Contemporary politics,local and international current affairs, science, music and extracts from the Queensland Newspaper "THE WORKER" documenting the proud history of the Labour Movement.
MAHATMA GANDHI ~ Truth never damages a cause that is just.
A female chimpanzee born at a central Queensland zoo
recently will provide a much-needed genetic boost to an Australasian
breeding program, keepers say.
The chimpanzee is the first baby born in Queensland since the 1970s and the first for Rockhampton Zoo.
Rockhampton
Zoo life sciences coordinator Graeme Strachan said the baby, born 11
days ago, is part of an Australian and New Zealand program that aims to
increase the number of chimpanzees from 51 to 80 in the next 20 years.
"This
little girl is going to be very genetically valuable to the region,
much-wanted I would say, because she's totally unrelated to the other
chimps here and that's a big thing about keeping the genetic lines
healthy," Mr Strachan said.
But for the next five years, the baby will stay very close to her mother, Leakey.
"They have a long weaning period and it will
probably be another five years before she gets a little brother or
sister," Mr Strachan said.
"That's the problem when their numbers decline.
"They've got a slower reproductive rate so the population can't recover."
Reproduction challenges
The
Rockhampton Zoo is one of three zoos in Australia and two in New
Zealand working together to boost the population of chimpanzees in
captivity.
The common chimpanzees are a high-priority species
because of their endangered status in Africa, and numbers have plummeted
from 3.5 million in 35 countries 50 years ago to fewer than 200,000
today.
"The sad part of what's happening with chimps in Africa
with palm oil, poaching and habitat destruction is that the future of
chimps could be in captivity," Mr Strachan said.
"This was why the regional breeding program, and the zoo's latest addition, is so important.
"The
regional program copies what happens in the wild, so many males born
here will stay here and be part of a patriarchal, hierarchical line that
stays there.
"Then the females, when they reach maturity around
nine, 10 or 11 years, will be transferred out to other groups so we just
follow that cycle in captivity."
There are currently seven
chimpanzees at Monarto Zoo in Adelaide, 22 at Taronga Zoo in Sydney, 10
in Wellington and six in Hamilton in New Zealand.
The new arrival has boosted Rockhampton Zoo's numbers to six chimpanzees.
Increasing
numbers will be no easy task as it is not just about genetics and
breeding but also about providing the best social situation for the
animals.
There was no breeding in the region for a number of years
until a number of unrelated chimpanzees were imported from Israel
through a European program.
Since then, there has been one reproduction in Taronga Zoo in Sydney and one at Monarto Zoo in Adelaide.
"That's been a huge boost to the regional program," Mr Strachan said.
This
baby's parents, mother Leakey, aged 23 and father Alon, 10, are
originally from Israel, transferred to Rockhampton together because they
are from the same community but genetically separate.
"We're hoping now this will kick it all off with the other two females, Samantha and Holly.
"They're
quite socially inexperienced and that's why we were quite concerned
about them giving birth, but now I think this going to get the interest
going, the 'cluckiness' going."
There are occasions where
first-time mothers will lose their infants through inexperience, but Mr
Strachan doesn't think this will happen to Leakey.
"She's a very stable and experienced female and has the best chance of raising a baby," he said.
She has taken to her new role like a duck to water, showing her baby off to the zoo staff shortly after giving birth.
"Leakey actually brought the baby and held the baby up, just like the Lion King," Mr Strachan said.
"It was amazing."
The
baby has been welcomed into the group, with Samantha and Holly showing a
healthy curiosity while Alon has demonstrated his protective instincts.
"He's allowed to touch the baby, but the others aren't so he's got his special status," Mr Strachan said.
"Generally the males stay out of it; they have a natural curiosity, but they are there to protect the group."
Mr Strachan said since the birth of the little girl, the whole group has a new sense of calmness.
"They're all quite inquisitive but they've got this feeling of new life and the future of their tribe," he said.
A week ago, Julia Cordova was one of about 3,000
teenagers at Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Florida, when a gunman
took an Uber to the school and opened fire with a weapon designed for
use by the US army.
On Wednesday (local time) she was sitting
next to the President of the United States at the White House, in an
antique chair in front of a fireplace in a room usually reserved for
world leaders, telling her story and asking for a solution to a half
century epidemic of mass shootings in America.
