(We) can do better

2pm, Saturday 27 February 2016, Flemington Community Centre, Victoria, Australia. Guest Speaker: The Hon Kelvin Thomson MP, Federal Member for Wills, will speak on : "Victoria, once the Gardens State, is now headed for population overload. How we are failing the next generation." We would like to use the occasion to thank Kelvin for his work over many years as a leading spokesperson for sustainable population and as an environmental advocate, including his support for many groups, including PPL VIC and those in his electorate of Wills. As you are probably aware he will be retiring from Parliament at the next election.

Time: 2 pm for 2:15 pm start

Date: Saturday 27 February 2016

Venue: Flemington Community Centre, Mt Alexander Road, Flemington. See Melways Map Reference 29 B12 (The Centre is on Debneys Park.)

Transport:

Carpark - in front of Centre (turn in off Mt Alexander Road.) If full parking is usually available in Victoria Street round the corner off Mt Alexander Road. Tram - down Flemington Road to Mt Alexander Road. Train - nearby Flemington Bridge Railway Station. Cyclists - the Capital City Trail is nearby for cyclists.

Guest Speaker: The Hon Kelvin Thomson MP, Federal Member for Wills, will speak on : "Victoria, once the Gardens State, is now headed for population overload. How we are failing the next generation." We would like to use the occasion to thank Kelvin for his work over many years as a leading spokesperson for sustainable population and as an environmental advocate, including his support for many groups, including PPL VIC and those in his electorate of Wills. As you are probably aware he will be retiring from Parliament at the next election.

Afternoon tea: Stay for a cup of tea after the meeting. We plan to finish by 5 pm.

Contact: Julianne Bell Secretary Protectors of Public Lands Victoria Inc. Mobile: 0408022408 Email; jbell5[AT]bigpond.com

Mark O'Connor, co-author of Overloading Australia talks on population fallacies and the IPAT equation and touches on Greens politics at the Sustainable Living Festival in a Sustainable Population Australia event.

Why does the mass media support false government narratives that justify our support or participation in deadly wars? Media analyst, Jeremy Salt and Susan Dirgham of Australians for Reconciliation in Syria, explore this perplexing question that shapes our times and our future.

Why does the mass media support false government narratives that justify our support or participation in deadly wars? Media analyst, Jeremy Salt and Susan Dirgham of Australians for Reconciliation in Syria, explore this perplexing question that shapes our times and our future.

This article is summary plus transcript from the video of Part Two of Politics and war in Syria: Susan Dirgham interviews Jeremy Salt. Susan Dirham is convener of Australians for Reconciliation in Syria (AMRIS) and Jeremy Salt is a scholar of Media propaganda and the Middle East.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Explains how Syrian society is secular, how women have freedom there, and that it is predominantly secular. For her it is very comparable to Australian society. So why don’t Australians know this? Furthermore, the Sunnis in Syria, who are in the majority, do not welcome the extremism that is being brought into the country.

Mystery of mass media’s motivation in supporting false government narratives

JEREMY SALT: Relates the problem back to the mass media again, ( as in Part One of this series). What people know about Syria is what the media chooses to tell them. There is a huge question about media ethics. Balance, objectivity are very big questions, which relate to media-ownership and the way the media operates generally. If we think about Australia, something close to 70 % of the print media is owned and operated by Rupert Murdoch. And we saw from what happened in England, how corrupt the Murdoch organisation can be, with the wire-tapping, the phone-tapping and all the rest of it. Murdoch himself is ultra, ultra conservative, very pro-Israeli. He is anti all the things we’re talking about and Murdoch runs his newspaper in the same way. The Australian newspaper, for example, is more or less like a free market Pravda.. It’s tightly controlled. There are gate-keepers. So all of this fits into the general context of the questions you are asking about why the media does what it does. The media will not say those things you are talking about - of course it won’t – because it disrupts the narrative. It doesn’t want people to know that women have freedom in Syria and that Syria is way ahead of most Middle Eastern countries in terms of women’s individual freedoms. Of course, if you are involved in political activity against the government, you’re in trouble. We know that. Well there is a good reason for that. Syria has been under siege for a long, long period of time. So the media is not going to bring out those positive aspects. But the interesting thing is, why does the media pick up a government narrative and reproduce it? Why? This is the real mystery. Why? I mean they did this over the Iraq war. It was seamless. 2003. It was very obvious that what Bush, Blair, Colin Powel were saying was without any factual basis. It was all propaganda. Blair’s dodgy dossier, all the statements they made about weapons of mass destruction, had absolutely no evidentiary basis. And, if you were a journalist, you should have been able to see that. I mean, a child could have seen it. So, where is the truth here? There is no truth. They couldn’t prove it, and yet they went with this government narrative. And then we have a war, which resulted in the destruction of a country, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and dispossession of many, many others. And at the end of it, when they’ve hunted for their weapons of mass destruction, and haven’t found them – because they weren’t there – the two papers I know of, the New York Times and the Washington Post, said, ‘Oh, we were wrong. We’re sorry.’ But this was another lie. Because they weren’t wrong. That wasn’t the explanation. The reason was they did not ask questions about the government narrative.

And so, after that incredible propaganda operation, I thought, well, that’s got to be it. Then along comes Syria – and they do the same thing all over again!

Why does the media do it? How does it interest the media to portray the Syrian war in such a fashion? The Guardian, for example, which is one of the worst culprits, why was the Guardian’s reporting up to this point so shocking? Anything a ‘rebel’ (so-called) or ‘activist’ said, the Guardian would snap up and publish. So why is the Guardian doing this? Does the Guardian have the same kind of antagonism towards Syria that the British Government has for its own strategic reasons? Because England lies with [?is allies with] America and America wants to bring down the Syrian Government, partly because Israel wants to bring down the Syrian Government – all these reasons. But why is the media going along with it? What are they getting out of it? Are they getting money? Why? How is it in their interests.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Is it because it’s a 9-5 job and …

JEREMY SALT: No, it’s not that. It’s something to do with the culture. It’s very hard for me to put my finger on it. Why they would do this. But it’s a pattern. That’s the whole point. It’s a pattern. It’s not an incidental thing. It’s not an aberration [….] And [they] will do the same thing with Iran. It’s like they have bought the government line in America and in England, on a whole range of issues.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Do they also help determine the government line?

JEREMY SALT: Well, there’s always interplay. […] But we have to ask the question about responsibility in the media. What is their responsibility? Where does it lie? What is the media there for? Well, it’s there to make money. To make a profit. If it doesn’t make a profit, it’s not going to survive. That’s one thing. But what else is the media supposed to be doing? The old-fashioned idea is the media was the watchdog of the public interest. And possibly that was more true up to about the 1970s, 1980s, than it is now. And then the newspapers started to go downhill, partly because of the internet, because people weren’t reading so much. They were watching television. They were doing social media, and all the rest of it. So, the quality of newspapers declined and they started – to keep up sales – they were doing different things. Infotainment. Celebrity gossip. All the rest of it. The quality of analysis and reporting fell. But we’re not really talking about that so much as we are talking about what should be reasonably good quality newspapers, like the Guardian, like the Washington Post. Why do they run this line on Syria? Why? Obviously what they’re saying is not true and, at the very least, is not balanced. Why did the Washington Post or the Guardian never report what the Syrian Government was saying?

SUSAN DIRGHAM: It gets back to money?

JEREMY SALT: I don’t know. I don’t know. I seriously don’t know why. And with a paper like the Guardian I have to ask questions. Well, the Guardian can’t make all that much money. Maybe it does. I don’t think so.
SUSAN DIRGHAM: Sponsors?

Mass media as a business

JEREMY SALT: I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going on. I really can’t explain this: why the media does this all the time.
So, when we talk about the media, what we are actually talking about is media as business. Business is money. And, you know, the diversification of ownership of the media. Like in America, for example, a number of very large corporations have media ownership. Like Westinghouse. Westinghouse is one of them, only one of them. Murdoch’s interests go all across the print media into film, into cable television, into fibreoptics – the whole thing. And the media has always worked closely with government because of this give and take. The media wants things from the government. It wants licences. And the media will give things to the government. It will give them [government] favourable publicity. In Australian or in England we know that politicians are very very quick to try to curry favour with the media magnates – with Murdoch, for example. They might fall out, but they do their best to stay on side with him. So the media functions as part of the business sector – fundamentally. And the business sector has close relations with the government. So there are interlocking systems, of which the media is part. I think this partly explains the kind of narrative we see about Syria and what we saw about Iraq. It’s pumping out a line.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Also, I was an activist during the Vietnam war – we’ve got some other activists here – and what we spoke of about then was the ‘military industrial complex’. That’s still alive and active. Can we also talk about the ‘media industrial complex’ and are there links?

JEREMY SALT: Are you talking about America?

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Generally, but America in particular, of course.

JEREMY SALT: The media industrial complex. Can you just explain what you mean by that?

SUSAN DIRGHAM: It means that people don’t really have a voice; that you do have – as you are suggesting – companies that have this power that can determine what the narrative is. For example, on Syria. So you don’t get that balance. Journalists don’t have the freedom to present a balanced picture.

The ‘free’ press.

JEREMY SALT: They don’t. If you work for a big news corporation, you cannot write what you want. It might be just coincidental that your views are the same as Rupert Murdoch’s. That’s really nice. But if they are not the same as Rupert Murdoch’s, you’ve got to make sure that, pretty much, they are. Otherwise you’re not going to have much of a future. You can’t just wander off and write whatever you want. But the thing about the media is – a lot of people take these phrases for granted – like ‘free press’ – so forth and so on. Well, free for whom? Who has the right to speak? Who has the right to write in the media?

It’s very carefully controlled. It does vary a little bit from news organisation to news organisation, but basically it’s controlled. Some people have access. A lot of people don’t have access. I mean a lot of people in Australia who don’t have any access at all to the mainstream media at all. They’re very well informed, they’re very intelligent, they’re articulate, they’re experienced, they know their area, but they’re not going to be given any space in the mainstream media. Because they’re going to say things that the mainstream media – for whatever reason – doesn’t want people to hear.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: If you worked in the mainstream media today, and you wanted …

JEREMY SALT: Well I couldn’t –

SUSAN DIRGHAM: …and you’re a person of courage, what would you do …

JEREMY SALT: Well, I wouldn’t last. I wouldn’t last. I couldn’t last.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Even moving to another area? You wouldn’t be an ABC Middle East correspondent if you …

JEREMY SALT: I don’t … no, I wouldn’t …

SUSAN DIRGHAM: …integrity and courage…

JEREMY SALT: No, I wouldn’t because I would go to Syria and I’d want to go to the Syrian Government and get their take on what’s going on.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Or the people…

JEREMY SALT: …and I’d want to go to the West Bank …

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Or the women. Don’t forget the women.

JEREMY SALT: Alright, okay, I’d talk to the women.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: The women of Syria…

JEREMY SALT: If I were in Palestine, I’d go to the West Bank and I’d talk to people there and I’d do it in a much more forceful way than the ABC would allow. So, therefore, someone like me – well, let’s not talk about me – someone like me is not going to be given the freedom to speak. Right? You’re sidelined. I know lots of people here, in this country, who are very well informed about the Middle East, about Syria, about Iran. They’ve no place in the media – and they’ve tried, but they’re shut out. And so the space is given to Greg Sheridan, for example, in The Australian, and… who was it, who wrote… Derryn Hinch!

SUSAN DIRGHAM: (Laughs softly).

JEREMY SALT: In the Age, wrote this silly piece about…

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Comparing Assad to …

JEREMY SALT: Yes!

SUSAN DIRGHAM: To Pol Pot!

JEREMY SALT: Yes! So what is a quality, so-called ‘quality’ newspaper doing with Derryn Hinch on the Middle East? When there are many, many people in this country well-qualified to talk sensibly, and they use Derryn Hinch.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: I think Derryn Hinch was probably using his heart and he was going to the shallow analysis…

JEREMY SALT: But

SUSAN DIRGHAM: … of the mainstream media, and he just thought, well, Assad’s the criminal; he’s a brutal criminal; he’s killing his own people; he must be like Pol Pot.

JEREMY SALT: But why use Derryn Hinch for this anyway?

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Yeah.

JEREMY SALT: He can write a letter to the editor…

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Yeah.

JEREMY SALT: ‘Derryn Hinch of Armadale, Worried Reader’, whatever he wants to describe himself.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Why don’t they ask you and me to write about it?

JEREMY SALT: Well, not me. Forget me. Just leave me out of it. There are a lot of other people who can write intelligently about it. Why do they go to Derryn Hinch? And the whole thing about the media is that the news is an artefact …
SUSAN DIRGHAM: (Joking) We’ll have a fight soon.

JEREMY SALT: No, we’re not going to fight. News is an artefact. It’s something that people who read newspapers might not necessarily be fully aware of. I mean they do generally or not. The newspaper is one dimensional. There it is, but there is a whole kind of, like, hive of activity befor that. So the raw news is shaped by the reporter, by the editors. It’s shaped according to where it’s placed in the paper. It’s shaped according to the headlines. It’s honed and whittled and refined. Until it gets to you. And you’ve got to think of the mass of information that comes into the media every single day, whether you’re talking about newspapers or television, immense mass. And what you are seeing is a tiny fraction. So ‘news’ should be put in quotes. News is something that the newspaper or television station wants you to know; chooses for you. It’s not unmediated. And then, the other part of that, of course, is the politics of it and the way that things are reported. For example, in the case of Syria, why Syria is reported in such a negative fashion and such an unbalanced fashion. Why have none of these news organisations seen as their business to try to be fair? This is what the so-called rebels are saying – let’s hear what the Syrian Government and people who support the government have to say and what the families of the soldiers have to say. We’ve seen nothing of that. Nothing whatsoever. So, it’s completely lopsided.

And, we go back to that basic question: Why do they [the mainstream media] do it? What’s in it for them? What’s in it for them? And there’s something grey here that I can’t really put my hands on.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: At the moment, and the people in this room know this, because I’m asking them to help me, I’m working on a complaint letter to the ABC because they had a program on in December, on Radio National Earshot program, ‘The Drawers of Memory, Ahmed’s story.’ And the protagonist in this program was a ‘freedom fighter’ in Syria; someone who was running round …

JEREMY SALT: Described as a ‘freedom fighter’?

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Well, he says he supports freedom, and his ‘friends’ the insurgents based in Damascus, who support ‘freedom,’ he reckons they will win in the end. And maybe they will; they’ve got so much ‘support’ from Saudi Arabia, from Qatar – Apparently he was a money-runner, with Saudi Arabia and Qatar’s money. But he is presented on the ABC as someone that’s credible. And the victims of these insurgents – ordinary people like us that live in the suburbs of Damascus – are just ignored. But, what I discovered when I did a little bit of research on this story is that this is basically an unofficial ABC policy, to present this side of things. As we’ve been discussing, basically. So you get MediaWatch saying, ‘Assad is a brutal dictator. Assad is a war criminal. Assad has used chemicals against his people …’ So, if Mediawatch says this, what mainstream journalist dares present another narrative, dares present the side of the Syrian people?

