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National News - Waste - January 2009 |
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Australian Capital Territory; New South Wales; Northern Territory; Queensland; South Australia; Tasmania; Victoria; Western Australia
12/01/09 Boost to wood export industries Media Statement - Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry
08/01/09 It's time to stop and get off the Gunns pulp mill merry-go-round Bob McMahon The Age Opinion
08/01/09 Delay on SA lakes flood Tom Arup The Age South Australia;
06/01/09 Finance doubts for mill Tom Arup The Age - with Andrew Darby Tasmania;
05/01/09 Health risk for over-medicated elderly Julie Robotham The Age
05/01/09 Garrett shoots down Gunns hopes on pulp mill / Blow for Gunns planned $2.2 billion Tasmanian pulp mill. Ben Cubby The Age Breaking News / smh.com.au, with AAP Tasmania;
Tony Burke http://www.alp.org.au/media/0109/msaff120.php
Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry
The Rudd Government has delivered on its election commitment to invest $9 million in Australia’s forest industries and make our timber export products more globally competitive.
Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry Tony Burke today announced applications were open for the first round of grants under the new Forest Industries Development Fund.
The funding will help wood processors to upgrade their operations, value-add to new and existing wood products and improve cost efficiencies along the value chain.
"The Rudd Government is committed to supporting growth in Australia’s forest industries, which underpin jobs in regional communities and the national economy," Mr Burke said.
"We currently record a significant trade deficit in forest products of around $2 billion per year so this investment is another step to help address that trend.
"This funding will help to ensure the industry continues to develop new ideas and adopt new technology right along the value chain."
The Forest Industries Development Fund is open to individual businesses and organisations involved in Australia’s forest industries for projects which are industry-focused, innovative and commercially-viable, particularly those developed for the export market.
It is part of a $20 million commitment by the Australian Government to prepare our forest industries for the future by helping to address the industry’s skills shortage, cracking down on illegally logged timber imports, preparing the industry for climate change and encouraging value-adding to improve market development.
Expressions of interest for the first round of grants under the $9 million Forest Industries Development Fund open today and close at 4pm on 6 February 2009.
For more information go to www.daff.gov.au/forestry/fidf or phone the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry on (02) 6272-5079.
AS THE community campaign against the Gunns pulp mill proposed for the Tamar Valley enters its fifth year, federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett has set a new deadline of March 3, 2011, for Gunns to complete hydrodynamic modelling of effluent dispersal into Bass Strait.
The extension condemns the people of Tasmania — the communities of the Tamar Valley in particular — to at least two more years of uncertainty and conflict. Investment in the region will continue to dry up because of the continuing threat of the pulp mill. The property market collapsed years ago — an analysis of sales figures for 2003 and 2008 show a 75% decline — and people have held off investing for four years in the hope that the mill plan will be knocked on the head.
Gunns has continually failed to meet deadlines and has continually been granted extensions. It's like playing "pass the parcel" to a cracked record. The music never stops and the parcel goes round and round.
No one in the Tasmanian or federal Labor governments will drop the parcel or unplug the record player, nor have they any intention of doing so.
Why not? Because something sinister happened in 2004. State and federal Labor endorsed the pulp mill before it was even assessed, as did the Howard government and the Tasmanian Liberal Opposition. The support of the Gunns mill was locked into Labor and Liberal policy. They also accepted a "benefits-only" view of the project that excluded any assessment of costs, risks and impacts to the public.
The public was deliberately excluded from consideration, as were other irritants such as the wood supply to feed the mill (Tasmania's forests), availability of water, the existing businesses in the Tamar and the Tasmanian fishing industry.
The Tamar Valley, one of the nation's most beautiful, prosperous and productive locations, home to 100,000 people, was set up to be the sacrifice zone for one of the world's biggest pulp mills. As a site for a pulp mill, the Tamar Valley ranks alongside, say, Bennelong Point (home of the Sydney Opera House) as a peculiarly demented choice.
Is it any wonder the people of the Tamar are in a state of rebellion? Is it any wonder the Australian populace opposes the mill and views the corrupt and corrupting saga of the approval process as symptomatic of the failure of representative government in Australia?
From the beginning, the pulp mill was a state-sponsored and state-promoted project that would rely for some of its construction and long-term operation on a heap of subsidies — estimated at between $200 million and $300 million— pillaged from the public purse. (After which Gunns made a profit last financial year of just $64 million).
The pulp mill proposal is not private enterprise in all its capitalist purity. One needs to turn the clock back to the Soviet era to comprehend what we are dealing with.
