
To the decent persons in Grafton and Maclean who advised me of this tirade, many thanks for your help.
For future reference please note. Maclean District Neighbourhood Watch will continue to assist all in need against any unsociable acts and all information gleaned from the public and or our actions will be forwarded to the authorities for their dealing.
FOR MACLEAN DISTRICT NEIGHBOURHOOD WATCH,

Neal Morris JP, area controller, crime prevention network

Impacts of Genetically Engineered Crops On Pesiticide Use

The opening paragraphs of a November 2009 report commissioned by The Organic Center Impacts of Genetically Engineered Crops On Pesiticide Use in the United States: The First Thirteen Years:

This report explores the impact of the adoption of genetically engineered (GE) corn, soybean, and cotton on pesticide use in the United States, drawing principally on data from the United States Department of Agriculture. The most striking finding is that GE crops have been responsible for an increase of 383 million pounds of herbicide use in the U.S. over the fi rst 13 years of commercial use of GE crops (1996-2008).

This dramatic increase in the volume of herbicides applied swamps the decrease in insecticide use attributable to GE corn and cotton, making the overall chemical footprint of today's GE crops decidedly negative. The report identifies, and discusses in detail, the primary cause of the increase -- the emergence of herbicide-resistant weeds.

The steep rise in the pounds of herbicides applied with respect to most GE crop acres is not news to farmers. Weed control is now widely acknowledged as a serious management problem within GE cropping systems. Farmers and weed scientists across the heartland and cotton belt are now struggling to devise affordable and effective strategies to deal with the resistant weeds emerging in the wake of herbicide-tolerant crops.

But skyrocketing herbicide use is news to the public at large, which still harbors the illusion, fed by misleading industry claims and advertising, that biotechnology crops are reducing pesticide use. Such a claim was valid for the first few years of commercial use of GE corn, soybeans, and cotton. But, as this report shows, it is no longer.

An accurate assessment of the performance of GE crops on pesticide use is important for reasons other than correcting the excesses of industry advertising. It is also about the future direction of agriculture, research, and regulatory policy.

PDF full report download

Fair dinkum, you're a bit of a political b*tch aren't you Kristina!

With something of a carefully stage-managed publicity blitz Kristina Keneally launched herself as NSW Premier late last year.
She faced the meeja on taking office and promised a government focus on five main issues - one of which was the "most vulnerable members of the community".
Now it didn't take long to see that this touchy-feely sentiment was going to be a load of hot air.
You can't get much more vulnerable than those Aussies living on or below the poverty line but I didn't see the new premier rushing to roll back the former Rees Government decision to take a big bite out of the Federal Government's one-off basic payment increase for quite a few single pensioners later this year, and this week the state government she heads is defending its Solar Bonus Scheme levy which will see those families on very low incomes and pensioners without assets subsidizing the cheaper power supplied to people rich enough to be able to install solar power throughout their houses.
"Effectively, the costs of the feed-in tariff paid to a customer with a solar PV system will be spread across all customers on the network."
This on top of the fact that the NSW Government is about to give the nod to yet another hefty increase in electricity pricing (after a plump increase in 2009) so as to cover the black hole it allowed to develop in power supply infrastructure which needs to be quickly papered over if government wants to sell-off state energy assets.
Yeah, Kristina - that's really governing for the vulnerable that is!
I don't care how small the buyback levy may or may not be for the average family - it's the bl**dy principle.
Why should the interests of silvertails still rule in New South Wales and a hypocritical blow-in premier dare to act as if that's a really bonza state of affairs.

Pic from KKK's scrap book of media images

If you thought the number of natural disasters was growing you're probably right

Does it sometimes feel as though there are more natural disasters occurring around the world rather than just more events being reported in the media?
Perhaps that vague feeling is more accurate than previously thought.

Since 1988 the WHO Collaborating Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) has been maintaining an Emergency Events Database EM-DAT. EM-DAT was created with the initial support of the WHO and the Belgian Government.

This database now has a number of graphs and maps of natural disaster trends including country profiles.

Australia rates in the highest number of instances category for drought (1976-1985), windstorm (1974-2003) and in the second highest for flood (1974-2003).

Click on graph to enlarge

Or another way of looking at similar data can be found at UNEP which gives more weight to improvements in information access affecting results.

Munich Re calculates the losses incurred due to severe weather-related natural disasters at an estimated US$ 1,600 billion since 1980. The Times reported at the end of 2009 that Natural catastrophes have left the world’s insurers with a claims bill totalling $22 billion (£13.7 billion) this year as the number of disasters linked to climate change increased markedly and insurers met $770 million in damages and repairs in Australia last year.

National Geographic natural disaster information including videos