JEREMY SALT: Why should we use the word ‘dare’? What is the problem in reporting Syria in a more balanced way? I mean, Australians would like to know for sure. They would like to have a different picture. Why does the media pump out this completely lopsided view? Why are they doing it? What are they frightened of? Why are they buying this narrative in this fashion? This is really what I can’t understand. You know, they’re not being told to do it by the government. The government’s not issuing an edict, ‘Please report this situation like this’. No-one’s doing that. So, exactly, how does it work out like that? That they will just report the situation in this kind of grossly unbalanced fashion.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: People get intimidated. They don’t realise their power. Individuals don’t realise the power and influence they have.

JEREMY SALT: If you were – I imagine that if you were an editor of a mainstream newspaper and you suddenly had a rush of blood to the head and decided to report Syria what you or I would call ‘fairly and objectively’, you probably wouldn’t last. But why? Why would they not allow you to report Syria in a more balanced fashion? This is the mystery that we keep coming back to. Why does the media do this? I mean, no-one’s going to punish them if they report the Syrian war – I would think – in a more balanced fashion. Why do they do it? And this is happening all the time. This freedom fighter: ‘I’m a freedom fighter’, ‘I love freedom.’ Oh, great. Okay. Well, so do I.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: So do the Syrian people.

JEREMY SALT: Congratulations. We all love freedom. Freedom’s a really nice thing.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: But what is freedom? What is free?

JEREMY SALT: It’s a word. That’s what it is. It’s a word: ‘I love freedom’.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Freedom to live.

JEREMY SALT: Yes. ‘I’m going to kill people, but I love freedom.‘

SUSAN DIRGHAM: ‘And I’m going to kill them for Saudi Arabia, for America.’

JEREMY SALT: And this has just one on and on for the last five years. And it doesn’t stop. And the latest thing we have is this situation in this town of Madaya, north of Damascus. And the media is reporting Assad forces, or Assad loyalists, or Syrian Army – what are they saying – usually the first two – besieged this town. And we have the reports of the civilians starving – and all the rest. I’m quite sure they’re having a terrible time.

“So, increasing the population – fast population growth and poor planning – they’re like a vicious circle. When I worked as a planner, I’d go to VCAT and, quite often, development applications would be turned down by councils and the developer’s argument would be, ‘I know, ideally, this isn’t the best place to build this development, but you do know that Melbourne’s population is going to double by 2040-something and so, therefore, we’ve got to start building high-density in areas where we wouldn’t normally build it, because, you know, unless we’re just going to sprawl outwards forever…’. But both are going to happen, so we’ve got to understand that rapid population growth and developers who are making sure that they’re taking control of the planning system - they’re intertwined.” Mark Allen, former planner, of Population, Permaculture and Planning in a speech at the Sustainable Living Festival in Melbourne, 14 February 2016.

Mark Allen of Population Permaculture and Planning asks: Is it possible to accommodate a growing population without unacceptably high density living and urban sprawl? If so, what rate of population growth should we be looking at and what types of community should we be creating? This workshop discusses the merits of village style living in combination with permaculture principles and asks the question, where do we go from here?

The gradual rise in oceanic acidity is weakening the shells of shellfish, corals and sea urchins, making them vulnerable to predation and damage from oceanic movements.

Many marine animals produce protective shells and exoskeletons from calcium carbonate from seawater, but higher CO2 concentrations absorbed into seawater from the environment is lowering the oceanic PH.

The gradual rise in oceanic acidity is weakening the shells of shellfish, corals and sea urchins, making them vulnerable to predation and damage from oceanic movements.

Many marine animals produce protective shells and exoskeletons from calcium carbonate from seawater, but higher CO2 concentrations absorbed into seawater from the environment is lowering the oceanic PH.

This makes conditions more acidic and is affecting the strength of shells making the animals weaker against predators such as crabs and other marine life. But new research at the University of Glasgow shows the humble mussel is fighting back by adapting and evolving to the sea changes.

In a new paper, published February 15, 2016 in Scientific Reports, researchers from the University of Glasgow found mussel shells grown under ocean acidification produce more amorphous calcium carbonate as a repair mechanism, compensating for the impact of environmental changes.

With growth in global industrialisation, the surface pH of the oceans has declined form pH 8.1 to pH 8.0, meaning the water is less alkaline. Increasing CO2 leads to ocean acidification and scientists expect a further reduction in alkalinity from pH 8.0 – pH ~7.7 by the end of the 21st century.

Dr Susan Fitzer, from Geography and Earth Sciences at the University of Glasgow, who led the research, said: “Many marine organisms are being directly affected by these changes. They need calcium carbonate to produce their shells and exoskeletons from calcium carbonate, but higher acidity reduces the concentration of carbonate ions available for shell formation and subsequently their shells are becoming more brittle which makes them more vulnerable.

“Our study found that mussel shells grown under ocean acidification produce more amorphous calcium carbonate and had less crystallographic control over shell growth. This shows the mussel shell composition is changing in response to the environmental change."

Mussels were found to have reduced growth and altered material properties when grown under future projected ocean acidification conditions. The shells became harder and less elastic resulting in them being more prone to fracture in stormy environments and more vulnerable against predation.

Dr Fitzer led the research with a team of scientists at the Diamond Light Source. The team used synchrotron X-ray Microscopy to investigate the influence of ocean acidification on amorphous calcium carbonate formation within mussel shells. Marine organisms, such as mussels, producing calcium carbonate shells, mould a solid crystalline structure from the natural disorder of amorphous calcium carbonate.

Dr Fitzer said: “Research suggests that mussels induce amorphous calcium carbonate as a repair mechanism to combat shell damage under ocean acidification.”

“These phase transitions from amorphous calcium carbonate to a crystalline structure are important to understand how marine organisms such as mussels produce their protective shells. Mussels use amorphous calcium carbonate to transport insoluble materials to crystalisation sites for growth and repair.”

Despite the findings, the mussels’ adaptation may be insufficient. The impact of rising oceanic acidification on the crystalisation of mussel shells still raises concerns for the protective function of shells, in order to protect animals against predation and stormy environments.

Dr Fitzer’s research was funded as part of a four year Leverhulme Trust study examining ‘Biomineralisation: protein and mineral response to ocean acidification’, awarded to the research team including Professor Maggie Cusack, Dr Nick Kamenos and Dr Vernon Phoenix. The common blue edible mussel Mytilus edulis was the focus of this study as a globally and economically important food resource.

The paper, titled ‘Biomineral shell formation under ocean acidification: a shift from order to chaos’, is published in Scientific Reports.

Susan Dirgham of AMRIS talks with Middle East and propaganda scholar, Jeremy Salt, about the history of western interventions in the Middle East and in Syria. She asks why the mainstream press don't tell westerners how Syria is secular and has good women's rights; women got the vote there in 1947. This article is summary plus transcript from the video of Part One of Politics and war in Syria: Susan Dirgham interviews Jeremy Salt. Susan Dirham is convener of Australians for Reconciliation in Syria (AMRIS) and Jeremy Salt is a scholar of Media propaganda and the Middle East

Jeremy Salt begins by talking about 19th century history of interventions in the Middle East, then about intervention in Iraq in 1990s. The UN ran this nominally, but really England and United States did. Two UN humanitarians objected to the inhumanity of economic sanctions against Iraq, possibly even mentioned ‘genocide’: they were Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck. [1] To Susan’s question, Dr Salt agrees that UN personnel no longer speak out. On the subject of the 2003 ‘weapons of mass destruction’: The use of no-fly zones to conduct aerial bombardments. [2] Libya. No-fly zone fig leaf. Syria: they wanted to get a UN resolution for a no-fly zone, but Russia and China blocked this with the UN. Next best thing [sic] was to pull down the government of Damascus by using armed gangs – mercenaries. From 2011 until now and still [the west]have not reached their main objective, which is the destruction of the government in Damascus, but they have destroyed a large part of Syria. This is similar to the Sandinista template of mercenaries used in Nicaragua.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Why do these people choose to fight for/align themselves with western governments when they can see as clearly as you and I can see that these western governments are out to destroy Arab societies?

JEREMY SALT: [Ed: Not exact quotes always; some paraphrase] But we don’t know who these people are. Initially some of them were Syrians, but a lot were from Iraq. Because, in many ways, the war in Syria is the Iraq war exported. The Saudis and other Gulf states have pumped money into Sunni Muslim groups in Western Iraq to destabilise the government in Bagdad, which they didn’t like.

The whole protest movement in Syria was wildly exaggerated [by external war-mongering forces] who were waiting to seize just such an opportunity to make their move against Syria. We’ve seen this happen in Latin America, the Middle East over many, many decades. It happened in Chili, Iran, Ukraine. When the people begin to protest, you come in from behind and you turn those protests to your advantage.

So, for the question of why local people would support western-aligned interventions, the level of true support is unknown. This is not a civil war. This is a campaign against Syria orchestrated by outside governments, who want to destroy Syria and are using a protest movement. Infiltrating it.

You might remember the first week of that protest movement in Dada, in Southern Syria. We are told that the Syrian military started firing into peaceful protesters.

What the media didn’t report was the number of civilians and police who were killed by armed men in that week. And we were told by the same media that there were snipers on rooftops firing into peaceful demonstrators. They said, ‘government snipers’. Almost certainly, they were not. They were provocateurs, stirring as much trouble up as they could. Since those days, we know full well, that the number of foreigners coming to Syria has turned into a flood.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Jeremy, the thing you mention about snipers; I was in Damascus in April 2011, just one month after the start of the crisis, and I met a young man who had been to an anti-government rally just that morning and he said that two people were killed at the rally and others were shot. There were police at the rally with arms, but they did not draw their weapons. So it was just a mystery, who killed these people and Syrians know this.

Taksim Square Massacre template

JEREMY SALT: Once again, this is part of a template. This happens in many situations like this. Where you send your undercover agents into a situation. They open fire from a rooftop or from round a corner. No-one really knows who does it, but that’s the opportunity that the enemy wants, and its media wants, to portray the government as being brutal and oppressive – to killing its own people.

So, what we are seeing in Syria is just another repeat of what we have seen in many, many other countries. We had this in Istanbul, in the Taksim Square Massacre. There was a Mayday march and people started firing into the crowd. They were obviously agent-provocateurs. Turning the whole demonstration – disrupting it – turning it into a panic-stricken kind of riot. 'Cause people didn’t know what was going on.

SUSAN DIRGHAM: One thing that people don’t know is that there was the CIA-orchestrated coup in Syria in 1949. The first CIA coup ever. The CIA had just been recently set up. This was in Syria. So Syrian people know their history, know their enemies –

JEREMY SALT: The whole thing is people in the Arab world generally have a very strong grasp of history and, you know, the people who suffer, who are the victims, remember the history. The people who do bad things to them; they want to move on, want to forget it.

So, of course there is a [?known] history. And it’s not just 1949; This goes back to the end of the first world war.

Syria has been ‘under siege’, effectively, all that time, up unto the present day. So, 1949, yes, that coup, Husni al-Zaim was put there by the CIA, and then he’s followed by a second man, Sami al-Hinnawi, then Adib Shishakli. And Shishakli, whether he was actually put-up to it by the Americans, is not clear. He probably wasn’t, but what he did, the Americans liked. Because, one thing that he didn’t like was a proposal to unite the fertile crescent. To bring Syria and Iraq together.

Iraq was under the domination of the British, so, if that had happened, it would have held a wonderful advantage for Britain – and the Americans didn’t want that. Because, beneath all of these things that we are talking about, all through the 20th century, up to the present day, there were these subterranean tensions between these outside powers.

Britain and France were wartime allies in 1914. Once the war was over, they were rivals.

And the British did what they could to limit French gains. And why did the French leave Syria in 1946? Because the British put pressure on them. Made them leave, because France was, relatively speaking, in a weak position. Britain was weak, but not as weak.

And we see, in the 1950s, Britain and the United States, this same sort of subterranean tension playing up because Britain’s fading as an imperial power, America’s moving into the region and doesn’t want the British to regain lost ground. So this is all part of the picture.

Secular society and women’s rights in Syria: if people knew the truth…

SUSAN DIRGHAM: Another bit of history going back to those times, is that women were given the vote in Syria in 1949. And what disturbs me greatly is we [Australians/westerners] don’t really know what Syrian society is like. It’s hidden behind that ‘brutal dictator’. So our media is presenting a ‘brutal dictator’ versus ‘rebels’ and, behind that ‘brutal dictator’, you’ve got the army - a secular army - and you’ve got a secular society, and you’ve got women, who have extraordinary freedoms. Do you think, if we knew …?

Western governments and media do not want us to know the truth

JEREMY SALT: Yes, of course, if we knew; if people went there. I mean Syria had a quite reasonable tourist industry before this war broke out. We all know that Syria’s a fantastic country. A wonderful place, right. So, a number of people who go there would see that for themselves, but what the others have to rely on is what the media tell them. And the media doesn’t tell them the things that you’re saying. And the media wasn’t saying these things about many, many other countries.

The media will pick up a story, a narrative, which fits in with what they and the government wants. As it did over Iraq, as it has done with many other situations. So Syria becomes a target to be destroyed, therefore it’s not in the interests of the government or much of the media to talk about positive things about Syria. Not to talk about a secular society, freedom for women, and all the rest – because people would say then, ‘Well, why are we taking Syria? Why are we going for Syria?

And so the narrative over Syria has been shocking from the beginning. There has been no balanced reporting whatsoever about Syria. I mean, one or two reporters file reasonable reports from time to time, but 95, 97% of the coverage has not conformed in any way to the standards of proper journalism. It’s been completely biased. You haven’t seen the other side.

If you are a journalist the primary responsibility is what they call ‘balance’. You’re never going to achieve perfect balance, but in a situation like this, even if you want to report what the rebels are saying and doing - even if you and I don’t think they really are rebels – let them have their say. Let people think about it. But you have to report what the others are saying. You have to go to the Syrian government.

You’ve got to go to the victims of the rebels. They are very good – the media – for the last five years has talked about the ‘victims of the Syrian army’ – as they say it – but they haven’t paid any attention at all to the victims of these armed groups. And if they did, then naturally, people would get a very different idea.

If they [journalists] talked to the government and were able to see what happens in families who’ve lost young men. I mean, how many young men have died in Syria fighting these [‘rebel’] groups? Sixty thousand? Something like that. Plus all the others – tens of thousands – wounded.

