Comments

The use of such a catastrophically dangerous technology as nuclear power should not have even been been contemplated in the first place, unless it was to have been under the control of an open and publicly accountable body with no ability to profit from cutting corners.

Such a body would have been owned and controlled by the same people who were to consume nuclear power and who are now imperiled as a result of the mismanagement of that technology. If the managers of the nuclear power stations, under the control of such bodies, had been made fully accountable to the public they served and had no ability to conceal vital information from those working in the industry or the broader public, it is possible that the nuclear failure might have been considerably less catastrophic than it turned out as a result of the natural disasters faced by Japan in recent weeks.

Whether even a power generation utility, fully owned and controlled by the public in an open and accountable democratic political system, would still be able to reduce, to an acceptable level, the peril that would be faced by the Japanese in the event of any likely calamity, natural natural or man-made, would be hard to know. However, removing from the hands of private companies particularly the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), whose callous cutting of corners has resulted in the threat to the lives and health of tens of millions of Japanese living in the near vicinity of the Fukushima reactors, would be a necessary first step.

Ironically, it seems that Australia's elder 'Labor' statesman, Paul Keating has failed to understand how many Japanese have already paid with their lives and health for having placed public safety responsibility in the hands of private companies, and if the worst were to come of the unfolding disaster the toll could be much higher.

On the night of Tuesday 29 March, the ABC's 7.30 Report made Australians swallow yet another lecture on the supposed necessity and virtues of the "free market" and of privatisation by the same man that imposed "free market" economics on both the Labor Party and the Australian public in 1983, when he became Treasurer in the newly elected Hawke Federal Labor Government, namely Paul Keating.

The title of the story, Keating on Labor's woes, implied that the election of John Robertson, as Leader of the Labor Opposition, a man who publicly opposed the NSW Labor Government's policy of privatising electricity would confine the Labor Party to political oblivion for years to come. The fact that the rank and file of the Labor Party and Trade Union movement and the broader NSW public strongly support Robertson's public opposition to the sell-off of their electricity generating assets was considered irrelevant by Keating, who dismissed it as 'populist'.

A Brisbane woman is suing a luxury United Arab Emirates resort after she was jailed for adultery when she complained of being drugged and raped by three men in Saudi Arabia. The Age 28th March. Ms Gali was drugged and raped by three co-workers in a United Arab Emirates resort, was jailed for "adultery" and served eight months before being "pardoned". Her employer failed to obey the laws and to give her proper induction. Understandably, she is suffering from trauma and a host of psychological pains. Magnanimously, she stated she did not want the incident to be manipulated into an anti-Muslim or anti-Arab attack. Even though the perpetrators weren't from the Middle East, they were collaborators in a system that makes women victims into criminals, to be vilified, imprisoned and punished. Another victim, who was 19 at the time and whose name has not been released, was raped in 2006 in Qatif, a city in the Eastern Province. A Saudi court more than doubled the number of lashes that a female rape victim was sentenced to last year, to 200, after her lawyer appealed against the original sentence. The woman's offence was meeting a former boyfriend, who she had asked to return pictures he had of her because she was about to marry another man. The couple were sitting in a car when a group of seven men kidnapped them and raped them both, lawyers in the case told the Arab News. Shariah law punishes victims of rape, because when a victim reports rape, she admits to sexual intercourse with the accused. Sheik Faiz Mohamad, a graduate of Islamic law and lecturer at an Islamic centre in south-western Sydney. He said in 2005 that women largely bear responsibility for rape if they make themselves an object of sexual desire. He upset many in a religious community still haunted by images and stories of Bosnian refugees being gang-raped during the recent war. There has been little significant response from Muslim community leaders, when condemnation of Faiz's comments should have been swift. Such archaic cultural misogynous laws still exist today, and are completely incompatible with today's human rights, women's equality, and democratic principles. This is why multiculturalism has its limits.

In your article, you said: "After the reactor properly shut down due to the earthquake, the tsunami caused flooding in the power backup and ruined the diesel generators preventing powering the cooling pumps." I assume you are talking about the accident at Fukushima No.1 Power Station on March 11. If you look at my article Japan Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Disaster you will see that my information says the reactor(s) did not shut down properly and that the backup diesel power source ran only for a short time due to lack of fuel. However, four reactors are involved (although reactor 4 was down for maintenance) so perhaps you are right with regard to one of the reactors, but which one. Is it possible for you to tell me which reactor you were referring to and the source of your information. I'd be very happy to know about that. Also, I encourage you to read my article and comment if you would like to do so. Thank you.

