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fiercer fires during Australian summers, signs of Global warming and climate change
The fierce fires and fire storms in Victoria, South Australia, New South Wales and Tasmania - signs of a warmer, drier climate, more extreme weather patterns and a start of a serious imbalance on our planet....

The Big Winning Issue for 2007

Serious issues on Australia's agenda in the election year of 2007: will they be addressed?

If we line up all the Big Issues in 2007 we need to talk about, an announcement of the "winner" is rather disturbing.

The Big Issues for the new year - and consequently for the 2007 Federal Election - seem to crystallise as we start the year 2007 in the lead-up to what probably will be an October election. And concerns over climate change jumps out as the big winner, and we think it's closely followed by concerns about Australia's involvement in the Iraq war, aggravated by the fate of one single man in that useless war on terrorism: David Hicks.

What's on this page:

This page brings together four articles, and we nominate climate change as the main issue of the year: the report of a News Ltd commissioned survey shows that most Australians rank climate change as the most important issue.

Following the News Ltd article, a report by the Canberra Times environment reporter Rosslyn Beeby. It suggests that the phones of Australia's environment scientists may be bugged by Canberra'a spinmasters. The report suggests that a CSIRO Report on geo-sequestration was so damning, that John Howard's operatives confiscated and shredded all its copies.

CSIRO Denial

We rang reporter Rosslyn Beeby as soon as we could, and issued our press release, supporting the issues she had raised. But within hours, we received an email from CSIRO itself - fully denying the validity of the Canberra Times report. Here's that communication:

We also alerted Greens Environment spokeswoman Senator Christine Milne. She investigated the Canberra Times claims in the next Senate Estimates inquiry. Rosslyn Beeby's report of what happened in that Senate Estimates session is the third article on the page.

We support the view that the Iraq war debacle and agressive meddling in Middle Eastern affairs by the neo-conservative Bush Administration is driven by the greedy and insatiable thirst for control of the world's oil resources. We should not forget that American oil chiefs are directly linked to Washington. The US government cannot support renewable resourcesif the fossil fuel industries dominate Washington: the argument is made in The UK Guardian's article about Iraq - our fourth story.

The final article is from independent reporter John Pilger, who in The UK Guardian reflects on the Australian Flag, on neo-conservatism, and on Australia's xenophobia under Howard - and about the concerns we all should all share.

Quick links:

Click the links below to jump down to the articles and items on this page with the same title.

Related pages:

The page summaries below point to some pages about Climate issues and the attitude of the Howard government to these issues, as well as to pages related to the Iraq invasion.

27 January 2007: Five years for David Hicks: it's quite enough! - Philip Ruddock, an Attorney-General who is 'grossly inaccurate', misleading in argument, in breach of the standards of the Australian criminal code, and who misrepresents the law? Ask former chief justice Alastair Nicholson and Queens council Lex Lazry.

6 December 2006: After five years, Bring Hicks Home! - "He lives in a cell of featureless walls, 24-hour lighting and a single window of frosted glass that in daylight glows like a fluorescent globe," write Ian Munro and Penny Debelle in The Age, when the fifth year in Guantanamo Bay ends for David Hicks. Also on this page, Naomi Klein reports on the 'culture of torture' of her neo-conservative government.

3 December 2006: From coal and horses and shock-jocks: Forcing the coal industry on its environmental knees - The judgment against Centennial Coal's Anvil mine by the New South Wales' Land and Environment court was a blow for the coal industry, but a giant - albeit potential - win for the planet, which brought together on the same side of the table some very unlikely partners: shock-jock Alan Jones, a 26-year-old student from Newcastle, and wine growers from The Hunter.

8 October 2006: An Inconvenient Truth Down-under - "The reason [Australia] has joined the US in failing to ratify Kyoto, is that it wishes to sabotage this international agreement. Australia's policy under the Howard Government has been to attempt sabotage, not just of Kyoto, but of any international climate change treaty or protocol that 'works'..."

 :::CALL TO ACTION::: Monday 18 September 2006: A Planetary Emergency: Earth on the boil - this week, of all weeks in the year, seems a most opportune week to send you Project SafeCom's 'brand-new' publication - the brochure "From Climate Change to Climate Justice".

14 August 2006: Got that sinking feeling? - Some of Australia's closest neighbours are getting 'that sinking feeling' - and with good reason: their nations are sinking, or rather, rising sea levels increase the likelihood of them becoming "climate refugees". But this page is about our own country: Australia...