If that were shown, the whole narrative would be disrupted. But it can’t be shown. It can’t be shown. You cannot really show the victims of war. This is common in all wars. They don’t like to show the gruesome detail.

We saw the other day how Obama was wiping away tears for children who had been shot dead in America. Well, this is the same Obama who has been ordering missile strikes in Yemen that have killed children.

Now if you show the victims of those missile strikes in Yemen – actually show the bodies – well then, the American public would do a double-take: ‘What on earth are we doing? Dead children! We’re killing children in Yemen.’

No, you don’t see those photographs. And the same in Syria. You don’t see the gory detail of what the armed groups are doing. It will be played down. But when the government does something, or the military does something, it’s magnified to the ultimate degree.

So there can’t be any trust in the mainstream media now, there cannot be. After the absolute pinnacle of propaganda about Iraq; Syria is even worse.

NOTES

[1] Denis Halliday - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Denis J. Halliday (born c.1941) was the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq from 1 September 1997 until 1998. He is Irish and holds an M.A. in ..."

Economic Sanctions "Hit Wrong Target," Says Former U.N. ...
" “Economic Sanctions “Hit Wrong Target,” Says Former U.N. Humanitarian ... Iraq,” warned former United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator Hans von Sponeck, .... Commonwealth Club of California held at the swank Westin St. Francis Hotel in .."

[2] Use of ‘No Fly Zones’: The way this works is to accuse a government of bombing its own citizens then for external powers to declare a ‘no fly zone’, which is somehow interpreted to mean that those powers can enter the zone and bomb government planes which may actually be trying to defend themselves against armed takeovers that imperil citizens. So this stops a country from defending itself militarily and enables outside powers to take over, beginning with the airspace.

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Dr Shaaban says UN Report claiming to uncover torture and murder by the Syrian government has no more credibility than the 'weapons of mass destruction' that the US used as an excuse to invade Iraq and which were later shown not to exist. "Everybody who is carrying arms against civilian and against the Government is a terrorist. The Russians are here according in response to the requests of the Syrian Government. The Russians are coordinating with us every single step and they are only fighting terrorists"; "The Security Council Resolution 2254 asked for one broad delegation from the opposition to represent the opposition in Geneva. Let us wait to see when that delegation is going to be made. The reality, Tony, again, is that these oppositions are paid by Turkey, by Saudi Arabia, by Qatar. [They] represent the countries who are paying them, but they do not represent the Syrian people. However, we are ready to sit with them whenever they are ready for a dialogue as Security Council resolution say"; "President Assad has been elected by the Syrian people and it is the Syrian people who decide [whether he will go"; Transcript and link to videoed interview inside article.

Transcript of Interview

TONY JONES, PRESENTER: It's almost impossible to imagine what life is like for ordinary Syrians caught up in the multi-sided conflict where the rules of war are routinely ignored. This week the world got a rare glimpse into what conditions are like for those detained in Syria's official prisons and makeshift detention centres. UN investigators accused the Syrian Government of murdering and torturing prisoners on a scale so grand it amounts to extermination. Government soldiers have even filmed the abuses they're accused of.

The UN report also accused Islamic State extremists and other rebel groups of torturing and executing their detainees. It's estimated thousands have been killed over the past five years.

PAULO PINHEIRO, IND. COMMISSION OF INQUIRY ON SYRIA: Prisoners are routinely tortured and beaten, forced to live in unsanitary and overcrowded cells with little food and no medical care. Many perish in detention.

TONY JONES: Meanwhile, Russian air strikes continue to pound rebel positions. This amateur video shows just how devastating the conflict in Syria has become with civilians increasingly in the firing line. The video shows what's said to be a series of Russian attacks on Aleppo, the city where 50,000 people have been displaced.

Well as the war on the ground continues to escalate, there's a second track: a hard road towards peace through United Nations-mediated talks in Geneva which have stalled several times. Delegates from the Syrian Government and the opposition arrived in Geneva last week for the peace talks which will take place in two weeks' time at the end of February. Each side blamed the other for the collapse of the talks.

Well let's go live to Damascus now. Dr Bouthaina Shaaban is the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's top advisor and she joins us now.

Thanks for being there.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN, ADVISOR TO SYRIAN PRESIDENT: Hello.

TONY JONES: Is your government prepared to return to the UN Syrian peace talks in Geneva on February 25th?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Well, if you allow me first just to say that unfortunately what the UN report has mentioned at the beginning of this program is totally unfounded. They have never been to Syria, they haven't been talking to Syrian people, they have been making such a statement as means of targeting the Syrian people and Syria, part of this war on Syria, I consider that report. However, to answer your question, Tony, the Syrian Government has been prepared right from the beginning of this war to respond to every single effort that was made by Kofi Annan, by General Moon, by Lakhdar Brahimi, by General Dhabi and now by - by de Mistura. The problem is not with the Syrian Government; the problem is with the agents who had been created by other parties, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, claiming that those people represent the Syrian people. And I will put this question with your viewers, Tony: do Western people believe that Saudi Arabia is an example to bring an opposition that would make democracy and the freedom and the human rights? Is Saudi Arabia the example that the West looks up to?

TONY JONES: Dr Shaaban, I'm just going to interrupt the flow here to go back to what you said at the beginning because you took umbrage with the UN Human Rights Commission report into the deaths in detention.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Yes. Yes. Yes.

TONY JONES: Now the reports includes accounts from more than 500 survivors of the Government's detention centres. It of course goes on to talk about other deaths in militia-controlled detention centres. But you are the Government, so it says that some of the worst of the detention centres were controlled by the Syrian intelligence agencies. Almost all of the people, these 500, describe being the victims of or witnesses to torture and inhuman and degrading treatment. Are you saying that they're all liars?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: I will answer you in two points, Tony. The first point is that this report, first Paulo Pinheiro was not allowed to come to Syria because we know how biased he is, but I will tell you that this report is as reliable as the claim that there was nuclear and mass destruction open in Iraq before occupying Iraq. And it is as - targeting Syria as a claim on Iraq was and we can see after 13 years of targeting Iraq what happened to Iraq and what happened to the Iraqi people because of all these unfounded claims that were targeting on Iraq. This is the first point. The second point: I will ask the UN, did they mention that millions of children that are being killed in front of our eyes in Yemen and Yemen did not do anything - isn't the obligation of the UN to question Saudi Arabia about this aggression, this horrible war on Yemeni people? What I'm saying is that ...

TONY JONES: Dr Shaaban, I'm going to - I'm sorry to ...

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: ... the UN report has no - has no credibility. One word, one word: the UN report has no credibility. It has not been done in Syria.

TONY JONES: The UN report, if I may say so ...

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: It has not been - yes. No credibility.

TONY JONES: Dr Shaaban, if I may say so, the UN report, as I say, sets out 500 witnesses who say they've all been in detention and they've witnessed horrors in detention in Syrian detention centres. More than 200 of those survivors say they witness one or more deaths in custody.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Those people ...

TONY JONES: They describe - if I can just finish. They describe their cell mates being beaten to death during interrogation or dying in their cells after being tortured. Have you taken the time to read the accounts of these individuals?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: I did. I definitely did. And I will remind you of the first Geneva when we went to Montreal and there were pictures published in London claiming to be pictures of people who are dying of hunger in Syrian prison and later the whole world discovered that these pictures were made up by a cuttery - a company to be broadcast. I tell you, these people interviewed, if they were people who are interviewed, they are - they haven't been in Syrian prisons, they were not in Syria. This report was made in the Turkish and Jordanian camps of the supporters of the terrorists who had been targeting Syria for the last five years. It is another way of targeting the Syrian people and Syria,

TONY JONES: Well I'll just bring one particular case to your attention because there's so much detail around it. In 2014 a man held in the centre under the control of the Fourth Division of the Syrian Army had his genitals mutilated. There are case after case of torture and murder in this report and whether you believe the witnesses or not, can I ask you, how are you going to respond to it?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: I - I would have believed a report that would be balanced and that would speak about ISIL crimes, about the moving of Syrian people from anywhere that terrorists occupy to God and the Syrian Government. If the Syrian Government is as this report describes, could you - could you tell me or could the UN tell me why 85 per cent of the Syrian population are in the areas controlled by the Government? Why wherever there is a terrorist organisation in any part of Syria, the whole Syrian people move to the areas where the Syrian Government is in full control? You know, I answered you, Tony ...

TONY JONES: Dr Shaaban - Dr Shaaban, can I just make the point that's not entirely true as we see hundreds of thousands of Syrians fleeing the country and going to places like Turkey and making their way to Europe. Now this report calls for your government to take urgent action, to make direct orders to the military and the intelligence personnel associated with these prison camps, to order them to cease the arbitrary killing of prisoners. Will you do that?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: My government is not working for the UN to tell our government its duties. We are a responsible government, our people are extremely important to us, and as I said - I repeat again: such a report, plus the sanctions, plus all the measures that had been taken against the Syrian people to present food and medicine to arrive to the Syrian people, plus the terrorists - all these are different ways of targeting our country and our people.

TONY JONES: Alright.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: And this is why we have been suffering for five years from this war. It's about time that the world looks for the truth rather than for falsified accusations that are totally unfounded. It's about time. It's about time.

TONY JONES: OK. Bouthaina Shaaban, let's go back to these peace talks in Geneva which you say you are prepared to return to. The key condition for the peace talks to actually succeed is for there to be a ceasefire. Do you agree to that?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Well, the least thing that the world and the UN could have said is that the Syrian delegation arrived as scheduled by the - by the - by the Vienna group. The Syrian delegation was there ready with no pre-condition. The Syrian Government was - was - the Syrian delegation was positive and forthcoming. While the other side were fighting with each other and they were so irresponsible and they are the ones actually who brought the talks into an end. So, as I said, it is ...

TONY JONES: Yes, no, that is true. Dr Shaaban, I'm sorry to interrupt you. Dr Shaaban, that is true, they were squabbling amongst each other. But I'm actually asking if when you go back to the talks, you're prepared without conditions to offer up a ceasefire?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: You know, there is no - no such thing as this question. We are prepared to go back with no pre-condition and the other side should go back with no pre-condition. But then what the subject or the timetable of the talks is left up to the Syrian. This is what Security Council Resolution 2254 says. It says it is the Syrian people who decide what is the agenda, it is the Syrian people who discuss the agenda and it is the Syrian people who agree on the agenda.

TONY JONES: Yes.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: No-one should impose any agenda on the Syrian people.

TONY JONES: That is true, but there is also a plan to end the conflict which has been endorsed by Russia, by Iran, by the United States and many others. It's that the peace talks would establish a transitional government in Syria which would rule the country for 18 months, after which ...

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: You know ...

TONY JONES: I'll just finish the point. After which point there would be elections. In 18 months there would be elections. Do you agree to that plan?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Tony. Tony, Tony, I am here to be informative to your viewers and I respect your viewers. I'm speaking from thousands of miles away. The only way and the best way to end this war on Syria is to have Western countries truly wanting to fight terrorism, to join the Syrian Army and the Russians in fighting terrorism. You know at Ramadi in Iraq, they said that the American coalition liberated Ramadi. 90 per cent of Ramadi is destroyed. Our ecology is destroyed, our factories are destroyed, our country is destroyed, our agriculture is destroyed and yet Western countries say (inaudible) ... how to stop the conflict. It's very simple. Join us in fighting terrorism. That's how we stop the war on Syria. But not to speak about ceasefire and the human, etc. with the - with terrorism speeding in our country and with the Army financing and facilitating terrorism from Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar with the full support of the US and the West. This is the reality of the situation, believe me.

TONY JONES: Well, I mean - well, one other - one other harsh reality is that the Russian air strikes that you're talking about, it said 90 per cent of them are not hitting ISIS terrorists, but they're hitting the Free Syrian Army and other opposition groups backed by the United States. This is a huge problem, isn't it? I mean, if you're fighting terrorists rather than opposition groups, why are you bombing so many of the opposition groups?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: (Laughs) This is one problem with the language that the West is using. What is the difference between someone who kills in Nubl and Zahraa and someone who kills in Hama? Everybody who is carrying arms against civilian and against the Government is a terrorist. The Russians are here according in response to the requests of the Syrian Government. The Russians are coordinating with us every single step and they are only fighting terrorists, and Tony, allow me to give you one example. When 60,000 people in Nubl and Zahraa were liberated by the Syrian Army supported by Russian aircraft, the Turkish and the Western media said that all the roads to support the opposition had been cut. They did not speak about 60,000 people who were liberated. They were speaking about the ability of the Syrian Army to stop the financing and the arming of the terrorists. This is the truth, Tony, honestly.

TONY JONES: Do I take it ...

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: I am Syrian. I have been here throughout.

TONY JONES: Can I interrupt you for another question?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Please.

TONY JONES: Can I take it from what you're saying that a ceasefire is not even close, that there's no chance of a ceasefire while any opposition group is still fighting against your government? Is that what you're saying?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: No, no, that's not what I'm saying. Please don't let me say what I don't want to say. No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying the agenda of the talks would be put by the Syrian people with no pre-condition. But I'm saying the Western interpretation of what is going on on the ground does not at all correspond with reality.

TONY JONES: Alright. OK.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: We are fighting terrorists.

TONY JONES: OK.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: We are trying to liberate Aleppo.

TONY JONES: Yes,

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: We are trying to liberate Aleppo. Why the West doesn't want Aleppo to be liberated from terrorists? Why? This is the question. Why don't they want our city to be liberated?

TONY JONES: Can I ask you this - Can I ask you this then because it is a fundamental question strategically?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Please, please, please. Please, please.

TONY JONES: Taking Aleppo back for the Government would be a huge win for the Government.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Ya.

TONY JONES: This could take a very long time and it does seem to me that you're saying the fighting will continue backed by the Russians at least until that happens.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Liberating the people of Aleppo is the most important thing. It is not taking Aleppo to Government. The Government is the Government of the entire Syria. There are two million people in Aleppo who have been without electricity, without water and missiles are falling on them, killing children, civilians. The historic city of Aleppo has been destroyed by these terrorists and yet there is someone in the West who would say why should Aleppo be liberated of terrorism? Is this something good to say?

TONY JONES: Well, I mean, once again I'll just make the point that the images that we just saw a moment ago were from Russian air strikes on Aleppo which were hitting civilians.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: That's not true. That's not true. Russian air strikes, they are only striking to help the Syrian Army to strike terrorists and the Russians do not do a single thing without co-operating with the Syrian Army. The so-called American coalition is not coordinating with Syria. They did not even strike one oil truck three years they were here before the Russians. Why did the Russians were able to discover that ISIL is the one who is selling the oil to Turkey and to Europe through Turkey. Why the Americans did not discover that before the Russians came?

TONY JONES: I'm sorry to interrupt you again, but there is one fundamental question that I need to ask you ...

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Please. Yep, please.

