Get Aborigines off reservations to pick fruit?

I know Aborigines and I can't see it. Some might but not many. On the reservations (Sorry: "Communities") they're too used to "sit down money" (welfare). There are already unemployed Aborigines in the local area and the need for pickers has been well advertised so if they want the work, why don't they just roll up at the farm gate? Other local Aborigines do. And note that Kimberley Land Council represents an area that is on the other side of the continent from where the pickers are needed

The powerful Kimberley Land Council says a Federal Government plan to import Pacific Islanders to pick fruit in rural communities is "shameful". The council has thrown its weight behind Opposition indigenous affairs spokesman Tony Abbott, who says Aborigines will feel cheated when they see Pacific Islanders being paid to pick fruit while they languish on welfare.

But at Orange World Mildura, where this season's crop will rot unless more seasonal labour is found, Joe Scopelliti is not so sure. Looking around his orchard, he sees Turks, Greeks, Vietnamese and Australians. Tongans have pruned his vines.

As for Aboriginal people? "You just can't seem to find them," he says. "If you're telling me they want to work, I'll give them a go," he says. "Why not? I'll employ anyone, so long as they are willing to work."

With an overall unemployment rate in the Mildura area of 8 per cent and 31 per cent of indigenous people in the area not in the labour force, Aboriginal workers Orion Hunt, 22, and Nathan Taylor, 24, share the sentiment. Both have worked as pickers in the past, although Mr Hunt now works for the Mildura Aboriginal Corporation. "It's no good," he says. "Those jobs should go to local people."

In an unlikely political union, Mr Abbott has joined ALP powerbroker Warren Mundine in attacking the Government's proposal to import 2500 workers from Tonga, Vanuatu, Kiribati and Papua New Guinea to fill seasonal shortages.

While Mr Mundine considers it "bizarre" that his Government would jet in overseas workers when thousands of Aboriginal people were unemployed, Mr Abbott describes it as an "exercise in folly". "The kind of money which employers are putting up to bring them in and repatriate them would be much better invested in getting local Aboriginal people a start in the local economy," Mr Abbott told The Australian yesterday.

"The fact that we've got a substantial pool of unemployed people who are our immediate ongoing responsibility makes this an exercise in folly because obviously, if any of these Pacific Islanders are working nearby high-unemployment Aboriginal towns, the local people are going to feel cheated."

Kimberley Land Council boss Wayne Bergmann accuses the Government of taking "the easy option" instead of investing in its most disadvantaged citizens. "My frustration in all this stuff is the inept failure of government to actually engage," Mr Bergmann said. "To hear that the Government are proposing to bring in more overseas workers when Aboriginal people are disadvantaged in the workforce is shameful."

Yet the notion of there being a large, waiting and willing supply of Aboriginal fruit pickers within easy reach of the Murray orchards is a moot point along the river. At the Mildura Aboriginal Corporation, chairman Sid Clarke agrees it is silly to fly overseas workers into areas where unemployment is well above the national average. "I can't understand them importing people from other places when you've got really high unemployment in your town, be it Aboriginal, white, or what," Mr Clarke said.

Two hours up the river at Robinvale, Gary Letts from the Murray Valley Aboriginal Co-operative insists Aboriginal people are already heavily employed as fruit pickers and demand for workers is outstripping supply. At Turnbull Orchards in Mooroopna, near Shepparton, office manager Karen Marsden says Mr Mundine is wrong to suggest there are large numbers of unemployed Aboriginal people near fruit-growing areas who could be offered jobs. "Every season we get Aboriginal people here picking fruit for us," she said. "Any person who comes in looking for work gets put on."

The idea of flying seasonal workers into the Murray-Goulburn area is not new. In 2005, Noel Pearson championed a scheme under which Aboriginal people from Cape York were brought in to pick fruit in the Murray-Goulburn area. Mr Pearson then raised the same question Mr Mundine raises now. "In a place like Robinvale, thriving industry, not enough workers, they should be supplied from within Australia," Mr Pearson said. "If we've got a work shortage in places like Cape York and they've got a worker shortage down here, we should provide the workers."

As Mr Mundine put it: "If you're going to fly people from the Pacific islands, what's wrong with flying people from Cape York, for instance. Or Karratha, or Melbourne, or Sydney, or Brisbane, or Nhulunbuy." He says there was a time when Aboriginal people would travel hundreds of kilometres for seasonal work, but they had been "weaned out" of these jobs over the past 30 years "and now we can't get back into real jobs".

