On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 12:25 PM, Coal Terminal Action Group <hcec@hcec.org.au> wrote:
Dear friends,
For years, Hunter Valley residents have expressed concern about coal dust. In Newcastle, Maitland, Muswellbrook, Singleton and other Hunter Valley communities, we routinely wash coal dust off our houses and wonder what it’s doing to our lungs.
The coal companies say they can’t tell us whether fine particles from coal wagons spread into suburbs along the coal corridor. They can’t tell us how this pollution is affecting our health or how far coal dust spreads from uncovered coal wagons into the areas where we live, work and go to school. Until we told him two weeks ago, the Planning Minister Brad Hazzard was unaware that coal wagons in NSW were not covered!
The NSW Government has also failed to answer these questions, so we’re taking matters into our own hands: community groups are commissioning our own air quality monitoring. We’re raising funds to engage independent experts who will measure and report on fine particle pollution along the coal train line – day in, day out.
Right now, the NSW Government is considering a proposal for a fourth coal terminal in Newcastle that will double the volume of coal exported from our port. That would double the dust in residential areas throughout the Hunter. Imagine the headlines if we had regular, reliable monitoring on the levels of coal dust we’re already breathing in – it would make approving a new mega terminal a hell of a lot more legally risky and politically unappetising.
By donating now, you’ll help empower all residents with the information we need to protect our health, our families and fight back against the insatiable expansion of big coal. With coal exports from our region set to treble in the next 10 years, it’s time we learned once and for all how coal is already affecting our health. It’s time to get the facts, and hold politicians and big coal accountable for protecting our health.
We’d love to clear the air – but first we’ve got to know what’s in it. Please donate $25 or more – whatever you can afford:
Charts used in my talk (A New Age of Risk) on 22 September at the meeting “Mobilizing Science for Sustainable Development: The Sustainable Development Solutions Network” at Columbia University are available on my web site under Recent Presentations or via the direct link.
LABOR has become an electoral machine largely devoid of purpose and risks a period of “unprecedented bleakness”, the former finance minister and party powerbroker Lindsay Tanner says.
In a blistering assessment, Mr Tanner argues the party has become so hollowed out that even its signature polices such as the national disability insurance scheme and the national broadband network were motivated more by political expediency than internal belief.
Labor has become an electoral machine largely devoid of wider purpose.
Lindsay Tanner
Speaking in New York, Prime Minister Julia Gillard rejected Mr Tanner’s views about Labor lacking purpose, and his criticisms of key policies.
“As the focus has shifted from material concerns to more abstract issues of human rights, the Greens have prospered at Labor’s expense” … Lindsay Tanner. Photo: Luis Enrique Ascui
In a forthcoming collection of essays, Mr Tanner argues it would be a “grave mistake” for Labor to believe its poor standing in the polls at state and federal levels was cyclical because he believes it may be structural.
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He said the party had declined due to an increase in affluence, which had eroded the party’s original working-class base, the rise of “cynical manipulators” in senior positions, and the growth of the Greens.
“Labor has become an electoral machine largely devoid of wider purpose,” he argues in his essay, Politics Without Purpose.
“Labor governments still do good things but at the behest of random external forces, not any kind of inner calling,” he says.
“This delivers some electoral success but it is inevitably fleeting, and meanwhile the political capital on which longer-term electoral competitiveness depends, is slowly melting away.”
Mr Tanner says the substantial increase in pensions, granted when Kevin Rudd was prime minister and he was in cabinet, was driven by external political circumstances, not purpose.
“The unedifying gyrations on climate change and asylum seekers over the past 15 years hardly suggest a clear purpose,” he says. “The national broadband network was an improvised response to an unexpected situation.”
Mr Tanner says even the disability scheme, a policy heavily promoted by the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, as driven by core Labor values of fairness and equity, was compromised because it was outsourced to the economically dry Productivity Commission to develop.
“Past equivalents used to be nurtured within the party, the trade union movement, and sympathetic non-government organisations.”
However, Ms Gillard said: ”The government’s purpose it to keep the economy strong, not just for today but tomorrow.”
She said the government’s purpose was to use the proceeds of the strong economy to ”meet the needs of the Australian people”. She cited as examples school funding, dental care for low and middle income earners, and the disability insurance scheme, “all great Labor reforms”.
Ms Gillard did not answer specifically when asked about Mr Tanner’s views that it was wrong to change leaders in 2010. However, she has long been aware Mr Tanner opposed dumping Kevin Rudd at the time.
Mr Tanner, disgruntled at the ousting of Kevin Rudd as leader, quit politics at the election in 2010 and his seat of Melbourne fell to the Greens. “As the focus has shifted from material concerns to more abstract issues of human rights, the Greens have prospered at Labor’s expense,” he says.
“The Greens can always outbid us because they are not weighed down by the need to deal with material concerns and to win majority support in order to form government.”
Mr Tanner attacks “the distinct class of political professionals” influencing the party as “extremely adept at the mechanics of politics but largely uninterested in its purpose”.
He says the rising affluence of the working class, a consequence of technological change, the mining boom and economic reform, made selling the narratives of material deprivation and broad economic injustice much harder than 50 years ago.
“It is hardly surprising that a lot of the sting has gone out of Labor’s historic mission – redistributing wealth and income to ordinary working people – when many of those people are now among the richest people in a globalised world.”
Mr Tanner says the picture is “very grim”.
“If we find ourselves out of office all around the country in a couple of years’ time, we will have very little to fall back on,” he says. “Rebuilding needs people, resources and purpose.”
He offers little in the way of a solution other than advocating real reforms that empower rank-and-file members. The incremental changes agreed to at the ALP national conference last December, were “mildly positive but inconsequential changes that have little relevance to Labor’s fundamental problems”.
“The truth is that it is probably too late for any of this to matter.” He said a “root and branch re-think about why we exist” was the only way to deal with the challenge.
Scientific models suggest that major Pacific ecosystems will move hundreds of miles by 2100 as a result of climate change. The results of this research could help officials manage the potentially significant impacts — on sea creatures and humans — of marine habitat shifts.
Satellites trace sea level change BBC News A major reassessment of 18 years of satellite observations has provided a new, more detailed view of sea–level change around the world. Incorporating the data from a number of spacecraft, the study re-affirms that ocean waters globally are rising by … See all stories on this topic »
