North Stradbroke Island racial segregation claims

It is the literal line in the sand literally dividing one of Stradbroke Island’s most beloved campgrounds over allegations of racial segregation limiting access to non-Indigenous visitors.

The Blakesleys Slip area, about 10km south of Dunwich on North Stradbroke (or Minjerribah in the local Indigenous language), has been a popular camping and fishing spot for decades, but new rules from Queensland Parks and Wildlife have angered many, including a stipulation part of the site should now be reserved for exclusive use of the Quandamooka people.

Some, including former local federal MP Andrew Laming, have called the move reverse racism, while Queensland Parks and Wildlife says it is about protecting and managing the site for everyone.

Blakesley’s Slip, formed by shifting sands during sand mining in the area about 40 years ago, has been a popular – albeit unofficial, camping spot for years, but attempts to regulate overnight visitation to the area have raised tensions.

While many have accepted the introduction of camping fees and a formal booking system limiting numbers, some feel a move to divide the area into two distinct sections – one for general campers and one for the exclusive use of Quandamooka traditional owners – has crossed the line.

Luke Seaborne, a local resident who has been camping and fishing at the popular spot for 30 years, has launched a petition calling on supporters to challenge the changes.

“They’re literally drawing a line in the sand and saying who can or can’t go where,” he said. “I think we can all respect each other and learn from each other, but what they’re doing here is just plain divisive.”

The area is jointly managed by QPWS and the Quandamooka Yoolooburrabee Aboriginal Corporation, which was awarded native title rights over parts of the island several years ago.

Straddie’s shift away from sandmining towards eco-tourism in recent years has caused increasing friction on the laid-back island.

In a statement, a QPWS spokesperson said the new rules provided “an opportunity for all Queenslanders, including the Quandamooka People, to immerse themselves in this unique natural and cultural setting”.

“As the native title owners of the land, the Quandamooka People are entitled to set aside areas for the Quandamooka community to be on Country to camp with their families and engage with their culture,” the statement said.

But Dr Laming, a passionate advocate for the island, said the moves went too far. “Of course they should be entitled to engage with their culture, but not by segregating it from everyone else,” he said. “If we’re really serious about reconciliation, why wouldn’t you share the site and camp together?

“It reeks of reverse racism.”

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/qld-politics/north-stradbroke-island-racial-segregation-claims/news-story/b8f38fa3de5764541cdf63ff0d12cc33

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Renewable fantasies in Queensland

There are numerous intelligent ways to respond to the risk of climate change. Setting heroic and enormously costly state-based targets is not one of them.

The Queensland government’s ten-year Queensland Energy and Jobs Plan has essentially set three targets: a 30 per cent reduction in emissions compared to 2005 levels by 2030; 70 per cent renewable electricity generation by 2032; and net-zero emissions by 2050.

Currently, Queensland’s renewables generation share is 21 per cent, with coal providing 60 per cent of Queensland’s electricity generation requirements and gas 10 per cent.

Queensland would need to further reduce its carbon emissions from 160 million tonnes to 138 million tonnes per year in 2030 to meet its emissions target. In a signal that it will fail, the Palaszczuk government has pushed the date out by two years to 2032. It lifted the renewables target to 70 per cent to cover up its irresponsible timeline.

This plan is doomed, and it will be very costly.

For starters, much of the successful reduction in emissions already achieved since 2005 has been due to lower rates of primary forest clearing – a gain which cannot be repeated.

Queensland’s growing population, expected to reach six million in 2029, will make it difficult to reduce emissions from the transport sector. It will take decades to completely switch to battery-powered vehicles. Besides, every battery-powered car on the road has been built thanks to mining and minerals processing emissions and, unless the Tesla is kept in the garage, will require mostly coal and gas-fired electricity for the next decade at least.

While the cost of solar generation has fallen, the true cost of electricity generation also includes the cost of guaranteeing supply. As coal and gas-fired generators shut down over the next two decades the cost of that supply guarantee will rise enormously because of the high fixed costs of baseload alternatives.