Julia wasn't even born when 12 students and a teacher
were gunned down by fellow students at the Columbine High School in
Colorado in 1999, yet survivors of that rampage were also at the White
House on Wednesday.
Also gathered were some families of the 20
first graders who were gunned down alongside six of their teachers and
school staff at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 by another
young man armed with the same AR-15 semi-automatic firearm.
The
event was billed as a "listening session" with President Donald Trump
beginning with a pledge to be "very strong on background checks", to put
an emphasis on "the mental health of somebody" and vowing that "it's
not going to be talk like it has been in the past".
"We're going to get it done," he said.''
'Fix it!'
Everyone agreed they need to stop this happening again, schools must be made safe from gun violence.
Personal
stories were told by 17-year-olds still trying to make the events of
last week seem anything more than a bad movie, and by the children, now
grown to adulthood, the parents and grandparents who all had their lives
shattered in a few moments years ago that still lives with them every
day.
Andrew Pollock, whose daughter Meadow was among the 17
killed in Florida last week, couldn't control his emotions, demanding
the President "fix it!"
Fixing guns with more guns
But
one thing was abundantly clear, with the best will in the world, and
away from the influence of powerful political forces like the National
Rifle Association, ordinary Americans respectfully but fundamentally
disagree on how to respond to these shootings.
The President was not alone in the group suggesting that one answer might be to arm teachers.
"There are plenty of teachers who are already licenced to carry firearms," one man said.
"And when something like this starts, the first responders are already on campus."
Someone
suggested undercover police could pose as janitors or librarians. Two
Stoneman Douglas students and the President nodded.
Maybe former cops could work in schools, another man said.
But
the father of one of the young victims at Sandy Hook, whose wife is a
teacher, made the point that school teachers have more than enough
responsibilities than to have the lethal force to take a life.
"A
deranged sociopath on his way to commit an act of murder in a school,
knowing the outcome is going to be suicide, is not going to care if
there's somebody there with a gun," the father said.
Instead, he said, the solution is to train teachers and students to identify individuals at risk of carrying out such a crime.
Prevention, not mitigation, should be the focus, many argued.
The
elephant in the room remained gun control, and the fact that weapons of
war like the AR-15 are able to be freely purchased in many states by
anyone, including someone who is mentally ill.
On Tuesday, the President announced plans to
ban so-called "bump stocks" — an accessory that turns a legal rifle into
a machine gun, used in America's deadliest mass shooting in Las Vegas
last year.
Another episode of Trump TV?
As an hour-long
event, staged for the cameras, it would be easy to dismiss it as a PR
stunt by a President whose approval rating for his response to the
Florida shooting stands at just 33 per cent in the latest Quinnipiac
Poll — another episode in the reality TV presidency of Donald Trump.
For
a President known not to read much, including his daily briefings, but
who spends hours watching cable news, perhaps immersing him in a TV
event was a very clever way for his staff to have him hear a wider range
of views than he'd get on Fox News.
The
focus on schools also begs the question, even if you find an answer to
this problem, what about protecting concert-goers on the Vegas strip,
dancers in an Orlando nightclub, people at the movies in Colorado, at
Sunday school in South Carolina or a church in Texas?
President
Trump's closing remarks pretty closely mirrored his introduction, while
going further in highlighting mental health as a major issue, and
suggesting that America was better equipped to deal with the problem
with "institutions many years ago".
Yet this was the President who
signed a law in February 2017 revoking an Obama-era regulation making
it harder for people with mental illnesses to purchase guns.
"The world is watching," the President said, "and we're going to come up with a solution."
With that he turned to Miss Cordova and firmly shook her hand, as if sealing a deal.
Protesters at Westpac headquarters in Sydney in February 2017 calling on
the bank to rule out funding for the Adani coalmine, which it later
did.
Photograph: Paul Miller/AAP
Adani’s plan to build Australia’s largest coalmine has suffered
another setback. The company has abandoned its March deadline for
securing financing for the first stage of the Carmichael mine.
In October, Jeyakumar Janakaraj, the chief executive of Adani
Australia, told Reuters it aimed to settle financing for the project by
March 2018.
Today, as reported in Fairfax Media, Adani has confirmed it would not be meeting that deadline.
A spokeswoman for Adani Australia told the Guardian the March
deadline was predicated on the company receiving a subsidised loan from
the Australian government through the Northern Australia Infrastructure
Facility (Naif). Since the Queensland Labor government has said it would veto any such loan, she said the financing timeline was now pushed back.
