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  • Thank you for speaking up ALYSIA GET=UP
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      aKLYSIA
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    NEVILLE,

    Week after week, we continue to hear the disturbing evidence from those who have worked inside Australia’s detention centres and witnessed the trauma being inflicted on children as young as two.

    This week was no different, as we learnt that a newborn baby – just five months old – was sent to Nauru. In spite of all we know, the Government is still desperately clutching on to the idea that what they’re doing is somehow justified. But for years now, GetUp members have been chipping away at this idea, which looks flimsier by the day.

    While the Government may have been successful in pushing children out of sight, they will never be pushed out of mind. GetUp members made sure of that last week, when we presented Parliament with a 102,220 signature-strong petition calling for the immediate release of all children and their families. Members in Canberra braved below zero temperatures to stand alongside 231 silhouettes of children on Parliament Lawns, each one representing a child still locked in detention.

    None of this would’ve been possible without the dedication and support of amazing GetUp members like you, so thank you!

    231 childrens' silhouettes

    On the day, the 231 silhouettes stood as a solemn symbol of the 231 children in detention. Bashir Yousufi, who was detained on Christmas Island as a child, spoke of the impacts detention had on him and how he still carries them to this day. He spoke on behalf of all the children who are still being locked up and denied the opportunity to enjoy their childhood.

    Bashir speaking at petition delivery

    GetUp members were joined by Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, Melissa Parke MP, Anna Burke MP and Andrew Wilkie MP, who accepted the petition on behalf of Parliament and spoke passionately about the urgent need to release all children from detention. (Immigration Minister Peter Dutton was also invited to accept the petition, but advised he was unable to attend.)

    Politicians speaking at petition delivery

    This shameful policy of detaining children is supported by both major parties, which is why it’s so important to champion those who are courageous enough to speak out against it. If you’re on Twitter, can you take 30 seconds to send a message of thanks to those who stood with us last week, by clicking here?

    It’s not easy, but every day our fight is emboldened by GetUp members – like you – who don’t give up and keep raising your voice to speak up for all children locked in detention.

    Thank you so much for being part of the fight!

    Alycia and Ricky for the Getup team

    PS. Last week, our message was trending across the country as people posted photos from their childhood and shared a story to remind Australians of the 231 children in detention who are being denied a childhood. You can check out some of the stories here: https://storify.com/GetUp/kidsout

  • [New post] NSW Nationals want smaller seats – how?

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    [New post] NSW Nationals want smaller seats – how?

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    The Tally Room <donotreply@wordpress.com> Unsubscribe
    7:04 PM (1 hour ago)
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    New post on The Tally Room

    NSW Nationals want smaller seats – how?

    by Ben Raue

    Last month, Nationals MLC Ben Franklin announced that he would seek a parliamentary inquiry into the size of the western NSW electorates of Barwon and Murray, which cover a majority of the New South Wales land mass. Today, according to a tweet from the party’s account, the NSW Nationals passed a motion calling for smaller electorates in regional NSW.

    It’s true that these electorates are huge, and are a challenge to represent, but this simply reflects the low populations living in these areas. While there are some variations in electoral boundaries which could make Barwon at the least slightly smaller, any legislative changes would likely require increasing the population contained within seats in Sydney and along the coast, unless the Nationals are considering a proposal to increase the size of the Legislative Assembly.

    The proposal also ignores the fact that the Nationals actually benefit from our electoral system. In 2015, the Nationals polled about the same as the Greens, but won 17 seats to the Greens’ 3, due to their vote being concentrated in particular parts of the state.

    Franklin ignores all the other conditions that can make it harder to represent an electorate, such as having a large number of residents who don’t speak English, many residents with problems needing support from their local MP, such as public housing issues. It’s a lot easier to measure the landmass a seat covers, but it doesn’t mean it is the only problem faced by MPs in representing their electorate. Yet we don’t discuss weighting electoral power based on any other type of disadvantage – it’s one person, one vote.

