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Category: Sustainable Settlement and Agriculture

The Generator is founded on the simple premise that we should leave the world in better condition than we found it. The news items in this category outline the attempts people have made to do this. They are mainly concerned with our food supply and settlement patterns. The impact that the human race has on the planet.

  • Fears grow of Labor election loss

     

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    The proposed resource super-profits tax thrust on to unsuspecting miners has united these normally warring barons in an unprecedented fashion.

    At the same time, the government appears uncertain how to approach the miners and manage the inevitable compromise in a policy and political sense.

    One day the government rounds on the lying and ignorant industry leaders, as Wayne Swan called them, and on the next Kevin Rudd is talking about consultation with the industry.

    Some within the government are suggesting there will be a quick offer and settlement of the dispute to get it out of the way, while others warn not to expect an early resolution and relish a fight with the foreign-owned mining companies that don’t pay their “fair share”.

    BHP Billiton’s chief executive Marius Kloppers told his 16,000 employees yesterday the government’s claims were incorrect about the amount of tax miners pay and that the process of consultation and negotiation was at a stalemate. The clear view from the mining companies is that the consultation panel set up to negotiate “transitional arrangements” has a limited remit and cannot discuss the real concerns the miners have about the new tax. Given the panel seems to be moving beyond its own terms of reference in its interim report, to be put to the government today, and backing big concessions on the tax, including lifting the threshold rate when the tax begins from 6 per cent of profits to 12 per cent, it would seem the panel members agree.

    The government continues to insist the consultation process is going swimmingly and is appealing for the industry to continue to talk to the panel. But, given the panel can’t make final decisions on issues the miners want addressed and the mining chiefs and government leaders continue to “negotiate” through headlines and parliamentary insults, there appears the need for something to break the deadlock and bring the debate back under control.

    Given the government points to the Hawke government’s success in introducing the petroleum resource rent tax, perhaps the Prime Minister could convene a 1980s summit, where chief executives and cabinet ministers meet face to face and under pressure to find middle ground.

    Given that Rudd decided last night not to attend and address the Minerals Council of Australia’s annual dinner after deciding instead to attend the celebration for the 100th anniversary of the election of the Andrew Fisher government, a Hawke-style summit is unlikely.

    What’s more, the 1987 tax followed more than two years of consultation, including a white paper and a green paper, to work out the best way to introduce the tax and not damage the oil and gas sector. It seems too late for such a process now, given that the tax was sprung on the resources sector, fully formed, on May 2.

    Some MPs, and indeed some ALP candidates who are attending today’s campaign briefings, are furious with the way the tax was introduced and are uncertain as to how to react to mooted changes and avowed declarations of war. There are miners and MPs who are convinced the government was intent on such a war from the beginning.

    Labor claims that part of its polling slump and the Prime Minister’s polling slide are a result of the “tough actions” the government took on tax reform. But the slump began well before the RSPT was unveiled and the miners unleashed their public campaign.

    Indeed, the miners were slow to react publicly to signs they were about to be subjected to a regime they could not bear because they had worked more quietly with the government over the proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

    But Rudd appears to have caught slump disease from British Conservative leader David Cameron, who managed to blow an unbeatable lead in the polls months from an election and only scraped into government, long before the miners became active.

    Rudd has gone from being the most popular leader in modern times to having some of the lowest levels of personal support, and the ALP has gone from having an unassailable lead in the polls to being behind or at best level-pegging. This is just three full months from an election campaign.

    There has been a mountain of explanations as to why Labor finds itself in this position: a loss of faith and credibility for Rudd; broken promises; botched programs such as the $2.45 billion roofing insulation scheme and waste on the school buildings program; interest rate rises; cost of living rises; the abandonment of the emissions trading scheme to combat greenhouse gas emissions; a reversal on asylum-seekers’ treatment; and, latterly, the new $12bn tax on miners’ profits.

    The question for those Labor MPs who fear losing the election is no longer how they got to where they are but how they get away from where they are.

    Certainly, as Labor MPs and candidates gather in Canberra today for a briefing and instructions on how to campaign and sell the government’s achievements, the way ahead is the key issue.

    The latest Newspoll has Labor’s primary vote at 37 per cent, a level that Labor must improve on if it is to win the next election. There is no doubt the polls will narrow as the election nears and Labor has the advantage that voters are not switching in sufficient numbers to Tony Abbott from Rudd as the preferred prime minister.

    How and when to deal with the mining profits tax compromise is crucial to these calculations as the Liberal leader continues to oppose the “great big new tax”.