TONY JONES: ... and that is that the pre-condition of the opposition groups and of the United States and other countries for any transitional process is that President Assad steps out of it, steps aside and removes himself from the process. Will that ever happen?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Well, you know, this - what you call opposition group, the Security Council Resolution 2254 asked for one broad delegation from the opposition to represent the opposition in Geneva. Let us wait to see when that delegation is going to be made. The reality, Tony, again, is that these oppositions are paid by Turkey, by Saudi Arabia, by Qatar. They are not nationalists who grew up in the country, who have political parties, they are not like Australian opposition.

TONY JONES: OK.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: I came to Australia and I visited the Opposition.

TONY JONES: Alright.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: There is a political party, there is government, there are representatives of people. Those represent the countries who are paying them, but they do not represent the Syrian people. However, we are ready to sit with them whenever they are ready for a dialogue as Security Council resolution say.

TONY JONES: And we're nearly out of time, but I've got to get you to answer this critical question: will President Assad agree to stand aside or will he put his own power ahead of the interests of his people?

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: I'm - President Assad has been elected by the Syrian people and it is the Syrian people who decide.

TONY JONES: Dr Shaaban, thank you very much for agreeing to speak to us again.

BOUTHAINA SHAABAN: Thank you.

See new ABC report about this here. The ABC has interviewed Hans Brunner about the problems of bandicoots in Victoria. The interview will be screened on Sunday 22 February 2016 on the 7pm news, we believe. (The schedule changed from this Sunday.) Hans Brunner is well-known to professional ecologists and wildlife enthusiasts in Frankston and the Mornington Peninsula, where he has continually championed the rights of bandicoots to safe habitat in the face of ever-increasing obstacles and stone-walling by government. Hans continues to be involved in the defense of preserving a full natural ecology in Frankston.

The inventor of a revolutionary hair identification system, Hans is known nationally as a key expert witness on dingo hair identification in the Azaria Chamberlain appeal case which freed Lindy Chamberlain. Among other cases, Hans is known internationally for his work to identify the nature of hair samples linked to the Orang Pendek, a mysterious upright ape or hominid sighted in Sumatra.

Hans is the author of Hans Brunner and Brian J. Coman, The identification of mammalian hair, 1974 and Hans Brunner and Barbara Triggs,Hair ID : an interactive tool for identifying Australian mammalian hair, 2002.

Pictures in this article were provided to Hans by the ABC.

This article contains a speech by Kelvin Thomson, critical of a motion to change environmental law by George Christensen, Member for Dawson, Queensland. Monday, 8 February 2016, House of Representatives, Chamber Speech, page 22 Hansard proofs.

KELVIN THOMSON I do not support this motion by the member for Dawson. The environmental law is there to protect the environment and to protect endangered species. The member for Dawson's own party brought it in. All environmental groups ask is that mining companies, agribusiness and so on do not break the law, just as environment groups and ordinary citizens are expected to abide by the law.
If companies abide by the law, there is no issue. All the provisions that the member for Dawson complains about do is give people a right to take action if the environment law is not being complied with. The implication in the member for Dawson's motion is that mining and other companies should not have to comply with the environmental law—that they should be able to break it with impunity.

The member for Dawson may not care about the black throated finch, but I do. It is a beautiful little bird. We should not push it to the edge of extinction in our quest for ever-increasing material wealth. Mining booms come and go but black throated finches do not. If the black throated finch becomes extinct, there is no way to bring it back. We have the EPBC Act precisely because we have learnt from the mistakes of the past and we should support it and strengthen it, not undermine and white-ant it.

Since being passed by the Howard government 16 years ago the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act has been the overriding national environmental protection law, including throughout the mining boom, and environment groups are required to operate within this law. Since the act commenced in the year 2000 there have been approximately 5,500 projects referred to the minister under the environmental impact assessment provisions. Of those projects around 1,500 have been assessed as requiring formal assessment and approval.

Around 33 actions have been commenced in the Federal Court by third parties in relation to the EPBC Act's environmental impact assessment process. The proceedings taken by third parties have related to only 22 projects that had been referred under the environmental impact assessment process, so this means that third-party appeals to the Federal Court affected only 0.4 of one per cent of all projects referred under the legislation.

Environmental advocacy is in the public interest. Environmental advocacy enhances environmental decision making and accountability and drives policy reform to protect the environment. The Australia Institute conducted national polling and found that 68 per cent of Australians support environmental advocacy. While 27 per cent said environmental groups had too much influence in public debates, 34 per cent said they had not enough influence.
By contrast, most people—62 per cent—said big business and 58 per cent said mining companies had too much influence.
While six in 10 Australians are concerned that big business and mining companies have too much influence, the coalition enthusiastically promotes them and even encourages them to become political activists and fight government policy. In the last five years the mining industry has spent $340 million on lobby groups and more on registered lobbyists and in-house lobbyists. The government is arguing to silence environmental activists while on the other hand it wants industry lobbyists to become activists—the irony, the double standard!

Section 487 was designed to address issues of standing, a legal term that broadly means an individual's or group's right to challenge an approval on the basis that they are either affected by it or have a special interest in the outcome. It does not provide for open standing, whereby anyone can bring an action for review, but it does authorise representative standing in which groups can act on behalf of an affected community. This is a crucial component of a national environmental act that seeks to promote rigorous and effective environmental review for approvals that, potentially, affect matters of national environmental significance, such as the development of Queensland's Galilee Basin coal deposits.

Removing section 487 will stop environmental groups from acting on behalf of affected communities and performing their important function as a watchdog. As The Australia Institute has highlighted, advocacy is essential for a well-functioning democracy, providing for those most affected by government decisions to be involved in policy formation, helping keep government accountable to the wider community and counterbalancing the influence of corporate organisations over government decision making.

Robust environmental review by focused, engaged, representative organisations, like the Mackay Conservation Group and the Australian Conservation Foundation, has never been more important. Rolling back the legal provisions that allow this to happen would be a backward step.

Population is a big issue happening in the world today, with our numbers having increased massively from around 1 billion in 1850 to what now looks like 11 billion at the end of the century. Right now, the numbers of the world’s poor increase by 80 million each year and the number of unwanted pregnancies are 210 million per annum. Considering that human population predicts 88% of impact to other animal and plant species (according to the International Union for the Conversation of Nature) human population remains a huge, yet very controversial concern. (This article was written by Michael Bayliss as part of an information booklet with Mark Allen (founder, Population Permaculture and Planning) entitled: 'Why We Need To Talk About Population.' This booklet is designed to engage with a younger, left leaning generation including environmentalists and activists. It will be available at the Sustainable Living Festival Big Weekend at Federation where Mark Allen will also present on town planning and population issues. To find out more, click here.

Australia's population numbers

It almost seems absurd to extend these world population concerns to Australia. Australia's a population of just under 24 million (at time of writing) and a density of around 3 people per square kilometre seems minuscule when compared to the demographics of other (mostly densely overpopulated) countries. Surely with miles and miles of free uncharted space, Australia could take its fair share of the world’s load? Isn’t Australia one of the highest per capita fossil fuel guzzling and carbon emitting countries in a society awash with consumerism and materialism? Couldn’t we all consume less, replace those coal industries with renewables, and open up our borders to take in our fair share?

Ecological and logistical considerations

The problem is that when you look at our continent more closely, our vast land of plenty starts to look a bit wanting. Only around 6% of our soil is arable by world standards, with 80% of the land-mass arid or semi-arid. This means that we have an incredibly fragile ecosystem with a very low carrying capacity that has struggled with white occupation for the last 200 years and it is about to get another wallop through climate change. There is every good reason why the south-east coast of Australia is populated and the central and north-west are nearly vacant, and that having large numbers of people live in the interior of Australia makes almost as much sense as populating the Sahara.

Academy of Science opinion on our population

The Australian Academy Of Science has suggested that our capacity to sustain ourselves will be maximised by not exceeding 23 million (whoops, we’ve just done that!) with Jared Diamond and Tim Flannery, painting a bleaker picture - that Australia can only support around 8 million people in the long term for our society’s current level of per capita footprint. This means that to be sustainable, we need to find ways of reducing our per capita and overall consumption by 1/3 at our current population to be sustainable, according to these predictions. However, our population is also growing at a rate of an Adelaide every 3 years, and at this rate our population will double in 35 years time. This will mean reducing our per capita output by 1/6 of current levels in a very short amount of time. What happens after then?...

Breaking taboos

The topic of population has become a taboo in Australia over the past 20 years, partly due to the ongoing perception of us living on an empty continent, and partly due to the mass media promoting the social-demographic arguments of Pauline Hanson, One Nation and others to drown out rational ecologically-based discussion. While there are educated people with no xenophobic agenda currently championing for a sustainable population such as Kelvin Thomson and Dick Smith, there is still confusion in many people's minds between population numbers concerns and racial prejudice. When I ask my friends in the environment movement why they don’t think more about population, the typical reply is: ‘Every time we discuss it, it always ends up with a white guy in his 60s ranting about immigrants.’

Rational discussion

I would like a rational discussion about population to return to the conversations of progressive and socially minded people. Population numbers are intrinsically linked to our economy, and manipulated by our government to fast-track GDP growth (as I shall explain soon) so it is really difficult to talk about the end of neo-liberal capitalism without talking about population numbers at some point. It is hard to talk about cooperative self-resilient communities and eco-villages as the way of the future whilst our town planning system is trying to keep up with an Adelaide’s worth of growth in our major cities every few years. It is hard to share our environment with our native plants and animals for much longer if an end point to our population growth is never debated and if our only option to reduce our per capita footprint infinitely lower is unrealistic. Finally, higher population growth does not automatically mean greater diversity and better outcomes for refugees and asylum seekers. Under our currently societal structure, it can even be the other way around!

Three models and three ideologies

Below are three models of possible population growth in Australia, representing three ideologies, where I want to table the pros and cons with each model. The first is the ‘business as usual’ approach of our current system. The second is an open borders policy, and the third is a sustainable population model.

Model 1: Business as usual:

Business as usual with ~1.5% growth per annum, majority of growth policy regulated to raise GDP, and with a current tax system that allows people to pay less tax from owning property (negative gearing).

As can be seen from the chart, our current model of population growth is beneficial for government to raise money through more people paying tax. It is also very beneficial for employers, as it allows an environment for more applicants for jobs, placing downward pressure on wages and conditions. It is most certainly of benefit for those in the property and construction industries, especially for those who invest in property, where a growing customer base ever drives up the demand for the price of properties in established suburbs (for now).

Unfortunately, things become pretty much worse for everyone else. Whilst it is easy enough to deduce the negative effect of this kind of population growth policy has on young job seekers (for example) and in raising general costs of living, it may be surprising to note that refugees, both past and present, are adversely affected by this type of population growth. For example, past generations of migrant market gardeners have been priced out of their area as the urban boundaries of Melbourne and Sydney expand. Likewise, refugee immigrants are being pushed out due to the increased gentrification that comes with high density living in inner city Melbourne suburbs such as Footscray, Carlton, and Richmond that have traditionally been very viable hubs of strong migrant communities. In recent years, new arrivals through the humanitarian program have tended to settle in areas around Broadmeadows, Deer Park, Heidelberg Heights and Dandenong. A far cry from (say) Victoria Street in Richmond, current generations of refugees face social isolation and difficulties in accessing essential services, which makes establishing community or assimilation more difficult. The Multicultural Development Association has reported that refugees in current times are lacking access to essential information, such as what the swimming flags mean on Australian beaches! The fact that Broadmeadows has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country is telling.

Most people are surprised to find out that our humanitarian intake has gone DOWN since the Howard Era, as proportion of our intake, from 25% prior to 1996 down to current levels of around 5-10%. As Howard himself said on 2014 on live radio:

“One of the reasons why it’s so important to maintain that policy is that the more people think our borders are being controlled the more supportive they are in the long term of high levels of immigration. Australia needs a high level of immigration. I’m a high immigration man. I practiced that in government. And one of the ways that you maintain public support for that is to communicate to the Australian people a capacity to control our borders and to decide who and what people and when come to this country.”

In other words, the asylum seeker fiasco during the Howard Government era, Tampa crisis et al, was politically engineered so that people would be complacent to another kind of population growth that the government (and big business) prefers!

Imagine if we traveled to another planet and witnessed and alien society where the government, swayed by big business, had an immigration policy that was based almost entirely on making money for small sectors of society. Imagine this was at the expense of refugees, or people in desperate need from other countries. Imagine the government engineered a border crisis so that refugees were seen as a huge problem so that, once a tough stand seen to be taken towards them, the government used that ruse to bring in population growth policies from other avenues. Imagine, in this society, the the former leader could basically state this word for word and pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. Imagine, in the society where the left were disinclined to call the government out on these policies, for fear of sounding anti-refugee and xenophobic, even when the population policies themselves are discriminatory towards asylum seekers. Imagine if keeping silent perpetuated this growth as a component of the neo-liberalist growth-at-all-costs agenda and if keeping silent on this was a liability on environmental objectives. From an outsider point of view, I’m sure the whole situation would seem more than a little illogical and farcical.

Population has been a very prickly issue for us on the left, particularly in recent decades, with the shadow of Pauline Hanson and One Nation/Reclaim Australia, and particularly when population growth is generally equated in our minds to refugees and open borders policies. However, if we choose to not debate population at all, then our current social and politically engineered population growth policy will continue, the same one that unfairly disfavours refugees and asylum seekers in favour of migration programs that generate short term increases in GDP. This is, to my mind, a very cynical neo-liberalist ideology. We, on the left, have the obligation at the very least to be educated on population policy as it currently stands, and at very least, lobby for a change in policy in favour of the humanitarian program again, even for those of us who are pro-growth. There is also a strong argument that it is very important to support the anti-war movement to prevent the formation of refugees in the first place and that refugee crises are generated by arms manufacture, neo-colonialism and global conflict.

Even if one were recipient to the short-term benefits of this kind of population growth, it must be recognised that the positives are just that - short lived. Eventually, property becomes so expensive that it is not worth investing in anymore. This is called a housing bubble, and has happened to Japan in the late 80s early 90s and currently China and the USA. Coupled with an infrastructure deficit and environmental overshoot, this can only affect everyone in the long term.

So if the current model sounds unfair to most, one might consider a more egalitarian open borders approach. Let’s explore that below, with its associated pros and cons.

Model 2: Open Borders policy:

Open borders policy, no cap on humanitarian intake, no policy to mitigate natural birth rate or GDP fuelled migration (This is in spirit the policy of the Greens Party). This model assumes growth of 600 000 per annum (250 000 humanitarian, 250 000 GDP, 100 000 natural growth).