The spokeswoman would not confirm what the new funding timeline was, saying it was “commercial in confidence”.
“We remain 100% committed to the Carmichael project. We are confident of securing financing,” she said.
Adani’s missed funding deadline is just the latest in a string of setbacks.
In December, the Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, announced she would veto any federal loan to the project.
What Adani still describes on its website as the project’s “biggest
deal”, a $2bn deal with Downer EDI to construct and operate the mine, was scrapped when Adani announced it could no longer afford the contract.
All four big Australian banks previously ruled out funding the
project, leading Adani to search for loans from foreign banks. Dozens of
international banks had also ruled out funding.
Adani has also
had to downgrade the predicted output of the mine, and its own
consultants have contradicted Adani’s claims of the number of jobs the
project would create.
The federal Labor party has hardened its stance against the project, canvassing
ways to kill the project if it wins government, receiving advice on
whether existing environmental laws could be used, and examining whether
a “climate trigger” could be introduced to those laws.
Labor leader Bill Shorten has said the project is “just another project” and noted it must stack up economically and environmentally.
Other senior labor leaders have gone further. The deputy leader,
Tanya Plibersek, has been telling members of the public who write to her
office she does “not believe that the Carmichael mine project stacks up
economically or environmentally”.
And Mark Butler, the opposition spokesman for climate change, has doubled down on earlier comments, saying
the project was not in the national interest, and it was not “what the
world needs to do … to keep global warming well below two degrees”.
Adani has abandoned another deadline for securing
finance on Australia's largest proposed coalmine, prompting Labor leader
Bill Shorten to ridicule the idea that "some billionaire [will] come
down in a helicopter and rescue" regional Queensland.
The Indian
conglomerate had given itself until March 31 to secure investors for the
$16 billion Carmichael coal project, but an Adani spokeswoman said this
was "no longer the timeline".
It is the second time Adani has
pushed back its deadline for financial close, after vowing last year to
lock in investors by the end of December 2017.
The spokeswoman did
not nominate a new deadline but said that Adani was still trying to
sell a minority stake in the central Queensland project to help raise
the $3.3 billion it needs to get it off the ground.
The Adani
spokeswoman said the miner remained "100 per cent committed" to the
project and "confident" of securing finance it had hoped would flow from
a federal government loan, before that was torpedoed by the Palaszczuk government.
Led by billionaire Gautam Adani — named
India's 10th richest person by Forbes last year — Adani will seek
finance overseas after major Chinese banks joined a growing list of lenders, including Australia's "big four" banks, who shunned the project.
Mr
Shorten told ABC Radio Brisbane that his position on the mine was
"straightforward — this deal doesn't stack up by any measure that we've
seen so far".
"They've missed more deadlines — I think in today's
newspapers again, they're missing another deadline," he said, adding
there were financial doubts and "environmental concerns".
Mr
Shorten, after a series of public forums in Townsville, Mackay and
Rockhampton this week, said there needed to be "a plan for jobs that
just doesn't rely on a billionaire multinational coal company coming in
with this very controversial project that has a lot of detractors".
"Labor's
plan is to diversify the economy in central and north Queensland, not
to pretend that there's going to be some billionaire come down in a
helicopter and rescue it all, because I just don't believe that," he
said.
Mr Shorten said Adani's "boosters" were wrongly branding sceptics of the project as "anti-mining".
He
denied the suggestion that the federal opposition had recently hardened
its rhetoric against Adani because of the Batman by-election in
green-tinged inner Melbourne.
"Our position has been for 18 months that the deal has to stack up environmentally and commercially," he said.
"And in fact the Queensland Government during its most recent state election arrived at our position."
These masters of disguise are some of the world’s oldest surviving
mammals, but they are threatened by habitat loss, traffic and feral cats
– and they need our help
Researchers believe the remaining Australian echidna population may be
threatened and they need citizen scientists’ help to save them.
Photograph: KristianBell/Getty Images/iStockphoto
They
may be one of the world’s oldest surviving mammals – around for at
least 25m years – but scientists don’t know much about echidnas. Now
researchers believe the remaining Australian population may be
threatened and they need citizen scientists’ help to save them.
The short-beaked echidna is found only in Australia and Papua New
Guinea. In 2015 the Kangaroo Island echidna, a once significant
subspecies, was listed as endangered.
