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  • Feds not willing to take climate change seriously

    The Prime Minister is looking out of touch and vulnerable to changing public sentiment on the big issues of the moment: Iraq and climate change, according to Steve Lewis, chief political correspondent for The Australian (24/10/2006, p.12).

    Climate change ignored: The severe drought, which has turned so much of Australia’s inland into barren tracts, has highlighted the government’s unwillingness to take seriously the challenge of climate change. For years, Howard’s energy and environment policies have been framed through the prism of protecting, at all costs, Australia’s fossil fuels sector.

    Renewables support limited: The 2004 energy statement reflected this approach. The government has been only half-hearted in its support for renewable energy sources. Yet Australia could – should – have been a world leader in this regard.

    Feds not willing to invest: We have the expertise, the climate, the natural resources, but we have lacked a Federal Government willing to take seriously the need to invest in an alternative route to cleaner energy. Green groups have been demonised and those who argue that Australia’s reliance on fossil fuels can’t go on forever have been sidelined as a ruthless fossil fuels pragmatism was maintained.

    Nuclear argument comes too late: Although nuclear energy may play a part, the government should be condemned for failing to embrace a green culture sooner and with more passion, Lewis wrote. Finally, it appears that senior government figures have been mugged by reality. No doubt Howard will formally announce a significant shift in the government’s stance on energy and environmental issues before next year’s election.

    The Australian, 24/10/2006, p.12

    Source: Erisk Net  

  • Bondi beach will disappear by end of the century

    Global warming is not going to end at the boundaries of the state or even the nation, and maybe the responsibility shouldn’t stop there either, says The Sydney Morning Herald (23/10/2006, p.15).

    Predictions becoming alarming: Meanwhile the predictions on the impact – and cost – of global warming in Australia are becoming more alarming. We’ll be faced with more droughts and more bushfires.

    Snowfields will decrease: The CSIRO predicts that the NSW snowfields may decrease by between 18 and 66 per cent by 2030, which would dramatically limit the opportunities for tourism.

    Oceans will rise: Sydney and other places will struggle with their water supplies, while Sydney University scientists suggest that in Sydney the ocean could advance by as much as 150 metres by 2100.

    Bondi beach will disappear: Under that scenario the beach at Bondi would disappear and the Collaroy-Narrabeen beach could retreat by 22 metres.

    The Sydney Morning Herald, 23/10/2006, p.15

    Source: Erisk Net  

  • UK troops worsen problems in Iraq: army head

    By Deborah Haynes

    Thu Oct 12, 2006

    http://tinyurl.com/y65w2z

    LONDON (Reuters) – The head of Britain’s army said the presence of British troops in Iraq was exacerbating the security situation on the ground and they should be withdrawn soon, according to a British newspaper.

    General Sir Richard Dannatt also said in an interview with the Daily Mail newspaper that Britain’s Iraq venture was aggravating the security threat elsewhere in the world.

    In unusually blunt comments for a serving senior officer, Dannatt told the Friday edition of the newspaper that the troops should "get … out sometime soon because our presence exacerbates the security problems".

    Britain, Washington’s main ally in Iraq, has around 7,000 soldiers deployed, mainly in the south of the country.

    The U.S.-led invasion to oust former president Saddam Hussein has come under heavy criticism, as the civilian death-toll mounts and British and U.S. troops are increasingly in the firing line.

    Dannatt, who took over as Chief of the General Staff in August, said: "We are in a Muslim country and Muslims’ views of foreigners in their country are quite clear. As a foreigner, you can be welcomed by being invited in a country, but we weren’t invited certainly by those in Iraq at the time.

    "The military campaign we fought in 2003 effectively kicked the door in. Whatever consent we may have had in the first place, may have turned to tolerance and has largely turned to intolerance. That is a fact. I don’t say that the difficulties we are experiencing round the world are caused by our presence in Iraq but undoubtedly our presence in Iraq exacerbates them."

