 |
| Ben Jennings |
 |
| Dave Grunland |
Saturday 6 May 2023
A Letter to the Editor published four days before a certain coronation day
George Brandis' reference to the young Prince Charles' attending Timbertop reminded me of an episode recounted by a Uralla identity, formerly a maths master at Eton College.
Queen Elizabeth came to Eton one day to officially open a new building and our man had a brief chat with her afterwards, as one does. He asked: "Your Majesty, I've always been curious about your sending your son Charles to Timbertop in Australia. Her Maj replied: "Oh, well, we always thought Charles wasn't all that academically inclined." Our man responded: "Oh, don't worry, Your Majesty, we have some very stupid boys here at Eton." Evidently a frost descended as she moved on.
Kent Mayo, Uralla
[The Sydney Morning Herald, 2 May 2023, p.18]
Friday 5 May 2023
Yet another Northern Rivers forest protector is before the NSW court
 |
| IMAGE: Echo, 4 April 2023 |
Forest protector 23 year-old Kashmir Miller (Bachelor of Laws with First Class Honours, Southern Cross University) who suspended herself in a tree on a 25m high platform by a rope attached to three NSW Forestry machines in Doubleduke State Forest in early April has had her case adjourned until 11 May 2023, when as R v Kashmir Miller Case No. 2023/00108712 it is scheduled for Ballina Local Court where it is listed as Mention (Police).
Background
Echo, 20 April 2023:
Forest defender Valerie Thompson will today face court in Ballina after she was arrested for stopping forest operations in Doubleduke State Forest north of Grafton.
Ms Thompson sat high in a tree on a platform, in what is referred to as a tree sit, which was attached to logging equipment and stopped logging for 30 hours in early March this year.
The conflicts in Doubleduke have been ongoing, with NSW Forestry Corporation accused of multiple breaches of harvesting laws including failing to map all giant trees and habitat trees.
On Friday last week the EPA instructed the Forestry Corporation to stop work, which is a temporary victory for the forest defenders. Ms Thompson’s protest was carried out while the EPA was carrying out its investigation into breaches that have since been upheld. Ms Thomson faces charges relating to entering a closed forest and interfering with timber harvesting equipment.....
NSW Environment Protection Authority, News, 16 April 2023:
The EPA has acted on community concerns about giant trees in Doubleduke State Forest on Bundjalung Country near Grafton, leading the Forestry Corporation of NSW (FCNSW) to voluntarily suspend tree harvesting there.
Update: 20 April 2023
FCNSW has completed a remap of active harvest areas as requested by the EPA on 14 April 2023.
The additional mapping provides assurance to the EPA and the community that all retained trees in active harvest areas have been identified and mapped.
Having regard to remapping works undertaken by FCNSW, a voluntarily suspension of operations is no longer requested by the EPA.....
Logging is again underway in Doubleduke State Forest. It is not certain that it was ever temporarily suspended in practice.
Thursday 4 May 2023
Wednesday 3 May 2023
Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Legal Services (ATSILS) calling for urgent funding relief - representation at Byron Bay Local Court & 12 other regional courts to cease until further notice from 15 May 2023 for all new ASTI matters
Aboriginal Legal Service, News, 28 April 2023:
Alongside other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services (ATSILS) around Australia, we are facing a crisis and calling out for urgent funding relief from the Commonwealth Government.
Demand for our services has almost doubled since 2018 but our core Federal Government funding has decreased in real terms. This means we are being pushed harder than ever before.
We are dedicated to maintaining high quality, culturally safe legal services for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people – the services that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people expect and deserve.
This is only possible when we prioritise the physical and mental health of our teams so they can do their best work for community. Right now our teams are stretched and without an emergency support package from government we are unable to continue the fight for community at the current pace. Service freeze in 13 Local Court locations
If we do not receive the emergency government funding, we will be forced to freeze ALS criminal law services at the following Local Courts beginning Monday 15 May 2023:
Byron Bay
Eden
Forster
Junee
Lithgow
Moss Vale
Muswellbrook
Scone
Singleton
Temora
Tenterfield
West Wyalong
Wauchope.