Libya: Largest Military Undertaking since the Invasion of Iraq. Towards a Protracted Military Operation by Michael Chossudovsky of Global Research 20 Mar 2011 :

Outright lies by the international media: Bombs and missiles are presented as an instrument of peace and democratization...
This is not a humanitarian operation. The war on Libya opens up a new regional war theater.
There are three distinct war theaters in the Middle East Central Asian region. Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq.
What is unfolding is a fourth US-NATO War Theater in North Africa, with the risk of escalation.
These four war theaters are functionally related, they are part of an integrated US-NATO military agenda. ...

LIBYA-When historical memory is erased - In the square the banners of King Idris wave by Manlio Dinucci also of globalresearch.ca 28 Feb 11 :

Benghazi captured, the rebels have lowered the green flag of the Republic of Libya, hoisting in its place the red, black and green banner with crescent and star: the flag of the monarchy of King Idris. The same flag was hoisted by protesters (including those of the Partito democratico and the Rifondazione comunista) on the gate of the Libyan embassy in Rome, raising the cry: "Here's the flag of democratic Libya, that of King Idris." It was a symbolic act, rich in history and burning current events....

Tim wrote:

That, [David Attenborough] said, was a cause for optimism---we can make that kind of effort again to shift to a sustainable economy, an industrial economy that operates within limits. But where will this economy find enough non-renewable resources to maintain it? Can we run any kind of industrial economy indefinitely?

Whilst there can be no kind of industrial economy that can last indefinitely, I think given the earth's considerable remaining stock of non-renewable natural resources, if we dramatically change the way society is run, then I think there is hope that we may be able to sustain the kind of industrial production which produces truly useful artifacts, such as computers, telecommunications, sewing machines, railway systems, solar energy panels, spades, rakes, wheelbarrows and bicycles, for a little longer.

Whilst we can't hope for a sustainable future without population stability, we could still progress a long way towards the goal of sustainability by reducing humankind's wasteful consumption of non-renewable natural resources.

We must at least remove economic incentives which increase profitability for product manufacturers and retailers, but at the expense of reducing by more than is necessary the natural capital owned, or which should be owned, by human society as a whole as well as future generations. Better still, such practices should be criminalised, if at all possible. Practices, which which we should aim to minimise, include:

• Built-in obsolescence
• Manufacturing tools, items of machinery and other items with similar parts that are non-standard.

At the very least, it should be illegal to manufacture and sell anything, which can't make use of screws, washers, nuts and batteries and electricity outlets with standard sizes and specifications. If this had been done decades ago, the amount of fill in rubbish tips today would be vastly less and our remaining stocks of metals, fossil fuels and other natural capital would be much greater. Items that typically become useless after two or three years, either because they are designed to break down or because it is not possible to replace a missing part, could instead easily have useful lives of at least many decades before they are consigned to the tip. Given that humankind still has considerable remaining stocks of natural capital, it would not be too late even now to adopt such measures to seriously reduce their waste.

We could also vastly reduce the need for so many people to travel as far as they do and as often as they do by better town planning. Why can't governments insist that work locations, shops, schools, entertainment venues and other amenities be put near where people live?

Where people still have to travel a lot, there are many ways in which it is possible to reduce the cost of transport. If a taxi could be driven without a license plate, the prices of which have been driven up to the order of over AU$300,000 by speculative trading (see WA TAXI CAB (Perth) Premium Taxi Plate $315,000 on 24 Mar 11), fares would be low enough to make taxis a more affordable means of transport to many who now own cars as well as allow taxi drivers to earn a decent living in a civilised working week and not have to work in the slave-like conditions that most Australian taxi drivers now work under.

It is excessively hard for people to obtain motorcycle licenses. If motorcycle licenses could be obtained more easily, particularly by people prepared to ride low-powered motorcycles or no-peds, then the number of cars on our roads and the natural capital consumed in their manufactured and use could be dramatically reduced.