    93 comments on this story

  • Debate hots up on pulp mill future

    Debate hots up on pulp mill future

    Updated 1 hour 29 minutes ago

    Forestry industry talks and the resignation of Gunns’ chairman have restarted the debate over a proposed pulp mill in Tasmania’s north.

    John Gay was with the company for 37 years and was a major driver of the proposed $2 billion Tamar Valley pulp mill.

    Former premier Paul Lennon has told ABC Local Radio the current industry crisis talks and a downturn in international wood chip markets had vindicated Mr Gay’s determination.

    “A mill must be built in Tasmania. If it’s not, then the forest industry will wither on the vine,” Mr Lennon said.

    Australian Greens leader Bob Brown believes the mill project is still alive.

    Senator Brown says Mr Gay’s departure opens the way for alternative pulp mill proposals.

    “The pulp mill as conceived by John Gay is dead in the water with its chlorine with its destruction of native forests and wildlife and pollution but it doesn’t say that it’s off the drawing board,” he said.

    Mr Gay’s resignation coincides with the formation of a new anti-mill group.

    The Friends of the Tamar Valley’s Judith King says Mr Gay stepping down should deliver a clear signal to government that the mill is finished.

    “But we also wants Gunns to deliver that signal, to say that the mill is finished.”

    She says her group will work with others to stop the mill being built.

    Tags: company-news, forests, timber, tas, hobart-7000, launceston-7250

    First posted 1 hour 33 minutes ago

  • The three stupidest things said about the BP oil spill

     

    4. “I don’t honestly think it opens up a whole new series of questions, because, you know, in all honesty I doubt this is the first accident that has happened and I doubt it will be the last.”
    — Robert Gibbs, White House Press Secretary, April 23, 2010, inspiring all kinds of confidence in the safety of offshore drilling three days after the spill

    5. “The reality is we will be depending on oil and gas as we transition to a new energy future. You are not going to turn off the lights of this country or the economy by shutting it all down.”
    — Ken Salazar, Secretary of the Interior, on May 18, 2010, in response to Senator Bernie Sanders’ question about reinstating the moratorium on offshore drilling
    NOTE: Petroleum accounted for less than one percent of electricity generation in the U.S. last year. Oil does not keep the lights on.

    6. “We need the increased production. The president still continues to believe the great majority of that can be done safely, securely and without any harm to the environment.”
    — Gibbs, White House Press Secretary, April 23, 2010

    7. “There were good reasons for us to put in offshore drilling, and this terrible accident is very rare in drilling. I mean, accidents happen. You learn from them and you try not to make sure they don’t happen again.”
    — Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), May 4, 2010, on why the new American Power Act includes new offshore drilling

  • Gunns chairman John Gay quits

    Gunns chairman John Gay quits

    Updated 15 minutes ago

    Retiring Gunns chairman John Gay

    Gunns chairman John Gay is quitting the timber company and all its subsidiaries. (ABc News: Josh Goodyer)

    Gunns chairman John Gay has announced he is quitting the timber company and all its subsidiaries.

    In a statement to the Stock Exchange, Gunns Limited says Mr Gay is retiring from the board of Gunns, its subsidiary Southern Star Corporation and all related subsidiary companies, effective immediately.

    Mr Gay stepped down as chief executive of Gunns almost a year ago, but retained control of the controversial pulp mill project.

    He has been under pressure from major stakeholders to leave.

    Mr Gay began with the company in 1973 and was managing director for the past 24 years.

    The board says Mr Gay was instrumental in the rationalisation of the Tasmanian timber industry.

    Gunns’ share price plummeted this week despite the company announcing it had sold its retail arm for $40 million.

    Tags: company-news, forests, timber, tas, hobart-7000, launceston-7250

    First posted 18 minutes ago

  • A summer heatwave will not affect our ground water

     

    Because water enters the aquifers for part of the year but drains from them continuously to support the flows of many rivers, water tables rise and fall in an annual cycle; as they fall, stream networks shrink and flows decline naturally. This is particularly apparent in chalk areas, where the annual fluctuation of the water table may be more than 20 metres. Given the shallow slope of chalk valleys, the head of the stream may move several kilometres up and down the valley, giving rise to the familiar winterbournes.

    The last three summers have been exceptional in that for some periods, especially in 2007, the rainfall was so heavy that soil-moisture deficits were reduced or eliminated in some areas and there was, unusually, a rise in water tables and an increase in the flow of some ground-water-fed rivers. However, far from being just sufficient to keep these streams flowing, as Brown implies, this pushed some of them to record flows for summer months.