The Rudd Government hopes its three-year trial of bringing in 2500 Pacific islanders can be rapidly increased to 25,000. In announcing the program, Agriculture Minister Tony Burke said farmers were "sick to death of watching their fruit rotting on the vine because they couldn't get a worker there to pick". The National Farmers' Federation is backing the scheme. Acting chief executive Denita Wawn says Australians will not be displaced by seasonal workers and that more "barriers" needed to be removed to enable Aboriginal people to successfully move to where seasonal jobs are.

Foreign Affairs Minister Stephen Smith yesterday said the scheme would be determined by demand and Australians would always be offered work first. "The requirements that we will put in place will ensure that if there is an Australian, or someone based in Australia, who is ready, willing and able to work in the horticulture industry, then they'll get the jobs first," he told Macquarie Radio in Sydney.

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The Australian government could well fall for this one

Kevvy Rudd likes lots of immigrants and he is a dedicated Warmist so he might grab this idea as another feelgood gesture

Over one hundred non-governmental organizations from across the Pacific Islands region have written a letter to the leaders of Australia and New Zealand urging them to change their immigration policies in response to climate change. The open letter -- addressed to Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark -- calls for increased permanent immigration as well as resettlement services and reduced carbon emissions.

Damien Lawson of Friends of the Earth Australia feels that Australia and New Zealand need a new immigration category for people forced to resettle because of climate change. "Ultimately there needs to be recognition in our immigration program that there are people already in the Pacific being displaced because of climate change, people having to leave small atolls and islands because of sea level rises," he said. "We think there needs to be a special category in our humanitarian program that recognises the displacement caused by climate change," he added.

Lawson stated that low lying nations such as Tuvalu and Kiribati are already facing rising seas and vioelent storms. He said that the region could expect sea levels to rise several meters this century.

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Doomster Flannery washed out again

By Andrew Bolt

Alarmist of the Year Tim Flannery really should stay out of the predictions business, unless he's just rehearsing a comedy act. Four years ago, there was his prediction for Perth:

Speaking last night at the State Government's Sydney Futures forum, Dr Flannery warned of a city grappling with up to 60 per cent less water. As temperatures around the world warmed by 2 to 7 per cent, Sydney could glimpse its future by looking at the devastating impact that global warming had already had on Perth. "I think there is a fair chance Perth will be the 21st century's first ghost metropolis," Dr Flannery said.

Instead:

Perth's dams have reached their highest July level in eight years, despite WA's gas crisis causing the closure of the Kwinana desalination plant at the start of the month. Above-average rainfall in the major catchment areas since April has meant that the dams are about 34 per cent full. Weather Bureau spokesman Glenn Cook said that the high dam levels were due in part to good winter rain last year...

Three years ago there was his prediction for Sydney:

He also predicts that the ongoing drought could leave Sydney's dams dry in just two years.

Instead:

The available storage as at 3 p.m. Thursday, 7 August 2008 was 66.0 %.

Flannery's latest city-scare? It's for Adelaide, and given five months ago:

The water problem is so severe for Adelaide that it may run out of water by early 2009.

Instead? Let Tim Blair give you the soggy news and the healthy dam readings. We've seen Flannery's sort before, of course:

And so around the chorus ran
"It's keepin' dry, no doubt."
"We'll all be rooned," said Hanrahan,
"Before the year is out."

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Climate balance from a major TV show!

A turning point in the debate: 60 Minutes is suddenly not so sure man is heating the world to hell, after all. And it won't have been reassured by Kevin Rudd's shaky grasp of the evidence in spruiking his carbon tax:

PM KEVIN RUDD: But economic cost (sic) of not acting is massive, it's through the roof. Think about food production, the Murray, think about the impact on tourism in QLD, no more Barrier Reef, Kakadu, no more Kakadu. Think about the impact on jobs, it's huge.

Actually, even if Rudd really thinks warming will wipe out the Barrier Reef and Kakadu (neither of which show any sign of going anywhere), he is deceiving viewers by suggesting his carbon tax would make the slightest difference to the climate. Indeed, the only impact will be on jobs - as in costing them, and not, as he claims, saving them.

TARA BROWN: How certain are you that mankind is the cause behind global warming?

PM KEVIN RUDD: Well, I just look at what the scientists say. There's a group of scientists called the International Panel on Climate Change - 4000 of them.