While the remaining population is listed as “least concern”,
researchers question the listing. As Tahlia Perry, a PhD researcher at
the University of Adelaide’s Grutzner Lab, which is studying the
molecular biology of echidnas, says: “When you don’t have exact numbers,
it’s really hard to give something a listing.”
In September 2017, the lab, in association with the CSIRO’s Atlas of Living Australia, launched the free echidna CSI app
to encourage Australians to photograph wild echidnas and collect their
scat, or droppings. “What we are hoping to find out is [whether there
are] other pockets of populations around the rest of the country that
are in the same sort of threat level [as the Kangaroo Island species]
because they face the exact same threats,” says Perry.
"They are masters of disguise and hiding and are insanely fast when they want to be."
The main threats to echidnas are land clearing and habitat loss. This
was demonstrated on Kangaroo Island when the population shrank as
development increased. Echidnas can travel great distances – often
several kilometres in a day – they have very large home ranges and so
land clearing and rapid developments can cause problems in their ability
to travel by removing viable habitat, says Perry. Other major threats
include traffic, feral cats and potentially the rapidly changing
climate.
What is known about the echidna is fascinating. Like their mammalian
cousins the platypus, echidnas lay eggs but keep their young – puggles –
in the mother’s pouch. Once they are the size of a cricket ball and
their spines begin to develop, they are kicked out of the pouch and left
in burrows. And while some echidna populations nurture their young,
mostly the puggles are left to figure things out for themselves.
A short-beaked echidna puggle at Sydney’s Taronga Zoo in
November 2016 – the zoo’s first successful echidna births in nearly 30
years. Photograph: Taronga Zoo/EPA
Echidnas are quite smart, though, having the biggest frontal cortex
in relation to their body size of all mammals, including humans. They
can climb, burrow and run rapidly. They are mostly solitary animals, but
the rare times they are seen collectively is when they form “an echidna
train”. This is when the female is in season and up to 20 males follow
her across great distances, all competing for her attention.
They are robust and are found in wildly different environments, from
the desert to the snow, likely to having much lower body temperature
than all other mammals - around 30C - which can fluctuate by up to 10C
in a single day.
Perry has long been fascinated by the spiky creatures. Asked for a
little-known fact, she points out the back feet of the echidnas point
backwards to help them dig their burrows. This bewildered the British
taxidermists of old who, thinking there must be a mistake, rotated the
feet forward. Now hundreds of years later, those feet are being switched back.
With the help of the research project, Perry hopes to discover more
about the echidna’s DNA, eating habits and hormones to study breeding
patterns.
“You can also measure things like stress hormones to figure out what
populations are particularly stressed,” she says. “For instance, [the]
ones that are around more suburban areas, it would be interesting to
find out if that is affecting them in a negative way or if they don’t
care at all.” Anecdotally some echidnas seem terrified of humans –
burrowing quickly – while others are more inquisitive.
Their ability to escape stressful situations so quickly is why little
is known about echidnas, says Perry. “They can literally dig themselves
into the ground within a matter of seconds – they completely disappear
in front of your eyes … They are masters of disguise and hiding and are
insanely fast when they want to be as well. So they are just not great
for a research animal.”
As part of Guardian Australia’s series on endangered species, we’re
encouraging readers to take part in the echidna CSI project. Download the free app, then photograph your local echidna or collect a sample of their scat and help to save the echidna.
High living costs and stagnating wages are putting more workers under housing strain.
Photograph: Rebecca Vale/Alamy Stock Photo
The number of employed Australians seeking help for homelessness has
jumped by almost 30% in three years, sparking concerns that stagnant
wage growth and high housing costs are pushing workers to the brink.
The Victorian-based Council to Homeless Persons
has released an analysis showing 20,302 employed Australians sought
homelessness support in 2016-17, well up from 15,931 in 2013-14.
The council has blamed the rise on a combination of sluggish wage
growth and extreme housing costs. On Wednesday, the Australian Bureau of
Statistics released the latest wage data, which showed wages grew by
just 2.1% last year. Housing costs grew by 3.4% in the same period.
That’s only adding to the profound pressure on people like Mim, who
works in out-of-home care in Victoria. Mim, who only has one name, fled a
violent relationship many years ago, taking her three children with
her. She immediately found herself homeless.
