government – Page 15 – ANGFA Queensland

Time to stop pretending that we really care about our kids and grandkids futures

Sep 062013

Original story by Brad Farrant, University of Western Australia at The Conversation

The Global Climate Wake-Up Call, Maldives. Photo: niOS/Flickr

We are about to show the children of today and tomorrow and the rest of the world that we don’t really care about them.

Australians are about to elect the Coalition into federal government. A Coalition that is not fair dinkum about doing our fair share to prevent dangerous climate change.

Our existing emission reduction targets are completely inadequate yet even before he gets into government Tony Abbott is already preparing to abandon them.

At a time when we need the people of the world to urgently come together and commit to the massive increases in emission reductions that are required to prevent dangerous climate change Australia is about to set the most unethical example to the rest of the world by doing the opposite. As I have said before, if a high emission per capita wealthy nation like ours won’t commit to doing its fair share how can we expect anyone else to?

This election is likely to have significant international implications. Can anyone honestly image Tony Abbott standing on the world stage calling for more ambitious emission reduction targets?

The mainstream media has played a major role in bringing this irresponsibile situation about. Some sections of it more than others. The media has been as absent from public climate change discussions and election forums as the Coalition has. Where is the indepth media scrutiny of the short-comings of the proposed climate change policies? Where is the media outrage at the very idea that the Coalition is willing to walk away from our emission reduction commitments?

Most of the mainstream media seems to be stuck in denial and avoidance of the problem. However, to place all the blame at their feet would be unfair.

Voices advocating for the children of today and tomorrow have been almost completely absent from the public climate change debate, especially during the election campaign. The existing organisations set up to speak up for and protect the interests of children are clearly inadequate for the challenge that dangerous climate change presents. We need new bodies at the state and national levels to represent and advocate for the children of the future because the adults of Australia are failing to look after them.

Ultimately all of us will be judged by the kids of today and tomorrow for what we did and didn’t do to protect them from dangerous climate change.

What will your answer be when they ask what you did?

Brad Farrant does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.

The Bass is Back

Australian native freshwater species, fisheries, government

Sep 032013

News release from DAFF

Queensland Boating and Fisheries Patrol (QBFP) District Manager Brett Depper said the species had been off limits between 1 June 2013 and 31 August to protect the species during its breeding cycle.

Australian Bass - Macquaria novemaculeata. Image: DAFF

"Fishers can return to their favourite spot to catch Aussie Bass from Sunday, 1 September,” he said.

"It's important to remember that size and possession limits apply. The minimum size is 30cm and the possession limit is two.

"The annual closure period is vital to protecting Australian bass during vulnerable times and is aligned to their breeding cycle within Queensland’s southeast river systems," he said.

"Australian bass are a migratory species and head downstream to spawn within brackish systems each year.

"The closed season is an important measure that allows stocks to replenish to ensure there are sustainable fisheries for current and future generations of Queensland anglers."

Mr Depper said fishers were able to continue catching bass during the closed season at the State's Stocked Impoundment Permit Scheme (SIPS) dams.

"A number of the SIPS dams and weirs did not have closed season restrictions and many were filled with good supplies of Australian bass," he said.

"Fishers can enjoy year-round fishing at any of the State's SIPS dams by purchasing a permit.

"Money from the permits goes towards restocking the dams and helping to sustain native fish stocks."

For more information about Australian bass, closed seasons or SIPS visitwww.fisheries.qld.gov.au.

Anyone who suspects or witnesses illegal fishing activity is encouraged to call the Fishwatch hotline on 1800 017 116.

Follow Fisheries Queensland on Facebook and Twitter (@FisheriesQld).

Media contact: Sacha Kitson, 07 3087 8583

The power of the fragment: why politicians have turned their backs on climate

community, environment, government

Sep 032013

Original story by Clive Hamilton at The Conversation

Strong action on climate change has been undermined by the fragmentation of politics. Photo: kukkurovaca/Flickr

A recent Vote Compass poll shows 61% of Australian adults want the federal government to do more to tackle climate change; 18% want it to do less. This figure, consistent with many polls over the years, squares with various developments in Australian politics but contradicts others.