Even if we are unable to achieve the goal of population stability and reduction quite as soon as we would wish, adopting measures such as I described above can surely still increase the likelihood of human civilisation becoming sustainable before it strikes catastrophe.

Of course, I am not saying for a minute that we not take every opportunity to argue for population stability, but the fight for sustainability has to be fought on every possible front. If we make less advance than we would wish on one front then at least an advance on another front can only buy us more time.

The article, Questions That Continue To Bedevil Me of 24 Mar 11 by Tim, may be in response to this comment. In the teaser, he has written, "The fight for sustainability cannot be a war fought on all fronts, but a single-minded determination to remove the first stumbling block to solving all other problems."

Bernard Salt's message in his talk on February 12th at the Boroondara Community summit , Hawthorn Town Hall was crystal clear: it would be great and in fact would a community service if empty nesters and widows in the municipality would sell up and leave their homes to make them available for younger people who could avail themselves of the local amenity, especially schools. The strategy appears to be to target ordinary home owners in a campaign to get a lot of movement of property. The technique used in the talk was to illustrate the idea using the iconic "brick veneer" and the repeated image was of a widow "rattling around" in it. "Brick veneers", essential to the lexicon and repertoire of humorist and entertainer Barry Humphries are ordinary houses mostly built in the 1950 and 1960s that everyone used to be able to aspire to but their $ value especially if they are within striking distance of any amenity or service has made them expensive. This is because of the intense competition for housing especially in established Melbourne suburbs due to massive population growth. Salt's focus on the "brick veneer" is a bit like tax- you need to target the masses to get the maximum result. The "brick veneer" rather than the architect designed or historic Edwardian or Victorian homes are symbolic of and house ordinary Australians. An idea illustrated with a visual image -"widows rattling around in brick veneers" is apt to be repeated and get into the vernacular. Eventually those who put out this propaganda don't have to do much more work on the idea on behalf of those they represent. The people themselves, receptive to what they are told take it up as a truism. This is what happened with the suburban backyard. About 20 years ago opinion articles in the main newspapers appeared, moralising about how Australians need to live more compactly and relinquish their love affair with the backyard. A backyard is a very ordinary image. Lots of people had them or aspired to have one complete with "Hills Hoist" (an umbrella shaped outdoor clothes line installation). I noticed soon after the articles appeared in the newspapers that people would parrot this as part of their social exchanges! It became the thing to say at dinner parties after people had exhausted the tedious topic of house prices. To them, somehow, it didn't quite mean they themselves had to move on immediately, but someone else could! This is, in fact, the real "NIMBY", when you unthinkingly latch onto an odious idea and embrace it on behalf of other people.

Francis, thanks for your info and analysis. Despite living here for over 35 years I had never before seen the statistic about Zai-Nichi Koreans and crime. I will check it - not that I doubt you, but it does seem, as you say, unreal. Although I am not living in one of the serious disaster zones, the area where I live, northern Ibaraki Pref., has been quite badly affected. I totally concur with what you say about the lack of looting, whinging and panic. People here have been wonderful, polite, cooperative and helpful! But, it has been that same strong social order that has allowed nuclear power to be introduced into this country, despite the obvious problems I have stated in the comment above, and will probably keep it going for years in the future unless a way can be found to harness current public opinion against nuclear power. Kindly take a look at this article: http://www.nuclearpowerdaily.com/reports/Days_before_quake_plant_operato... Totally outrageous! But I have not yet seen it in the media in Japan!! Strong (undemocratic) social order also has its significant downsides.