    There is a long and ugly history in Australia of electoral laws being used to increase the voting power of rural voters at the expense of urban voters – in effect MPs represented land, not just people. In New South Wales at a state level, and in most other jurisdictions, different quotas were set in rural and urban areas, meaning that there were much smaller numbers of voters in a rural seat than in an urban seat. Read more of this post

    Ben Raue | June 13, 2015 at 7:04 pm | Tags: Electoral reform, New South Wales, Redistribution | Categories: Uncategorized | URL: http://wp.me/ppI95-6RJ
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  • The John James Newsletter 64

     

    The John James Newsletter 64

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    John James
    		2:06 PM (3 minutes ago)

    The John James Newsletter 64
    13 June 2015 – Provence


    The ugly truth is out there, but you have to want to know it Sheldon Richman

    Global Apollo programme seeks to make clean energy cheaper than coalSir David King calls for £15bn a year R&D spending on clean energy to make it cheaper than coal, in emulation of the space race. Making electricity 100% renewable by 2050 would require affordable energy storage, both on the domestic and national scale, with better batteries, heat storage in water, soil or molten salt, compressed air, flywheels and hydrogen. Sir David Attenborough said: “The exciting thing about the Apollo report is that it is positive – at last someone is saying we can do things.”http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/02/apollo-programme-for-clean-energy-needed-to-tackle-climate-change
    Snowden: balance of power has shifted as we “turn away from reaction and fear towards resilience and reason”Bulk data collection programmes had been declared illegal and disavowed by the US Congress. “After the White House found that this program had not stopped a single terrorist attack, even the president who once defended its propriety has now ordered it terminated.”http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/05/snowden-balance-power-shifted-people-defy-government-surveillance-nsa?CMP=ema_565
    From Multi-Year Drought To Flash Flooding: ‘Weather Whiplash’ ExplainedExtreme weather is becoming longer and stronger because of changes in our atmosphere that cause weather patterns to get “stuck.”http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/06/02/3664087/weather-whiplash/ and a deeper analysis of where it is heading in “The coming Age of Storms”https://robertscribbler.wordpress.com/
    Is it any wonder that the Arctic is melting so fast?Watch the beguiling movement of C02 – click here and go to the second picturehttp://www.designntrend.com/articles/26311/20141119/swirls-of-carbon-dioxide-dictate-severity-of-greenhouse-gas-emissions.htm

    Britain’s Student Union Votes to Boycott Israel over violations of Palestinian human rights. The motion explicitly aligns the union with the Palestinian-instigated Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions [BDS] campaign. The NUC is the UK’s umbrella student organisation for some 600 higher education institutions representing seven million students. http://www.timesofisrael.com/britains-student-union-votes-to-boycott-israel/ Australasia’s largest specialist college to divest £1.2m from fossil fuels http://www.theguardian.com/environment/keep-it-in-the-ground-blog/2015/jun/05/australasias-largest-specialist-college-to-divest-12m-from-fossil-fuels?CMP=EMCENVEML1631
    Fossil fuels warm the planet for an instant, but the C02 continues to warm the planet for decades The warming induced by CO2 over its lifetime in the atmosphere would exceed the warming from direct combustion by 100,000.  http://www.reportingclimatescience.com/news-stories/article/study-claims-greenhouse-gas-warming-felt-in-months.html C02 half-life possibly less than 30 years. See fascinating discussion inhttp://euanmearns.com/the-half-life-of-co2-in-earths-atmosphere-part-1/
    Hollywood still grapples with nuclear falloutThe US turned swathes of desert radioactive during the cold war and denied it. The mystery still haunts Hollywood and rural Mormon communities. By the time John Wayne succumbed to stomach cancer in 1979, of 220 cast and crew, 91 had contracted cancer,http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jun/06/downwinders-nuclear-fallout-hollywood-john-wayne?CMP=ema_565
    US Officials Consider Nuclear Strikes against Russia“The options go so far as one implied—but not stated explicitly—that would improve the ability of US nuclear weapons to destroy military targets on Russian territory.” In other words, the US is actively preparing nuclear war against Russia.http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-officials-consider-nuclear-strikes-against-russia/5453655 Sleepwalking to Another Mideast DisasterDenied crucial information about Syria, the American people are being led toward the precipice of another Middle East war, guided by neocons and liberal hawks who are set on “regime change” even if that means a likely victory for Sunni terrorists,https://consortiumnews.com/2015/06/04/sleepwalking-to-another-mideast-disaster/ andhttp://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article42043.htm 
    8.2 Million Iraqis In Need of Emergency Humanitarian AssistanceAll segments of Iraqi society – Yezidi, Christian, Shabak, Turkmen, Shia, Sunni and Kurd – have been affected by the violence. http://worldpress.org/link.cfm?http://www.ipsnews.net/2015/06/8-2-million-iraqis-in-need-of-emergency-humanitarian-assistance/