The four of them squashed into the family’s four-wheel-drive ute –
the two youngest in the back, and Mim and her eldest boy in the front.
There were times when Mim couldn’t see a way out.
Mim, from Victoria, says housing costs and low wages are putting her at risk of homelessness. Photograph: Mim
“When I was stuck in it, I was just stuck. I just felt like the worst
parent on the planet,” Mim told Guardian Australia. “I felt like a huge
failure, actually. I think that fed into the stress as well.
“When you feel like the worst parent on the planet … it feeds into
not feeling like anyone is going to want you either – anyone’s going to
want you for work, or anyone’s going to want you for housing, the lot of
it.”
"All the things my kids never had – I’d love to be able to do all of that"
The family, through sheer determination, found a way to survive,
eventually securing emergency accommodation and later government
housing.
Now in her 40s, Mim is again nearing breaking point. She lives in
Taggerty, about two hours away from her workplace in Burwood, on
Melbourne’s outskirts. A recent injury has left her unable to work and
her worker’s compensation payments have been withheld due to problems
outside her control.
The money she does have goes to rent and petrol. She’s currently
living in what she jokingly described as a “bush shack”, which she’s
using as a stopgap solution until she finds a private rental. Nothing
she’s seen so far is within her reach.
“I’ve got three kids and I wonder – they’ve all had such big
experiences – I wonder if any of them will have kids,” Mim said. “But if
they ever do, I want to be a grandma that’s able to buy grouse things
for their grandkids, or help out with school fees. All the things my
kids never had – I’d love to be able to do all of that.”
The ABS data showed wages grew by 0.6% in the December quarter and
2.1% throughout last year. Public sector wages grew the most, increasing
by 2.4% through the year. Private sector wages rose by 1.9%.
The Council to Homeless Persons policy and communications manager,
Kate Colvin, said the disparity between wage growth and high housing
costs was putting a lot of strain on workers, particularly those who
were working infrequently or in insecure employment.
“If that disparity continues, we’ll only see more and more people
homeless while they’re working,” she said. “Then the challenge is that
people become homeless [and] it’s just even harder to engage in paid
work, because if you’re moving around between friends’ places, couch
surfing, it’s hard to have the stability to work.”
Unions have said Wednesday’s ABS figures put wage growth at a near-record low.
The Australian Council of Trade Unions assistant secretary, Scott
Connolly, said the figures were at odds with 27 years of uninterrupted
economic growth in Australia. The ACTU said workers needed more power to
negotiate fair pay rises.
“Right now big corporations have too much power and working people
have too little,” Connolly said. “We need to change the rules so that
there is a fair power balance between working people and big business.”
ROCKHAMPTON is celebrating a new arrival with the birth of a female chimpanzee at the city’s zoo.
The
little girl, born to first-time mum Leakey, is the first chimp born in
Queensland since the mid-1970s, Rockhampton Deputy Mayor Cherie
Rutherford said.
The baby chimpanzee with mother Leakey at Rockhampton Zoo. Picture: Supplied/Yvette Fenning
“Both
the baby and her mum, Leakey, are doing very well and the dad, Alon, is
acting just like any curious and nervous new dad so they are all very
much the perfect image of doting new parents and a perfect little baby
at this moment,” Cr Rutherford said.
“We’ve had the area cordoned
off to the public this past week to give the parents some downtime to
get used to their new life but we’re very excited to be reopening that
space in the coming days so the public can come meet our newest member
of the family,” Cr Rutherford said. Mother "Leakey" has taken to motherhood like a natural. Picture: Yvette FenningRockhampton
Zoo Life Sciences co-ordinator Graeme Strachan said it was incredibly
pleasing to see both mum and baby reaching all the key milestones.
“Leakey
and her baby are doing all the right things at this point which is
really wonderful to see, especially for a first time mum like Leakey who
is learning all these new things,” Mr Strachan said. The public will be able to see the family in coming days. Picture: Yvette Fenning“The most important behaviours we’ve observed just recently is that breastfeeding has begun and is going really well.
“Aside
from that, Leakey just dotes on her baby and it’s been such an
incredible experience for our zoo staff that we can’t wait to share it
with the public in the very near future,” Mr Strachan said. Mum and baby get to know each other. Picture: Yvette FenningLeakey snuggles her baby at the zoo. Picture: Yvette Fenning
The EPA’s pro-fossil fuel agenda has rapidly run into a thicket of legal problems.