When a country has gone from being the world's largest creditor to the world's largest debtor in only 20 years it can no longer afford to re-build. (as above) Assuming that the "solution" to Japan's economic decline is continuing to grow the population is based on ideology and and economic theories. Economics is an ideology, a theoretical system of supply and demand, a method of enabling societies to live and have their lifestyles supported. Economics is the social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Ideas and social sciences are infinite by default and have no limitations. They exist in theories and in mathematical/functional models. However the real world, the world of finite resources, has parameters, boundaries, and people have muiti-dimensional needs and aims that may not coincide with economic growth agendas. A nation, our planet as a whole, has finite resources, and each nation has particular natural and topographical limitations. To continue to add more people, despite inadequate food supplies, inhabitable land areas, inhospitable terrain, declining fish stocks, climate change, energy needs, and simply lack of space would be reckless and misanthropic. Economic ideals of growth should not transcend human welfare, liveability, long term survival, and exacerbate ecological overshoot - as we are already in! People are more than economic units to be exploited, confined and imported for growth. People shouldn't be bred like battery hens or factory pigs. (and these creatures shouldn't either). The tragic recent earthquake and tsunami are examples of limits to growth. We can't assume that our planet is static. It isn't, and is changing. Monolithic man-made structures, forcing people to live in unstable and unsafe areas, would exacerbate tragic outcomes and limit recovery. The need for nuclear power is due to excessive power needs. The Economy should be our servant, not our Master. Economics exists to support human lives, not so humans can support economic growth - as economists seem to think! Economic growth has become an aim rather than a tool, to our detriment. Japan may be the first highly industrial nation to actually be on the route to sustainability. Once their population balances to one of stability, where births equal deaths, they can live comfortably within their environmental and resource limits. They don't have to rebuilt to their previous economic outputs. Until then, economic decline may be a cost they have to endure. They need to rebuild their society, their economy, on a sustainable level - without the easiest, "dumbed-down" way, of perpetual population growth - which means sacrificing long term sustainability, lifestyles and basic survival for short-term economic gains.

I am Tony Boys, the Antony Boys mentioned in Sheila Newman's article. Firstly, I would like to say that I'm a little glad not to be in Sendai as that area was hit by the earthquake+tsunami (hereafter E+T) rather harder than where I am, which is Hitachi Omiya City, Ibaraki Prefecture, about 120km north of Tokyo and close to the Pacific coastline. However, we're about 120km southwestish from the Fukushima No.1 Power Station. This is causing us huge anxiety as it is still not clear (March 21, 0850 JST) whether the four reactors still having problems will be brought under control. Otherwise I fully concur with what Sheila says in her article. It is quite obvious that Andrew MacLeod is using the disaster(s) in Japan to push his own ideological agenda, something that most people would find rather offensive, I think, given the current circumstances in Japan. The population of Japan is a complex subject. I'll try to keep it short. Basically, we have the notion that a larger population would somehow have mitigated the consequences of the E+T and nuclear disasters (or would have made them less serious, or would have made recovery easier, quicker, and so on). I totally disagree and would argue as follows. 1) Flat land suitable for housing and other construction is in short supply in Japan. (Roughly 67% of the land area is forested mountains.) Naturally, this has meant that large areas of land historically thought to be unsuitable for construction have been developed over about the last 100 years or so. This is generally soft/moist land near the sea, lakes and rivers, traditionally used for paddy fields or simply left alone as marshland for common use. Most Japanese people are quite aware of the phenomenon of liquefaction that occurs in association with earthquakes and will avoid building on this kind of land. (The recent earthquake in Christchurch, NZ, is also a very good example of this problem.) Population pressures, though, have made it necessary to do so. This same population pressure on the land has also resulted in more construction on flatlands near the sea, the scenes of most of the horrific disasters in the overall current Japanese E+T disaster. "Tsunami" is, after all, a Japanese word. Everyone here knows that quakes are likely to be followed by tsunamis. We have one fairly big tsunami alert each year or so. People who build and live near the sea, especially along the coast where the really serious disasters have occurred this time, know that they are in danger at all times. This current E+T is reckoned to have been the largest since about 850AD, but it happened! Why do they live or have their businesses there? Basically and simplistically, because there's nowhere else convenient to build. (Fishing infrastructure is an exception, I'll agree.) So would a smaller or a larger population be better? 2) This is the tricky one. Not hard to write a book on this one, so I'll try to restrain myself. How come a country where 50 million people might be the limit for a 'sustainable' lifestyle now has a population of 127 million (and falling very, very slowly)? In the Edo Period, as mentioned in Sheila's article, the population was stable at just over 30 million, but this was after a sharp rise that had resulted in extensive deforestation had effectively capped population growth. Serious famines occurred during this time. Following the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan opened up to the world and trade in food and other commodities became possible. Food (etc.) availability was no longer the limiting factor for population, and Japan joined the race for 'national wealth and military power.' I'm talking about history, not ideology. My mother-in-law's generation (my wife is Japanese, and her mother is now 77) had 8-10 siblings, this being encouraged by the government as, cynically, 'cannon fodder'. The result has been Japan's 20th century history of war, defeat and the only country to be bombed by the atomic bomb, post-war revival and economic growth and development. History. I don't know if Japan ever had the 'choice' to industrialize or not, but given the circumstances of the 20th century it was probably the only realistic path. Of course, this can be debated, as can the ideological aspects of Japan's development path. What we have ended up with is a situation in which a country very poor in mineral resources has become a highly industrialized and populous country where the people (generally) enjoy a high standard of living. So, in a sense, naturally, they would 'want' to have nuclear power. (The history of nuclear power in Japan is fraught with the usual problems of democratic processes being completely ridden roughshod over by those in power who saw a chance to make bundles of money from nuclear power stations, but this - though closely connected with the ongoing nuclear disaster - is not the place to pursue this discussion...) So with the information we have in 1) about earthquakes, tsunamis and places in Japan that are considered dangerous, was it really a 'good idea' for Japan to be building dozens of nuclear reactors along its coastline (where all the reactors are situated). Not really. Lots of serious accidents waiting to happen, and this time they did! So what does this have to do with a smaller or larger population? Hypothetically, Japan could have chosen a different development path - one that kept the population within the limits defined by availability of farmland and other basic resources, I estimate about 50 million, and at that level, and with foresight and intelligence, would not have required nuclear power. Hence, any large E+T occurrence could not result in a nuclear disaster. Economic development + (or is it "=") population growth leads to social and infrastructure complexities that become harder and harder to control. In some countries this might be OK. But I hope you can see that for Japan this is very dangerous. Final comment to Andrew MacLeod: A relatively younger population, or a relatively more skilled population (through immigration ,etc.) may have beneficial economic or recovery effects (normally and) in times of disaster. In the case of Japan, and I suspect quite a few other countries, local conditions make this marginal at best and possibly downright dangerous, as shown above. For Japan, where the history of migrant workers shows that this can only ever be a short-term policy (very, very few people settle down here as I have), this is really not a practical option. What would be better, in terms of disaster avoidance, would be a smaller population which did not have to build residences etc. on marginally safe land and which did not require the huge amounts of electrical power that make nuclear power stations appear to be a 'necessity.' As far as Japan is concerned, these long-term aspects are far more important than short-sighted statements about the age structure or skill-level boosted by increasing the population through immigration.