11 March 2006: Burning Coal and burning the planet - The Australian Labor Party has just released its environmental policy blueprint, and on the face of it, the policy looks 'half decent', but, as always needs to be asked, is the ALP policy all it's stated to be? And, how vulnerable is the stated target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 60% by 2050?

5 March 2006: Silencing the climate change prophets - ABC Four Corners lifts the lid off government gagging of those who know and should tell us. "Some scientists believe that there'll be more environmental refugees. Is that a possibility?" - "I can't really comment on that..."

Authored by Project SafeCom and published  23 March 2003: Why Project SafeCom opposes the invasion of Iraq - Why Project SafeCom opposes the invasion, why it is corrupt, and what some other people say about it. "One of the chief agendas for the USA is the control of the oil-rich countries - and interwoven with that, is that the key agents in the policy formulation are also those in significant positions of control of the oil industries, such as Dick Cheney, Jeb Bush, George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Donald Evans, James Baker."

Mass concern at climate change

news.com.au
By Leticia Makin
January 17, 2007 06:00am

AUSTRALIANS are more worried about climate change than terrorism or any other global issue but believe there is widespread public misunderstanding about it, according to a NEWS.com.au survey.

Three-quarters of respondents said they had given close personal attention to climate change but more than half said they believed Australians were poorly informed about it, reflecting what one expert described as "mass public confusion surrounding climate change in Australia".

An overwhelming majority of respondents said they did not trust the Government on the environment, and while 68 per cent said Australia should sign the Kyoto Protocol, an even greater proportion - 82 per cent - said Australian policy should go further than the treaty to tackle climate change.

There were 3032 respondents to the survey, which was taken last month by Coredata in partnership with NEWS.com.au.

Almost 60 per cent of Coalition voters said the Government's efforts at tackling climate change were insufficient, suggesting it could be a key policy area for swing voters in this year's federal election.

Dr John Zillman, President of Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, and former director of meteorology in Australia, said there was "mass public confusion surrounding climate change in Australia because there are two completely different definitions" of what constitutes climate change.

"One is used by the scientific community in which climate change means an assessment of any change in climate from year-to-year or decade-to-decade no matter the reason behind it," Dr Zillman said.

"The second is the political United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change which says climate change is that due only to human influence."

Alex Horwood, 26, of Melbourne, said she understood that climate change was "mainly global warming caused by man-made pollutants" but also felt the majority of Australians could not make the same distinction.

"Most people don't care until it is a disaster so now the drought is so bad people pay attention, but even still I think most people don't care that much because they think it's not affecting the ... but it is," Ms Horwood said.

Dr Zillman said that despite people being confused as to the exact meaning behind climate change they were right to believe humans could be responsible for the change.

"In the past century the global average temperature has gone up by 0.6-0.7 of a degree which is larger rise than believed to have occurred in the last thousand years or so and there is evidence (like greenhouse gasses) to suggest that this is because of humans," Dr Zillman said.

Both Liberal and Labor voters said they did not trust the Government to do enough to combat climate change nor to accurately assess issues of environmental protection.

Along with their failing trust in the Government, respondents felt businesses was also untrustworthy, with more than 82 per cent saying they did not believe companies would make the right decisions when it came to protecting the environment.

Only 26.5 per cent of respondents agreed nuclear power should be used as a means of tackling the effects of climate change. Half believed that nuclear energy would not make that great a difference to the extent of the nation's carbon emissions.

Dr Zillman said the use of nuclear energy could "contribute in a significant way to reducing greenhouse gases and then in effect human induced climate change".

"The logic is that if climate change is occurring due to greenhouse gas emission then we need to reduce this and one of the ways to do this is to consider using nuclear sources," Dr Zillman said.

"I feel very very strongly that we must look at nuclear energy and weight it up as an option ... we can't ignore it."

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,21069008-2,00.html

Climate of fear silencing scientists when they must be heard

Canberra Times
Thursday, 4 January 2007
Rosslyn Beeby

LAST MONTH former United States president and climate change activist Al Gore told 5000 scientists attending an American Geophysical Union conference to speak out on climate change. "Get involved because so much is at stake," he said.

Gore was well-aware of the political implications of his challenge. Getting involved in the global warming debate means taking a stand against government censorship and running the risk of a funding backlash or full-frontal assault on your reputation.