This will mean the ALS is unable to act for people facing new criminal charges in these Local Courts from 15 May.
We will do all we can to ensure that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with criminal law matters listed in these Local Courts receive legal help from another provider, such as Legal Aid NSW.
We will be in touch directly with current clients who have matters listed in these Local Courts.
This decision does not affect other courts that the ALS currently services.
Tuesday 2 May 2023
Today there are an estimated 5 billion people online around the world and so many governments apparently want them to stop creating online content by blogging, chatting, commenting, posting or tweeting.
Sunday Age, 30 April 2023, excerpts:
Today there are an estimated 5 billion people online. But those users are not all surfing the same web. Sites accessible in, say, Darwin might be blocked in Delhi.
Meanwhile, internet freedom - access without surveillance or suppression - is down for the 12th year in a row, according to US non-profit Freedom House.
Splintering happens at a content level, Sherman explains, as governments censor the way the internet looks in their countries. But the technological bones of the net are cracking too.
After all, the internet is largely run under the sea, not in the Cloud - data zooms along underwater cables snaking between continents. After the 2013 Edward Snowden leaks revealed that US and British intelligence agencies had been spying on traffic around the world via these cables, Brazil announced it was building its own walled-off net (yet to come online) and teamed up with Europe to start rerouting more undersea cables around the US.
As the great powers fight for technological dominance, nations are kicking out foreign tech companies they take issue with - from the US, Australia and other nations banning China's telecom giant Huawei on network infrastructure builds, to Russia labelling Facebook's parent company, Meta, a terrorist organisation.
Now China's technology ministry has joined with a group of its telecoms, including Huawei, to argue that the internet's underlying architecture needs an update. And they have a radical plan: a new IP they've been floating to the United Nations, which critics say will allow for more government control.
How do countries restrict internet freedom?…..
China has been arresting people for online posts since the early years of the "worldwide web". Today, there is no reliable count of how many have served jail time. Dr Li Wenliang, who first raised the alarm over COVID-19 in Wuhan in 2020, for example, was reprimanded for his social media posts before he died of the virus…..
In countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, people are on death row for tweets and Facebook posts. And some regimes, including China, Russia and Saudi Arabia, deploy armies of trolls and bots to intimidate and harass critics online.
Of course, during times of unrest, some governments simply shut down their internet altogether. Think of Iran's blackout after the death of a young woman in the custody of morality police in 2022. That year, 35 countries pulled the plug a total of 187 times - a record high. But shutdowns come at a cost: lost e-commerce, banking and tax transactions, investor trust. Throttling, where a connection is slowed to the point that it becomes nearly impossible to use, is more subtle. Rights groups say it is deployed in Myanmar, Turkey and Russia.
States can also ask internet companies to remove data. Google lists such requests in its transparency report: it has received 3.5 million since 2011. National security is the most common reason, ahead of copyright claims, defamation and privacy. In the past decade, Russia requested by far the most removals from Google services, at more than 123,000, followed by Turkey at about 14,000 and then India, the US and Brazil in that order, with fewer than 10,000 requests each.
Another censorship ploy is DNS manipulation. DNS stands for domain name system: it's the phonebook of the internet. People think of the net in terms of website addresses, like amazon.com or smh.com.au, but these domain names need to be turned into numbers for machines to understand them. That's the job of the DNS. By manipulating the servers that deliver it in a given territory, a user who searches for YouTube, for example, could be redirected to a censored domestic equivalent.
The internet's DNS architecture is overseen by a Californian non-profit with a very literal name: The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Russia wants to create its own DNS, claiming it will need one if it's ever severed from the global internet - as Ukraine asked ICANN to do when Russia invaded it in 2022. (ICANN declined Ukraine's request, saying it was neither technically feasible nor within the group's mission.)
But for Russia, this is a key plank in its ambitions to create its own "sovereign internet". To do that, it's looking at its ally China.
What is the gold standard for restricting the net?
When the internet arrived in China just before the turn of the millennium, the Communist Party was already quietly building the means of controlling it. Under Project Golden Shield, China often turned to Western companies for the technology it needed to funnel internet traffic through chokepoints and spy on what flowed in.