So when the National Association of Forest Industries calls for the Australian Government to provide infrastructure funds to help Gunns fast-track the $2.2 billion pulp mill, because Gunns is unable to raise any money in the world credit markets, that is entirely consistent with the propping up of favoured industries that we witnessed under John Howard and that is now a runaway train under Kevin Rudd.
Howard's vision of a 3 million-hectare tree plantation estate fuelled by managed investment schemes, which has caused such devastation to rural Australia, particularly Tasmania where 25% of farms have gone under trees, is nothing compared with the staggering scale of Rudd's proposed 34 million hectares of carbon offset plantations.
According to this logic, if you plant trees as a carbon offset, you won't need to reduce your carbon emissions. Thus the piddling 5% carbon reduction target. Keep on mining. Keep on logging native forests. Keep on burning coal and oil. Sounds like the mission statement of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, does it not?
Julia Gillard's spruiking of the pulp mill is the authentic voice of that union. Is there an implied federal guarantee to Gunns in this? I fear and suspect so.
The Labor Government is putting behind it the collapse of the Murray-Darling, the dying of the Great Barrier Reef, the destruction of the native forests, the finitude of water resources. Australia is a nation choosing to fail.
The pulp mill is a symptom of a deep-seated disease that is Australia-wide and not a localised "not in my backyard" issue for the residents of the Tamar. It is the local scab on a national cancerous sore. It is fast looming as a symbolic battleground for Australia's future. It has been forced on the people of this nation by rotten government policy and rotten government behaviour.
It has forced the people of Tasmania on to the streets in their tens of thousands. It has forced us to mobilise community resources to defend what the generations have built here in the Tamar Valley.
We must defend our vineyards and our olive groves from the assault by government and corporation. We must defend our fishing grounds and our farms. We must defend our families, livelihoods and property because we have a vision for Australia's future that begins with what has been proven to be sustainable.
Bob McMahon is the spokesman for the community action group Tasmanians Against the Pulpmill (TAP).
FEDERAL Environment Minister Peter Garrett will today announce he is delaying a decision to flood the Murray River lower lakes with sea water until an environmental assessment is conducted.
Mr Garrett has been considering advice to waive the environmental assessment process before the flooding because of the high acidity levels that exist in the South Australian lakes.
There was no indication from Mr Garrett's office yesterday of how long the review conducted by the Department of Environment, Heritage and the Arts will take.
The debate about whether to flood the lower lakes in South Australia has been prompted by fears that an acidification tipping point could be reached in the lakes because of the lack of water flowing in the Murray-Darling system.
Acidification occurs when water levels reach low depths, exposing soil to the air and causing it to turn toxic. At some points in the lower lakes water levels are almost half a metre below sea level.
Finance doubts for mill
Tom Arup The Age - with Andrew Darby
January 6, 2009
Garrett gives Gunns more time
Andrew Darby Finance likely to be the final decider
It's still the 64-million-litre question
Advertisement
THE future of the proposed multibillion-dollar pulp mill in northern Tasmania remains in doubt despite a Federal Government decision to approve construction of the project.
Hours after federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett yesterday gave logging giant Gunns the go-ahead for the project, financial analysts expressed serious doubt about the company's ability to attract the $2.2 billion needed for the northern Tasmanian mill in a frozen credit market.
The financing of the project may also be complicated by conditions placed on it by Mr Garrett, which require the company to provide detailed environmental data on the effect of effluent runoff into Bass Strait before the mill will be allowed to begin processing woodchips.
The conditions are tougher than those set out by the former Howard government environment minister and current Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull in October 2007, which said the environmental studies could be undertaken after the mill had begun operating.
Gunns chief executive John Gay welcomed Mr Garrett's decision and said the company had already begun an environmental effects study, which is due to be completed in 15 months.
Mr Gay reiterated comments made to the Australian Stock Exchange that Gunns had "significant interest" from financial institutions to back the mill, but blamed the global credit freeze for being unable to "finalise" the needed credit. Mr Gay said Gunns had appointed a major industrial bank to oversee the raising of funds.
Two financial analysts, who asked not to be named, told The Age the pulp mill would be unlikely to gain financial support.
Mr Garrett denied yesterday the decision to require the testing data, and to impose fines of up to $1.1 million if Gunns exceeds environmental limits, meant the death of the mill.
But former adviser to John Howard and anti-pulp mill campaigner Geoffrey Cousins said the decision to delay final approval until the testing data meant "the coffin is finally shut on the mill".
"Credit where credit's due," Mr Cousins said. "Garrett has decided to gather all the information before giving the approval, unlike the spineless Turnbull, and that's positive."