Senator Ludwig said he was still assessing the call for increased research funds for agriculture and food production. Ironically, the Productivity Commission recommendation to halve funding over the coming decade. Food is not as important as the "god" of economy, obviously. He emphasised imports were largely highly processed foods, beverages and processed fruit and vegetables. According to a report in The Australian, we now import more than a third of our fruit supply and almost 20 per cent of our vegetables, amid warnings of increasing threats to future food supply from population and land-use pressures. With a global population blowout, decline in fertilizers, peak oil and declining arable land - not to mention water supplies - securing food for Australia should be a top government priority. Growing food should be more important than growing our economy. Norman Borlaug was called the father of the green revolution. The green revolution was the development of new strains of crops that could feed more people with the same amount of land. It is estimated that the green revolution feeds an extra billion people with a billion acres less land, thereby saving a billion lives and a billion acres of forest and non-farmed lands. He won the 1970 Nobel peace prize, the Congressional Gold Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom as well as Padma Vibhusan India's second highest civilian honor. "In my Nobel lecture," Borlaug says, "I suggested we had until the year 2000 to tame the population monster, and then food shortages would take us under. Now I believe we have a little longer". That "little longer" is coming up fast, and our 40 years of reprieve is nearing it's end. He said: "So future food-production increases will have to come from higher yields. And though I have no doubt yields will keep going up, whether they can go up enough to feed the population monster is another matter." Growcom chief executive Alex Livingstone said Australians should snap out of their "complacency", warning that food imports could be threatened by the burgeoning world population. Mr Livingston said fruit and vegetable imports could dry up as the world population rocketed to nine billion by 2050. "The (Australian horticulture) industry is not going to collapse tomorrow," Mr Livingston said. "But the long term trend of doing nothing means the implications are severe." We cannot continue to rely on food imports due to global demands increasing due to population blowout, and warnings ignored by Borlaug. The Malthusian Trap is the theory that, as population growth is ahead of agricultural growth, there must be a stage at which the food supply is inadequate for feeding the population. There must be a point at which it cannot become any more efficient and cause some degree of famine, not to mention the deforestation, soil erosion and pollution that would be caused when we start to quite literally scrape the barrel. It remains to be seen if a GM Revolution will put Malthus’ theory to bed once and for all, but like any advancements, there are costs that may be too risky to take.