Photograph: Dennis MacDonald/Alamy
In its first year in office, the Trump administration
introduced a solitary new environmental rule aimed at protecting the
public from pollution. It was aimed not at sooty power plants or
emissions-intensive trucks, but dentists.
Every year, dentists fill Americans’ tooth cavities with an amalgam
that includes mercury. About 5 tons of mercury, a dangerous toxin that
can taint the brain and the nervous system, are washed away from dental
offices down drains each year.
In Trump’s first day in the White House, the administration told the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to withdraw an Obama-era plan that
would require dentists to prevent this mercury from getting into
waterways. But in June, the rule was unexpectedly enacted.
This apparent change of heart followed legal action filed
by green groups, part of a cascade of courtroom standoffs that are
starting to slow and even reverse the Trump administration’s blitzkrieg
of environmental regulations.
“The Trump administration has been sloppy and careless, they’ve shown
significant disrespect for rule of law and courts have called them on
it,” said Richard Revesz, a professor at the New York University school
of law.
“I expect we will see a number of further losses for the
administration on similar grounds. If they keep showing the same
disregard for the law, their attempt to repeal all these environmental
regulations will go badly for them.”
The reversal of Obama’s environmental legacy has been spearheaded by
Scott Pruitt, who heads the EPA, the agency he repeatedly sued as
Oklahoma attorney general. Pruitt, who accused Obama of “bending the
rule of law” and federal overreach, has overseen the methodical delay or
scrapping of dozens of rules curbing pollution from power plants,
pesticides and vehicles.
Ironically for Pruitt, who has touted a “back to basics” approach
rooted safely within the confines of the law, this rapidly executed
agenda has run into a thicket of legal problems, causing the
administration to admit defeat in several cases.
In July, a federal court ruled
that the EPA couldn’t suspend rules designed to curb methane emissions
from new oil and gas wells. This was followed by a hasty retreat in
August when the EPA agreed to not delay new standards to reduce smog-causing air pollutants, the day after 15 states and environment groups sued.
Then, in December, a federal court told the EPA it couldn’t delay a new standard for dangerous levels of lead in paint and dust.
The EPA, Scott Pruitt, appears before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA
Other arms of the federal government have also been stymied from
implementing Trump’s deregulatory agenda. The US Fish and Wildlife
Service, stung by a lawsuit, listed the rusty patched bumblebee as
endangered in March after initially delaying the decision. And on
Thursday, a federal court told the department of energy it must implement four energy efficiency regulations it was looking to scuttle.
Many of these legal problems have stemmed from the sheer pace of the
rollbacks – required public comment periods have been set aside in some
cases, any rationale for repeal or delay has been missing in others.
Opponents of the administration also believe there is a determination to
expunge every vestige of Obama’s environmental legacy, regardless of
merit.
“They are trying to score political points or attempting to grant
favours to corporations who don’t want to follow the rules,” said Aaron
Colangelo, the litigation director of the Natural Resources Defense
Council. “It all shows that this administration won’t protect the
environment unless they are sued. They have been reckless and not
followed the basic requirements of the law.”
The EPA now faces a fresh wave of opposition as it looks to craft
replacements for major Obama rules such as the clean power plan, which
sought to limit emissions from coal-fired power plants, and the waters
of the US rule, which greatly expanded clean water protections.
If the proposed replacements are, as expected, far less onerous on
industry than current iterations, environmentalists and around a dozen
states, headed by New York and California, will be poised to further jam
up the process in the courts.
“Over and over again, the Trump administration has put the profits of
multinational polluters over the health and well-being of everyday
Americans,” said Eric Schneiderman, New York’s attorney general.
Schneiderman has been prolific in opposing Trump’s environmental
revisions, filing more than 50 lawsuits during the administration’s
first year to, among other things, protect the clean power plan, enforce
stricter vehicle pollution standards and ensure that chlorpyrifos, a
common pesticide linked to neurological harm to children, is banned.
“We’ve already beaten back several of this administration’s toxic
policies, from energy efficiency rollbacks to smog,” Schneiderman said.
“Our fight to protect public health and our environment will continue in
court.”
This article was updated on 20 February 2018 to correct the amount
of mercury washed away by dental offices each year. It is about 5 tons,
not 5m tons as we originally said.