    Of course Brown is right that removing water for household supply also lowers water tables and decreases river flows, as does obstructing a river by building a dam; but the issue is often confused. In 1988-92 and 1995-97 a series of dry winters lowered water tables, leading to complaints from those living in winterbourne valleys about the disappearance of their streams. The winter of 2000-01 was so wet that some of the same householders were complaining of flooding and asking water companies to remove more water.

    The predictions of climate change are that rainfall will become less predictable, so stream networks will expand and shrink more markedly than we are used to; maybe the past two or three decades have seen the first signs of that. But ground-water levels last month were at or above average.

    In simple terms, we don’t buy water for public supply, we just rent it – so most of it should be returned to the river with little net loss of downstream flow. This happens to a degree in the Thames catchment, and at Winchester where sewage is recharged to the chalk aquifer, but too rarely in other areas of Britain. This is where more effort might pay dividends.

  • When Hyperbole Comes Back to Bite

     

    But part of the problem lies in the language itself, indeed in the very way the Rudd Government likes to govern. More than any other government in recent memory — certainly more so than the Howard government, but more so than the Hawke-Keating governments too — policy-making under Kevin Rudd has been driven by a large number of public inquiries.

    Before coming to office, Kevin Rudd made some bold statements about his belief in “evidence-based policy”. In terms of gathering evidence, he has lived up to that promise. Since coming to office, the Rudd Government has commissioned more than 100 different government inquiries, commissions, round-tables and working groups, on everything from climate change and the nation’s tax system to bottle recycling and Olympic sport.

    The Rudd Government’s hunger for the evidence is so keen that it is taking it in some strange directions. Last week, for instance, the Australian Bureau of Statistics announced it would be conducting one of the largest national health surveys ever, and that it had the power to fine people $110 a day if they refused to take part.

    As Paul Colgan observed in The Punch, this is paternalism taken to absurd lengths. Those failing to comply “may … get a knock on the door at 3am from clipboard-wielding statisticians” he quipped.

    Libertarians and other opponents of the Rudd Government have pointed out that, particularly on health and welfare matters, this is a government that likes to tell ordinary citizens what to do. The alcopops tax, the recent hike in tobacco excise, the continued imposition of welfare quarantining in the Northern Territory, all seem to reinforce the emerging pattern.

    But what happens to all this data once collected? This is where the Government’s hyperbole problem has started to set in: Kevin Rudd and his ministers are all too ready to abandon the inquiries, evidence and data for political expediency.

    The best example of this is on the issue of climate change. The Rudd Government’s climate policy development process was long, detailed, comprehensive — and ultimately ignored. First Ross Garnaut was commissioned to produce a White Paper. Then Penny Wong and her department responded with a Green Paper. Labor’s eventual CPRS legislation ran to six bills and thousands of pages. And now all of it has been put on the back-burner until 2013.

    The Henry Tax Review is another case in point. This “root and branch” review of Australia’s tax and transfer system took 18 months, issued an interim report and finally made more than 100 recommendations. Wayne Swan sat on the Review for five months, and then accepted only two of the review’s recommendations. He is even pursuing a policy — to increase the superannuation levy to 12 per cent — that the review didn’t recommend. Evidence? Yes. Evidence-based policy? No.

    Welfare quarantining in the Northern Territory is a particularly disingenuous example of the way this Government plays with the evidence for political gain. After inheriting the Northern Territory Emergency Review from the Howard government, Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin formed a review board to advise her on the policy’s effectiveness. But did she listen to what they said? The three key recommendations of the NTER Review Board were that the Racial Discrimination Act be reinstated, that welfare quarantining be abolished and that the permit system for remote communities be rehabilitated. Macklin ignored all of them.

    And she is still refusing to remove the blanket provisions of income management, despite the accumulating evidence that it doesn’t work. A recent, peer-reviewed, quantitative study has revealed that income management has no effect on the purchase of healthy food or harmful booze and cigarettes (see Thalia Anthony’s article about the study on newmatilda.com today). If the Rudd Government wants evidence, here is some very robust data indeed. But Macklin has ignored it, because it is politically convenient for her to do so.

    There is a clear pattern emerging here. While the Rudd Government certainly likes to appear to be consultative, to seek evidence and to listen to the views of experts and the community, when it comes to the hard reality of everyday politics, it will act in its own ruthless short-term self-interest. There are now countless major inquiries sitting on ministers’ desks, whose recommendations will likely never be implemented. Remember the 2020 Summit?

    No wonder the Opposition’s attacks on “Rudd Government spin” appear to be biting. On the evidence available, evidence-based policy is just another example of this Government’s hyperbole problem.