The Howard Government lost the 2007 election in part because it was not seen to be doing enough to tackle climate change. When he was prime minister the first time, Kevin Rudd’s popularity fell sharply when he appeared to abandon plans to reduce Australia’s emissions. And Malcolm Turnbull is the preferred Liberal leader in substantial measure because he is more hawkish on the issue.

Against these examples, the Gillard government’s support fell after it introduced the carbon price. And now both major parties are watering down their commitments to reduce emissions.

The truth is the Australian public does not know what it wants its government to do on climate change. A large majority wants it to do something, but the government seems to lose support whenever it does anything. The only notable exception (and perhaps because many people don’t know it exists) is the Renewable Energy Target, first introduced by the Howard Government as a sop to public anxiety.

For any political leader unwilling to exercise leadership on the issue, trying to respond to climate change leaves them uncertain which way to turn.

The confusion and fretfulness over how to respond to global warming is an expression of the uniqueness of climate change among environmental issues. It ought to be simple: the science tells us that to have a reasonable chance of limiting warming to the widely accepted target of 2C, rich countries such as Australia (and especially Australia) must reduce their emissions by 25-40% by 2020. They must continue to reduce them until they are at least 90% lower by the middle of the century.

All of the economic modelling shows the required transition in the energy economy would come at modest, even trivial, overall cost. Yes, there would be substantial adjustment, including job losses in old energy industries as they are replaced by new ones. But dealing with structural change has not prevented governments in the past from undertaking major reforms, such as tariff cuts, competition policy and forest protection. By any measure, these have been much less important to the nation’s future.

Part of the difficulty lies in the way politics has transformed over the last 30 years. The 1980s’ convergence on neo-liberalism, accelerated by the collapse of communism, has not seen the populace coalesce around a common conception of the national interest. Instead, it has fragmented.

In place of a grand ideological contest over who should rule, the centre has relinquished its authority. Politics today is increasingly dominated by rancorous and self-righteous groups that constellate around specific issues.

The fragmentation of politics, which goes beyond traditional pressure group activities, is in part due to a better educated population more willing to challenge traditional forms of authority. In itself this is a good thing. The exception is when the authority being challenged really does know best, as is true of immunology and atmospheric physics. In this case a little knowledge can indeed be a dangerous thing. The internet gives as much access to disinformation as it does to information, and some are not educated in how to judge the difference.

Climate politics has been caught in this new dispensation. There is an irony to this because it is one of the few cases where the objective case for a strong action is overwhelming. Yet we have seen politicians anxiously trying to catch the public mood, seemingly unaware that the mood is determined by a raucous and angry minority of so-called sceptics.

Tony Abbott beat Malcolm Turnbull for the Liberal Party leadership by one vote after backbenchers were spooked by an organised torrent of emails, phone calls, faxes and letters flooded into their offices. Julia Gillard’s support never recovered from the “JuLiar” campaign promulgated by a small but determined and well-organised campaign that echoed not only in the blogosphere but in the mainstream media too.

The new kind of interest group politics can be highly effective when the majority is willing to tolerate it. In what might be called “the equation of influence”, if we take a small number of activists and multiply it by their level of passion the product will be bigger than the one we obtain by taking a very large number and multiplying it by a care factor that ranges from periodic hand-wringing to “couldn’t be arsed”.

While most Australians are concerned about climate change they are not concerned enough to take on strident deniers in everyday situations. Al Gore recently put it this way

The conversation on global warming has been stalled because a shrinking group of denialists fly into a rage when it’s mentioned. It’s like a family with an alcoholic father who flies into a rage every time a subject is mentioned and so everybody avoids the elephant in the room to keep the peace.

We see most starkly the power a rampant faction can wield in the Republican Party in the United States, where those who led it a decade ago are saying: “What happened? How did we allow the Tea Party to capture our party?” They were not willing to resist those fired-up people and now they have to figure out how to take their party back. Because the Tea Party is like a poison that, until it is sucked out, will prevent the Republicans ever regaining their former influence.

Though not as decisive, the Coalition parties in Australia have experienced a similar invasion. We’ve seen, for example, party conferences pass resolutions against the teaching of climate science in schools.

