The Keneally Government of NSW has just announced that it will protect 107,000 hectares of Riverina redgums and set up an $80 million support package with logging to be wound down over the next five years.

But after five years the loggers would have done their redgum raping and pillaging, so seriously how much viable forest habitat would be left worth protecting?

Premier Keneally in following others advice has ignored the NSW Government's own community consultative process of the Natural Resources Commission and chosen to ignore the Commission's 16 recommendations. She's no different!

Several communities of koalas in the Mumbulla and Murrah State Forests on the NSW South Coast near Bermagui are at risk of regional extinction due to plans by Forestry NSW to commence logging their forest habitat on Monday 1st March 2010.

Originally published 27 Feb 10, Updated 1 Mar 10 with Media Release of 27 Feb 10 from the Conservation Council ACT Region.

In October 2008, NSW Forests logged what it labeled “two compartments” in Bermagui State Forest north of Bermagui. It justified this under the infamous Eden Regional Forest Agreement (RFA). This RFA is one of three established in 1999, in which the NSW Government relegated 15.1 million hectares of native forests across New South Wales for logging anytime.
Recent anti-protester legislation has seen four forest campaigners who had allegedly entered Bermagui State Forest charged under Labor's Ian MacDonald's Forestry Regulation 2009 due to go before the court on 18th June 2010.

In response to a reader's request, this is a Tiger Quoll (Dasyurus maculatus). It is Australia's largest carnivorous marsupial on the mainland and it has become endangered because of humans destroying its habitat. It is not a cat.

Much information may be obtained online simply by typing 'tiger quoll' on Google.

It's another one of these licensed to kill 'Regional Forest Agreements' (RFA's) by Forests NSW.

This time the bastard loggers are in the old growth and rainforest between Ulladulla and Batemans raping and pillaging South Brooman State Forest, a rare surviving home of Australia's endangered Spotted-Tailed Quolls and endangered Grey-Headed Flying Foxes.
And its all approved by Forests NSW under another slimy Regional Forest Agreement.

Last month, on 29th January 2010, Tasmania's infamous corporate logger, Gunns Ltd, dropped its multi-million dollar defamation suit against the remaining 13 environmental activitists protesting against its immoral pulp mill logging threat to Tasmania's old growth native forests.

But Gunn's Neanderthal arrogance persists. According to Gunns 13 spokesperson Warrick Jordan, "the world needs to know..that Gunns continues to sue Tasmanians who oppose their environmental vandalism.” [Tasmanian Times].

The Snowy River was one of the wildest rivers in Australia. But political ambitions destroyed the legend and now 99% of the Snowy is diverted by the Snowy mountains scheme. By the time it reaches the sea it has only 5% of the flow because of the Jindabyne Dam and other major dams.

The Snowy River Alliance is right. Australia's most famous wild river, the Snowy River, deserves to have its natural flows restored. The Alliance argues that if Snowy Hydro schemers releasing 28% of the Snowy's original flows, its ecology could be restored. But the current life sucking 5% dished out by the Snowy Hydro is exploitative, selfish and wrong.

If one visits our Australian CRIKEY website and scrolls down the ENVIRONMENT menu to its current subject listing: 'The case against school veggie gardens' and clicks...one is instantly redirected away from the CRIKEY website to another remote website. In this case away from CRIKEY to 'The Atlantic'

Why is CRIKEY auto-redirecting its readership?

Why is CRIKEY redirecting/outsourcing its content without explanation? Is this laziness? Is this content padding? Where is CRIKEY heading?

If Victorian Labor is to be epitomised in its wholesale profiteering of Melbourne's heritage, it is the carving up of Kew Cottages 90 acres, which for decades on the prominent Yarra River's prominent hilltop bend was home to Victoria's mentally handicapped, the socially unwanted, the 'too-difficult' vulnerable members of Melbourne's community. It was Melbourne's Bedlam and society labelled them 'mad' and banished them to 'Kew' up on the hill, behind the big wall. Now the Victorian Government is profiting from decades of neglect of many of its most vulnerable.

[This article was initially a comment to the article by Sheila Newman on this site 'Victorian Elections: A Midsummer Night's Meeting with MPs about what's going on'].

The callous and evil slaughter and rape of ethnic Tamils last May by the Sinhalese armed forces in Sri Lanka compares with the Indonesian mass murder of East Timorese in the Indonesian Invasion of 1975 and again in the 1991 Dili Massacre.

In September 1974, in central Java, Australia's Prime Minister Gough Whitlam told Indonesia's President Suharto that East Timor was “too small to be independent”. Thirty odd years later the Australian Government turned a blind eye to Rajapaska's Tamil genocide in Sri Lanka.