A scavenger is any animal that feeds on decaying organic matter, esp on refuse. They prey on carrion, and avoid getting sick themselves. The disaster in Japan is being used by Andrew Macleod to push his own agenda, and frighten the people of Australia. Any disaster would be magnified with more people! Surely Haiti's example is enough to show that higher populations are a killer, and any disturbance is even worse with overpopulation. Our planet is not stable, but dying. There have been any number of urgent scientific reports in recent years emphasising just how dire the future looks and how little time we have left to act. But around the world only a few have truly faced up to the facts about global warming. Requiem for a Species by author Clive Hamilton is the story of a battle within us between the forces that should have caused us to protect the earth, like our capacity to reason and our connection to nature, and our greed, materialism and alienation from nature, which, in the end, have won out. Clive Hamilton, Dick Smith and Mark O'Connor and all the rest will keep hammering the government on the cautionary science of climate change, declining arable land and resources knowing perfectly well they'll be ignored because the vested interests of both Liberal and Labor and their myopic aims for electoral and economic "success" rather than long-term survival. Earth is not just about supporting the human race. Other species also contribute and have a right to exist without being exterminated for human expansions. Japan has one of the highest average life expectancies in the world, and the aging of the population is proceeding at a rapid rate. In the words of renowned British scholar Thomas Robert Malthus, The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Despite the "green" revolution, this is quite true even today. Japan currently imports sixty percent of the food it consumes. With its limited amount of arable land, one can only imagine the level of dependency a larger population in Japan would have. With dependency comes vulnerability, and Japan would be first hit in the event of a global food shortage. More population would exacerbate the problem. Japan already has some of the most congested and largest cities in the world. What would happen if this population were to swell? Pollution would increase, and the logistics of supply and demand would become worse. Sachs last year revealed that Japan’s GDP would be increased by a full 15 percent if 80 percent (currently at 60 percent) of all women in Japan held some sort of a job. Such a boost in both workforce size and GDP would be welcomed in a country currently grappling with an aging, shrinking workforce. Older people should be encouraged to continue to work - even part time - so that their knowledge and skills utilized. Human resources need to be invested in and optimized. Overpopulation creates short-term economic benefits, but long-term pain and suffering. Japan's emergency is primarily a human disaster and environmental one, not an "economic" one as Andrew Macleod says. Japan is highly skilled and educated, and they don't need foreigners for their economy. They may have a high trade deficit, but they are on the way to a sustainable nation. Is it shameful that he is exploiting this natural disaster for his own ends - more immigration and "skills" in Australia for more property development and business customers. Victoria's trade deficit is woeful and not helped by population boosting! The Economy is a system to support our lives, an ideology, that can grow perpetually and infinitely in theory, but not our planet, our resources, our ecosystems.

Interesting in the presentation on Global Population Speak Out (link above) that after all those millennia of "progress" that humans manage to get back to the happy situation where they have low birth rates and low death rates resulting in a stable population as in the hunter gatherer stage. Was the progress worth those awful times of high death rates in the intermediate phase? The model certainly is not consistent with the cliche of life for primitive people being nasty brutish and short, either.