The question arises of whether an Abbott government, by pacifying the anti-science activists, will provoke the broad and diverse body of the “climate concerned” into a phase of much more intense activism?

The reasons for exasperation will come thick and fast from the new government: the appointment of charlatans to senior advisory positions, evisceration of the federal climate change department, winding back legislation, including the Renewable Energy Target, rising emissions as the Direct Action Plan fails, and Australia taking a spoiling role at international meetings, especially the crucial Conference of the Parties in Paris in 2015.

Taking the long view, perhaps a reactionary government is what climate activism needs to reverse the equation of influence, to force the polity to leapfrog the half-measures we have seen so far. After all, it is what the science demands.

Clive Hamilton is Professor of Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra and is currently a visiting academic at University College London. He is a member of the Australian Greens.

This article was originally published at The Conversation.

Read the original article.

Requiem … for climate change journalism

community, environment, government

Sep 032013

Original story by David Holmes, Monash University at The Conversation

For refusing to ask the hard questions on climate change, journalists are also to blame for the issue’s absence in this election campaign. Photo: ToniFish

Well, what has changed? The Earth’s atmosphere and oceans continue to take in heat equivalent to four Hiroshima bombs per second; humans are forcing climate change 10,000 times faster than orbital forcings; Australia has just had its hottest 12 month period confirmed, but we are having “the election that forgot the environment”.

With this update of the newspaper reporting of climate change, we have seen next to no journalism that is going to call politicians to account for action against dangerous climate change, as politicians themselves have turned their backs on climate, and thrown up “smoke and mirrors”.

Ten days into the campaign, Brad Farrant and I reported on the absence of climate reporting in the major news outlets and an emerging pattern that climate change was only newsworthy if it had economic implications.

A day later, the story of the LNP’s $4bn climate funding shortfall broke mostly in outlets most supportive of Labor’s policies.

In the third week, the Fairfax press had four articles and commentaries on the inadequacies of the major party policies in addressing the dire warnings of the “leaked” IPPC assessment report number 5.

But apart from these stories, the press has all but given up on climate change in this election campaign.

Critical decade for action? Remember that?

Remember, by contrast, the Franklin River Campaign in 1983? It led the news bulletins for weeks during the election campaign that year.

But it seems climate change, without the photo opportunities of protest and dissent, and the tangible efforts to save a place of natural beauty, does not fit with contemporary news narratives. So much so that the political parties do not see any votes in it.

The Australian has covered some of Labor’s climate-linked policies but have turned these back on Labor itself. By the end of week two, Greg Sheridan claimed a personal connection with Rudd, only to suggest that signing up to Kyoto was for pure populism rather than to address a “moral challenge”.

Simon Fraser gets even more personal, linking a Labor initiative to fund early warning of extreme weather to the fact that Rudd and Gillard both have beachhouses, which will nevertheless be safe in the event of “1 in 100 year events".

As lead environmental journalist at the Oz, Graham Lloyd has a more sophisticated approach to climate change reporting. He is not a climate change denier, but is deterred by any action on climate that would harm the economy. Protecting the Great Barrier Reef and biodiversity are higher on Lloyd’s agenda than climate change per se, assuming that the former can be achieved without carbon reduction.

In week four, Lloyd also covered one of the LNP’s more effective policies: for an elected LNP to use its term as chair of the G20 to pursue an agreement between China, the US, India and the EU to slow down deforestation.

There has been some coverage of Tony Abbott’s direct action plan, but little analysis of whether the ALP’s plan to bring forward the ETS as a way of washing its hands of a carbon tax will meet the declared emissions targets.

With the exception of a recent Age interview with the Executive Director of ClimateWorks Australia Anna Skarbek, there has been no analysis of whether the target that both party’s have set, to reduce emissions to 5% below 2000 levels by 2020, is going to be in anyway effective, as Peter Christoff has suggested, let alone achievable.

Yet Tony Abbott is placing great store in direct action, a combination of unproven techniques of carbon sequestration, a modest renewable technology subsidy and of course a B.A. Santamaria style Green Army of workers, who are going to “clean up” Australia. Such an army, is reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s With Enough Shovels approach to digging bunkers in the depths of a nuclear cold war.