Here in Australia we've seen intimidation, exclusion from influence, political ridicule and censorship of scientists. We've also seen a dumbing down of the political debate on climate change as a result, with rhetoric rather than science the weapon of choice adopted by government and opposition.

The National Farmers' Federation recently claimed the Prime Minister's Emissions Trading Taskforce was "stacked" with mining, manufacturing and energy generation interests, "opting to embrace those sectors that represent the problems, and excluding many of those who offer solutions".

This selective approach was in evidence recently when federal environment minister Senator Ian Campbell addressed the National Press Club. He quoted a study published in Scientific American that he claimed cited seven options or "wedges" needed over the next 50 years to stabilise global greenhouse emissions, including carbon capture and nuclear energy.

Australian Greens climate change spokeswoman Senator Christine Milne quickly pointed out that Campbell had misrepresented Professor Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacalas' work. They had described 15 options in their study and Milne argued that by ignoring eight of these options Campbell "misled his audience about the choices we have to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, implying that carbon capture and storage and nuclear technology are essential rather than optional."

He also failed to mention that for nuclear power to constitute one wedge in the model, "The world's nuclear power output would need to treble over the next 50 years compared with the worldwide annual growth in the nuclear power industry of about 5 per cent."

In May last year, The Canberra Times obtained a copy of a confidential report by the Cooperative Research Centre for Coal in Sustainable Development. It stated that solar thermal technology was capable of producing Australia's entire electricity demand and was the only renewable energy capable of making deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

Written by five CSIRO Energy Technology scientists, the report said solar thermal technology was "poised to play a significant role in baseload generation for Australia" and would be cost-competitive with coal within seven years.

But sources claim that until details were published by The Canberra Times, the draft report was passed around "like a political hot potato", with no date set for its release. Despite federal government claims that the CRC "just hadn't got around to releasing it", the view taken by senior climate change scientists was that the report had been deliberately suppressed.

There are also rumours circulating that a second CSIRO report on the feasibility of geosequestration (carbon capture and underground storage) was so damning that all copies have been confiscated and possibly destroyed.

Sound far-fetched? Perhaps not when you consider many scientists working on developing renewable energy options are quite literally terrified of the implications of speaking to journalists or giving a background briefing to elucidate some of the complexities of their work.

The Canberra Times has spoken to scientists who are worried that their phone calls may be traced or emails scrutinised for comments critical of government policy. In one instance, a scientist who merely provided the correct details for a photo caption was subsequently carpeted for "unauthorised contact with the media", One senior scientist refused to be interviewed for a feature on Australia's renewable energy options, apologetically explaining that "it's just not worth the possible risk to my program's future funding."

Murdoch University's Professor on Energy Studies, Dr Phillip Jennings, has described a "climate of fear" operating among solar energy researchers. Sources at the Australian National University say two of the nation's leading solar researchers, Professor Andrew Blakers and Profess Klaus Weber the inventors of the solar sliver cell which is predicted to revolutionise the rate of global uptake of solar energy have been warned against speaking out publicly.

It's a pity, because Blakers and Weber are the kind of climate change visionaries we need to hear from, given the recent predictions by the Stern Report that we have only a decade to get greenhouse emissions under control.

This week Federal Science Minister Julie Bishop claimed Australia had to "find new ways" to encourage more students to study science at universities. For that to happen the current political climate must change. Bright students simply won't fancy a career where George Orwell's Big Brother is watching.

Rosslyn Beeby is Science and Environment Reporter.

Link to the Canberra Times article

Industry can gag research: CSIRO

Canberra Times
15 February
Rosslyn Beeby

The CSIRO has confirmed coal industry bodies have the power to suppress a new report questioning the cost and efficiency of clean-coal carbon capture technologies because they partly funded the research.

Dr David Brockway, chief of CSIRO's division of energy technology, told a Senate estimates committee hearing yesterday it was "not necessarily unusual" for private-industry partners investing in research programs - such as Cooperative Research Centres - to request reports be withheld from public release if findings were deemed to be not in their best interests.

His comments followed questions by Australian Greens Senator Christine Milne regarding the release of an economic assessment by a senior CSIRO scientist of a new carbon capture technology to reduce greenhouse emissions from coal-fired power stations.

Senator Milne later described the report's possible suppression as "utterly scandalous behaviour" and contrary to the national interests at a time when climate change was the most pressing issue facing Australia.