Labor’s environment group says digging up ‘polluting coal isn’t a winning strategy in a carbon-constrained economy’.
Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images
Labor’s influential internal environmental lobby group has called on
the federal party to clarify its stance on the controversial Adani
coalmine, a project it says is not in the national interest.
The national convener of the Labor environment action network,
Felicity Wade, told Guardian Australia on Tuesday the party needed to
make a decision.
“It’s time for Labor to make its position on Adani clear,” she said.
“The Adani mine is not in the national interest and does not have
broad community support. Digging up low-quality polluting coal isn’t a
winning strategy in a carbon-constrained global economy.”
Wade’s intervention follows a signal from the Labor leader, Bill Shorten, on Monday that there was an ongoing role for coal
in Australia, and a strong speech to the Sydney Institute by the
opposition spokesman on climate change, Mark Butler, who said
development of the Galilee basin was not in Australia’s national interest
because it would displace mining and jobs in existing coal regions, and
would not help the world meet its obligations under the Paris climate
agreement.
Labor has been signalling publicly since the end of January a more
hardline stance on the Adani project, and the party has been looking at a
range of legal mechanisms that could be used to stop it.
But the signalling, which has coincided with a byelection in Batman, in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, where Labor will face off with the Greens, has not yet resulted in the party adopting a concrete position on the project.
The powerful mining union warned last week
that Labor adopting a more hardline stance on Adani would trigger a
divisive internal ALP debate on the future of the coal industry, and
cost Labor political support in Queensland.
Shorten is visiting Queensland coastal electorates this week armed
with infrastructure announcements, and while on the ground in Townsville
sent a clear message that Labor was not anti-coal or anti-mining.
He said of the Adani project that it was highly unlikely to get
finance, and the promised jobs associated with the project had not
materialised. Shorten said his party’s position on Adani was it “has to
stack up commercially and environmentally”.
Butler, who has been on the record opposing Adani for almost a year, gave a less hedged message on Monday night.
He said developing the Carmichael mine would fly in the face of
current market trends, where export volumes for thermal coal had been
flat for several years, and would also be inconsistent with the
International Energy Agency’s advice “on what the world needs to do … to
keep global warming well below two degrees”.
Wade acknowledged it was more difficult for Labor to adopt a
definitive stance than it was for the Greens. “Unlike for the Greens,
for Labor all decisions have real world consequences,” she said.
“The grand gesture that destroys confidence in central and north
Queensland and leads to the election of another Coalition government
undermines climate action more fundamentally than the fate of any
individual mine.
“If Labor is to take the lead of the financial markets and oppose
Adani, we must take decisive action to ensure genuine economic activity
and jobs in north Queensland.
“As Labor people we understand why economically vulnerable
communities object to the sense that post-materialist elites in the
south want to decide their futures.
“But that doesn’t change the fact that the Adani mine will be bad for the global climate.”
Wade said Labor should use the Adani decision to offer voters in
Queensland a comprehensive regional development policy, and to overhaul
the national environmental protection framework, which was sorely
lacking.
“As Labor struggles to work out how the Adani mine’s problems can be
dealt with through legislation, never has there been better proof of the
need to revamp the laws and institutions charged with ensuring we get
the trade-off between economy and environment right,” she said.
“Ideally we get to a point where community confidence in the
approvals process saves us from these politically divisive messes in
which nobody wins.”
The Greens climate spokesman, Adam Bandt, has accused Labor of saying different things to different constituencies.
“If Shorten came out today and said Labor would stop Adani from going
ahead if they win next election, like Hawke did with Franklin Dam, the
project is dead,” Bandt said Tuesday. “Time for clarity, Labor, not
fence-sitting”.
You know, judging by today’s papers, it’s almost as if Labor is trying to walk both sides of the fence on coal until the Batman by-election is over. Come on Labor, time to commit to quit coal and #stopAdani
Labor’s candidate in Batman, Ged Kearney, told Guardian Australia Labor needs to be “sensitive to the communities” in Queensland that are facing a jobs shortage.
“I think I have been really upfront about my view of Adani that … I
sincerely don’t think it stacks up, particularly financially,” she said.
“What I have learned at the ACTU is you can’t just say, ‘Stop
something.’ There’s a whole complexity and a whole raft of social,
economic and legal issues that has to be dealt with. It’s a hard
message. It’s not a two-word slogan; it’s a complex message.”
