Shame on you all! When election promises go south

Image of O'Farrell and Cansdell from Steve Cansdell MP's Clarence Chronicles, June 20120

From Clarence Valley Review letters to the editor on 30 June 2010:

Expecting a lot

Ed,
In response to the article "Don't expect too much from Coalition, says Nats Chair" (CVR 23/6/10) I believe the electorate is expecting a lot.
If the Coalition Party does not and probably never intended to complete the Pacific Highway upgrade by 2016 then I say to those politicians, including the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Barry O'Farrell shame on you for exploiting those families who have roadside memorials to their deceased family members along the Pacific Highway.
I recall the many photographs which included Mr Cansdell taken beside these memorials in the printed media and on television trying to extract sympathy votes from the electorate.
I say shame on you all. Are there no politicians today with any dignity and fortitude in standing up for what they believe in without having to toe a party line?
The Coalition Party are backing away from every key commitment espoused by Mr Steve Cansdell against the present basket case State Government.
The electorate are not fools, it is the same old ploy used by all political parties when an election is imminent that any incoming Government will have a "very bare cupboard".
Is there no one out there who has dignity, honesty, shows respect for others and have a desire to help every member of the Community by becoming an Independent member?
If so, please step forward, we need you.

Lyne Dobson, Waterview Heights

Northern Rivers resident gets the last laugh on local tip charges

According to one NSW North Coast mayor:
"The State Government’s waste and environment levy is $20.40 a tonne to dump rubbish at the tip – charged on top of the council’s fees.
This amount is set to rise each financial year for the next five years until it reaches a capped price of $70 a tonne.......additional costs could not be absorbed into the current council budget, so they would have to be added to the waste levy in rates."
According to one NSW North Coast resident:
"After finding out what I had to pay to take my home e-waste and other items to the nearest council operated tip, I sent all of it over the border instead with a Queenslander returning home. Cost? It's free at that particular tip destination, so it was nothing, nil, nada, zero, zilch."
He also says he has no intention of voting for the Keneally Government because of the way it continues to milk regional New South Wales.

Pic at Google Images

Those sidebar polls are back again

I've just been reminded that North Coast Voices ran a series of sidebar polls in the lead-up to the 2007 Australian federal election.

So today we have posted the first for election year 2010 - on the subject of Tony Abbott and campaign promises.

Eyes right and join in the fun. Poll results will be published in posts at a later date.

The second poll planned will be on the topic of Julia Gillard.

Clarence Ahead invites climate change adaptation expert to speak at Yamba, 6 July 2010

At 6.30pm on Tuesday 6 July 2010 Professor Garry Willgoose is giving a talk on "Climate change, its consequences, and us" at the Yamba Bowling & Recreation Club by invitation of Clarence Ahead .

Admission is $30.00 and includes two course meal, tea or coffee. Bar service will be available. Further information can be had from Des Plunkett Ph: (02) 66. 433044.

Dr. Willgoose is an ARC Australian Professorial Fellow from the Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment at the School of Engineering, University of Newcastle, with expertise in the areas of hydrology; climatology; water resources; ecohydrology; erosion; climate change adaptation; mine rehabilitation; mine closure; mine environment; mining; uranium; nuclear waste disposal.

Rather amusingly I was alerted to this Clarence Ahead initiative by an obvious climate change denier writing in one of the NSW North Coast newspapers.

The letter writer appears to believe that the academic, who in September last year was reported to have said that more frequent heatwaves will present big problems in regional areas.....the biggest impact [of climate change] will be on health, water and local government works programs, will probably support the denialist position.

This should make for an interesting exchange during any question and answer segment on the night.

Photograph from University of Newcastle website

Whales can be grandmothers too

Pilot Whales from Sea Fijii Travel

It is no secret that the pro-whaling lobby likes to characterize all cetaceans as 'fish'.
The Swedish Wire reported last month that:

Kristjan Loftsson, Iceland's millionaire whaling king, doesn't really see the difference: "whales are just another fish," he said at a crunch meeting of the International Whaling Commission.....If they [whales] are so intelligent, why don't they stay outside of Iceland's territorial waters?"