But “direct action” is interesting from the point of view of its DLP-derived grassroots pragmatism, with its image of the “working man” having a civic impact – rather than big government trying to change behaviour for the sake of an “invisible gas”.

Irrespective of its ideological foundations, direct action is to climate change what the hydrogen car was to the electric car: a wholly ineffective, but powerfully-promoted alternative that has nevertheless been successful in keeping fossil-fuel cars on the road up until now.

But what kind of climate science scrutiny will Abbott get if he assumes the job as prime minister?

A challenge to Abbott on climate change came up at an ABC Insiders interview on Sunday:

BARRIE CASSIDY: On climate change, we have just had the warmest winter ever along the east coast. Is that evidence of climate change?

TONY ABBOTT: It is evidence of the variability in our weather. But just to make it clear, Barrie, I think that climate change is real, humanity makes a contribution. It’s important to take strong and effective action against it, and that is what our direct action policy does.

Whilst Abbott seemed self-assured about the variability judgment before waiting for the detection and attribution studies to come out, he is at least reiterating his public view that anthropogenic climate change is real.

David Holmes does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.

Environment groups say vote Green

community, environment, government

Sep 032013

Original story by Sara Phillips, ABC Environment

With climate change still rating as an important issue for Australian voters, which party has the most environment-friendly policies? The environment groups are unanimous in their assessment.

The ABC's Vote Compass found a majority of Australians believe the government should do more to tackle climate change. Image: ABC Vote Compass

CLIMATE CHANGE IS STILL an issue that motivates voters, if you believe the results of the ABC's Vote Compass results released last week. A majority of 61 per cent of Australians believe the government should do more to tackle climate change. Even the vexed question of whether to put a price on carbon dioxide has support from half the population, with a minority 32 per cent of voters against such a measure.

Support for action on climate change was strongest amongst Greens voters, with Labor voters also showing clear support. But even Liberal voters, who were the least supportive of action on climate change, tipped the scales in favour of climate change policies with 68 per cent believing the government should do the same as they are now or more on climate change.

It's a result that is not reflected in the campaigning from our leaders. As I have blogged previously it's been a quiet campaign for the environment.

However environment groups have been active in analysing the environment policies from the parties running in the 2013 election. Universally, the green groups have rated the Greens as having the most environment-friendly policies. Labor comes in second with the Coalition or the Liberals rated third.

According to Vote Compass, this broadly reflects the level of interest voters for those parties show in the issues. For example, Lock the Gate is a loose collection of environment groups concerned with the impacts of coal seam gas exploration on prime agricultural land. It found that the Liberal party was the least prepared to regulate coal seam gas development. Likewise Vote Compass found that Liberal voters were the least likely to support regulation of coal seam gas development.

On the troublesome carbon tax/ETS question, most green groups marked down the Coalition for its stated intention to abolish the price on carbon. But again, Coalition voters would prefer to see the carbon price removed, with Vote Compass showing that 58 per cent of Coalition voters oppose a price on carbon.

Where the voters and the policies diverge is on the general question of tackling climate change. Regardless of the party voters are intending to vote for, a majority agree that tackling climate change is important. But if you believe the assessments of the green groups, only the Greens are doing enough on this score. It's a discrepancy that either calls into question the policy analysis of the environment groups, or the commitment Australian voters have to effective climate change action.

Links to the environment groups' analysis are below.

Vote Climate

University of Melbourne "Election Watch"

Climate Institute "Pollute-o meter"

100% Renewable "Solar Scorecard"

Australian Conservation Foundation

Environment Victoria "Enviro-tracker"

Climate and Health Alliance

Lock the Gate

Queensland Feral Animal Summit

community, government, pest species

Aug 302013

News from Biosecurity Queensland

Feral cat (Felis catus)

More than 70 participants representing all sectors including community, industry and government, attended the first Queensland Feral Animal Summit hosted by the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Dr John McVeigh in Toowoomba at the end of June.