Dr Brockway confirmed the report which The Canberra Times understands was largely completed last year - may never be made public. He suggested industry partners tended to regard research as their intellectual property because "they pay for it."

The economic assessment, co-authored by CSIRO chemical engineer and carbon capture expert Dr Greg Duffy as part of CSIRO's participation in the Cooperative Research Centre for Coal in Sustainable Development, was due to be issued last year. According to a summary of the report's findings in the CRC's recently issued annual report, it raises questions about the efficiency of a new carbon capture technology known as the aqua ammonia process.

It says the process is "seriously limited by problems" and "unlikely to be favoured commercially" over the traditional and flawed MEA (monoethanolamine) process for carbon removal from emissions.

CSIRO sources contacted by The Canberra Times last night claimed the report's release had been indefinitely postponed and when finally published, it might only be made available to coal industry partners through a "members only" section of the centre's website.

After the estimates hearing, Senator Milne called for the report to be issued as soon as possible by CSIRO and the CRC for public scrutiny.

"What we have here is a situation where research that is funded by the Australian taxpayer and in the public interest can be kept secret because it doesn't suit the agenda of private sector interests," she said.

"If this situation is typical as CSIRO has implied then it makes you wonder how many scientific reports haven't seen the light of day."

Senator Milne said she had made subsequent inquiries about rules governing CRC reports and was told "certain provisions mean some reports are regarded as owned by the private sector."

"This has to change. Research cannot be suppressed or censored in this way" she said.

The Cooperative Research Centres program was established in 1990 by the Federal Government to bring together scientists and research users to conduct and fund research "to enhance Australia's industrial, commercial and economic growth."

Research programs are jointly funded by the Department of Education, Science and Training, universities, state government agencies and private industry.

The CRC for Coal in Sustainable Development has 19 funding partners, including CSIRO's division of energy technology, Australian Coal Research, BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto Energy, Stanwell Corporation, Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Mines, Wesfarmers Premier Coal and Xstrata Coal.

Dr Brockway told the estimates hearing CSIRO's energy division was focusing considerable research efforts on developing new methods of capturing carbon emissions and described carbon capture as "a key feature" in reducing Australia's greenhouse emissions.

He said he was not aware of the findings of Dr Duffy's economic assessment of the aqua ammonia carbon capture process and had no knowledge of the report's current status.

"I don't know very much about it," he said.

Last September, Dr Duffy told a House of Representatives committee inquiry into geosequestration (carbon capture and burial) technology that carbon capture would double the cost of baseload electricity generation and reduce the output from a power station by "about 30 per cent".

It would cost "hundreds of millions of dollars" to retrofit coal-fired power stations with carbon capture equipment, he said.

The CRC for Coal in Sustainable Development also delayed release of a CSIRO report on solar thermal technology which described it as "the only renewable technology that can make deep cuts in greenhouse emissions" and predicted it would be cost competitive with coal by 2015. The report was released last year after The Canberra Times obtained a copy.

http://canberra.yourguide.com.au/....category=environment

Iraqis will never accept this sellout to the oil corporations

The US-controlled Iraqi government is preparing to remove the country's most precious resource from national control

The UK Guardian
Kamil Mahdi
Tuesday January 16, 2007

Today Iraq remains under occupation, and the gulf between those who profess to rule and those who are ruled is filled with blood. The government is beholden to the occupation forces that are responsible for a humanitarian catastrophe and a political impasse. While defenceless citizens are killed at will, the government carries on with its business of protecting itself, collecting oil revenues, dispensing favours, justifying the occupation, and presiding over collapsing security, economic wellbeing, essential services and public administration. Above all, the rule of law has all but disappeared, replaced by sectarian demarcations under a parliamentary facade. Sectarianism promoted by the occupation is tearing apart civil society, local communities and public institutions, and it is placing people at the mercy of self appointed communal leaders, without any legal protection.

The Iraqi government is failing to properly discharge its duties and responsibilities. It therefore seems incongruous that the government, with the help of USAid, the World Bank and the UN, is pushing through a comprehensive oil law to be promulgated close to an IMF deadline for the end of last year. Once again, an externally imposed timetable takes precedence over Iraq's interests. Before embarking on controversial measures such as this law favouring foreign oil firms, the Iraqi parliament and government must prove that they are capable of protecting the country's sovereignty and the people's rights and interests. A government that is failing to protect the lives of its citizens must not embark on controversial legislation that ties the hands of future Iraqi leaders, and which threatens to squander the Iraqis' precious, exhaustible resource in an orgy of waste, corruption and theft.