No, it's actually called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And no, there are not 4000 IPCC scientists. Try 2500, instead. Rudd is lucky that this exaggeration wasn't picked up by Brown. What's more, a number of those 2500 don't stand by the IPCC conclusion on man's effect on the climate. Many others were not even consulted over the report's bottom-line finding.

PM KEVIN RUDD: ... And what they (IPCC scientists) say to us is it's happening and it's caused by human activity.

Actually, even the IPCC report admits doubts, saying it's only 90 per cent sure humans are responsible for most of the warming in just the 25 years until 1998. But a token alarmist is then rolled on to preach doom:

DR TIM FLANNERY: Stop burning coal and other fossil fuels and stop putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere because that is what is warming the atmosphere and that is what's driving the changes.

I wouldn't rely on anyone with Flannery's record of alarmist inaccuracies. And in this case thousands of scientists disagree, actually. 60 Minutes, to its credit, finally talks to some of the "thousands" it agrees are there:

PROF. RICHARD LINDZEN: We need CO-2. It's not a poison, it's not a pollutant. It's essential for life on earth. I mean how much are we going to depend on people's ignorance in order to produce panic?.

DAVID EVANS: (There's no evidence that carbon emissions cause any significant warming at all...

And reporter Tara Brown even dares mention the Medieval Warm Period:

TARA BROWN: Perhaps nowhere in the world is there more compelling evidence against the man-made carbon dioxide argument than Greenland. Long before the Industrial Age, the Vikings lived here and happily grew wheat and vegetables. It was known as the `Medieval Warm Period' and temperatures were even hotter than they are today.

But, wait, there's more:

TARA BROWN: So statistically, in the last seven years, the flattening and perhaps even slight cooling of temperatures - is that significant?

DAVID EVANS: Yes, yes it is significant. Once it gets up to five years or so it's really quite significant. Whatever was driving the temperatures up has taken a break for a while and meanwhile carbon emissions have continued and the level of carbon in the atmosphere has gone up about 5% since 2001, yet we see no more warming.

But back to Rudd, who can't have counted on being corrected mid-scare by Brown:

PM KEVIN RUDD: Here's a measurement which people should just sit back and pay a bit of attention to - the 12 hottest years in human history have occurred in the last 13 years. That's a fact.

TARA BROWN: It's not my position to correct you Prime Minister but Ive been told that in fact during the middle ages the global temperatures were two to three degrees warmer than now. Certainly we've had the hottest 12 years in recent history but the planet's been a lot hotter.

PM KEVIN RUDD: Well, I stand by what the International Panel of Climate Change Scientists have had to say. There will always be argy-bargy about elements of the detail.

Where the world has been hotter in human history is now just "elements of the detail" to Rudd? And is he not even familiar with this debate over dodgy IPCC claims, and what it says about the IPCC on which he relies so heavily? And still Brown hasn't finished sowing doubts:

TARA BROWN: But one thing climate scientists agree on - if global warming is caused by CO-2 emissions then the CO-2 will leave a distinct signature their computer models predict a big red hotspot above the equator. The problem is thousands of weather balloons equipped with some very sophisticated thermometers have measured the temperatures in the atmosphere to test the theory, and guess what, no hotspots.

DAVID EVANS: There's no hotspot, there's no hotspot at all. It's not even a little hotspot and it's missing. We couldn't find it.

Sadly, Brown then goes on to quote for no clear reason previous 60 Minutes stories which preached alarmism over drought and Chernobyl, and waffles on without quite finding the courage to admit they swallowed green scares whole. But there is this rally near the end:

PM KEVIN RUDD: The key thing is, how do you bring carbon pollution down in an economically responsible fashion? And having looked at all the detail this is the best way forward.

TARA BROWN: But if you believe the sceptics, and carbon dioxide isn't to blame for global warming then we face massive change for no good reason.

DAVID EVANS: Isn't it a bit dopey to wreck the economy for a purely theoretical reason when the alleged symptom, warming, stopped six years ago.

To conclude: 60 Minutes has dared to contradict the global warming "consensus", and its own record, to present fairly the growing evidence that supports the scepticism of thousands of scientists. That puts it ahead of the media curve - certainly ahead of the ABC. And having this done on the country's most-watched current affairs show marks a significant turning point in the debate. 60 Minutes, for one, will now have a vested interest in saying "we told you". Rudd, already at sea with the evidence, should be very, very nervous.

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