The current fixed capital cost of 4th generation SMR nuclear reactors is high relative to coal, but nuclear, which enjoys a capacity factor of 95 per cent, only needs to be cost competitive against similarly costly (but less reliable) baseload alternatives in hydro-electric dams and large-scale batteries.

Palaszczuk’s $62 billion hydro-electric dam proposal reminds us of the Snowy 2.0 cost blowout and will very likely again prove world-renowned Professor Brent Flyvbjerg’s adage that megaprojects are always ‘over budget, over time, over and over again’. At full employment, nation-building fantasies can very quickly turn into skills shortages, wage inflation and cost blowouts.

Setting aside the infeasibility of achieving a fair dinkum net-zero target by 2050, there are lower-cost paths and timeframes to tackle the risks of climate change. To the extent that climate change is an existential threat to civilisation – which remains an open question – the policies to mitigate or adapt to its impacts should be global. States should not be in the business of setting their own targets. Australia’s electricity generation sector is a single national market. State targets will increase the overall economic cost of meeting those targets.

As the Productivity Commission pointed out more than a decade ago, the heavy lifting should be done by the jurisdictions best able to mitigate their emissions, and who bear the lowest cost of mitigation, within the framework of an overall global emissions reduction target that balances long-term economic, social and environmental goals.

How did we get into this pickle?

First came the language. Renewables are not ‘renewable’ as the technology – solar panels, turbines and batteries – are made from physically limited resources such as rare earths, more limited than coal, gas and oil which, for all practical purposes, are unlimited.

Because of this legerdemain of language, Queensland is facing two black holes. When the coal-fired power stations shut down and when the first generation of renewable technology needs renewing.

Second, the assertion that renewables are the cheapest form of energy is not true. Industry subsidies, targets and regulations dramatically tilt the playing field. Thermal coal and gas are not subsidised and, in fact, are penalised via higher capital costs to account for regulatory risk. Forcing Queensland industry onto renewables too quickly will put at risk what remains of its export- oriented heavy industry. The net result will be an economy that is even more dependent on China for manufactured goods.

Third, switching to renewables cannot possibly permanently lower Australia’s current 3.5 per cent unemployment rate. In the long run, switching to renewables too quickly will simply raise costs and lower incomes and living standards for all Australians.

Fourth, to maintain confidence in, and continual public funding to, the renewables lobby there has been silence on the near-term technological feasibility of renewables as the primary source of power generation. The Australian Electricity Market Operator says it is ‘working with industry to engineer a power system capable of running at 100 per cent instantaneous penetration of renewable energy.’ In time (and at what cost) to meet Palaszczuk’s new targets?

Finally, there is the fantastic assumption that regional communities will cop this ‘once-in-a-century transformation’. It’s worth keeping in mind that 85,000 Queenslanders work in the mining industry today, more than at the peak of the mining boom a decade ago. When will the AWU and CFMEU tell its members? When will ‘Lock the Gate’ come out against environment-destroying solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries, and vastly more complex poles and wire electricity distribution systems?

Are Olympic green credentials worth the economic harm to Queensland people, especially in the farming and mining communities across regional Queensland? Now that most of big business and the universities have rolled over, unwilling to critically debate the merits of these state-based targets, is there an opposition left in the country prepared to question the costs and benefits of this latest ‘urgent’ government-mandated project?

https://spectator.com.au/2022/10/queensland-renewable-one-day-not-feasible-the-next/

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The modern-day Fascists are on the Left

In his essay, Politics and the English Language, George Orwell wrote, ‘The word fascism has now no meaning.’

Last weekend, I experienced this firsthand. I was attending my first CPAC Conference. After lunch, I stepped outside to get some fresh air. When I heard chanting and screeching, curiosity got the better of me and I went to investigate.

I saw a small group of pale people shouting about ‘fighting the right’ and ‘smashing fascism’. I quickly determined that these skinny, carefully masked-up youngsters posed no danger. They weren’t going to be fighting anyone, not without eating some red meat at least.