    Putting himself directly at odds with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bush, the general criticized the post-invasion planning by the U.S.-led coalition.

    "I think history will show that the planning for what happened after the initial successful war fighting phase was poor, probably based more on optimism than sound planning."

    "The original intention was that we put in place a liberal democracy that was an exemplar for the region, was pro-West and might have a beneficial effect on the balance within the Middle East. That was the hope, whether that was a sensible or naive hope history will judge. I don’t think we are going to do that. I think we should aim for a lower ambition."

    The Ministry of Defense declined to comment immediately on the comments. A spokesman at Blair’s office was not immediately available to comment.

    In a snapshot of the daily chaos plaguing Iraq, gunmen stormed a television station in Baghdad on Thursday and shot dead 11 staff in the biggest attack yet on media in the country.

    Iraqi media organizations, funded by religious or political groups, are frequent targets for militant groups as attacks by Sunni Arab insurgents and sectarian death squads continue to convulse the country, killing an estimated 100 people a day.

  • Why Did Israel Blow Up Gaza’s Power Station?

    Bad Faith and the Destruction of Palestine

    By Jonathan Cook

    September 29, 2006

     

    Nazareth.

    A mistake too often made by those examining Israel’s behaviour in the occupied territories — or when analysing its treatment of Arabs in general, or interpreting its view of Iran — is to assume that Israel is acting in good faith. Even its most trenchant critics can fall into this trap.

    Such a reluctance to attribute bad faith was demonstrated this week by Israel’s foremost human rights group, B’Tselem, when it published a report into the bombing by the Israeli air force of Gaza’s power plant in late June. The horrifying consequences of this act of collective punishment — a war crime, as B’Tselem rightly notes — are clearly laid out in the report.

    The group warns that electricity is available to most of Gaza’s 1.4 million inhabitants for a few hours a day, and running water for a similar period. The sewerage system has all but collapsed, with the resulting risk of the spread of dangerous infectious disease.

    In their daily lives, Gazans can no longer rely on the basic features of modern existence. Their fridges are as good as useless, threatening outbreaks of food poisoning. The elderly and infirm living in apartments can no longer leave their homes because elevators don’t work, or are unpredictable. Hospitals and doctors’ clinics struggle to offer essential medical services. Small businesses, most of which rely on the power and water supplies, from food shops and laundry services to factories and workshops, are being forced to close.

    Rapidly approaching, says B’Tselem, is the moment when Gaza’s economy — already under an internationally backed siege to penalise the Palestinians for democratically electing a Hamas government — will simply expire under the strain.

    Unfortunately, however, B’Tselem loses the plot when it comes to explaining why Israel would choose to inflict such terrible punishment on the people of Gaza. Apparently, it was out of a thirst for revenge: the group’s report is even entitled "Act of Vengeance". Israel, it seems, wanted revenge for the capture a few days earlier of an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, from a border tank position used to fire artillery into Gaza.

    The problem with the "revenge" theory is that, however much a rebuke it is, it presupposes a degree of good faith on the part of the vengeance-seeker. You steal my toy in the playground, and I lash out and hit you. I have acted badly — even disproportionately to use a vogue word B’Tselem also adopts — but no one would deny that my emotions were honest. There was no subterfuge or deception in my anger. I incur blame only because I failed to control my impulses. There is even the implication that, though my action was unwarranted, my fury was justified.

    But why should we think Israel is acting in good faith, even if in bad temper, in destroying Gaza’s power station? Why should we assume it was a hot-headed over-reaction rather than a coldly calculated deed?

    In other words, why believe Israel is simply lashing out when it commits a war crime rather than committing it after careful advance planning? Is it not possible that such war crimes, rather than being spontaneous and random, are actually all pushing in the same direction?

    More especially, why should we give Israel the benefit of the doubt when its war crimes contribute, as the bombing of the power station in Gaza surely does, to easily deciphered objectives? Why not think of the bombing instead as one instalment in a long-running and slowly unfolding plan?