However, the fact that whales are social mammals often living in close kinship groups is well-known and research continues into why this is so.

According to Victoria Gill at BBC News on Friday 2 July 2010:

Scientists have discovered an evolutionary reason why humans and whales both have grandmothers.
As post-menopausal females age, the researchers say, they become increasingly interested and helpful in rearing their "grandchildren".
This could help explain why female great apes and toothed whales (cetaceans) have lifespans that extend long beyond their reproductive years.

To celebrate a summer of Royal Society science festivities, all Royal Society journal content is free to access until 30 July 2010, so the full research article by Rufus A. Johnstone and Michael A. Cant The evolution of menopause in cetaceans and humans: the role of demography can be downloaded as a PDF file:

Human females stop reproducing long before they die. Among other mammals, only pilot and killer whales exhibit a comparable period of post-reproductive life. The grandmother hypothesis suggests that kin selection can favour post-reproductive survival when older females help their relatives to reproduce. But although there is an evidence that grandmothers can provide such assistance, it is puzzling why menopause should have evolved only among the great apes and toothed whales. We have previously suggested
(Cant & Johnstone 2008 Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 105, 5332–5336 (doi:10.1073/pnas.0711911105)) that relatedness asymmetries owing to female-biased dispersal in ancestral humans would have favoured younger females in reproductive competition with older females, predisposing our species to the evolution of menopause. But this argument appears inapplicable to menopausal cetaceans, which exhibit philopatry of both sexes combined with extra-group mating. Here, we derive general formulae for 'kinship dynamics', the agerelated changes in local relatedness that occur in long-lived social organisms as a consequence of dispersal and mortality. We show that the very different social structures of great apes and menopausal whales both give rise to an increase in local relatedness with female age, favouring late-life helping. Our analysis can therefore help to explain why, of all long-lived, social mammals, it is specifically among the great apes and toothed whales that menopause and post-reproductive helping have evolved.....

Our analysis thus implies that females of most social mammalian species will experience a decline in local relatedness with age, but that the two unusual and very different social arrangements that characterize menopausal species (respectively, female-biased dispersal and local mating in ancestral humans, and philopatry of both sexes combined with extra-group mating in pilot and resident killer whales) both give rise to an increase in local relatedness with female age. This build-up of local relatedness over the reproductive lifespan of a female means that the great apes and toothed whales, by contrast with most mammals, are predisposed to the evolution of reproductive restraint and altruistic helping behaviour later rather than earlier in life. The value of an explicit focus on kinship dynamics is that it reveals the underlying similarity between the ape and whale cases, which would otherwise be obscured by the differences in their social structure....

The expected benefits of ceasing reproduction in order to selectively assist close kin will thus increase with age in the ape and whale cases because younger females are less likely than are older females to have close relatives in the group—there is little value to sacrificing the possibility of direct reproduction to become a helper at an age when there are likely to be few or no kin present to help.

A vote for Gillard or Abbott is still a vote for Internet censorship in Australia?

According to the Australian Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy as reported by ZNet:

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has reiterated the government's support for its mandatory internet filter policy after the change in Prime Minister and has slammed proposed amendments by Senator Kate Lundy that would allow Australians to opt in or out of the technology...... "We have got an election commitment to deliver," Conroy told journalists in a doorstop interview in Sydney this afternoon. "Just because [Greens Senator] Scott Ludlam says it's been shelved, doesn't mean it's true."

Because there has been leadership change and Australia has a new prime minister in Julia Gillard there is no reason to suppose that the intention to impose Internet censorship is off the government's political agenda. Even if Gillard herself has been remarkably reticent in the face of this contentious issue.

While arch-conservative and professional 1950s-style Catholic, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, should have alarm bells ringing with his view that the nation should have a new way of ensuring that proper community standards are applied to the media, all media, including new media.

Both Federal Labor and the Coalition would be prepared to dump on Internet users in an effort to secure support of the 'Christian' bloc at the 2010 federal election. The first preference polling numbers are still too close to do otherwise.