Known as China's Great Firewall, it's the world's most extensive internet censorship tool. As the destabilising power of the internet has become clear - including during the Arab Spring of the early 2010s - the firewall has grown "higher".
China now blocks Western social networks, except for a version of LinkedIn stripped of its newsfeed. Google Search has been barred since 2010, when the US company pulled out over a cyber attack and censorship concerns.
"Censorship covers a broad but ambiguous category of keywords and topics," says the Beijing internet user. "We don't know when and where [we'll] hit the red line."
BACKGROUND
The 2023 Index of Economic Freedom lists Australia in 13th place and classifies it as "mostly free" - a drop of ten ranking positions since 2021 when it was classed amongst "the most free".
The Freedom on the Net 2022 report considered Australia ranks 9th out of 70 countries globally, tying with France and the United States, at the time classifying the country as "free".
Meanwhile, in Australia concerns still remain about our implied freedom of political communication under the Australian Constitution and the general public's right to know.
According to Google Transparency, in 2019 Australian federal or state government officials or agencies (including police and the courts) submitted 9 single item or bloc requests to Google Inc. requesting removal or suppression of material indexed in Google Search or found on Google sites such as YouTube and Blogger or services such as Gmail.
In 2020 there were 13 single item or bloc requests to remove or suppress sent to Google from Australia, another 12 such requests in 2021 and 13 such requests in 2022.
Since 2011 Google Inc. has kept a file categorising reasons given by government officials or agencies for submitting these requests.
In the case of Australia from 2011 through to 2022 these categories ranged from National Security, Government Criticism*, Privacy & Security, Defamation, Hate Speech, Impersonation, Bullying/Harassment, Religious Offence, Violence, Fraud, Adult Content, Obscenity/Nudity, Suicide Promotion, Copyright, Trademark, Regulated Goods and Services, Other and Reason Not Stated.
Google Inc. also records government requests for user information.**
In the years January 2014 to June 2022 Google lists receiving 32,103 individual government requests from Australia for user/s information relating to 38,952 accounts.
Note:
* Requests categorized as “Government criticism” are related to claims of criticism of government policy or politicians in their official capacity. Claims in this Google category are are not made by the members of the general public.
https://support.google.com/transparencyreport/answer/7347744?hl=en
** A variety of laws allow government agencies around the world to request the disclosure of user information for civil, administrative, criminal, and national security purposes. Google carefully reviews each request to make sure it satisfies applicable laws. If a request asks for too much information, we try to narrow it, and in some cases we object to producing any information at all.
Monday 1 May 2023
It's the state and territory governments more than the federal government which are going to decide renters ability to attain & retain housing in the near future
In Australia there is evidence to suggest that by 2022 there were est. 640,000 Australian households whose housing needs were not being met.
These households are either experiencing homelessness, in overcrowded homes or spending over 30% of their income on rent.
This unmet housing need is projected to increase to 940,000 households in 2041.
In a November 2022 the Community Housing Industry Association released a report noting the unmet need in states/territories/regions by number and percentage of all households.
 |
CHIA, Nov 2022, “Quantifying Australia’s unmet housing need: A national snapshot”, p.2
On 29 June 2022 The Guardian reported:
The public housing waiting list across all jurisdictions rose by more than 8,000 households last year, from 155,141 to 163,508. Most of the increase was among households considered “in greatest need”. While for the last nine years social housing stock remained static at est. 4.2% of all housing stock.
The National Cabinet meeting last Friday, 28 April 2023, ended with these joint announcements by the Prime Minister and state & territories leaders, according to ABC News:
National cabinet has endorsed $2.2b in measures to strengthen Medicare
The announcements include expanding the nursing workforce to improve access to primary care and incentives for doctors to stay open for longer hours
Housing ministers will develop a proposal outlining ways to strengthen renters rights, which will be dealt with by national cabinet later in the year
Work will be undertaken to improve the migration system through increased visa processing capacity and expanding pathways to permanent residency for skilled workers. [my yellow highlighting]
What is clear is that although there may be the intention that a guiding statement on renters rights will eventually be produced by the National Cabinet, it will be left to individual states and territories to decide how and to what degree renters rights will be strengthened.