This model is conducive to the ideal for many who identify with the social left, as an open border policy provides an unbiased avenue of entry into Australia regardless of race, religion, socio-economic status etc. An opens border policy means that industralised countries such as Australia can play a more definite role in accommodating displaced people from abroad and the idea that everyone is free to move wherever they wish to worldwide. The idea of border restriction or control can be uncomfortable for many as this implies an exclusion from those living in the majority world from the relatively privileged position of Australia. From the political field, many Labor-Left and Greens politicians support this ideology, with perhaps Sarah Hanson-Young of The Greens being the most vocal and well-known advocate of this position.

However, in trying to write the above table objectively, I tried to come up with tangible Pros that were practical rather than ideological. This proved to be more difficult than I was anticipating, and had to put in a few question marks in the pros column as the practical benefits are either tenuous or are a double edged sword with associated cons.

Speaking of the Greens, I’ve observed that many Greens policies cry out for more and more infrastructure (trains, trams, social services, public housing etc). At the same time they generally do not support environmentally destructive mining practices, not least unconventional mining such as fracking. But then, where will all our infrastructure come from? Trains lines, schools, public housing, plumbing - these all require raw materials that need to be dug up from the ground, and processed into tram lines by use of fossil fuels. There really is no way around this unless we learn a way of making train lines out of renewable resources, which isn’t likely. So much of Australia’s per capita consumption is embedded within the town planning system - suburbia and high density apartment living are both inherently resource hungry. Separation of homes and workplaces, and our physical and economic separation from our food sources result in a reliance of our earth’s resources that no amount of wilful reduction of our per capita consumption will mitigate, unless our town planning system changes substantially. If it doesn’t, there is no way we can really put much of a brake on our dependency on resources, and with model 2’s annual growth rate at 600 000 per annum, this could only escalate within our current town planning system. Instead of being able to plan to change the town planning system to accommodate more people in a sustainable way, any government would probably be doomed to play an endless cycle of infrastructure catch up under our current system - at the environment’s expense, even more-so than under our currently system.

I doubt an open borders policy would be practical for any government in the long term. Without an opportunity to transition large scale to a better town planning system, the housing, services and infrastructure costs would be huge. This means either a steep decline in quality of life for residents, or huge taxes or government debt (most likely a combination of all the above). Voters tend to not like those things. Voters on the left would also feel alienated and lied to by a government that would be forced to continue to mine for resources to build the infrastructure with, even if the economy was completely powered by renewable energy. Finally, the huge population growth would have a massive and unavoidable impact to the environment, particularly habitats and water supplies near to the large urban conurbation, even if our per capita footprint were to go down. Any government being elected on an environmental platform would soon let down many of their voters. This is probably a realistic prediction of the Greens if they won government on an open borders platform - they’d soon be shot down. This is also a conundrum that I’m sure many of the left deep down struggle with. That environmental, as well as anti-capitalist objectives, are at odds, at some point, with a human population growth that is not sustainable. Government would survive better, in the long term, if there was some compromise and balance between open borders ideology and the realities of environmental objectives.

Open borders policy only works in the long term if we can work with the world to address the root causes of conflict and displacement that generate high numbers of refugees and asylum seekers. Without this, an open borders policy is great at helping individuals in immediate need for asylum, but can only serve to diffuse the larger problem into the long term. One example is the island of Tuvalu, which made a strong case for evacuating many of its people to Australia and New Zealand in 2003, due to land loss as sea levels rose. New Zealand now has a relocation policy which is very reasonable in those circumstances, however their population is expected to more than double from 12 000 to 28 000 in by 2050. This will mean an endless cycle of relocating people, unless there is a way for Tuvalu to be sustainable in its population growth. Fortunately, according to the UN, non-coercive population sustainability strategies work if women are empowered and educated, and when there is access to family planning and contraceptive strategies (often at odds with the predominating patriarchal religions in host countries). No need for one-child policies or for coercion by the west to the majority world! Mostly grass-roots foreign aid and proactive international cooperation is key.

One final concern with an open borders policy is consideration of the original custodians of our land. My instinct is that any policy to promote population growth without consultation of aboriginal people can be easily argued as more unsolicited colonization of Australia. This belief was certainly shared by some my Noongar identifying friends and community back when I lived in WA, many of whom would be very welcoming to a generous refugee intake, if only their people were consulted on policy. If aboriginal perspective on population issues is hard to find, I imagine this can be attributable to the many other uphill battles that their communities are fighting daily, and poor representation of both aboriginal perspective and the population issue in Australian society. For those willing to search however, there are references in the literature, perhaps most poignantly expressed in the Deaths In Custody Watch Report (1994):

‘Since 1788 the non-Aboriginal powers within our lands have taken upon themselves to increase the population by many millions, meanwhile our population became near to extinction...Australia’s population is bearable at this point in time but further ecocide of this country will leave nothing for no one...Ecologically our land is on its knees: with help it can survive and resuscitate itself, but with any major increase in population this land will die, and we will die with it.’

Model 3: Sustainable Population policy:

A medium term sustainable population numbers policy that promotes (1) fiscal policies that do not encourage large family sizes and (2) promotes policies where immigration = emigration (e.g. Between 70 - 80 thousand per annum), with priority given to the humanitarian program (intake of at least 20 000 per annum, with flexibility in times of crisis). An emphasis on foreign aid funding would go to empowering women to make their own life choices, including career decisions, earning capacity and family size.

No model is perfect, and although it is probably self-evident that I advocate for this third model, it would not be objective of me if I did not acknowledge the cons associated with the model. However I would like to highlight that most of the negatives are either risks arising from poor management of the model, or from short term changes as our society goes through adjustments. On balance, this model of population sustainability strikes me as one that allows for the best balance of long term economic objectiveness, environmental and pollution goals, town planning goals, whilst allowing for a defined but generous humanitarian intake. Keep in mind that refugees and asylum seekers would be better off adjusting to a country that had the capacity to provide them with the services that they required to participate fully in their new home. They would not need so much the additional burdens of suburban sprawl, un-affordable housing, and an unforgiving job market that many refugees, along with other disadvantaged groups, face in today’s growth-at-all-cost system. That’s not to say that these problems will disappear, but they will be less and so much easier to address and manage. Currently, many migrants who come to Australia in recent times report feeling very socially isolated in the outer suburbs and miss the greater sense of community that they had back home.

Not that immigration is the only way to a sustainable population - far from it. I envision a future where families with no children are seen as societal norms just as much as families with children, and where adoption is seen as a viable and accessible alternative to couple of all sexual and gender identities. The key, as always is through education, empowerment, and allowing people to make their own choices. High schools, for example, should educate young people into the pros and cons of having children, and with consideration of the environmental impacts of having children, and the implications for future generations with worsening environmental conditions. I do not advocate fiscal policies that reward large family size, instead this money should be spent on children’s services, such as schools and and medical subsidies.

With a sustainable population, more money and energy could go into grass-roots foreign aid instead of more and more infrastructure and more investment could go into transitioning our society and economy into one that less focused on growth and more focused on social and environmental resilience. If our town planning system were to reflect the ideals of eco-villages, intentional communities, and permaculture principles, we would be in a better position to accommodate our current population longer term. We may also be in a better position to assist people in need of asylum or refuge into the future.

Final Words:

I hope this article has helped to disentangle some of the confusion and assumptions that have been barriers for further discussion on population issues for Australia and abroad. Although my own views are currently for population sustainability at this stage, I acknowledge that there will be many differing views and ideas on this topic and I hope my ideas may help to stimulate further thoughtful discussion and debate. I have not yet heard a successful argument for long term high rates of population growth that can also account for positive outcomes for our cities, towns, environment and asylum seekers, however that does not mean that one doesn’t exist! Please let me know if you have any ideas =).

Going Underground's Afshin Rattansi interviews the former British Ambassador to Syria on the irony of London hosting a Syria conference to aid refugees while Cameron drops bombs to create more. "This week London hosted the Syrian Donor conference in an attempt to raise money for the people UK bombs continue to displace to the shores of Europe. But as Philip Hammond mulls sending guns to Libya to quell the rise of Isis - made possible by the British toppling of Gadaffi - should we really even believe his claims that Russia is helping ISIS/Daesh by bombing Cameron's supposedly 'moderate' rebels." (Afshin Rattansi) First published at https://www.rt.com/shows/going-underground/331567-assange-detainment-syria-conference/

Below is the video of the full show, embedded. The Peter Ford interview sequence starts at 17minutes 40 seconds into show:

National Party member for the Victorian seat of Lowan Emma Kealy has called on the state government to extend a kangaroo culling trial to West Wimmera Shire.

(Click link to vote on poll).

The government introduced a two-year trial to cull kangaroos for pet food in 2014.

A State Government trial involving Ararat, Horsham, Northern Grampians, Yarriambiack, Southern Grampians and Pyrenees local government areas is due to conclude in June.

Ms Kealy wants to see the program introduced permanently or the trial extended to include West Wimmera Shire. “It’s created 12 jobs at the Hamilton abattoirs, where they are processing the meat for pet food,” she said.

This article was first published by the Australian Wildlife Protection Council.

Ms Kealy wants to make it permanently open season.  “Culling” should be for old, or sick, animals.  This would not be a “cull”, but be a slaughter.  It would be all out war against our Australian animal icon.

The trial had only occurred in areas where kangaroos were in plague proportions.   Since the start of these trials the number of permits has increased dramatically, from 30,000 per year, to 70,000 and now 100,000, probably in an effort to justify the slaughter.
Ms Kealy said while there were environmental concerns about the issue, the trial had only occurred in areas where kangaroos were [purportedly] in "plague proportions".

To soften her killing plans, Ms Kealy said shooters were trained to kill kangaroos with a single shot to the head to make the process as humane as possible.  That’s almost impossible, due to the size of the head, and the accuracy needed!

AWPC member, Šime Validži?, says that:

…kKangaroos are not in plague proportions but their populations are self-regulating. They are not “the environment” to be “managed” but native, sentient beings who have the right to live in their native homeland. It is humans who are spreading into the habitats of native species.  Australia has the worst record in the world when it comes to species extinctions and it is the result of genocide against indigenous peoples. Since I did not wish to be part of such a country, having emigrated to Victoria, Australia with my parents in 1970, I returned to my country of origin, Croatia, in 1992 and encourage others to do the same. I never saw a kangaroo in the wild even though I travelled a lot and did some farm work, picking potatoes and peas.

POLL: Should kangaroos be culled in the Wimmera for pet food?

I was unable to find the poll on that page. Was anyone able to find the poll and to vote? - Ed

Great advances this week by the Syrian army and Russian air force have broken the rebel siege of two towns, and broken their umbilical link with Turkey. But they have also revealed the truth about Western media 'journalism'...

Something really significant happened this week. It wasn’t the last-ditch attempts to find a peaceful solution to the Syrian conflict in Geneva, or their failure. Neither was it the game-changing developments on the ground in Syria and the tightening of the noose around the foreign-backed terrorist armies – though this was certainly ‘significant’.

What happened was that the mask of ‘humanitarian relief’ fell off the Western interventionists and their media cheer squads like so much dirty linen, exposing the naked self-interest behind the whole rotten Syrian conspiracy.
While the ridiculous deliberations over what style of terrorist was an acceptable participant in the Geneva talks may have been a vexing spectacle for Syrians, and the attention paid by the Western media to the ‘High Negotiations Committee’ an affront to their senses, it didn’t really surprise anyone.

Perhaps Syrians weren’t surprised either by the rapid gains of the Russian-Syrian offensive and moves to cut the last convenient border crossing west of Aleppo – something which so many had been hanging out for for so long and specially in rebel-besieged Aleppo. Unlike all those ignorant souls unable to see out of the Western media bubble, they had been watching it all unfold for weeks, as well as being conscious of the strategic significance and urgency of cutting Turkey out of the Syrian war – thanks in no small part to the Russian military’s free supply of information.

But as a collective cheer echoed around Syria when it was announced that the border had been cut, a collective spasm engulfed Western media commentators and government spokesmen, rapidly spreading to UN representatives and Aid agencies, Foreign Ministers and leaders.

“Rebel supply lines have been cut!” they cried indignantly, as if Russia had cut them by accident, not realising the rebels depended on these ‘supplies’ that came in from Turkey just to survive.

It may be a struggle to understand how it can be that all these people ‘just don’t get it’- don’t understand that the Syrian army and the Russian air force, Hezbollah and Iran are targeting their ‘rebels’ intentionally; that they are trying to kill them or drive them out, or trap them so they are forced to surrender. This is after all what military campaigns do, and it is abundantly clear that only a military solution is now possible against these murderous militants.

But perhaps they do understand it, and this is just ‘wilful ignorance’ – an attempt to maintain the sham reality of the ‘revolution’ and the ‘Free Syrian Army’ so they can go on using it to conceal their unrelenting campaign to seize power from Damascus.

What the falling of the ‘humanitarian mask’ has revealed is that all these drivers and accomplices to the armed insurgency have lied and obfuscated and spun their dirty conspiracy from the start. But now that Russia has ripped off their cover they are shameless about what they’ve done.

What is more, the admissions of complicity in this illegal armed insurrection against Syria’s elected government have come first from Western reporters and commentators, such as the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s Matt Brown, who framed the news on the breaking of ‘rebel supply lines’ like this:

MATT BROWN: "It's substantial because of that supply line. It demonstrates the power of Russian air strikes because the UN says that they were unprecedented in this operation.

It's also cut the rebels off from supplies of food, fuel, ammunition, weapons and fighters that they were getting down that supply route from Turkey."

That’s right – the ‘rebels’, who we have been told for years need our ‘aid’ because they are being massacred and starved by the Syrian government have not been doing so badly after all.

Every time there was a new ‘massacre’ we have listened to earnest discussions on supplying ‘non-lethal aid’, and humanitarian aid, and demands that ‘humanitarian corridors’ must be opened.

And when the Syrian government has opposed these plans on the grounds that arms and ammunition might be smuggled in with the humanitarian aid, it has then been blamed for the failure and the ongoing war.

How astounding it is then to hear this admission from someone like Brown – who despite his record of advocacy for the rebel cause, has never revealed his knowledge of its umbilical connection to Turkey. In fact this reality has been concealed from his Australian audience at all costs, even though it’s been plain as daylight to the rest of us.

Back in 2013 Matt Brown made a documentary called ‘Ibrahim’s war’, which told the story of a 11 year old boy living in the rebel-occupied part of Aleppo, whose father had abandoned his job and went out every day to fight ‘on the front’. That this was actually with the Front – the Al Nusra Front – was never admitted by Brown, even less what this terrorist group was actually doing – targeting neighbouring residential areas with snipers and indiscriminate rocket and mortar fire.

Brown related his experience at the time he made his ‘UN award-winning’ documentary in the report above:

"In 2013, I drove down to Aleppo from the north, a little further to the east than where this has happened in what is now territory controlled by the Islamic State group; and earlier I had hiked in further to the west across the border into the towns west of Aleppo.