Unlike many places in the world the Tarkine remains as a hidden treasure and a forgotten wilderness. This expanse of uninterrupted 477,000 hectares of Tarkine wilderness holds ancient relics both plants and animals dating back millennia, and unique habitats not found anywhere else. Home to numerous threatened or endangered plant and animal species and with almost no introduced predators, the Tarkine has long held a special significance for Indigenous communities, said to have inhabited the area up to 10,000 years ago. Peter Garrett gave the Tarkine wilderness a one-year emergency listing, which Mr Burke let expire. Since then he has let a British mining company test drill in the area. A leaked report suggested he ignored recommendations from the Australian Heritage Council to have the wilderness area included on the heritage list. Mr Burke's department had approved a plan by a subsidiary of British miner Beacon Hill Resources to drill 48 holes in the area's magnesite karst -- a landscape of fissures, caves, caverns, sinkholes and underground streams -- found by the report to be "globally rare" and fragile. Shree Minerals applied to Mr Burke's department on February 16 for environmental approval for a magnetite and hematite mine in the same area. Venture Minerals is also known to be looking to develop a tin, tungsten and magnetite deposit. Andrew MacIntosh from the environmental law department at the Australian National University says the timing of the announcement is "somewhat curious", in reference to Mr Burke also announcing the environmental approval for a Gunns pulp mill project. There will be a period of "community consultation" to decide whether to re-instate the Tarkine it's Australian Heritage Listing status. He said The Australian Heritage Council has stated very clearly that the wilderness values of the Tarkine have to be considered as a whole. So putting a mine in the Tarkine area affects the wilderness values associated with the whole region. "Community consultation" is a euphemism for asking for public submissions, to get the appropriate ticks, and then do what you were going to do anyway! Environmental, heritage values, indigenous sites, ancient forests, public values, endangered animals, tourism and sacred places of great intrinsic worth are no longer necessarily safe from market forces and the resources boom. As the Minister FOR the Environment, Tony Burke should show some integrity and vote against commercial exploits, and ensure the Tarkine's long-term protection, not the contrary.

Editorial comment: The following was originally posted as a comment to the article What recourse do victims of nuisance dog barking have? of 18 Jul 11. As a bug in the earlier version of Drupal, from which this site is built, prevents links to pages, other than the first comment page from working, I have reposted the comment here.

These dogs are everywhere in Manitou spgs, Co., (Not sure whether this is a place or what? - Ed) where k 9s are respected more than people. Since Manitou doesn't subscribe to the aspca, it's a real battle to impress upon code enforcement that noise is an issue. As a retired individual and a combat vet. I truly appreciate my silence. But when the code officer doesn't live in town and is a dog owner, well you're really pushin' chain. Basically in my humble opinion it's a real matter of consideration by the dog owner, if they don't give a crap about your life, etc, then why shouldn't I use every legal effort to make that owners life as miserable as they make mine. I know that sounded petty but I'm open to alternatives. One of these owners happens to be deaf, doesn't know noise from silence. But the village puts up with such, and since I seem to be the only one complaining ( my auditory abilities are better than normal ) I'm the odd ball. This doesn't preclude a valid complaint, but when you're one against the whole village of dog owners, you may as well have leprosy. I can only hope that some these inconsiderate owners, someday get the annoyance of their lives by some screaming red headed triplets. I like animals, I have raised children, dogs, and can shoe a horse, all the time in doing so there was never a complaint by others to me to manage my animals. Inconsiderate, this is the bottom line for those with animals that cause this nuisance.

This article rightly shows that because of their effective support for high immigration, the Greens can't be considered a serious political party in favor of the environment.

However, I think the most critical factor about how the existence of the Greens adversely affects democracy and serves Australia's ruling elites has been overlooked.

In the 19 years since the Greens were formed in 1992, they have succeeded in drawing out of many thousands of well-meaning environmentalists money and energy that could have been put to far better use.

Given that the two major political parties, Labor on the one hand and the Liberal/National coalition on the other, have poor to abysmal records in government and that this has been shown conclusively again and again, it is inconceivable that after 19 years, the decent alternative that the Greens claim to be could not have at least steadily and consistently increased its electoral support. By now such a party should be in government either in their own right or in coalition, in many parts of Australia. At the very least, such a party should have a substantial presence in all Parliaments.

With a few rare exceptions, like the 2010 Federal elections and the 2010 Tasmanian state elections the electoral performance of the Greens has been, at best, mediocre and usually poor.

If the 'anti-war' Greens could not have performed well in 2004, then when could they ever have?

The outcome of the 2004 elections were particularly harmful to Australia, not to mention the rest of the world, and could have been avoided. In 2003 the Howard Government participated in the illegal invasion of Iraq, using a pretext shown to have been a deliberate lie.[1] At the 2004 elections, Howard did not even have to pay the slightest electoral price for his actions and was re-elected with effectively an outright majority in the Senate. The campaign by the Greens, supposedly leaders of the anti-war movement, in those elections did not stop the Liberal/National majority from gainining an outright Senate majority, where the proportional quota voting system should have made that easily achievable.