    The occupation of Gaza did not begin this year, after Hamas was elected, nor did it end with the disengagement a year ago. The occupation is four decades old and still going strong in both the West Bank and Gaza. In that time Israel has followed a consistent policy of subjugating the Palestinian population, imprisoning it inside ever-shrinking ghettos, sealing it off from contact with the outside world, and destroying its chances of ever developing an independent economy.

    Since the outbreak six years ago of the second intifada — the Palestinians’ uprising against the occupation — Israel has tightened its system of controls. It has sought to do so through two parallel, reinforcing approaches.

    First, it has imposed forms of collective punishment to weaken Palestinian resolve to resist the occupation, and encourage factionalism and civil war. Second, it has "domesticated" suffering inside the ghettos, ensuring each Palestinian finds himself isolated from his neighbours, his concerns reduced to the domestic level: how to receive a house permit, or get past the wall to school or university, or visit a relative illegally imprisoned in Israel, or stop yet more family land being stolen, or reach his olive groves.

    The goals of both sets of policies, however, are the same: the erosion of Palestinian society’s cohesiveness, the disruption of efforts at solidarity and resistance, and ultimately the slow drift of Palestinians away from vulnerable rural areas into the relative safety of urban centres — and eventually, as the pressure continues to mount, on into neighbouring Arab states, such as Jordan and Egypt.

    Seen in this light, the bombing of the Gaza power station fits neatly into Israel’s long-standing plans for the Palestinians. Vengeance has nothing to do with it.

    Another recent, more predictable, example was an email exchange published on the Media Lens forum website involving the BBC’s Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen. Bowen was questioned about why the BBC had failed to report on an important peace initiative begun this summer jointly by a small group of Israeli rabbis and Hamas politicians. A public meeting where the two sides would have unveiled their initiative was foiled when Israel’s Shin Bet secret service, presumably with the approval of the Israeli government, blocked the Hamas MPs from entering Jerusalem.

    Bowen, though implicitly critical of Israel’s behaviour, believes the initiative was of only marginal significance. He doubts that the Shin Bet or the government were overly worried by the meeting — in his words, it was seen as no more than a "minor irritant" — because the Israeli peace camp has shown a great reluctance to get involved with the Palestinians since the outbreak of the intifada in 2000. The Israeli government would not want Hamas looking "more respectable", he admits, but adds that that is because "they believe that it is a terrorist organisation out to kill Jews and to destroy their country".

    In short, the Israeli government cracked down on the initiative because they believed Hamas was not a genuine partner for peace. Again, at least apparently in Bowen’s view, Israel was acting in good faith: when it warns that it cannot talk with Hamas because it is a terrorist organisation, it means what it says.

    But what if, for a second, we abandon the assumption of good faith?

    Hamas comprises a militant wing, a political wing and a network of welfare charities. Israel chooses to characterise all these activities as terrorist in nature, refusing to discriminate between the group’s different wings. It denies that Hamas could have multiple identities in the same way the Irish Republican Army, which included a political wing called Sinn Fein, clearly did.

    Some of Israel’s recent actions might fit with such a simplistic view of Hamas. Israel tried to prevent Hamas from standing in the Palestinian elections, only backing down after the Americans insisted on the group’s participation. Israel now appears to be destroying the Palestinians’ governing institutions, claiming that once in Hamas’ hands they will be used to promote terror.

    The Israeli government, it could be argued, acts in these ways because it is genuinely persuaded that even the political wing of Hamas is cover for terrorist activity.

    But most other measures suggest that in reality Israel has a different agenda. Since the Palestinian elections six months ago, Israel’s policies towards Hamas have succeeded in achieving one end: the weakening of the group’s moderates, especially the newly elected politicians, and the strengthening of the militants. In the debate inside Hamas about whether to move towards politics, diplomacy and dialogue, or concentrate on military resistance, we can have guess which side is currently winning.