We slept in the same houses as foreign fighters actually, who were also crossing in, and the government is now pushing in that direction.

So, it just gives you some idea of how cut off the rebels in Aleppo are becoming. That's underlined the power also of Iranian advisors, the pro-government militias and those Russian air strikes and the rebels say it proves that the government isn't serious about those peace talks."

It might sometimes be a narrow line between journalism and political advocacy, but for Brown and his media colleagues this line has evidently now become invisible. But whether they identify themselves as political actors has almost ceased to matter, because as far as their audience is concerned they are only journalists, award-winning ones. When they report what 'the rebels say' - how would this audience know they are hearing dangerous nonsense?

As is was, proof that the rebels aren't serious about peace talks was just provided by the ABC's sister state TV channel, SBS in its evening news bulletin about the latest developments around Aleppo. Opinion was sought from the Syrian Opposition's 'Chief Negotiator', who turned out to be none other than Mohammed Alloush, the new leader of one of the Saudi's most favoured terrorist groups in Syria.

Do they really believe that the Syrian government could 'negotiate' with this man?

Article first published in Russian Insider. Check the comments out there too.

On 4 December 2015, the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) adopted Opinion No. 54/2015, in which it considered that Mr. Julian Assange was arbitrarily detained by the Governments of Sweden and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. In that opinion, the Working Group recognized that Mr. Assange is entitled to his freedom of movement and to compensation. The application was filed with the Working Group in September 2014. The Opinion 54/2015 was sent to the Governments of Sweden and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland on 22 January 2016 in accordance with the Working Group’s Methods of Work.

In addition to this short working group statement, Download the inedited text of the opinion and legal argument.

Given that Mr. Assange is an Australian citizen, one of the members of the Working Group who shares his nationality recused herself from participating in the deliberations.  Another member of the Working Group disagreed with the position of the majority and considered that the situation of Mr. Assange is not one of detention and therefore falls outside the mandate of the Working Group.

In mid-2010, a Swedish Prosecutor commenced an investigation against Mr. Assange based on allegations of sexual misconduct. On 7 December 2010, pursuant to an international arrest warrant issued at the request of the Swedish Prosecutor, Mr. Assange was detained in Wandsworth Prison for 10 days in isolation. Thereafter, he was subjected to house arrest for 550 days.  While under house arrest in the United Kingdom, Mr. Assange requested the Republic of Ecuador to grant him refugee status at its Embassy in London. The Republic of Ecuador granted asylum because of Mr. Assange’s fear that if he was extradited to Sweden, he would be further extradited to the United States where he would face serious criminal charges for the peaceful exercise of his freedoms.  Since August 2012, Mr. Assange has not been able to leave the Ecuadorian Embassy and is subject to extensive surveillance by the British police.

The Working Group considered that Mr. Assange has been subjected to different forms of deprivation of liberty: initial detention in Wandsworth prison which was followed by house arrest and his confinement at the Ecuadorian Embassy.  Having concluded that there was a continuous deprivation of liberty, the Working Group also found that the detention was arbitrary because he was held in isolation during the first stage of detention and because of the lack of diligence by the Swedish Prosecutor in its investigations, which resulted in the lengthy detention of Mr. Assange.  The Working Group found that this detention is in violation of Articles 9 and 10 of the UDHR and Articles 7, 9(1), 9(3), 9(4), 10 and 14 of the ICCPR, and falls within category III as defined in its Methods of Work. 

The Working Group therefore requested Sweden and the United Kingdom to assess the situation of Mr. Assange to ensure his safety and physical integrity, to facilitate the exercise of his right to freedom of movement in an expedient manner, and to ensure the full enjoyment of his rights guaranteed by the international norms on detention. The Working Group also considered that the detention should be brought to an end and that Mr. Assange should be afforded the right to compensation. 

5 February 2016

Check the Working Group’s Opinion on Julian Assange’s case (No. 54/2015), adopted in December: http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Detention/A.HRC.WGAD.2015.docx

See press release by the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention:
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=17013&LangID=E

Inside is the text of the public statement issued by the UN expert panel on Arbitrary Detention, which you will not find in most mainstream publications, which are seeking to obfuscate the UN opinion and its importance, with their own opinions. Julian Assange is a Victorian-born Australian citizen and asylum-seeker, recognised as a refugee by the UN. The Ecuadorian Embassy in London granted him refugee status, but the UK government stopped him from going to Ecuador by taking his passport and surrounding the embassy with police, day and night. What did Assange do? Assange famously published, on his Wikileaks, authentic film of US soldiers hunting down civilians with helicopters and machine guns as if they were in a video game. (Film: 'Collateral Damge' inside this article.) The US was so furious at this (and other very relevant exposures of its criminal secrets) that it mounted an international persecution of Assange. The mass media helped the criminal US by defaming Assange and they are still doing it because their owners support war and propaganda. Assange has been openly threatened with assassination by at least two US politicians. It is clear that in the biased US justice system, he does not stand a chance. To their great shame, successive Australian Governments have done nothing to help Assange. To my knowledge, only Senator Scott Ludlam in South Australia has criticised this abject failure to defend a great leader in the fight to stop wars by forcing transparency in government. (Please let me know of any other politician who has spoken up.)

GENEVA (5 February 2016) – WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been arbitrarily detained by Sweden and the United Kingdom since his arrest in London on 7 December 2010, as a result of the legal action against him by both Governments, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention said today.

In a public statement, the expert panel called on the Swedish and British authorities to end Mr. Assange’s deprivation of liberty, respect his physical integrity and freedom of movement, and afford him the right to compensation (Check the statement:  http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=17012&LangID=E)

Mr. Assange, detained first in prison then under house arrest, took refuge in Ecuador’s London embassy in 2012 after losing his appeal to the UK’s Supreme Court against extradition to Sweden, where a judicial investigation was initiated against him in connection with allegations of sexual misconduct. However, he was not formally charged.

“The Working Group on Arbitrary Detention considers that the various forms of deprivation of liberty to which Julian Assange has been subjected constitute a form of arbitrary detention,” said Seong-Phil Hong, who currently heads the expert panel.

“The Working Group maintains that the arbitrary detention of Mr. Assange should be brought to an end, that his physical integrity and freedom of movement be respected, and that he should be entitled to an enforceable right to compensation,” Mr. Hong added. 

In its official Opinion, the Working Group considered that Mr. Assange had been subjected to different forms of deprivation of liberty: initial detention in Wandsworth Prison in London, followed by house arrest and then confinement at the Ecuadorean Embassy.

The experts also found that the detention was arbitrary because Mr. Assange was held in isolation at Wandsworth Prison, and because a lack of diligence by the Swedish Prosecutor’s Office in its investigations resulted in his lengthy loss of liberty.

The Working Group established that this detention violates Articles 9 and 10 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and Articles 7, 9(1), 9(3), 9(4), 10 and 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Check the Working Group’s Opinion on Julian Assange’s case (No. 54/2015), adopted in December: http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Detention/A.HRC.WGAD.2015.docx

NOTE TO EDITORS:
The Opinions of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention are legally-binding to the extent that they are based on binding international human rights law, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). The WGAD has a mandate to investigate allegations of individuals being deprived of their liberty in an arbitrary way or inconsistently with international human rights standards, and to recommend remedies such as release from detention and compensation, when appropriate.
The binding nature of its opinions derives from the collaboration by States in the procedure, the adversarial nature of is findings and also by the authority given to the WGAD by the UN Human Rights Council. The Opinions of the WGAD are also considered as authoritative by prominent international and regional judicial institutions, including the European Court of Human Rights.

ENDS

Mr. Seong-Phil Hong (Republic of Korea) is the Chairman-Rapporteur of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. Other members of the Working Group are Ms. Leigh Toomey (Australia); Mr. José Antonio Guevara Bermúdez (Mexico); Mr. Roland Adjovi Sètondji (Benin) and Mr. Vladimir Tochilovsky (Ukraine). Learn more, log on to:  http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Detention/Pages/WGADIndex.aspx

The UN Working Groups are part of what is known as the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council. Special Procedures, the largest body of independent experts in the UN Human Rights system, is the general name of the Council’s independent fact-finding and monitoring mechanisms that address either specific country situations or thematic issues in all parts of the world. Special Procedures’ experts work on a voluntary basis; they are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their work. They are independent from any government or organization and serve in their individual capacity.

The Universal Declaration on Human Rights: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Library/Pages/UDHR.aspx
The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights:
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CCPR.aspx.

In a public statement, the expert panel called on the Swedish and British authorities to end Julian Assange’s deprivation of liberty, respect his physical integrity and freedom of movement, and afford him the right to compensation.

Mr. Assange, detained first in prison then under house arrest, took refuge in Ecuador’s London embassy in 2012 after losing his appeal to the UK’s Supreme Court against extradition to Sweden, where a judicial investigation was initiated against him in connection with allegations of sexual misconduct. However, he was not formally charged.

“The Working Group on Arbitrary Detention considers that the various forms of deprivation of liberty to which Julian Assange has been subjected constitute a form of arbitrary detention,” said Seong-Phil Hong, who currently heads the expert panel.

“The Working Group maintains that the arbitrary detention of Mr. Assange should be brought to an end, that his physical integrity and freedom of movement be respected, and that he should be entitled to an enforceable right to compensation,” Mr. Hong added.

In its official Opinion, the Working Group considered that Mr. Assange had been subjected to different forms of deprivation of liberty: initial detention in Wandsworth Prison in London, followed by house arrest and then confinement at the Ecuadorean Embassy.

According to a press release issued by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the experts also found that the detention was arbitrary because Mr. Assange was held in isolation at Wandsworth Prison, and because a lack of diligence by the Swedish Prosecutor’s Office in its investigations resulted in his lengthy loss of liberty.

The Working Group further established that this detention violates two articles of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and six articles of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Environment East Gippsland shouldn’t be forced down this costly road but they are … and it works! If anyone would like to share in this winning strategy you can send us a few bob so they can keep it going. Donations are tax-deductible (but we understand if people have thin piggy banks after Xmas). EEG has quite a few large bills to pay now. But their work isn’t over yet! Please drink a toast to all the players tonight – the EEG lawyers, the risk taking EEG team, and the GECO and FFRC surveyors – what a force! You can donate here.

Thursday 4th Feb 2015: Legal action forces VicForests to survey

Action taken by Environment East Gippsland and their lawyers, Environmental Justice Australia, has resulted in VicForests today agreeing to halt logging and survey for rare wildlife and plants in a stand of East Gippsland’s forests rich in threatened species.

“Sadly, since mid-January and while negotiations have been going on, VicForests continued to clearfell this amazingly valuable forest where four rare and threatened wildlife and two plant species were discovered by volunteer surveyors” said Jill Redwood from EEG. “It’s a shame that so much has been destroyed in this time, in an area that clearly should have been surveyed by trained biologists before the chainsaws moved in.”

The species recorded in the Kuark forest about 30km NE of Orbost, were the Long-footed Potoroo, Yellow-bellied Gliders, a new species of galaxias fish that only occurs in Kuark, a likely new, as yet undescribed species of crayfish, and two rare plants that should have 250m Special Management Zones applied.

“We have to wonder what gems we have lost over the years because the state government’s logging company calls the shots on whether an area should have a survey before it is clearfelled and burnt.”

“Sadly, Minister Neville’s Environment Department consistently refuse to order VicForests to survey for rare and threatened flora and fauna in areas slated for logging, so it’s left up to community groups to engage lawyers” said Felicity Millner of Environmental Justice Australia.

“We welcome this belated action by VicForests in this instance” said Ms Millner.

“We will be watching closely how their actions are carried out and are leaving our options open at this stage”, said Jill Redwood.

Malls and “destination” shopping are something I avoid, but I found myself in a retail center on January 2 to exchange a gift for another size. (My dislike for the mall world is such that if the transaction could have been handled online, I would have.) The relative tranquility in Los Angeles between the Christmas and New Year holiday due to significantly fewer people in town was gone by then, and the mall parking lot traffic lanes were filled by vehicles with nowhere to move – complete gridlock in a parking lot. Find original article here.

Maria Fotopoulos is a Californians for Population Stabilisation (CAPS) Senior Writing Fellow. This article was first published on Janurary 7, 2016.

Alas, the enjoyment of a much less crowded, less populated L.A. and the hope that rides in with a New Year quickly dissipated. Back to reality!

For us at CAPS, that means back to the issues that challenge us – overimmigration and overpopulation. As I sat in gridlock, my mind started running through ideas on how to better get the word out about what it means for the U.S., and the world, to continue on the path of growth. Something we often discuss is the importance of getting more people of like-mind about these issues engaging their family, friends and colleagues with information and facts.

There are many myths that still are bandied about as truth about immigration and overpopulation. A few of the most common myths are:

All of the people on the planet fit in Texas (or the Grand Canyon).
We are a nation of immigrants; we’re all immigrants except for American Indians.
Immigrants – illegal or not – are needed to do the work Americans won’t do.
Racism is the motivation behind limiting immigration.
Economic well-being depends on growth; illegal immigrants strengthen the U.S. economy.

In general conversation, be prepared to be a myth buster this year when you see these myths arise and when you read or hear inaccuracies from elected officials, politicians and the media (call, email and/or post on their social media pages).

CAPS has prepared responses to these myths here, and below.

All of the people on the planet fit in Texas (or the Grand Canyon).

Indeed, technically, they would, although extremely uncomfortably. In fact, all of the people on the planet can fit on home plate; we just need to stack them 7.3 billion high.

But, of course, it’s not about space, and it never has been.

The impact of humans, our ecological footprint, extends far beyond our living space. We build highways, homes, shopping centers, power plants and more. We drill for oil in the land and sea. We use forests, meadows, grasslands and deserts. In fact, we use 40 percent of the planet’s land just to produce food for humans, and we consume an additional 12 million acres for agriculture each year. The result is less space for other critters. Scientists say our planet is now in the sixth mass extinction of plants and animals, caused this time not by crashing asteroids, but by human activity, primarily the depletion of habitat for other species.

Beyond the environmental degradation, what do we gain from an ever-growing population? What can humanity accomplish with 9 or 10 billion souls that it cannot achieve with 7 billion? More people results in more crowding which means less open space and a lower quality of life. Who needs that?

We are a nation of immigrants; we’re all immigrants except for American Indians.

We are a nation of immigrants – as are all nations of the world – if one examines an appropriate period of history. No one on this planet can trace her or his ancestry back the 200,000 years of human existence within the confines of a present nation-state. American Indians, like all Americans, like all peoples of the world, are descendants of immigrants. Their ancestors immigrated across the Bering Strait at some point in history. The fact that various peoples have migrated at various times in history offers us little insight into how to manage migration in a modern world of nation-states on a crowded planet of more than 7 billion people. America has the world’s most generous immigration policy, but no country in the world allows unlimited immigration.