    Varoufakis: Greece’s creditors have turned negotiations into a warIt is not true that they made concessions and we made concessions and that there is a deadlock. They made no concessions. When we met the first time in February they came up with pretty much what they have now offered. Then we had months of negotiations in the so-called Brussels group. http://www.euractiv.com/sections/euro-finance/varoufakis-greeces-creditors-have-turned-negotiations-war-315247 Greece is playing to lose the debt crisis poker gameGreece has shown its best cards too early and may have missed opportunity to end destructive austerity imposed by Germanyhttp://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/feb/09/greece-is-playing-to-lose-the-debt-crisis-poker-game
    The Vatican talks Climate Change: The Pontifical Academy of Sciences Climate  change  from  unsustainable  consumption  by  15%  of  the population has become the dominant moral issue for society.http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/2068632/climate-change-and-the-common-good.pdf andhttp://www.climatecodered.org/2015/06/winning-carbon-war-vatican-talks.html
    Obama Sidelines Kerry On Ukraine PolicyKerry was reaffirming the position of Merkel and Hollande, the key shapers of the Minsk II agreement; and Nuland was nullifying them. Obama now has sided with Nuland on this; it’s a slap in the face to the EU: Poroshenko can continue ignoring Kerry and can blatantly ignore the Minsk II agreement; and Obama tacitly sides with Poroshenko and Nuland, against Kerryhttp://www.countercurrents.org/zuesse070615.htm
    Sea-level rises has accelerated to 4.4mm a year from earlier average of 3.2mm. http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/sea-levels-in-retreat-a-sure-sign-el-nios-grip-is-tightening-20150603-ghdwix

    US politicians call for release of secret 9/11 reportWhite House urged to release 28-pages of classified information alleging Saudi officials helped finance attacks.http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/06/politicians-call-release-secret-911-report-150603035342175.html
    WikiLeaks releases 17 secret TISA documentsThis agreement would hamstring governments and citizens by focussing on services. Like both TTIP and TPP, one of the central aims of TISA is to remove “barriers” to trade in services. It  ensures that services are deregulated and opened up to private companies around the world, and that once privatised, they cannot be re-nationalised.http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2015/06/wikileaks-releases-secret-tisa-docs-the-more-evil-sibling-of-ttip-and-tpp/ andhttp://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/06/03/wikileaks-strikes-again-leaked-tisa-docs-expose-corporate-plan-reshaping-global
    Some Israeli Leaders Do Tell The TruthStill today, 48 years on, few know the truth about how Israel set the stage for war in June 1967 to grab more Arab land. The single most decisive event that made war inevitable happened on Thursday 1 June, four days before Israel launched its attacks. What was it?http://www.countercurrents.org/hart030615.htm
    On the e-waste trailAn investigation into the toxic trail of illegal e-waste that is ushered from the first to the third world. At the beginning of 2011, the number of containers had gone up to 500 a month. Now, the average is up to 600 a month, with a noticeable increase in the months just after Christmas when many consumers are discarding gadgets after having found new ones under the Christmas tree.http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/witness/2014/09/e-waste-trail-2014924132443417118.html
    Compare Australia and China with the US prison populations China takes 7th place in the world in incarceration rate. Which of course makes you wonder, what the hell is going on in America? Are we just a society of misfits, rabble-rousers, and outright criminals? Or, is it something else?http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article42064.htm

    to John

  • Urgent: Does this sound renewable to you? get up

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    Urgent: Does this sound renewable to you?