    The moderates not the militants have been damaged by the isolation of the elected Hamas government, imposed by the international community at Israel’s instigation. The moderates not the militants have been weakened by Israel rounding up and imprisoning the group’s MPs. The moderates not the militants have been harmed by the failure, encouraged by Israel, of Fatah and Hamas politicians to create a national unity government. And the approach of the moderates not the militants has been discredited by Israel’s success in blocking the summer peace initiative between Hamas MPs and the rabbis.

    In other words, Israeli policies are encouraging the extremist and militant elements inside Hamas rather the political and moderate ones. So why not assume that is their aim?

    Why not assume that rather than wanting a dialogue, a real peace process and an eventual agreement with the Palestinians that might lead to Palestinian statehood, Israel wants an excuse to carry on with its four-decade occupation — even if it has to reinvent it through sleights of hand like the disengagement and convergence plans?

    Why not assume that Israel blocked the meeting between the rabbis and the Hamas MPs because it fears that such a dialogue might suggest to Israeli voters and the world that there are strong voices in Hamas prepared to consider an agreement with Israel, and that given a chance their strength and influence might grow?

    Why not assume that the Israeli government wanted to disrupt the contacts between Hamas and the rabbis for exactly the same reasons that it has repeatedly used violence to break up joint demonstrations in Palestinian villages like Bilin staged by Israeli and Palestinian peace actvists opposed to the wall that is annexing Palestinian farm land to Israel?

    And why, unlike Bowen, not take seriously opinion polls like the one published this week that show 67 per cent of Israelis support negotiations with a Palestinian national unity government (that is, one including Hamas), and that 56 per cent favour talks with a Palestinian government whoever is leading it? Could it be that faced with these kinds of statistics Israel’s leaders are terrified that, if Hamas were given the chance to engage in a peace process, Israeli voters might start putting more pressure on their own government to make meaningful concessions?

    In other words, why not consider for a moment that Israel’s stated view of Hamas may be a self-serving charade, that the Israeli government has invested its energies in discrediting Hamas, and before it secular Palestinian leaders, because it has no interest in peace and never has done? Its goal is the maintenance of the occupation on the best terms it can find for itself.

    On much the same grounds, we should treat equally sceptically another recent Israeli policy: the refusal by the Israeli Interior Ministry to renew the tourist visas of Palestinians with foreign passports, thereby forcing them to leave their homes and families inside the occupied territories. Many of these Palestinians, who were originally stripped by Israel of their residency rights in violation of international law, often when they left to work or study abroad, have been living on renewable three-month visas for years, even decades.

    Amazingly, this compounding of the original violation of these Palestinian families’ rights has received almost no media coverage and so far provoked not a peep of outrage from the big international human rights organisations, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

    I can hazard a guess why. Unusually Israel has made no serious attempt to justify this measure. Furthermore, unlike the two examples cited above, it is difficult to put forward even a superficially plausible reason why Israel needs to pursue this policy, except for the obvious motive: that Israel believes it has found another bureaucratic wheeze to deny a few more thousand Palestinians their birthright. It is another small measure designed to ethnically cleanse these Palestinians from what might have been their state, were Israel interested in peace.

    Unlike the other two examples, it is impossible to assume any good faith on Israel’s part in this story: the measure has no security value, not even of the improbable variety, nor can it be sold as an over-reaction, vengeance, to a provocation by the group affected.

    Palestinians with foreign passports are among the richest, best educated and possibly among the most willing to engage in dialogue with Israel. Many have large business investments in the occupied territories they wish to protect from further military confrontation, and most speak fluently the language of the international community — English. In other words, they might have been a bridgehead to a peace process were Israel genuinely interested in one.

    But as we have seen, Israel isn’t. If only our media and human rights organisations could bring themselves to admit as much. But because they can’t, the transparently bad faith underpinning Israel’s administrative attempt at ethnic cleansing may be allowed to pass without any censure at all.

    Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming " Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net

  • Record Profits for Exxon, Deprivation for Africa

    Oil Trip: Nigeria, Chad, Liberia

    By Emira Woods

    September 29, 2006

    http://www.counterpunch.org/woods09292006.html


    I t is almost impossible to imagine, as we sit in a well-lit, fully functioning gas station on Main Street, USA, that a community blessed with oil riches under its soil could look as impoverished as Yenagoa in the Nigerian state of Bayelsa.

    Yenagoa is the site of one of Nigeria’s first oil wells, built in pre-independence 1956 . Yet as in many communities in Nigeria’s oil rich Delta region, most people of Yenagoa live in mud huts. Some reside only a few feet away from the oil wells. But they lack electricity and indoor toilets. They have no hospitals, no running water, and no schools. And there is unemployment too. Oil companies like Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Chevron, and Exxon Mobil bring in foreign workers for even the most menial jobs.

    I recently took a trip to Yenagoa as part of a tour of three African countries-Nigeria, Chad, and Liberia-that may well fuel future U.S. energy needs. Historically, the United States has gotten two-thirds of its oil from other countries. Most U.S. oil imports come from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Mexico, and Canada. Increasingly, as the United States, China, and other nations expand their thirst for oil, and instability deepens in the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa is becoming a more attractive source for crude. The U.S. National Intelligence Council estimates that Africa could supply 25% of U.S. oil by 2015.

    The three countries I visited could well play a role in meeting that goal. Each is at different stages of oil production. In Nigeria, oil exploration dates back to 1956. In Chad, extraction started just three years ago. In Liberia, where I spent much of my childhood, the potential of oil off its expansive coastline holds hope for the future.

    In each of these countries, a complex web of geo-political actors, from oil company executives and government officials to military agents, makes decisions that impact the lives in the communities that produce the oil that flows straight to consumers in the United States.

    Nigerian Injustice

    The residents of Yenagoa lack jobs and basic social services. What they do have in abundance is environmental damage from decades of oil spills, compounded by the constant burning of gas flares necessary to extract the crude. Farmland is rendered useless while rivers and waterways, once well-populated with marine life, are now barren. One local chief explained that he received from Shell oil 150 Naira ($1.15) for each acre of land used by the company. I was astonished when he went on to say, "150 Naira, once every four years." With oil prices at historic highs, how could the compensation to communities long suffering the health impacts of oil spills and gas flares be such a pittance?

    Military and security personnel blanket the area around Yenagoa to protect oil interests. The communities are under siege.

    In Odi, a community adjacent to a well built in1958, villagers are demanding basic services like clean running water, electricity, and schools. The response from security agents has been severe. Our delegation watched in horror as one young man after another came forward to show fresh wounds from 5 days earlier. They told us that uniformed military men had grabbed 15 youths as they walked home from an adjacent village in the middle of the afternoon. The young men were beaten, tortured, and imprisoned, as a warning to others in the village. For almost a week, the youths languished in a prison miles away. Their family members were forced to walk for a day and a half to see them or bring them food in that decrepit prison. Their crime? Clamoring for basic rights.

    As oil companies celebrate record profits and the price of oil hovers close to $65 per barrel, African communities ostensibly blessed with the curse of oil languish in squalor. In fact, with no useable farmland or waterways, many in Nigeria say that they are worse off than their grandparents were before the discovery of oil.

    Hope in Chad?

    Recognizing the plight of their neighbors in Nigeria, communities in Chad’s oil producing areas worked hard, even before the onset of oil production in 2003, to minimize environmental damage and maximize the benefits to communities from which the oil flows.

    The 650-mile Chad-Cameroon pipeline (Africa’s biggest investment project) links landlocked Chad to world export markets through Cameroon’s port city of Douala. It was funded through loans and other support from the World Bank. Heroic measures initiated by activist, civil society, human rights, and religious community leaders led to a forward-looking revenue management law to manage the flow of oil revenues in a transparent way, ensuring resources for future generations.