Moreover, we are largely a nation of native-born citizens, a nation governed by the laws we enact. Until this current surge, each wave of high immigration was followed by a period of low immigration. From 1925 to 1970 – a period in which the United States overcame the Great Depression and fought and prevailed in WWII – immigration to this country averaged only 200,000 per year. Since then, Congress has raised the level to 1 million per year, not including illegal immigration. The 2013 Senate immigration bill (S.744) would have increased that even more significantly, by another 50 percent.

A lax immigration policy might have made sense in 1900 when the U.S. population was 76 million and there was plenty of open space. It makes no sense in this century when America – the third most populous nation after China and India?– has a population that is more than four times as high at 323 million (per U.S. Population Clock, January 2016).

Immigrants – illegal or not – are needed to do the work Americans won’t do.

Anytime someone says, “Immigrants do work Americans won’t do,” ask that individual to finish the sentence – “Immigrants do work that Americans won’t do AT THE WAGES OFFERED.” The solution to labor shortages is to increase wages, not to import cheap, foreign labor. That is how a market economy works. That is what built the American middle class. Massive immigration has flooded the labor market, contributing to 40 years of wage stagnation in America. Since the 2007 recession, all the employment gains have gone to immigrants. The number of native-born Americans working remains well below 2007 levels.

A similar argument is, “We need illegal immigrants for farm work. Otherwise, lettuce would cost $5.00.” A study by Philip Martin, agricultural economist at UC-Davis, found that labor costs comprise only 6 percent of the price consumers pay for fresh produce. Thus, if agribusiness increased farm wages by 40 percent, enough to bring in native workers, and if all the costs were passed on to consumers, the cost to the average household would be about $8 a year. That $1.15 lettuce would be $1.18, not $5.00.

Racism is the motivation behind limiting immigration.

It’s the modern American way – when you are losing an argument, call your opponent a racist. The fact is that hundreds of millions of people from all over the globe, including millions from Europe, would like to immigrate to America. A Gallup poll found 3 million just in the UK, yet you don’t hear groups of British-Americans saying, “Let my people in.” The paramount issue of immigration policy is the how many, not the who. Massive immigration leads to a strain on resources and society, regardless of who they are.

In 1999, Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal ruled that its constitution allowed 1.6 million mainland Chinese to immigrate to Hong Kong. The Hong Kong government immediately asked China to overrule the court. In 2014, Swiss voters approved a referendum to place immigration quotas on European Union citizens. The very European citizens of Switzerland – the country has four official languages?– opted out of the EU’s free movement of people policy.

Chinese limiting the immigration of Chinese, Europeans limiting the immigration of Europeans – it probably isn’t about racism. But the racial ambulance-chasers aren’t interested in such inconvenient facts.

Economic well-being depends on growth; illegal immigrants strengthen the U.S. economy.

Population growth and immigration increase population size, which increases total GDP, but that does not increase per capita GDP. It seems that many reporters and politicians failed high school math and cannot understand this simple distinction. For instance, one often reads a glowing economic report that the U.S. gained 100,000 jobs last month, ignoring that the country’s population grew by 200,000.

Economics is hardly a precise science, and economists still are debating the cause of the Great Recession. With an annual economy in the U.S. of $17 trillion, immigration is not a major driver of economic issues, and its impact on the economy should not form the core of the debate about immigration. Still, several prestigious studies have repudiated the “growth is good” economic argument:

An OECD study of 27 industrialized countries found that, on average, the fiscal impact of immigration was slightly negative. The U.S. was among those countries where immigration had a negative fiscal impact.
A UC-Berkeley demographer and University of Hawaii economist concluded, “Encouraging more childbearing today would make everyday Americans worse off now and in the future.
The Heritage Foundation found that the amnesty of the Senate bill “would generate a lifetime fiscal deficit (total benefits minus total taxes) of $6.3 trillion.

While there is debate about the economic impact of immigration-driven population growth, it is clear who suffers most. Harvard Professor George Borjas, described by both?Business Week and The Wall Street Journal?as “America’s leading immigration economist,” put it succinctly, “Affluent Americans gain; poor Americans lose.” Massive immigration floods the labor market, increasing unemployment and depressing wages for low-income workers. During the recessionary years of 2010-2013, unemployment in the U.S. averaged 8.5 percent. In the low immigration countries of Germany and Japan, it averaged 5.9 and 4.5 percent, respectively.

If you bust some immigration myths this year, please let us know!

Wednesday 3rd February marks the 19th anniversary of an agreement that has allowed the logging industry a legal exemption from Australia’s environment laws. Jill Redwood from Environment East Gippsland, where this exemption from commonwealth laws was first introduced says the Turnbull government is planning to instate another 20 years of this special treatment. When the agreement between the state and federal govt was signed, EGipp was promised a multi-million dollar economic boost – 400 new jobs – a bright future. There were 20 sawmills at the time – it’s now down to 5. It employs less than 0.05% of the regional workforce. The joint MR of 3rd Feb 1997 promised world class protection of old growth and biodiversity – both of which have declined rapidly in that time.
“We have one more year before this archaic agreement expires. To continue this out-dated, anti-environmental exemption to the laws for a passé and declining industry is deplorable”.

“Being exempt from environmental laws has caused the status of many forest dependent wildlife to take a nose dive. Some are now critically endangered, like the Leadbeaters Possum (Victoria’s faunal emblem) and the Swift Parrot while others like our Gliders are being added to threatened species lists”.

“We need to make native forest logging accountable” said Jill Redwood. “It’s time to bring it in line with other Australian industries and strip its preferential treatment. It has had 19 years of immunity from the law at great cost to our forests and the public purse”.

“Such critical wildlife habitat is worth far more standing than as a cheap export commodity. Our timber needs are 85% supplied by tree plantations. This is where the jobs and security for the industry is”.

“Over the past 19 years our forests in East Gippsland and across the country have been systematically clearfelled, mostly sold cheaply to overseas pulp and paper factories”.

“It’s time to set in place a new phase of valuing forests, keeping them upright and onshore for the many values they provide for Australia”.

"God, Sydney’s just unmanageable now. The traffic is beyond control. The roads just can’t cope! I’m not against growth but there’s not enough room on our roads for all the traffic!”

The young woman was inviting her friend in Melbourne to visit her in Sydney.

“We have the same problems here." her friend replied. "The traffic is so terrible that if you head off to do something in a particular suburb, chances are you will have to change your plans due to traffic. You never know really where you are going to end up. One night recently I needed to cross to the other side of the city to meet friends for dinner and I had to just give up and go home. I didn’t even make it to the city, let alone out the other side. I was in gridlock. Of course, I’m not against growth either. How could one question it with all the benefits even though, I must admit, it’s hard to see what they are.”

"I do wonder myself," her friend from Sydney mused. "But they say we must have it." She continued: “They’re constructing a new major road in Sydney for the traffic overflow and people have had to sell their houses to the government and, you know, they don’t even get market prices for them! I’m not against growth but…"

"Yes, it’s the same here in Melbourne. Houses belonging to people who had lived in them for 60 years were acquired by the government to make way for a new tollway but then, with the change of government, it did not go ahead. It was too late for some people as they had moved on but many were very relieved to be able to stay. But then they will have to go through it all again with another change of government as the Libs are determined to build it. If or when it is built it will go right through Royal Park which will be a terrible pity, it will wreck it, actually."

" Oh that's terrible to put it through a park, although I'm not totally surprised."

"I don't live near Royal Park, but it is still upsetting. Nearer to home most of the houses in my area that come up for sale are bought by developers. Then they're demolished and replaced with high density living. We're even getting high rise towers. No wonder parking in the local shopping centre is almost impossible now! But that’s progress isn’t it? And neither of us is against growth.”

"No of course not!! But the same problem afflicts our suburb in Sydney. All the gardens near us have gone. We used to have lots of birds but we see very few now. I used to really enjoy hearing them in the morning. It’s sad but I guess we have to live without a few things we used to enjoy. Oh well, we can’t have things all our own way I suppose and you can't stand in the way of growth."

“I guess it’s all very well for us to say this but what about the kids? There are not enough schools in and around Melbourne and what about the poor train and tram commuters? The trains are terribly overcrowded, by about 50% over maximum capacity. It can’t be healthy to be crammed in like that.”

“Yes it’s the same in Sydney. It’s really not as nice a place to live in as it was when I arrived from London with my parents 12 years ago.”

“Well if it’s anything like Melbourne, it will have grown by about a million people since then. They have to be packed in somewhere!”

"I guess our family have been part of all this! Oh well, at least we subtracted a family of five from London but then London’s kept growing too! Where will it end? What will it be like in 50 years? “

"It’s too far ahead to think about really, but it’s happening so fast in Melbourne and we can see it happening. Maybe we don’t have to worry about 50 years from now but we sure as hell need to worry about five or ten years from now! Already it’s not as good as it was when I was a kid and it sounds as though it was much more free and easy when my parents were young and Melbourne was not so huge”

The two young women pause , deep in thought for a moment.

“If things are not getting better in Melbourne and they certainly are not in Sydney, then something is wrong!"

Neither of us opposes growth but this actually seems to be the problem! What do you have when you don’t have growth? How does that work?"

(Both together) "Oh God! This is doing my head in!”

"Don’t worry about it now , let’s go and have a drink and start planning your trip to Sydney. Oh!! that’s where this whole discussion began wasn’t it?!”

A growing number of French people own their own homes. Ownership runs at 64% today, and is expected to grow to 68% in the next six years. France is well behind other European countries though in home ownership. The champions are in Eastern Europe. 96% of people own their own homes in Romania. 70% own their own homes in Italy. Seven out of ten French home owners have entirely paid off their home loan. For people purchasing today, the average time to pay off a home is 17 years. This is a situation to dream of for Australian home-buyers, who are only second to Hong Kong's in suffering under a terrible system. The French system discourages land-speculation in a number of ways which therefore deter the flourishing of a malignant property and growth lobby there. This article is based on a France2 news item "L'achat immobilier, une valeur sure plébiscitée par les Français," 29 January 2016.

Five million people in France own more than one property. 700,000 own more than four properties. Bricks and mortar are the preferred investment - more than the National savings account (le Livret A), bank shares, life insurance or gold.

Over the past 15 years, French property values have risen by 62%. [Ed. This is considered to be very high in France, although does not of course compare to Australian or Hong Kong prices. It is a testimony to the underlying stability of the French housing market. See Sheila Newman, The Growth Lobby in Australia and its Absence in France, (Chapter 3 and ff) to understand why.] So, for the French, housing - mostly for rental purposes - is considered a good investment [Ed. even though rents have been reregulated by the State recently, at least in Paris].

The most numerous investors are those who rent their homes out for short-term rental, typically via AirB&B or similar. There are regulations to limit this practice to four months maximum a year. Beyond that permits are required by local government. Profits must be declared but abuses are frequent. Hotels criticise these businesses because they compete with them but don't pay the same taxes and are not subject to the same social responsibilities. Careers are evolving in managing multiple sublets of this kind and in servicing them financially.

A frank discussion about the consequences of Merkel's open borders on Denmark, with a number of references to the Australian system for processing refugees. Note, however, that refugees do not usually achieve permanent resettlement in Europe, whereas they usually do in Australia. When European governments talk about taking in refugees, they are talking about a temporary situation. In this interview Oksana Boyko of RT asks Ft. Anders Vistisen about the Danish plan to confiscate valuables from refugee applicants to pay for their costs and how many more refugees can Denmark accept. Why is Denmark moving refugees to rural camps? Won't that detract from their integration?

You stay, you pay Ft. Anders Vistisen, Danish member of the European Parliament

"As spring approaches, refugee flows from the Middle East into Europe are expected to intensify, putting Europe in a race against time to get a handle on the refugee challenge. Is a collective solution still possible or will EU members have to go their separate ways? To discuss that, Oksana is joined by Anders Vistisen, a Danish member of the European Parliament." (Introduction to program.)

Four months ago, France committed to taking 30,700 refugees over two years, but after four months only 62 refugees have been sent from the processing centres. The European Union planned on 11 reception centers in the 'hotspots' of Italy and Greece, but there are only 4 functioning ones. Seven countries voted against the redistribution of immigrants by the EU and one is taking the EU to court for breaching the rights of national parliaments and the European parliament itself. Greece says it was depending on other EU countries sending reinforcements to its coastguard, but so far, the number of reinforcements has been minute, with France far in the lead. This article is a translation of a news item from France 2 and the illustrations are taken from that item. (Translation by Sheila Newman)

L'oeil du 20h [France2, 8pm News special] of 27 January 2016, puts European cohesion in the face of migrants to the test. One news item chases the next and we forget quickly. Four months ago, Europe came to an agreement on how to redistribute 160,000 migrants. Where are we with this today?

In order to solve the migrant crisis, Europe decreed a general mobilisation. Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission (9 September 2015) said: Enough poetry, enough rhetoric. We have to act now."

This was more than four months ago. Did the 28 countries of the European Union act on this emergency plan? A year ago, a million migrants have crossed the Mediteranean, but the European Plan only concerns a small proportion of them. The 28 member countries have two years to allocate 160,000 refugees originating from three countries, Syria, Iraq and Eritrea.

A the end of 4 months, only 414 have been allocated in accordance with the plan. How can this be explained? First problem, according to our understanding, one quarter of member countries of the EU have not allocated any place for this refugeee program.

Austria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Hungary, Estonia and Slovakia. Special mention for Slovakia, which actually issued a complaint [against immigrant quotas to the EU Court of Justice] [1] against the plan to redistribute refugees.

And is France playing the game? Our country committed to opening the doors to 30,700 refugees over two years. State of play after 4 months: Only 62 people have been taken. That's not much, but, according to the Minister of the Interior, [2] France is waiting for the EU to allocate more to it.

GOVERNMENT SPOKESPERSON FOR THE MINISTER OF THE INTERIOR: "Over the last three months we have indicated that we have more than 900 places that could be used. But today the number of arrivals is very much less than the capacity we have."

REPORTER: So you are being sent fewer people than France ...

GOVERNMENT SPOKESPERSON FOR THE MINISTER OF THE INTERIOR: Than the number we could take.

REPORTER: So the problem lies upstream in what Europe calls 'the Hotspots' - those redistribution centers where the immigrants are registered and orientated. The European Plan required eleven in the two countries on the front lines: Italy and Greece. There are only four functioning ones, however: three in Italy and one in Greece.

Why such a delay in a country where 80 per cent of refugees arrive? We contacted the Greek Minister for the Interior. He puts the blame back on his European partners.

GREEK MINISTER OF THE INTERIOR: We need more coast guards. ... Help from European countries is taking too long to arrive.