Government officials, including the deputy prime minister, Barham Salih, have announced that the draft oil law is ready to be presented to the cabinet for approval. Salih was an enthusiast for the US-led invasion of Iraq, and the Kurdish militia-led administration he represents has signed illegal oil agreements that it is now seeking to legalise. Given that parliament has not been meeting regularly, it is likely that legislation will be rushed through after a deal brokered under the auspices of the US occupation.

Iraq's oil industry is in a parlous state as a result of sanctions, wars and occupation. The government, through the ministry of oil's inspector general, has issued damning reports of large-scale corruption and theft across the oil sector. Many competent senior technical officials have been sacked or demoted, and the state oil-marketing organisation has had several directors. Ministries and public organisations are increasingly operating as party fiefdoms, and private, sectarian and ethnic perspectives prevail over the national outlook. This state of affairs has negative results for all except those who are corrupt and unscrupulous, and the voracious foreign oil corporations. The official version of the draft law has not been published, but there is no doubt that it will be designed to hand most of the oil resources to foreign corporations under long-term exploration- and production-sharing agreements.

The oil law is likely to open the door to these corporations at a time when Iraq's capacity to regulate and control their activities will be highly circumscribed. It would therefore place the responsibility for protecting the country's vital national interest on the shoulders of a few vulnerable technocrats in an environment where blood and oil flow together in abundance. Common sense, fairness and Iraq's national interest dictate that this draft law must not be allowed to pass during these abnormal times, and that long-term contracts of 10, 15 or 20 years must not be signed before peace and stability return, and before Iraqis can ensure that their interests are protected.

This law has been discussed behind closed doors for much of the past year. Secret drafts have been viewed and commented on by the US government, but have not been released to the Iraqi public - and not even to all members of parliament. If the law is pushed through in these circumstances, the political process will be further discredited even further. Talk of a moderate cross-sectarian front appears designed to ease the passage of the law and the sellout to oil corporations.

The US, the IMF and their allies are using fear to pursue their agenda of privatising and selling off Iraq's oil resources. The effect of this law will be to marginalise Iraq's oil industry and undermine the nationalisation measures undertaken between 1972 and 1975. It is designed as a reversal of Law Number 80 of December 1961 that recovered most of Iraq's oil from a foreign cartel. Iraq paid dearly for that courageous move: the then prime minister, General Qasim, was murdered 13 months later in a Ba'athist-led coup that was supported by many of those who are part of the current ruling alliance - the US included. Nevertheless, the national oil policy was not reversed then, and its reversal under US occupation will never be accepted by Iraqis.

Kamil Mahdi is an Iraqi academic and senior lecturer in Middle East economics at the University of Exeter - email: K.A.Mahdi(at)exeter.ac.uk

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1991320,00.html

Cruelty and xenophobia stir and shame the lucky country

The social regression and flag-waving promoted by Australia's neocon prime minister may come unstuck in Guantánamo

John Pilger
Friday January 19, 2007
The Guardian

The Australian writer Donald Horne meant the title of his celebrated book, The Lucky Country, as irony. "Australia is a lucky country run by second-rate people who share its luck," he lamented in 1964, describing much of the Australian elite as unfailingly unoriginal, race-obsessed and in thrall to imperial power and its wars. From Britain's opium adventures to America's current travesty in Iraq, Australians have been sent to fight faraway people with whom they have no quarrel and who offer no threat of invasion. Growing up, I was assured this was a "sacred tradition".

But then another Australia was "discovered". The only war dead whom Australians had never mourned were found right under their noses: those of a remarkable indigenous people who had owned and cared for this ancient land for thousands of years, then fought and died in its defence when the British invaded. In a land littered with cenotaphs, not one honoured them. For many whites, the awakening was rude; for others it was thrilling. In the 70s, thanks largely to the brief, brave and subverted Labor government of Gough Whitlam, the universities opened their studies to these heresies and their gates to a society Mark Twain once identified as "almost entirely populated by the lower orders". A secret history revealed that, long before the rest of the western world, Australian working people had fought for and won a minimum wage, an eight-hour working day, pensions, child benefits and the vote for women. And now there was an astonishing ethnic diversity, and it had happened as if by default: there simply were not enough Britons and "blue-eyed Balts" who wanted to come.