The Summit, the first stage of building and enhancing the management of feral animals in Queensland, will guide the development of a framework to address particular feral animal issues, promote and inform on those issues and identify funds and resources to mitigate those issues.

The focus was firmly on the impacts feral animals have on industry and the environment and what actions are required to prevent further impacts.

A number of agreed directions arose from the summit, including:

Feral pigs can damage sugarcane, wheat, banana and strawberry crops

the importance of preventing new, emerging species and an expansion of existing species ranges;
establishing commonly agreed and clearly expressed priorities, roles, responsibilities and actions;
support for systems that reward effective management and allow compliance actions to encourage participation;
multi species management approaches rather than species specific approaches;
increasing community understanding and engagement;
the importance of collaboration and coordination;
the need for the community to be aware of and skilled to deal with feral species;
commitment to streamline access to existing funding and ensure funding is coordinated, practical and inclusive;
eliminating duplication through knowledge networks and communication groups to gather and disseminate information to stop duplication of effort; and
innovating to expand the number of people and organisations involved in the management of feral animals.

The Invasive Plants and Animals Committee (IPAC) was also announced at the Summit.

The IPAC will be comprised of representatives from a number of industry bodies, and state and local governments.

IPAC representatives will play an overarching and leadership role in managing invasive plant and animal issues across the state.

For more information on feral animals, visitbiosecurity.qld.gov.au

A more sustainable Australia: let’s get creative about productivity

environment, government

Aug 302013

Original story by Christopher Findlay at The Conversation

A more sustainable Australia As the 2013 election campaign continues, what are some of the long-term issues that will shape Australia’s future?

Productivity will be even more critical over the next 12 months as high export prices decline. The question that should be front and centre in the debate about Australia’s future vision is: what drives productivity?

Cities are the key to our productivity. Photo: Flickr/mugley

Here is the recent story, with a chart from a presentation by Dean Parham, Australia’s foremost productivity expert.

Labour productivity growth has halved since the early part of the last decade. Capital productivity has also fallen so the productivity with which we use all inputs into production has gone flat.

Incomes have grown faster than labour productivity because the value of exports relative to the cost of imports has been rising. With those terms of trade falling, we would like to restore the 3% labour productivity growth and the 2% overall productivity growth as soon as we can.

How do we do that?

Australia’s national productivity. Image: Dean Parham

Churning the economy

Let’s return to the origins of productivity growth – innovation and churn.

Churn refers to the exit of weak performers who are replaced by the entry of stronger performers. This exit and replacement matters for the productivity of an industry or community.

The scope for churn depends on incentives for and resistances to change. These in turn depend on policy. For example, the way that policy makes it easier or more difficult for new firms to enter markets.

There is a rich agenda for policy reform in Australia, as previous Productivity Commission Chairman Gary Banks has presented.

The Prime Minister has announced a national economic reform panel, which should study the Banks list closely. The Asian Century White Paper also had a good hit list of reform topics.

Banks suggests measures related to incentives, such as trade policy, those related to capability, such as education policy, and those related to flexibility, such as workplace regulation.

We have the menu but we have to regain the appetite for reform.

Innovate

Innovation is more difficult to pin down and less often discussed. Yes, it includes making new things, like iPads or robotic trucks, but it also means doing things differently.

Our research report, Borders Blurred, found that businesses break up their operations as they shift design, production, sales and after-sales services around the world in response to cost differences.

They might, for example, do design work in Australia using high-skill and expensive labour, and organise the production processes that require a lesser degree of skill in other lower-cost locations.

Successful firms respond to changes in markets; they learn and they are agile in creating new and competitive goods and services.

But where does the capacity to innovate come from?

Partly this comes from inside an organisation, but increasingly we understand that whole communities, that is, the cities and towns where businesses are located, matter.

As Chairman Banks said:

The innovations that shape the productivity potential of organisations can stem from ‘internal learnings’ specific to a firm, but commonly involve the absorption and application of knowledge generated externally. The institutions and forces responsible for creating and transmitting knowledge are therefore important for a country’s productivity performance.

Governments have taken action to improve performance with various subsidies, like those for the car industry, but subsidies have not created “value for money”.