At the recently concluded 2010 Victorian state elections, the Greens won no lower house seats and were again unable even to stop the Liberal/National party from winning an outright majority in the upper house.

The outright majority that the Liberal/Nationals have gained has taken away from Victorians any recourse in Parliament against the Liberal/National Coalition Government until the next state elections in 2014, should it choose to govern in a way which is as harmful to ordinary Victorians as they have in the past.

I don't believe that the Greens would perform as poorly as they nearly always do unless it actually suited the purposes of those in control of the Greens not to wield any effective influence in Parliament.

If they were to hold the balance of power or even were to form Government, then their supporters would rightly expect them to do something for their benefit.

This would mean that the Greens would either have to act against the powerful vested interests they claim to be against or be shown up as the frauds that I believe most of them to be.

As they have never gained enough representation in any Parliament, they have been able to avoid being put to the test. (Of course, they now have the balance of power in Tasmania with 5 of the 25 the seats. This will be worth following closely. Hopefully, just possibly, the Tasmanian Greens may show themselves to be an exception to this sad pattern.)

Footnotes

1. As shown in the recent movie Fair Game or in the YouTube broadcast of testimony by CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson before the US Senate (also embedded in this comment), upon which Fair Game was based, the pretext given by The U.S. government and the Australian government for the invasion of Iraq was a lie. That lie was that Iraq had a secret nuclear weapons program, which it intended to use on other countries. In Australia, the largest demonstrations since the Vietnam, War were held against the threatened invasion. In defiance of public opinion, Howard proceeded with Australia's participation in the invasion of Iraq. As the Greens were part of the leadership of the anti-war movement, they should at least have gained massively, but didn't. If they could not gain in those circumstances, then how could they ever expect to?

See also Valerie Plame Wilson interviewed by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show on 30 October 2007, Wikipedia and Sixty Minutes.

It is horrifying and disgusting that a scientific licence has been issued by DECCW NSW Wildlife Licensing and Management Unit NSW to Wollongong University to retain kangaroos in a cage 1 metre x 1.3 meters x 1.7 metres for up to 9 months to ascertain the amount of methane gas expelled by the kangaroos. Apparently they requested 15 kangaroos to be tested but the licence has been approved for 6 animals to start with. The kangaroo will be obtained from excess "stock" from wildlife parks, and they will be euthanased when experiments/ research is finished. Wildlife have a rightful place on our land, and are not "stock" and nor are they "excess". What sort of macabre experiment is this? What could the results be used for to benefit the animals? It would only be detrimental to them, and the individual animals being experimented on. Kangaroos and wildlife will never replace livestock. To reduce methane emissions, we need to reduce meat consumption. What a terrible way for a animal to have its life ended when it was used in a commercial way. This is not science but research to support commercial use of kangaroos and it is no different from Japan's bogus "research" on whales that was really commercial interests. No wonder Australia could do nothing for the whales, with so much embedded hypocrisy at such high levels. Kangaroos suffer incredibly from stress myopathy, and this means they become vulnerable to diseases. The methane emissions could be quite different under these unnatural conditions. Some have been informed the University may also be looking at doing the same experiments on wombats as well. Where are the ethics of such research? Confining, manipulating these range-land grazing animals for dubious purposes. They will be isolated from their mob, their territory, and suffer terribly. The end is misery and death for these captive animals. Please come on board and work together to stop this now ! For more information please view the petition

Every term at primary school I was obliged to fill in a form stating my father's occupation, my address and my religion. The problem was that I wasn't sure which category I fitted into. I tried a variety of Christian denominations- rotating 4 I knew of several times or put down whatever sounded good on the day.The teachers never asked me why my religion kept changing ! One day after yet another form filling school day I half seriously upbraided my father for having left me in the ignominious position of not knowing my category. He replied that if I wanted a label then I could go and get one any time I wanted and I could have any one I wanted. I was free to choose! Having been given this carte blanche, I was no longer interested since the appeal of a label to me was that it was something one was given,not what one chose. I declined and from that moment,overcame any desire for a religious label. I wonder what I have missed out on by not belonging to a religious tribe,nor following mysterious learned rituals nor experiencing the immediate acceptance when a signal heralding religious allegiance is immediately understood by a stranger.