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    Paul and Jess – GetUp!
    11:00 AM (9 minutes ago)
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    Dear NEVILLE,

    It was the comment that got everyone talking. On Thursday, Prime Minister Tony Abbott used primetime radio to boast about cutting clean energy, calling wind farms “visually awful” and arguing “I would frankly have liked to have reduced the number a lot more”. 1

    Now, his government is kicking straight into action by rescheduling a parliamentary vote for Monday morning to slash jobs and investment for Renewable Energy Target (RET).

    But here’s the kicker: Monday’s proposed legislation won’t just cut investment in clean energy. The Abbott Government wants to redefine ‘clean energy’ altogether, by including burning native forests in the Renewable Energy Target. A move like this could see the open slather logging of forests that our Australian wildlife depend on for survival. Just as terrible: every native forest cut down and burnt for electricity takes away from capacity and more investment in the clean energy of the future – like solar.

    The Senate is our last chance to stop this. Key Senators have already been getting hundreds of calls from GetUp members, and reports are they are seriously considering their position in the face of the public pressure. We’ve got just one last shot – on Monday morning – to make a final impression, and that’s to show how thousands of Australians cared enough to open their wallets to put this ad in the paper before this critical vote.

    Chip in now to put this full page ad in the Canberra Times on Monday morning

    Join the calls to save our forests and clean energy industry.

    When Senators and their staff open the paper on Monday morning, we need to make sure that the dangers of this legislation are front and centre.

    They have the power to stop it. Let’s make sure they have the facts when this comes to a vote.

    Thanks for all you do,
    Paul and Jess for the GetUp team.

    [1] ‘Awful and noisy’: Tony Abbott slams wind farms during interview with Alan Jones. Sydney Morning Herald, 12 June 2015.

  • VICTORY! Seriously, G7 Says Goodbye to Fossil Fuels! AVAAZ

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    VICTORY! Seriously, G7 Says Goodbye to Fossil Fuels!

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    Ricken Patel – Avaaz Unsubscribe
    2:54 AM (6 hours ago)
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    Dear Avaazers,

    “The

    Our appeals followed G7 Chair Angela Merkel everywhere for 6 weeks.

    Many told us it was a pipe dream, but the G7 Summit of leading world powers just committed to getting the global economy off fossil fuels forever!!!

    Even the normally cynical media is raving that this is a huge deal.

    And it’s one giant step closer to a huge win at the Paris summit in December — where the entire world could unite behind the same goal of a world without fossil fuels — the only way to save us all from catastrophic climate change.

    For 2 years our community has led global public mobilisation for this goal, including:

    • spearheading the gigantic, momentum-changing, 700,000 strong climate march last year
    • a 2.7 million person petition for 100% clean/0 carbon delivered to dozens of key leaders
    • scores of rallies, high-level lobbying meetings, opinion polls, and ad campaigns, all funded by our community
    • a 3 month all-out push for the G7 summit leadership, especially German Chancellor Angela Merkel, to put this on the agenda and agree to this goal

    Our work is far from done, but it’s a day to celebrate — click here to read more and say congratulations to everyone else in this incredibly wonderful community!!

    https://secure.avaaz.org/en/paris_here_we_come/?bhPqncb&v=60188

    “The

    We spearheaded the largest climate march in history – nearly 700,000 strong and a game-changer for political momentum.