There are sometimes calls for the creation of company clusters to capture and promote this information sharing, but the specific selection of apparently connected businesses is not likely to succeed either.

It is better to focus on removing impediments for generating ideas and transferring them within an existing community.

Cities, universities, research

From this perspective, there are three things to add to the productivity action list, which are key parts of setting the vision for Australia – the cities, the universities and research funding.

Cities contribute to the productivity of people who live in them, because the productivity of each worker is aided by those around them, and productivity growth is supported by these interactions and the sharing of ideas.

But some cities work better than others as centres for sharing information. We need to pay more attention to policies that could make our cities work better and its citizens more creative.

If we understood this better, we could also say more about the two-way relationship between cities and their surrounding regions.

Within cities, universities play a key role. They broker information and act as the intermediaries between raw knowledge and those who apply it.

Universities undertake basic research, but the translation of this research into real-life application and innovation can be further strengthened and prioritised.

And within universities, the funding systems matter: they support this research that generates new ideas.

These systems are now based on student load, both domestic and international, and are under challenge. Universities are subject to the same sorts of competitive processes that are driving manufacturers to globalise.

New competitors include teaching-only operations. They can operate at lower costs and the risk is that they will draw students away from the traditional suppliers.

It will then be more difficult to sustain the business model in which revenue from students is used to support our research performance.

More direct funding for research, public and private, will be critical for the success of the innovation system.

Thanks to the Sustainable Australia Report 2013 for inspiring this series.

Employee of the University of Adelaide

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.

Wanted: political leader with a vision for a sustainable future

environment, government

Aug 292013

Original story by Helen Camakaris, University of Melbourne at The Conversation

Our brains predispose us to a quick fix, but with the right leadership we could choose a path to different future. Photo: Scott Ogilive

A sustainable future remains within our grasp but – thanks to the way human brains work – only governments can implement many of the necessary strategies. Our political leaders have a unique responsibility.

Consensus politics and compromise may well be the only way that we can deal with existential threats such as climate change, food and water scarcity, and the social disruption that would inevitably follow. If the current election campaign is anything to go by, these concepts do not come easily to Australia’s political leaders. But perhaps that will change.

Humanity’s approach to these problems is limited by the way our brains have evolved. Climate change presents a challenge to our evolved altruism, which is circumscribed by expectations of benefit to kin or reciprocal reward and an obsession with fairness.

Similarly, our drives to seek status and consume goods are largely instinctive; our evolved intelligence has simply taken them to a higher level. Unfortunately contemplating the long-term future is not on our radar. That is why good government is so important.

So can our current political leaders guide us toward a safer world?

We need leaders who are prepared to put forward long-term plans for decades, even centuries, something which does not come naturally since we evolved to live in the present, and our instincts encourage us to discount the future and underestimate risk. They must resist the temptation to appeal only to immediate self-interest, a shortcoming of our current adversarial democracy and short election cycles where leaders appeal constantly to the hip-pocket nerve.

Consensus on intractable problems could be achieved by a commitment to multi-party committees. Bi-partisan think tanks that include Members of Parliament and independent experts can help circumvent parochial attitudes, and foster rational decision-making for the long-term future. Indeed, a party that commits to such a model for helping to formulate policy for intractable problems might well win support in the electorate.

Governments must extend the use of incentives and disincentives to satisfy our desire for fairness. Where policy to promote long-term sustainability conflicts with immediate self-interest, clever strategies can guide behaviour while still providing choice. In Australia, the carbon tax was coupled with compensation for most citizens and some industries, making the personal cost minimal.

Unfortunately, the Liberal Party’s Direct Action Plan fails to offer any incentive to individuals to decrease fossil fuel energy use. It would also fail to deliver the minimum 5% cut by 2020 without an injection of a further $4 billion. It would be necessary to either increase taxes or decrease services and, since paying for a secure future does not come naturally, there is a significant risk that Australia would abandon its pledge.

The Direct Action Plan also demonstrates our genetic predisposition to live in the present. There would be no mechanism for Australia to achieve the necessary further cuts beyond 2020. In contrast, Labor’s emissions trading scheme links our efforts to global action, and the introduction of a cap would ensure that we meet future obligations.