But their words struck me as odd, particularly since I was attending CPAC as part of a delegation from the Australian Jewish Association. As the grandson of Holocaust survivors, who experienced first-hand what fascism is, I am hyper-vigilant about its dangers.

It got me thinking, where was this fascism they were protesting so vigorously?

I thought back to the talks I had just listened to that morning. Surely, they didn’t take issue with the all-Indigenous panel talking about why so many Indigenous people oppose the divisive Aboriginal ‘Voice’.

Did these activists think that Zion Lights, the climate advocate of Indian origin, was a fascist? Was it Michael Shellenberger, who ran as a Democrat candidate for California Governor that was getting them so worked up?

As I was thinking back to the diverse group of speakers I had listened to earlier that morning, something dawned on me. The protesters chanting about racism, while attempting to smash the windows and storm the convention centre, were almost exclusively white. While inside we listened to Nigerian and Japanese people share their points of view, outside, the gathered crowd was monolithic. The most diversity I saw was a girl with purple hair.

Ironically, it was on the t-shirts of the rent-a-crowd that one could find support for another historical injustice. Many of them unashamedly wore Marxism shirts. Perhaps they were unaware that the movement they were promoting has caused more deaths than even the Nazis.

It’s easy to laugh them off, but these far-left radicals represent something sinister. Whilst inside the conference, I hadn’t witnessed anything even close to fascism. These protesters, in trying to shut down free speech, were exhibiting aspects of it.

These zealots are just emulating their leaders on the left who call anything they don’t like, ‘fascist’. If you’ve read the news recently, you may have noticed, that instead of celebrating the election of Italy’s first-ever female Prime Minister, mainstream media labelled her a ‘fascist’. They do this because she refuses to bow down to Woke norms and proudly supports traditional values. Giorgia Meloni is in good company. Donald Trump, the most pro-Jewish president in US history, was also wrongly labelled a fascist and an antisemite.

As a rule of thumb, it’s likely that those being slandered with terms like racist or fascist provide a much better example than those doing the labelling, who are often themselves spewing hatred.

Much like the word racism, fascism has lost all meaning. Far-leftists have even attempted to label the Australian Jewish Association as fascist for representing common-sense values shared by the majority of Australia’s Jewish community.

By labelling everything they disagree with as fascist and racist, leftists devalue truly horrific historical events. This is part of a wider trend of misappropriation. In recent years, the word ‘apartheid’ has been co-opted by extremists to slander the Jewish state. In the process, they diminish the horrors experienced in South Africa.

Dialogue and the exchange of ideas are hallmarks of Australia’s open society. In order to preserve what our ancestors so successfully built here, we must learn to disagree with others without labelling everything and everyone as fascist, racist, or Nazi.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/10/when-is-fascism-not-really-fascism/

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Coal and gas are still Australia's economic saviours

With Australia in desperate need of economic golden eggs as we struggle with a massive debt burden and face a possible world recession, they’re trying harder than ever to kill the goose that is laying them. The huge $50 billion slash in the 2021-22 budget deficit, cutting it by two-thirds from $80 billion to $32 billion, largely resulted from record company tax collections of $126 billion. These were driven up by our highest-ever resources and energy exports of $421 billion, led by the condemned-to-death fossil fuels of coal, oil and LNG which together made up almost half the total. And in the current 2022-23 financial year, the golden eggs will be even richer as resources and energy exports are officially forecast to reach even higher to $450 billion as coal export revenues surge to $120 billion to exceed iron ore.

But governmental net-zero targets, investment bans by woke climate-catastrophe-obsessed boards of directors and super funds, a court system happy to be the plaything of climate-activist lawfare that has made Australia the world’s most litigious developed nation for mining projects, have all combined to bring the campaign against fossil fuels – and thereby against Australia’s historic dependence on reliable cheap energy and status as an exporter – to a serious tipping point.