Seems Australia has quickly forgotten the lessons of Vietnam War. The late Martin Luther King is oft quoted from a sermon he delivered in 1967 on the Vietnam War "A time comes when silence is betrayal".

[This article follows on from the initial article after Rajapaksa's war crime assassinations of surrendering Tamils on 10 May 09: Tamil Tigers - hunted down and exterminated like vermin by Sinhalese President Rajapaksa [22-May-09]]

One would assume that an organisation entitled the 'Australia Strategic Policy Institute' would be a government body or a body at least having Australia's strategic interests at heart.

But its director, Dr Anthony Bergin, with a title one would assume would be capable of research, has written an article for Fairfax media supporting Japan's strategic interests.

If our doctor were respectful of the democratic rights to protest we have in Australia and recognised the Japanese incursion in Australia's whale sanctuary in the Southern Ocean, and respected the existence rights of whales, then perhaps his article for Fairfax would have instead read like this...

'On the trail of the gunman from Snowy River' is the bleeding heart front page story in the Sydney Morning Herald by Fair fax journalist, Yuko Narushima, today (9th January 2010) about some poacher(s) slaughtering brumbies. It is a sick sad tale and one hopes the poachers will be caught and dealt with as soon as possible.

But if Fairfax's front page story on brumbies were actually about the daily comparable slaughter of kangaroos, perhaps his article may then read along these lines...

Japan's dogged pursuit of whales well beyond its shores in our Southern Ocean is more about preserving endangered cultural pride than science.

Japan's justifications for whaling are not commercial nor scientific, despite the official rhetoric. They are culturally deep and desperately self-preserving, despite being wrong, wasteful and backward.

Traditional Chinese have deemed 2010 the Chinese Year of the Tiger. But some traditional Chinese medicine is based on superstition, and some Chinese men still think the bones of a tiger will increase their libido and so want to kill tigers to get a hard on. AdultShop should set up in Beijing and sort these misguided blokes out.

The Growth Lobby seemed to have gone to some trouble to justify encouraging more immigration to Australia by making a detailed case on Wikipedia under the search heading: "Immigration_to_Australia"

Typically the arguments are the same old tired justifications that rely on historic success and links to economic growth, but they are shallow, unsupported and rely on claims by the biased Productivity Commission.

See also: "How the Growth Lobby threatens Australia's future" of 24 Jan 09.

The 2009 Copenhagen Conference “took note” of an 'Accord'.

Well, what a hell of an expensive note taking exercise that was!

The full cost of the Copenhagen Conference should be disclosed including all return flights, accommodation, livestock killed and A4 paper printed off, etc. Given that green house gases are their specialty, the conference hosts (the UN) should also disclose the total tonnage of greenhouse gas emissions of this latest Conference of the Parties (COP15). This then must become the decadent standard never to be exceeded in future.

See also: "A climate con: Analysis of the 'Copenhagen Accord' of 21 Dec 09.

Copenhagen was a deadline without a plan.

Too many issues, too many causes, too many delegates, too much reading, too many options and yet forced to deliver a global consensus solution in just 2 weeks!

Why was a Viking speed expectation imposed on such complex and polarising issues? Participants must have spent the first week just reading the plethora of reports and getting acquainted with the issues and with one another.
Plundering of foreign lands may have taken just 2 weeks, but to reach consensus on complex global negotiation between 192 countries with differing priorities in 2 weeks?

What will become labelled the '2009 Copenhagen Conference' has indeed proven yet to be 'another overhyped talkfest in a series of duds!'

Copenhagen's much hyped COP15 was all navel gazing on communications consultants' hype. Like Copenhagen tourism, I bet the consultants pocketed nicely!

Copenhagen was doomed to fail simply on the basis of unresolved perceived mistrust between the haves and the have nots and the sea-level nations being side-lined.

And Copenhagen of all places..what a detached comfortable venue!

So Australia's Rudd Government proclaims that some internet content is "simply not suitable in a civilised society". Mmmm, smells of public communications consultant speak!

This latest Ruddism could possibly become the broadest claim of the 21st Century thus far. Could Rudd-speak imply control beyond banning child porn? Could it in fact imply that any website that dares to be critical of Rudd and Ruddism be instantly condemned to be 'not Rudd suitable' and so excommunicated by his holiness?