Australia is not often news, cricket and bushfires aside. That is a pity, because the regression of this social democracy into a state of fabricated fear and xenophobia is an object lesson for all societies claiming to be free. In power for more than a decade, the Liberal prime minister, John Howard, comes from the outer reaches of Australia's "neocons". In 1988 he announced that a future government led by him would pursue a "One Australia Policy", a forerunner to Pauline Hanson's infamous One Nation party, whose targets were black Australians and migrants. Howard's targets have been similar. One of his first acts as prime minister was to cut $A400m from the Aboriginal affairs budget. "Political correctness," he said, "has gone too far." Today, black Australians still have one of the lowest life expectancies in the world, and their health is the worst in the world. An entirely preventable disease, trachoma - beaten in many poor countries - still blinds many because of appalling living conditions. The impoverishment of black communities, which I have seen change little over the years, was described in 2006 by Save the Children as "some of the worst we have seen in our work all around the world". Instead of a political respect in the form of a national lands rights law, a war of legal attrition has been waged against the Aborigines; and the epidemics and black suicides continue.

Howard rejoices in his promotion of "Australian values" - a very Australian sycophancy to the sugared "values" of foreign power. The darling of a group of white supremacists who buzz around the Murdoch-dominated press and radio talk-back hosts, the prime minister has used acolytes to attack the "black armband view of history", as if the mass killing and resistance of indigenous Australians did not happen. The fine historian Henry Reynolds, author of The Other Side of the Frontier, has been thoroughly smeared, along with other revisionists. In 2005 Andrew Jaspan, a Briton newly appointed editor of the Melbourne Age, was subjected to a vicious neocon campaign that accused him of "reducing" the Age to "another Guardian".

Flag-waving and an unctuous hand-on-heart jingoism, about which sceptical Australians once felt a healthy ambivalence, are now standard features at sporting and other public events. These serve to prepare Australians for renewed militarism and war, as ordained by the Bush administration, and to cover attacks on Australia's Muslim community. Speak out and you may break a 2005 law of sedition meant to intimidate with the threat of imprisonment for up to seven years. Once described in the media as Bush's "deputy sheriff", Howard did not demur when Bush, on hearing this, promoted him to "sheriff for south-east Asia". Like a mini-Blair, he has sent troops and federal police to the Solomon Islands, Tonga, Papua New Guinea and East Timor. In newly independent East Timor, where Australian governments colluded with Indonesia's 23-year bloody occupation, "regime change" was effectively executed last year with the resignation of the prime minister, Mari Alkatiri, who had the temerity to oppose Canberra's one-sided exploitation of his country's oil and gas resources.

However, it is one man, David Hicks, a spectacular loser in the new Australia, who now threatens Howard's "lucky" facade. Hicks was found among the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001 and sold as bounty to the Americans by CIA-backed warlords. He has spent more than five years in Guantánamo Bay, including eight months in a cell with no sunlight. He has been tortured, and never charged with any crime. Howard and his attorney-general, Philip Ruddock, have refused even to request Hicks's repatriation, as is his constitutional right, because there are no Australian laws under which Hicks can be charged. Their cruelty is breathtaking. A tenacious campaign by his father, Terry, has ignited a kind of public shame that is growing. This has happened before in Australia, such as the march of a million people across Sydney Harbour Bridge demanding justice for black Australians, and the courageous direct action by young people who forced the closure of notorious outback detention camps for illegal refugees, with their isolation cells, capsicum spray and beatings. Asylum seekers caught in their leaking boats by the ever-vigilant Australian Defence Force are now incarcerated behind electric fences on tiny Christmas Island more than 1,000 miles from the lucky country.

Howard faces no real opposition from the compliant Labor party. The trade unions, facing a rollback of Australia's proud record of workers' rights and up to 43% youth unemployment, have stirred, and filled the streets. But perhaps something wider and deeper is coming from a nation whose most enduring and melancholy self-image is that of disobedient larrikins. During the recent Ashes series, Ian Chappell, one of Australia's most admired cricket captains, walked out of the commentary box when Howard walked in. After seeing for himself conditions in a refugee prison, Chappell said: "These are human beings and you can't just treat them like that ... in cricketing parlance it was like cheating. They were being cheated out of a fair go."

www.johnpilger.com

http://www.guardian.co.uk/australia/story/0,,1994044,00.html