As for the built-to-rent component of any national plan to increase housing stock, Master Builders Australia sent out a media release immediately after this National Cabinet meeting welcoming a national approach to reforms to address the housing crisis which stated in part:
Master Builders Australia CEO Denita Wawn said the decision to tackle infrastructure investment, planning reforms to increase housing supply and affordability alongside sustainable growth across states and territories is an important signal for the industry.
“Industry will work closely with the Planning Ministers and National Cabinet to ensure all options are on the table and there are no unintended consequences of other reforms that may dampen this effort,” said Ms Wawn.
The Commonwealth Government also announced a series of other measures to boost investment for increasing housing supply including: increasing the depreciation rate [from 2% to 4%] for eligible new build-to-rent projects, and reducing the withholding tax rate for eligible fund payments for managed investment trusts to foreign residents on income from newly constructed residential build-to-rent properties.
However, Master Builders Australia went on to make an ambit claim for further reform:
“More needs to be done to speed up the delivery of new housing in the medium and high-density part of the market over the short term. Government efforts to expand the stock of build-to-rent will provide welcome support.
“The challenge will be to make sure that we put downward pressure on building and construction costs to increase output.
“Builders continue to face regulatory burdens and prolonged delays in approvals for building applications, occupation certificates and land titles. Additionally, land shortages in the wrong places, high developer charges and inflexible planning laws are restricting opportunities to meet demand, speed up project timelines, and minimise costs to both builders and their clients,” Ms Wawn said.
Master Builders’ Delivering the housing needs for all Australians recommends policies around housing supply, workforce, supply chain risk and cost pressures, simplifying regulatory settings that support investment in housing and business productivity.
The Property Council of Australia is also in favour of what it classes on its website News & Research page as the emerging build-to-rent sector.
It sees this sector as having the potential to deliver 150,000 new build-to-rent homes into the rental market in the next 10 years (by 2043) and says of a report it commissioned from Ernst Young and published on 4 April 2023:
.. estimates that the current size of the build-to-rent sector in Australia is $16.87 billion (this equates to roughly 0.2 per cent of the total value of the residential housing sector), with the expectation that this value will continue to grow in the coming years. If it reached just 3 per cent of the residential market, it could be worth $290 billion.
In comparison, the build-to-rent sector comprises of 5.4 per cent of the total value of the residential sector in the UK and 12 per cent in the US.
The Housing Industry Association also issued a media release on 28 April 2023 welcoming the National Cabinet’s agreement today to support a range of reforms to address housing supply, stating:
HIA’s Deputy Managing Director – Industry and Policy, Jocelyn Martin said the decision to tackle planning reforms to increase housing supply and affordability ultimately leads to more affordable rental accommodation and provides the capacity to deliver social housing without impacting housing supply more broadly.
On the part of federal and state governments there appears to be an aversion to their having direct ownership of any project building social housing and, on the part of finance and construction industries – along with property developers and investors – there appears to be a similar aversion to such a direct supply of social housing by the first two tiers of government.
Perhaps the smell of desperation in the air – with 243 construction businesses put into insolvency by the Australian Securities & Investment Commission (ASIC) in March 2023 alone, joining an unspecified number of other construction, registered property investment and/or property development corporations within the January to March 1,879 businesses-strong insolvency list – has the National Cabinet seeking to resuscitate more than one bird with its housing funding commitments.
Note: Searchable ASIC list can be found at
https://publishednotices.asic.gov.au/browsesearch-notices/
All these government and non-government actors appear to be suggesting that: after relaxing planning laws; increasing investment opportunities along with potential profits for all classes of investors; and the possibility for individuals, partnerships & corporations to access grants & other benefits in the proposed $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund; then market forces will inevitably push rental costs down once housing supply increases even though the most optimistic rendition of proposed supply is unlikely to fully meet the nation's unmet secure residential housing need.
My admittedly jaded personal response to the idea that residential rents will significantly reduce over the next 10 years……
I'm hoping that time will prove me wrong.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
