EACH DAY MORE TREES WILL DIE
Australian farmers have had enough of federal and state governments' reclamation of their land by stealth. So, on Sunday 1 July as a form of civil disobedience, thousands of farmers across Queensland, NSW and Victoria will cut down a tree. On 2 July they will cut down two trees and so on.
How has it come to this? The Federal Government sent Senator Ian Campbell to the Kyoto Conference in 1997 with a simple instruction. Only sign the agreement if the Australian government could insert a clause that allowed them to count the carbon credits accrued from stopping landing clearing in Australia . The clause 3.7 is known internationally as "The Australian Clause".
In signing the Kyoto agreement Australia pledged to contain emissions to 108% of the level they were at in 1990. Australia is the only industrialised nation that is on track to meet its targets.
Stopping land clearing has netted Australia a saving in emissions of 74million metric tonnes of carbon to October 2006. To put that into perspective, to gain the same reductions in emissions you'd have to shut down the entire economy of New Zealand or Ireland . For the same period the energy industry in Australia has increased emissions by 84 million metric tonnes of carbon.
The Federal government after Kyoto did a deal with the State Labor Governments in NSW and Queensland -- in exchange for additional funding -- that they would legislate to ban tree clearing in their state under the guise of being responsible environment managers.
It was a win-win for the Federal Government, who could meet its international C02 emission targets whilst allowing the economy to grow at record levels. By getting the State Labor Governments to legislate the Vegetation Laws they could dodge the bullets from their traditional rural voter base that was affected, all the while trotting out their green credentials to the Australian urban population.
The vegetation management laws introduced in both states are best described as draconian. A farmer who is accused of murder has more legal rights than a farmer who cuts down a state-owned tree.
In Queensland, if a Department of Natural Resources officer issues a farmer with a 'Compliance Notice' the only recourse a farmer has is in a magistrate's court. Our entire legal system is turned around -- the farmer must prove his innocence, whereas in any other case the prosecutor must prove the defendants guilt 'beyond a reasonable doubt'.
If the government came and took up to 80% of your home or business to meet their objectives you'd expect compensation. Indeed the constitution says that they can't take your land or assets without 'full compensation'. Farmers have had none. This is grossly unfair and farmers after a decade of trying to undo this injustice via political lobbying and the courts are at their wit's end.
The end result of Governments acting unfairly and unjustly towards its citizens is civil disobedience. History has shown that in a strong democracy, if its citizens can't rely on their judicial system to uphold their democratically won rights, civil disobedience is the only course of action. The result of Governments behaving badly towards its citizens is, in turn, a protest in the form of its citizens behaving badly.
Steve Trueman
AGMATES 100% Pro Australian Farmers
http://www.agmates.com/
NURSES Pushed Over The Edge
New National legislation becomes law today for nursing staff at aged care facilities to have a Federal Police check conducted.
Why is this so?
Following a past Victorian inquiry in into aged care staff abusing the elderly in nursing homes, the predictable knee jerk reaction was set in place.
One must ponder why patient abuse in general hospitals, etc, would not be also subjected to those staff members have the same check.
Who pays for this? - why the nurses at around $45 out of their pathetic wage packet
But did you know that in NSW a person off the street holding no qualifications other than the required "Police Check" can be employed as a
Care Service Employee in and aged care facility. Many do require the training qualifications of AIN II (Assistant in Nursing) or CSE II (Care Service Employee)
that are conducted by government funded training programs if you are on the dole, or $1200 up front to others.
The flood gates have opened, the Nurses have had enough of paying for paper certificates from organizations and government bodies just to be allowed to work.
We see daily experience of decades walk out the door - in many instances very highly skilled nurses retiring early or sea changing to other employment less taxing.
Trained in a hospital, not a University, a qualified Registered Nurse, Theatre Trained, Midwife, Aged Care, and ex-Matron, now referred to as DON (Director of Nursing) told SOS-NEWS that she had been Nursing all around the world including in the USA with NASA aerospace medicine.
She decided to work another 2 years before retirement as a Registered Nurse in aged care.
She told SOS-NEWS that if 40 years experience and international recognition plus security clearances are not good enough,
" they can take their bloody Police check and shove it," she said.
Her replacement at the nursing home is a graduate with 3 years University book servitude, and just 5 weeks bedside hospital experience - oops - and a current police check certificate.
SOS-NEWS further discovered that certain nursing agencies (where casual staff are obtained to fill shifts in hospitals who are short staffed), are sponsoring nurses from offshore and present them as qualified.
Recently one of these migrant nurses was sent for a night shift ready to assume "Registered Nurse In-charge" at a privately owned nursing home for 50 dementia elderly residents.
As the workload was exceeding the AIN's in the wards, a request to change a catheters bag on a male resident was sent to this RN In-Charge - unable to do the job requested, she
needed to be shown how this everyday process is conducted by an AIN.
Her report in the nurse's station logbook was illegible to other staff, who also were making entries, and her command of English was near zero.
This RN agency nurse was the only authorised person on duty that night allowed to administer dangerous drugs to residents from containers labeled in English?