    However, the Chadian government has subverted its own revenue management law. It has diverted spending away from the original priorities of agriculture, health, and education and toward "security." As a result, money that only now is beginning to flow from oil production is spent on weapons and other military equipment, instead of poverty reduction and the interests of future generations.

    The oil wells in Chad are newer, so its oil-producing areas haven’t yet experienced the damage caused by decades of oil spills. However, gas flaring, with its related health and environmental damage, is an integral part of the production cycle. When the wind blows, the smell of the burning gas blankets villages miles away.

    In a community near Doba, with gas flares as a backdrop, villagers told us about increased death and dying in the past few years from respiratory ailments and contaminated water supplies.

    Meanwhile, in Chad’s fertile agricultural zone, mangoes, cotton, gum Arabic, and cattle are abundant. Yet there is not one factory transforming the raw produce into goods for domestic or international markets.

    In spite of these challenges, Chadians maintain that their vigilance will minimize negative social and environmental impacts of oil and secure poverty reduction. Chad could easily feed itself and its neighbors if productive capacity were built in the agricultural sector. Oil revenue directed at building an education system, providing healthcare, as well as basic electricity, running water, and roads, could go a long way toward improving the condition of people’s lives.

    Throughout the country, in spite of a recent coup attempt and the elections in April that the majority of people boycotted, Chadians remain hopeful. From the capital city to the Southern oil fields, everyone seemed confident that future generations will experience a better life.

    Liberian Alternatives

    Liberia, the third country I visited, has recently emerged from 25 years of war. People there are hopeful too, despite the 85% unemployment rate and the complete lack of functioning schools or healthcare.

    Liberians hope that concessions now being granted for off-shore oil exploration will lead down the road to a new source of revenue. Liberia’s National Oil Company negotiated two contracts with the Nigeria-based Oranto Petroleum Limited and British-based Broadway Consolidated PLC. With exploration already underway, few in Liberia think that leaving the resource untouched is a viable option.

    The key question is, whether and how Liberia can escape the oil curse that so clearly has hurt Nigeria, Angola, and other countries in Africa’s richly endowed Gulf of Guinea region.

    One possibility is for countries like Liberia to consider alternative models for oil development. What, for example, can Liberia learn from Venezuela’s example of 61% national control of oil revenue and management? Or from Norway’s use of oil revenue to diversify the economy while advancing social services?

    Like many Africans, I fear that oil companies look to Africa for its resource wealth without seeing the people. Resource-rich communities are dehumanized and the color line is ever present as the greatest profits flow steadily to wealthy white men who already control enormous wealth and power.

    The price of oil has nearly tripled since President George W. Bush took office in 2001, yet the majority of the people who live in the countries from which the fuel flows still experience grinding poverty. Viewed side by side, the $10 billion quarterly profits of Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP, or Shell and the $1.15 per acre compensation paid (every four years) to some farmers in oil producing zones show just how unfair the global oil industry has become.

    The next time you pull up to the pump, stop a moment and remember that the thick black crude is extracted from the earth’s crust at great social, political, and environmental cost. Then do whatever it is in your power to demand dignity and proper compensation for those whose land or sea may be cursed with the blessing of this natural resource.

    Emira Woods is co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies.

  • Barefoot lawyers find true cost of advice

    By Adele Horin

    October 7 2006

    http://www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2006/10/06/1159641528381.html

    YOU would think a bunch of community legal centres that dispense advice to the down-and-outs might lie beneath the Federal Government’s radar. It has a war on terrorism to wage, a war on drugs, on the unions and on the Labor Party to execute.

    But no, the redoubtable Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock, found time from his musings on torture to kick the boot into these barefoot lawyers who earn half the going salary of their private sector counterparts. Their alleged crime is to dare to dissent from the Government on aspects of family law and anti-terrorism laws and its Achilles heel, industrial relations.

    Their punishment, he indicated, is likely to mean future funding contracts will prohibit the centres from engaging in advocacy, community education, or law reform.

    The Government withdrew its usual funding of the centres’ annual conference because the tenor of it caused displeasure. "Centres must focus on serving clients, not running private political agendas," Ruddock has said.