    Just last year climate change seemed to many of us like a behemoth that was dooming our species to a significant probability of extinction due to our own stupidity and corruption.

    But with hope, and good strategy, (the Avaaz effect:)), and the efforts of many leaders like German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Pope Francis, and organisations like our friends at 350 and the Guardian newspaper’s work on fossil fuel divestment, as well as killer research from groups like the World Resources Institute, most experts now believe the tide is turning, and momentum is building to get a global deal in Paris this year that will set the world on course to a solution. It will be a long fight, we cannot afford to drop our guard, but today, we celebrate a battle won!!!

    With gratitude and joy,

    Ricken, Alice, Emma, Iain, and the whole Avaaz team

    PS: the G7 declaration is just a commitment, and we need to hold them accountable, but commitments matter – sending an immediate signal to dirty and clean energy investors that will help accelerate the clean-energy boom we desperately need. There’s more info on the summit and how we helped win this on our celebration page:

    https://secure.avaaz.org/en/paris_here_we_come/?bhPqncb&v=60188

    Sources:

    Merkel convinces Canada and Japan on CO2 (Politico)
    http://www.politico.eu/article/germany-canada-japan-emissions-pledge/

    G7 leaders bid ‘Auf Wiedersehen’ to carbon fuels (Reuters)
    http://in.reuters.com/article/2015/06/08/g7-summit-idINKBN0OO25120150608

  • Good news today! Kakadu ACF

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    Good news today! Kakadu

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    Dave Sweeney, ACF Unsubscribe
    4:12 PM (24 minutes ago)
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    INGA

    I’m really happy to write to you today to share very good news, and to thank the thousands of ACF supporters who helped to make it happen.
    The Kakadu uranium miner Energy Resources Australia (ERA) just cancelled their planned controversial and contested underground mine – Ranger 3 Deeps.
    The plan never made sense and now ERA has accepted that it wouldn’t make dollars either.
    The shelving of this ill-conceived and environmentally damaging project is a big step towards ending uranium mining in the beautiful Kakadu National Park.

    How the ACF community spoke out for Kakadu

    After over a million litres of radioactive slurry spilled at Ranger uranium mine in 2013, thousands of you called for action. As a result of public outcry the federal government was forced to suspend mineral processing at the embattled mine.
    Despite this, and more than 200 leaks, spills, accidents and licence breaches, the company pressed ahead with plans for new underground mining – the Ranger 3 Deeps project.

    When the environmental impact statement for the project opened for public comment, thousands of ACF supporters told Federal Environment Minister Greg Hunt that a new uranium mine in the middle of a World Heritage listed national park was a bad idea.

    With help from you and other environment groups, we’ve kept the pressure on ERA to abandon this project and to instead clean up the existing mess at its troubled Ranger mine.

    THANK YOU SO MUCH

    Life in this beautiful place is safer now

    Kakadu is World Heritage listed, home to majestic waterfalls, vast wetlands teeming with wildlife, Indigenous rock art and over 50,000 years of living tradition and cultural practice.

    This news means common sense and the national interest has prevailed over the self-interest of the Australian uranium mining industry. We are very pleased that ERA has sought a formal assurance from its parent company, Rio Tinto, to fully fund the rehabilitation of the Ranger mine site.

    Huge foreign companies with bad track records should not be allowed to trash the places Australians love and leave citizens to foot the clean up bill.
    Today is a day to celebrate – but we’ll keep an eagle eye on ERA and Rio Tinto to make sure they honour their commitment to clean up Ranger.
    ACF will keep working with the Mirarr Traditional Owners in the transition to a post-mining regional economy and in helping to protect Kakadu. Our vision of a mine and nuclear free Kakadu is that much closer.
    Thank you for your ongoing support. To make a tax deductible donation before June 30, click here.

    DONATE

    Cheers,

    Dave

    Dave Sweeney
    Nuclear free campaigner
    Australian Conservation Foundation