The government must also recognise our responsibility toward citizens of future generations, and those beyond our borders who will be affected by our actions. Such attitudes are not instinctive because of the origins of altruism, but they are morally equitable. The disadvantaged in developing nations have a right to move toward a reasonable standard of living. Sanitation, health care, and adequate food and water are basic human rights, and the simple comforts of life could all be provided by green electricity with support from the developed world.

Stewardship of Earth must be seen as a government responsibility. Currently both parties promote growth but continuing growth is impossible on a finite planet, a fact that is not intuitively apparent to many people. Might we able to able to move toward the goal of sustainability if the government incorporated gradual changes that move us in the right direction?

The developed world must ultimately move toward a steady state economy. Many countries already have a per capita GDP close to zero – such a situation could be normalised and still provide a good quality of life. There are a number of strategies that would move us in this direction.

Gradually introduced cradle-to-grave pricing incorporating social and environmental costs would decrease consumption and moderate growth, and might be a more acceptable way to increase government revenue than an across-the-board increase in GST.

Reduced working hours as an optional alternative to increased salaries would also moderate consumption, ease unemployment, reduce inequity and increase leisure time, and would undoubtedly be popular with sections of the electorate. Research has shown that happiness does not increase above a modest income, but is a product of the quality of our relationships, our engagement with community, and time for pursuing our interests.

Runaway growth is also fed by the salary “arms race”, particularly in the corporate sector. The instinctive drive to demonstrate status is then made visible by the purchase of inordinately expensive homes and prestige cars, driving conspicuous consumption. Instead status could be recognised by relative salaries maintained within limits by regulation or taxation, complemented by honours and significant privileges.

The rush to exploit our natural resources should also be slowed down to provide for the future, again something we instinctively tend to ignore. A significant tax on mining profits that creates a healthy future fund would leave more resources in the ground, provide income for new industries for the future, and decrease the extraordinary incomes and extravagant lifestyles that flow to the lucky few through happenstance.

We must frame this debate in the context of leaving a habitable world for future generations, and highlighting humanity’s common heritage. The world desperately needs countries that will lead: there’s no reason why ours shouldn’t be one of them.

Helen Camakaris does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.

Currumbin Sanctuary head vet warns time is running out for koalas

government, threatened species

Aug 292013

Original story by Greg Stolz, The Courier Mail

A LEADING wildlife vet says new State Government funding to help save Queensland's critically endangered koalas is only a "band-aid".

Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary head vet Dr Michael Pyne says more funding is needed to save Queensland's koalas from illness and loss of habitat. Photo: News Limited

Premier Campbell Newman visited the Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary animal hospital on the Gold Coast on Wednesday to announce the next round of $800,000 in funding for koala rescue groups.

Sanctuary head vet Dr Michael Pyne said while the money was "a step in the right direction'', much more was needed to save koalas from illness and habitat loss.

Dr Pyne said the wildlife hospital took in 300 wild koalas last year compared to less than 30 in 2007.

"It's really frightening - we've got to be able to turn that around or there just won't be any koalas left,' he said.

"We really don't have that much time. It's reached that point where the young koalas are getting sick now (from diseases such as chlamydia).

"Koalas are under so much pressure - there's just so much disease devastating them.

"Now is the time - we can't wait any longer to try and save the local species."

Mr Newman last year criticised the Federal Government for declaring koalas a threatened species, saying it was tying up Queensland in "green tape".

Cuddling a koala and its joey at the wildlife hospital, he said he still maintained that position as the Queensland Government was protecting koalas with its $26.5 million Investing to Protect Koalas policy and koala habitat mapping.

"I can guarantee we are doing everything we can to protect them," he said.

Climate Name Change

environment, government

Aug 282013

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=efAUCG9oTb8

Go to http://www.climatenamechange.org

Since 1954, the World Meteorological Organization has been naming extreme storms after people. But we propose a new naming system. One that names extreme storms caused by climate change, after the policy makers who deny climate change and obstruct climate policy. If you agree, sign the petition at http://www.climatenamechange.org/#/pe..

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