Australia does not have a nursing shortage that can allow such dangerous practices such as we have mentioned to continue. Remember Queensland's "DR DEATH".
Nurses who have given up on bureaucracy and plain dangerous stupidity can be found earning more money in sandwich bars, employment agencies, hotels, clubs, council workers, etc, even sitting at home - right away from the incompetence.
Being the most qualified on duty at a nursing station is the RN (registered nurse), and we have established that most of their shift is taken up with paperwork while the nursing is left to the AIN's.
Baby boomers beware, just how much does the Florence Nightingale behind the nursing station at the nursing home you may reside in one day soon know about caring for you?
Who is caring for your mother and/or Father at the nursing home?
Nelson Lord of Lies Caught Out
A nice story by Mike O'Connor of the Brisbane Courier Mail reporting the ABC interview of where, Brendan Nelson MP, was exposed naked as a liar by Labor candidate for the Eden-Monaro seat in the Federal election, Mike Kelly.
Kelly a veteran army office of the Iraqi conflict and commanding world recognition for his ability as a strategist was more than a handful for this public servant who only had a bag full of bullshit to refer to.
If elected, it will be interesting to see the time frame of removing Kelly's integrity and concern for his fellow Australians to suit the "Party Room Politics"
Editor
IT IS not often you see Defence Minister Brendan Nelson trapped like a fugitive in a spotlight with the crosshairs of a television camera centered on his forehead.
It happened last week and when The 7.30 Report's Kerry O'Brien pulled the trigger, the minister died a politician's death trying to defend the indefensible.
Nelson's metaphorical demise mirrored the plight in which John Howard's Government is now mired and it is this: political expedience carries a hidden cost which becomes evident when fabrications, deceptions and convenient memory losses become exposed through an inconvenient turn of events.
Nelson's inconvenient truth was borne by Mike Kelly, a career officer in the Australian Army who has served in Iraq with distinction where he was hailed by the Americans - and still is - as one of the most effective, professional and inspired strategists to serve there.
While Kelly was in the army, he posed no real threat. This changed when he recently resigned to stand for the Labor Party in the litmus-test southern NSW federal seat of Eden-Monaro.
No longer fettered by his uniform, Kelly revealed on The 7.30 Report that he had been advising Canberra from Iraq that the AWB was paying bribes in exchange for wheat contracts to Saddam Hussein and that the Americans were torturing Iraqi prisoners.
These warnings, he said, were sent well before the Government claimed to have any knowledge of these events.
Bottom line - the Government knew and in claiming ignorance, lied to Parliament.
Nelson tried to paint Kelly as a Labor stooge playing party politics.
Kelly said he expected that but that he was only entering politics because he had been gutted by the unnecessary loss of life and the maiming of innocents he had seen in Iraq and wanted to do what he could to effect a change.
As much as he may have wished to denounce Kelly as a fraud, Nelson couldn't.
His military credentials were impeccable and reflected a reputation with a record for telling it straight, a quaint concept regarded as a fatal affliction in Australian politics.
Nelson then tried to dismiss his claims because they related to events which had already been debated extensively, employing the "let's move on" philosophy.
He was in effect saying - "What if we did lie and deceive? What if we did know the AWB was paying $300 million in bribes to Saddam? It's ancient history now".
It was a hollow defence and Nelson knew it.
When Kelly related how he had felt sickened by the knowledge that the AWB was paying money to be used to buy arms and ammunition to be turned against his fellow Australian soldiers fighting in Iraq and suggested that in another age, this could have been construed as treason, Nelson was a dead man walking and he looked it.
In telling his party room last week that he had "run out of rabbits to pull out of his hat", Howard revealed the core of his problems. He has pulled too many rabbits out of too many hats. He produced the rabbit that was the Cole inquiry into the AWB scandal, an inquiry which was construed so as to prevent any culpability by figures such as Foreign Minister Alexander Downer ever being exposed.
He pulled the George W. Bush-supplied rabbit of non-existent weapons of mass destruction out of the hat to justify declaring war on Iraq and, last week, produced perhaps his last rabbit - a decision which effectively puts the disgraced AWB back in sole control of Australia's wheat exports.
It was, however, a limp rabbit, a furry, long-eared version of John Cleese's dead parrot.
Caving in to pressure from the increasingly marginal Nationals, he decided to retain the single-desk system for selling our wheat.
He announced that a new entity would be established next year to market the wheat but it was immediately apparent that this "new" body would be AWB by a different name.
The company is to be rewarded for bribery on a massive scale.
It is not often that this writer finds himself in agreement with West Australian federal Liberal Wilson "Iron Bar" Tuckey but his remarks on seeing this particular Howard rabbit emerge from the prime ministerial headgear were to the point.
"The National Party has become the Coalition's ACTU," he said, denouncing the Nationals as "screaming fanatics" who were unable to spell the word "corruption" and declaring that the new entity would be "a front for the AWB".
The Prime Minister is right - there can be no more rabbits.
Not because he has no more to produce but because an increasing proportion of the population has tired of the magician's act and their fingers are hovering over the electoral remote control.
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