See also: ABC news 'Greenlight for internet filter plans' of 15 Dec 09, also Stop Internet Censorship! of 4 Dec 09,

What you can do: Attend an Anti-Internet Censorship meeting (see facebook). When: Monday 21 Dec 09, 7:30 PM; Where: Brisbane Square Library – Community Meeting Room

When Australia has an annual record 383,000 net migration this last year we have what is tantamount to foreign invasion by stealth. It is an 'immigration invasion'.

Howard started it and Rudd has perpetuated it. Australians are being pacified and re-educated into believing misleading justifications like economic growth, addressing skills shortages, multi-culturalism, being a world citizen, etc.

[This article was initially a comment to Sheila Newman's article 'Australia's governments are coordinating an unarmed invasion without your permission']

Possum drawing by Chloe and Kathleen, Anderson's Creek Primary School, Victoria, Australia

Lanamania is a distributor for possum yarn from New Zealand.

Its website boasts: "Our passion for knitting, our love of nature and our New Zealand heritage all come together in one product...Possum handknit yarn of Zealana -the light and soft touch of New Zealand."
But this view of Australia's native animal is somewhat different to those of Anderson's Creek Primary School in rural Victoria, Australia.

The media froth and bubble over recent asylum seekers arriving by boat near Ashmore Reef mid ocean between Timor and the west Kimberley coast pales in comparison with the daily arrivals at Kingsford Smith Airport in the middle of Sydney.

The Australian newspaper on 2nd November 2009, tallied the total number of Christmas Island detainees at 1165. Yet Australia receives 776 new immigrants per day and most arrive into Sydney by plane. This is where the media should have their cameras - at Kingsford Smith Airport's International Arrivals gate on the ground floor.

On New Zealand's North Island at the Bay of Plenty, another backyard possum fur trader, BASICALLY BUSH, runs a thriving business slaughtering Brushtail Possums for profit. It's just like the good ol' days of the 19th Century.

It seems the preferred kill method is by shooting..."Be careful not to get rubbish into the bag, and that you don't end up dropping bullets or spent shells in."
Basically Bush's motto is: "SKIN THE BEST and PLUCK THE REST"

It claims"This exciting raw material that has revolutionised the knitwear industry in New Zealand. Possum fibre is referred to as 'possum merino' and is promoted as 'lighter than cashmere'.

To his credit, NSW Premier, Nathan Rees in the days preceding the 4th December 2009 (his ousting as Premier) announced the creation of a massive new red gum national park along the Murray River near Deniliquin to protect much of the state's remaining river red gum forests from logging.

Probably the most relevant and credible authority on the centuries old problem of human introduced possums into New Zealand should be New Zealand's own Department of Conservation (DOC).

But DOC has no watchdog to vet its policy, aerial 1080 poison programmes, budget decision making, ethics, ecological strategic choices; so has DOC become its own unanswerable master dictating possum control and culling only on the basis of it deeming it administratively cost effective and efficient?

Perhaps a leftover of Rogernomics applied to lean management of New Zealand's ecology.

Nichols (NZ) Ltd is a "supplier of quality tanned skins of New Zealand and Australian origin." It is based at 29 Wickham Street, Bromley, Christchurch, New Zealand and is a subsidiary of UK based L H Nichols Ltd.

Nichols slaughters Australian native possums for commercial profit.

Columnist Elizabeth Farrelly in her Fairfax article ‘Critter cullers turn our lives into roadkill’ (2-Jul-09) acknowledges New Zealand’s introduced possum problem, but like many Kiwi’s with an Australian chip on their shoulder, she is quick to deride anything Australian. It's bad enough Australians slaughtering Australian wildlife, but for recent immigrants to have a go at what is natively Australian is beyond tolerance. Out of Australia’s dark white colonial past, colonial antagonism towards its indigenous people and its native fauna and flora has been typically incited by smug prejudiced colonists.

American Republican politician Katherine Harris of Florida is shown here in August 2006 during her campaigning for the 2006 Florida United States Senate election, holding a native opossum by the tail.

A profiteer in New Zealand is culling the Australian Brushtail Possum for commercial yarn export. It calls itself the Merino Possum Consortium and has no ethical issue culling native animals from Australia, so what would prevent it seeing potential gain from culling Kiwis for down for sleeping bags?

An article by Associated Press entitled "Kangaroo tries to drown dog, attacks owner" dated Tuesday, 24 November 2009 (today), naturally drew the author's attention... "A kangaroo startled by a man walking his dog attacked the pair, pinning the pet underwater and slashing the owner in the abdomen with its hind legs. The Australian, Chris Rickard, was in stable condition Monday after the attack, which ended when the 49-year-old elbowed the kangaroo in the throat.