Unless there is a truce in this war against fossil fuels, the current financial year will be the last time they will be capable of coming so significantly to our economic rescue. Already, next year’s official forecasts of an expected decline in the Ukraine war’s high commodity prices, of a Western world economic slowdown and for its rush to renewables (as self-destructive emissions targets are imposed), are together likely to result in a cut in our fossil fuel export revenue by almost a quarter in 2023-24. This, along with Australia’s deliberate official obstructionism to fossil fuel investment, particularly in coal, will all combine to kill off this economic lifeline whose current significance has been deliberately downplayed by those seeking environmental purity.

So while this year’s forecast iron ore exports at $119 billion takes the headlines, the fossil fuels of metallurgical coal at $58 billion, thermal coal at $62 billion, natural gas at $90 billion and oil at $15 billion are together officially forecast to be almost twice as big as iron ore’s export earnings this financial year and to make up, at $225 billion, half of Australia’s total minerals and resources export revenue. While, on their own, coal exports are earning more than iron ore, so effective has the campaign been against coal that not even the organisation that is supposed to represent it, the Minerals Council of Australia, was prepared to acknowledge coal’s primary role when it issued a press release last week welcoming the latest official resources and energy forecasts by the Department of Industry, Science and Resources, ‘as a strong reminder of the of the economic benefits delivered by the mining industry’.

In noting the forecast that Australia’s resource and energy export earnings will reach a record $450 billion in the current financial year , the MCA correctly asserted that, ‘Australia is only in a position to take advantage of these [high international] prices due to increased production across a range of commodities. In the last decade, over $250 billion of investment in new mines, processing equipment and infrastructure has resulted in Australia’s bauxite mining increasing 41 per cent, iron ore production increasing 84 per cent and lithium output rising nearly 400 per cent’.

Not a word about the biggest single revenue earner, coal, which became the mineral that MCA pretends does not exist ever since an emissions-obsessed BHP threatened to quit the MCA if it continued to lobby for coal; note the absence of coal in MCA press releases in recent years.

But when MCA campaigns against pressure for rises in mining taxes and royalties, as it has this month, by boasting of mining’s record $43 billion contribution made to the Australian economy in 2020-21 (with 2021-22 sure to be even considerably larger), coal’s existence is re-discovered and its multi-billion-dollar share is included – without acknowledgement. And by asserting that the effective tax rate on Australian mining investment is already high relative to many jurisdictions in other mining countries, it reminds governments that while Australia needs to attract more investment in mining (but you must not mention coal!) in order to benefit from growing international demand, there is strong competition for investment from other mining countries.

However, at least coal has proselytisers on a state basis. As Stephen Galilee, CEO of the NSW Minerals Council pointedly told me, ‘Some people want to ignore the fact that our coal sector even exists This is despite coal continuing to be NSW’s most valuable export commodity, worth around $22.6 billion in exports, and delivering a record $4 billion in royalties to the NSW government this year alone’.

But what of the future, given the high demand for NSW coal that Galilee claims is some of the highest quality available anywhere in the world, producing more energy with less emissions than coal from elsewhere? ‘There are currently 17 potential coal-mining proposals in the planning and development pipeline in NSW representing a further $4.6 billion investment.’ But nearly all are proposals to expand or extend operational lives of NSW’s forty existing coal mines; greenfield projects face too many hurdles.

The same goes for Queensland, where my old parliamentary colleague Ian Macfarlane who runs the Queensland Resources Council, said the latest official forecasts ‘reinforce the significance of the resources industry to the budget bottom line. Coal exports underpin both the Australian and Queensland governments’ budgets’. But Macfarlane warned that governments, particularly Queensland’s, ‘can’t take future investment and future returns from coal exports for granted’ and that the Queensland government’s decision to hike up coal royalty taxes to the highest rates in the world has resulted in ‘large mining investors already rethinking their investments in Queensland’.

Is it time someone brought another lump of coal into parliament to remind MPs of its economic significance?

https://spectator.com.au/2022/10/business-robbery-etc-102/ ?

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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