    There are 180 legal centres, dispensing advice on an array of topics from credit and debt to environmental law, and thanks to a lot of volunteers, they cost the Government only $22 million a year.

    But the power of a few pamphlets, an annual conference that featured the ACTU’s Sharan Burrow, and a single centre’s "industrial relations" data base made Ruddock see red – indeed reds under the bed. Fortuitously for the Government, the Office of the Employment Advocate has also decided it will no longer fund the legal centres to give advice to clients – mainly non-unionists – on industrial relations issues. It can handle all matters, from workers and bosses, in-house from now on.

    Bit by bit the Government is snuffling out the last flares of opposition, wherever it spots them, however feeble. Having won four elections, control of the Senate, the devoted support of the Murdoch press and talkback radio, the Government is still not content. It has planted hard-right warriors Keith Windschuttle, Janet Albrechtsen, and Ron Brunton on the ABC board to change its culture. It has undermined the independence of academics with its broad-brush sedition and anti-terrorism laws that have caused researchers to abandon studies on terrorism lest they be spied upon or detained.

    And now the Minister for Education, Julie Bishop, is planning to take over school curriculum. She does not like what children are being taught, claiming "ideologues" have "hijacked" the syllabus. It is not just the wrong history that is being taught, as the Prime Minister regularly asserts; it goes well beyond that.

    The Government, it seems, will not stop until all Australians are singing from the same song sheet. Unswerving approval of the IR changes, welfare-to-work, "staying the course in Iraq", detention without trial, and a white armband view of Australian history is not called ideological; it’s called correct.

    The Howard Government is in fact ideologically combative to a startling degree, forcing dissenters to toe the line through fear, funding partnerships and confidentiality clauses in contracts.

    A blanket of silence has fallen across Australia since the Government came into office in 1996, flexing its muscles against dissenters.

    It quickly de-funded several groups representing poor and disempowered Australians – the Australian Federation of Pensioners and Superannuants, National Shelter, the Association of Civilian Widows and other women’s groups, and the Australian Youth Policy and Action Coalition. In its stead it gave money to groups that have never caused a ripple, a rotating and occasional "youth round table", for instance, which to its credit once called for the restoration of a permanent body that might have some teeth.

    By 2002 a survey of peak groups in social welfare, aged, disability, and migrant issues, found half had lost significant funding and 20 per cent had lost all funding. Their role as advocates was a major reason for the clamp-down.

    A 2004 report by The Australia Institute showed non-government organisations had become more fearful of "biting the hand that feeds" them. Ninety per cent of the 290 surveyed believed their funding could be at risk if they criticised the Government. As the UNSW academic, Joan Staples, reminds us in a recent paper, the attitude to feisty non-government organisations was once different.

    A House of Representatives committee brought down a report in 1991 that said an important role of the these groups was "to disagree with government policy where this is necessary in order to represent the interests of their constituents". Howard, instead, sees them as single-issue groups and elites, with no role as advocates, or in policy formation. The Business Council of Australia, and such, are exceptions.

    He has shut the big charities up with multimillion-dollar Job Network contracts, and praises those that fill the gaps created by the withdrawal of government services. As long as they feed the hungry and house the poor but refrain from comment or advocacy, they are in the fold.

    Academics, likewise, are increasingly tied up doing contracted research for government departments, sworn to secrecy, even as their findings languish for months or years on a minister’s desk.

    It is only in the letters pages of some newspapers and on the internet that forthright dissenters can be found. The liberal MP Petro Georgiou has emerged as an unlikely hero because his viewpoint on asylum seekers and multiculturalism is so rarely expressed by any public figure, Kim Beazley included.

    Until now the legal centres, which include the Welfare Rights Network, have tried to reflect the views of their clients, bringing problems with welfare reform, family law, and industrial relations to the Government’s and public’s attention.

    They are out of tune with the times, and discord won’t be tolerated.