REPORTER: It's true that seven countries have sent no money to help processing function in the 'hotspots'. Other countries have only sent reinforcements that could be counted on one hand. Four agents from Belgium, only two from Finland. France, at 59, has sent the most.

Ten days ago, Jean-Claude Junker called European countries to order: "Each week 1200 more immigrants arrive in Greece. We need to begin implementing the emergency plan. While we are waiting, the people-smugglers are prospering.

Original article accompanying filmed report

Crise des migrants, l'Europe en fait-elle assez ?

Source: http://blog.francetvinfo.fr/oeil-20h/ ( If you don't find it, seek the title with the date: 27 January 2016.)

Pour résoudre la crise des migrants, l'Europe a décrété la mobilisation générale. Il y a un peu plus de quatre mois, le président de la Commission européenne, Jean-Claude Juncker exhortait les pays membres de l'UE à "agir, maintenant." Nous avons voulu comparer les efforts réalisés par les 28 pays membres.

Depuis un an, un peu plus d'un million de migrants ont traversé la Méditerranée. Le plan européen ne concerne qu'une petite partie d'entre eux, soit 160 000 réfugiés originaires de Syrie, d'Irak et d'Erythrée. Au bout de quatre mois, seuls 414 migrants ont été accueillis dans le cadre de ce programme. Comment l'expliquer ?

Soixante-deux personnes accueillies en France

Premièrement, un quart des Etats-membres n'ont à ce jour prévu aucune place d'accueil pour les réfugiés de ce programme. C'est le cas de l'Autriche, la Croatie, la République-Tchèque, le Danemark, la Hongrie, l'Estonie et la Slovénie. La Slovaquie a même déposé un recours contre le plan de répartition.

Qu'en est-il de la France ? Notre pays s’est engagé à ouvrir ses portes à 30 700 réfugiés sur deux ans. Mais au bout de 4 mois, seulement 62 personnes ont été accueillies. C’est peu, mais selon le ministère de l’Intérieur, la France attend que l’Europe lui en confie plus.

Le problème se situerait donc en amont, dans ce que l’Europe appelle des “hotspots”, ces centres de répartition où sont enregistrés et orientés les migrants. Le plan européen en prévoit 11 dans les deux pays qui se trouvent en première ligne : l’Italie et la Grèce. Mais seuls quatre de ces "hotspots" fonctionnent : trois en Italie et seulement un en Grèce. Le ministre de l'intérieur grec rejette la faute sur ses partenaires européens. Il n'a pas tort. Sept pays n’ont dépêché aucun agent pour faire fonctionner les "hotspots". D’autres états se sont contentés d’envoyer des renforts qui se comptent sur les doigts d’une main : 4 pour la Belgique et seulement 2 pour la Finlande. La France, elle en a dépêché 59. Soit presque autant de réfugiés qui ont été accueillis.

Il y a 10 jours, Jean-Claude Juncker a rappelé à l’ordre les Pays européens. Chaque semaine, 12 000 migrants supplémentaires arrivent en Grèce. Il y a urgence à ce que démarre le plan d’urgence. Car en attendant, ce sont les filières clandestines qui prospèrent.

NOTES

[1] http://www.rts.ch/info/monde/7303341-la-slovaquie-depose-un-recours-en-justice-contre-les-quotas-de-migrants.html "Request that the EU decision be annuled. 'The decision was adopted via a majority of voices, despite the opposition of some member countries,' explained Robert Fico. 'We are asking the ocurt to annule the decision, to declare it invalid, and to oblige the Council to pay the court costs,' he continued. 'We consider also that this case represents an attack on the rights of national parliaments and on the European Parliament,' he added.

[2] [France does not have a Ministry for Immigration; immigrants are usually processed regionally via local Prefectures- Candobetter.net Editor.]

January 26 2016: A parasite which kills thousands of people each year in sub-Saharan Africa arose comparatively recently, and its unusual sex life may lead to its own extinction, scientists have found. Researchers from the University of Glasgow’s Wellcome Trust Centre for Molecular Parasitology in the Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine have discovered that Trypanosoma brucei gambiense (T.b. gambiense), the main parasite that causes African Sleeping Sickness, has existed for thousands of years without reproducing sexually.

In a study, published today in the journal eLife, the researchers describe how sequencing the genomes of a large collection of T.b. gambiense has revealed that the parasite population today is made up entirely of asexual clones descended from a single ancestor.

Originally an animal parasite, T.b. gambiense ‘jumped’ into the human population within the last 10,000 years, at a time when livestock farming was developing in West Africa. The parasite is transmitted to humans by the bite of tsetse flies. Once in the bloodstream, T.b. gambiense can lie dormant for months or years without causing symptoms. Infected people suffer increasing damage to their nervous system, until they eventually lapse into a coma—the symptom which gives sleeping sickness its name.

The study’s lead author, Dr Willie Weir, said: “We’ve discovered that the parasite causing African Sleeping Sickness has existed for thousands of years without having sex and is now suffering the consequences of this strategy.

“An organism’s genetic blueprint is encoded in DNA packaged within structures called chromosomes. Most organisms have two copies of each chromosome and, through sexual reproduction, the DNA within the chromosomes can recombine randomly, in effect shuffling the deck of DNA cards.

“This process generates genetic diversity and, through natural selection, undesirable combinations and mutations are eliminated from the population, promoting long-term survival of the species.

“However, some organisms appear not to have sex at all. Evolutionary theory predicts that they should face extinction in the long-term and that a lack of sexual recombination should leave a characteristic genetic ‘signature’ in their DNA. While being theoretically predicted for almost 20 years, evidence for this signature has been elusive.”

The team’s research has shown that T.b. gambiense arose from a single individual parasite within the last ten millennia and, over time, mutations have accumulated on each chromosome copy.

Dr Annette MacLeod, senior author on the paper, added: “Because of a lack of sexual recombination, each copy has evolved independently of the other—a phenomenon called the ‘Meselson effect’. We have detected the first conclusive evidence of this effect in any organism at the genome-wide level.

“Essentially, the parasite compensates for its lack of sex by overwriting mutations through ‘copying and pasting’ DNA from one chromosome to another. However, our study suggests that this can only go some way to compensating for a lack of sex. Theoretically, this parasite species cannot survive indefinitely without sex and the predicted consequence of this is that it will become extinct in the long-term.

“In the near to medium term, though, identifying this weakness in the parasite could help researchers find ways to develop new forms of treatment for sleeping sickness which build on our findings. For example, the inability of individuals to share genetic information with each other could hamper the ability of the organism to develop resistance to multiple drugs.”

The paper, titled ‘Population genomics reveals the origin and asexual evolution of human infective trypanosomes’, is published in eLife and is available from http://elifesciences.org. The research was funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Back in 1788 on 26th January, the First Fleet of British Ships arrived at Port Jackson, New South Wales, having landed a few days earlier at Botany Bay. The British flag was raised right there at Port Jackson by Governor Arthur Phillip and the previous inhabitants were summarily and officially dispossessed. The First Fleet comprised six convict ships lead by two Royal Navy escort ships. There are varying accounts of the number of convicts who arrived in the First Fleet but I conclude after looking at a number of relevant sites that over 700 convicts arrived of whom about a quarter were female.

Whose celebration?

There are two aspects of "Australia Day" that inhibit me from feeling euphoric about this date and what it commemorates. In a way, it’s a story of defeat for many people involved. It was a transfer of ownership and the beginning of the colonisation of a whole continent This defeat included my own ancestors, who arrived mainly from Ireland, Scotland and Wales in the first half of the nineteenth century, forced out by inadequate opportunities in their lands of origin and aided by their own adventurousness.

Australian ecology trashed despite its attraction for brilliant natural scientists

For the incumbent population of the continent, of course this beginning was and remains an unmitigated disaster, for which the term genocide can be used without reservation. The day also marks the beginning of environmental interference and degradation on a massive scale and the extinction of unique species. This environmental ruination occurred despite the fact that naturalists, including Joseph Banks and Charles Darwin, had valued Australia’s fauna and flora so highly that they travelled to the ends of the Earth to study it.

Environmental destruction is an ongoing and accelerating disaster for the continent. In the last 200 years woodlands, grasslands and forests on a massive scale have been destroyed, or modified for human use http://jpe.oxfordjournals.org/content/5/1/109.full. Precious rivers on the driest inhabited content have been dammed (Snowy Mountain Scheme) and siphoned off for irrigation (Murray Darling river system) all for human use - agriculture, energy and mining. There is even talk of turning the north of Australia into “the food bowl of Asia.” Imagine the wreckage to natural systems that this will entail!

Public misinformed on priorities

As an academic paper states (see above reference), information on the decline of Australia’s environment is documented in piecemeal fashion in local state of the environment reports. It should be news which is broadcast to us as an emergency but instead we must go searching for it. This does not make it any the less true or any the less dire for the people who live here now and who will live here in the future. It is equally as or more important for the public to know about as the road toll or the latest murder.

Australia’s beginning as a modern nation was sad or devastating for many, exciting for some, and for others a mixture of both. Should not the celebration of an “Australia Day” be postponed to such a time as when Australia actually becomes a place that takes care of all on board? We are a long way from this simple but essential notion. It would seem that the original inhabitants were far more advanced in this direction, living close to nature and although having their own impact, taking far better care than those who literally took over.

We cannot reverse what has already happened, but can only affect things from today onwards and hopefully in the right direction.

Postpone Australia Day until we really have something to celebrate

Let’s postpone the national day of celebration to one when a future Australian government makes some important decisions. I suggest the following: to salvage a sustainable future from the jaws of environmental destruction, to give the Aboriginal people the means for self determination, to eradicate homelessness, to put in place an environmentally sustainable population policy as a matter of priority and to make science the most important decision adviser in national and local decision making.

Then will have a day that all of us can celebrate.

Videos inside: These films are dated 21 January 2016. They show successful attempts by the Syrian government to make Syria safe again. The government has been able to reconcile with 'rebel groups' that recognise that war is tearing their country apart. Refugee activists please take note. Nearly the biggest problem that Syrians continue to face is the refusal by US-NATO and its allies, such as Australia, to recognise that we must all work with the Syrian Government to make Syria safe. Because of these evil US-NATO policies, it is most unlikely that these positive developments will be promoted in the Australian media, if they are transmitted at all. So, please send these films round to everyone you know, to help end this war and place pressure on western governments to stop intervening.

Getting back to a normal life in Al-Hussinieh

Getting back to a normal life in Al-Hussinieh

Al-Hussinieh was the first quarter in Damascus and its countryside to witness a reconciliation which allowed its residents to return and live there.

The reconciliation process took 3 months to be achieved, and it followed a bloody three-year war in the village which led locals to evacuate it, because of the clashes between the Syrian army and armed groups, but now, after the reconciliation, life is gradually getting back to normal.

100s of displaced families return home in southern Damascus

Hundreds of displaced Syrians have been able to return to their homes in a district in southern Damascus. This comes as part of a reconciliation deal between the Syrian government and foreign-backed militants. Press TV’s Mohamad Ali has more on the story from the Syrian capital. [1]

US-NATO policies in Middle East threaten whole populations and societies

As mentioned in the first paragraph, nearly the biggest problem that Syrians continue to face is the refusal by US-NATO and its allies, such as Australia, to recognise that we must all work with the Syrian Government to make Syria safe.

Unfortunately there are many signs that US-NATO actually wants to completely destroy Syria in crimes that would, without exaggeration, dwarf Hitler's 'final solution'. Despite US-NATO's irreversible destruction of Iraqi and Libyan society, the Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, has recently agreed with the criminally destructive US-NATO desire to subdivide secular Syria into many different religious and ethnic models.

To her credit, shadow foreign affairs minister, Tania Plibersek has said what a bad idea this is, that:

"The prospect of of partitioning Syria or Iraq, or redrawing its boundaries to reflect the sectarian divisions already consuming the country, was easier said than done and would likely result in fresh fighting.[...] “There are generations of ­people who have grown up with an identity as a Syrian or an Iraqi,’’ Ms Plibersek said. “Recent polls confirm many people feel a sense of national identity and feel the conflict is soluble.’’ For that reason, Ms Plibersek said, talk of redrawing borders was unhelpful at this stage of the conflict. “While the borders are reasonably modern constructs, opening the possibility of redrawing borders is not likely to reduce conflict,’’ she said. “New conflicts would emerge about where these borders were drawn.’’ Source:"Tanya Plibersek rejects Bob Carr’s Syria plan."

NOTES, SOURCES, LINKS FOR LIVE REPORTS ETC

[1]
Watch Live: http://www.presstv.ir/live.html
Twitter: http://twitter.com/PressTV
LiveLeak: http://www.liveleak.com/c/PressTV
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/PRESSTV
Google+: http://plus.google.com/+VideosPTV
Instagram: http://instagram.com/presstvchannel
SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/videosptv

[2]
Read More http://me-channel.com/

Join Telegram Channel: https://telegram.me/MEClive

The assault and robbery of scores of women in Cologne on New Year's Eve, allegedly perpetrated by groups of migrants, has fanned the flames of the refugee crisis in Europe. And while European leaders introduce stricter measures to deal with offending asylum seekers, many are questioning the wisdom of the policies that brought them there. What's behind the seemingly increasing wave of violence by migrants and is the predominantly male migration skewing the European demographic profile, thereby predisposing its societies to even more crime? Oksana is joined by Valerie Hudson, a Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University, to explore these issues.

This article, including the embedded video, was originally published on RT/Worlds Apart as Cologne-ising Europe? Ft. Valerie Hudson, Professor of Political Science, Texas A&M University (21/1/16). This republication includes additional text.

Among some other fascinating observations, the interview asks, "How could Sweden, how could Germany, do this to its women?" It is well-known that sex-ratio imbalance has multiple negative consequences. It is often a consequence of wars and invasions, but rarely do you have an influx as in Germany, where the sex ratio has been altered so radically so quickly, with such a sudden mostly male wave of immigrants.

Sunday 14 Feb 2016 at 12-12.30pm: Mark Allen of Population Permaculture and Planning asks: Is it possible to accommodate a growing population without unacceptably high density living and urban sprawl? If so, what rate of population growth should we be looking at and what types of community should we be creating? This workshop discusses the merits of village style living in combination with permaculture principles and asks the question, where do we go from here?

Sunday 14 Feb 2016 at 12.30-1pm: Mark O’Connor, co-author of Overloading Australia, will look at why environmentalism is almost meaningless when there is no plan to limit growth of population, why this issue is often ignored, and what a better form of environmentalism could and should do. What are humane and practical ways to limit Australia’s and the world’s population? (Sustainable Population Australia - Victorian Branch (SPA Victoria) organised this event.)
http://www.slf.org.au/event/population-permaculture/Sustainable Population Australia presents 

POPULATION, PERMACULTURE AND PLANNING

Permaculture based sustainable planning