Opposition environment spokesman Greg Hunt saw it differently. "Peter Garrett today did his best to hide the fact that he had given the green light for the construction of the Gunns pulp mill in Tasmania," Mr Hunt said. He said the decision allowed mill construction to begin before the 2011 deadline.
Wilderness Society spokesman Paul Oosting agreed on Mr Hunt's point on construction. "The minister has made it clear that Gunns can begin construction of the pulp mill, even though they have not met the full Federal Government approval," Mr Oosting said.
The Australian Greens and the Wilderness Society are considering legal action. They say that allowing two years for Gunns to provide effluent data could contravene the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.
Greens Senator Christine Milne said she feared a scenario near the next election where unemployment and flagging investment caused by the global financial crisis would propel a late push by Gunns for public funds to deal with the effluent issues.
The pulp mill was estimated to create about 3500 jobs in the construction phase and a further 1600 permanent jobs.
With ANDREW DARBY
ELDERLY people receive no benefit from long-term use of many common medicines, and their health may even improve if they stop taking them, an Australian study has found.
Ceasing to take medicines such as sleeping pills and antidepressants improved people's mental abilities and reduced the likelihood of serious falls, according to the analysis by David Le Couteur, director of the Centre for Education and Research on Ageing at the University of Sydney.
In up to 85 per cent of people aged 65 or older, blood pressure was stable for six months to five years after withdrawal of blood pressure medicines, without any increase in the death rate.
Professor Le Couteur said his research was "in some ways a politically motivated exercise" intended to highlight the gulf between the results of drug company-sponsored trials and how elderly people actually fared on the same drugs.
"There's lots of money to show medicines work and very little money to show they don't," said Professor Le Couteur, who works as a geriatrician at Concord Hospital.
Evidence of the effects of taking multiple drugs was "almost non-existent", he said.
Bad reactions to medication were responsible for up to one-third of hospital admissions of older patients.
Among people 65 and older, 40 per cent were taking five or more medicines.
Professor Le Couteur's analysis, published in the journal Drugs & Aging, pooled results of previous research into drug withdrawal in older people.
In one New Zealand study, people taking sedatives or antidepressants were randomly assigned either to continue taking the medicines or were switched to a placebo. Those who took the placebo were 66 per cent less likely to suffer a fall over the following year.
Helena Britt, director of the Family Medicine Research Centre at the University of Sydney, said the study would help draw attention to the issue of drug side-effects, particularly with multiple drug use.
But she said there were barriers to weaning elderly people off drugs. "It must be very difficult for GPs, remembering many medicines initially are prescribed by specialists," she said.
NEWS
Blow for Gunns planned $2.2 billion Tasmanian pulp mill.Garrett shoots down Gunns hopes on pulp mill
January 5, 2009 - 12:47PM
Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett has rejected the proposed operating conditions for Gunns' $2.2 billion pulp mill in northern Tasmania, declaring a need for more studies on potential marine impacts.
$2.2b pulp mill project rejected- More studies needed: Garrett- Decision a setback for Gunns
In a decision that will surprise many, Mr Garrett told reporters in Sydney today that hydrodynamic modelling had not yet been completed and he was uncertain about the mill's impact on the marine environment.
Gunns, which wants to build the giant mill in the Tamar Valley, will have to do further work to gain Mr Garrett's approval.
Environmentalists have expressed concern about the impact of effluent from the mill on marine ecosystems in Bass Strait.
Mr Garrett's decision is a blow for Gunns, which is already stuggling to find financial backers for the project.
However, a Gunns spokesman, Matt Horan, said the company regarded the Mr Garrett's decision as "conditional approval" for the pulp mill.
"The company's position is that this is good," Mr Horan said.
"The hydrodynamic modelling required for the mill will take 18 months to complete."
Mr Garrett had agonised over the decision before he announced it in Sydney today, after Gunns submitted many of its environmental assessments late.
Gunns has been delivering the separate modules according to an environmental approval process laid down former environment minister Malcolm Turnbull in October 2007, though its deadlines for lodging separate applications have had to be extended.
The company believes that further environmental studies should be paid for by the Government because it has already invested $100 million in the project.
The Australian Greens believe Prime Minister Kevin Rudd had made the decision to approve the mill before he went on leave on Boxing Day.
The project to build the mill at Bell Bay, near Launceston, was rocked by the global financial crisis last year, when Gunns struggled to find backers after the ANZ bank pulled away.
Wal King, the chief executive of Leighton Holdings, the company contracted to construct the mill and a nearby wharf complex, said last October that he did not think the project could go ahead.
Building the mill would provide about 2000 construction jobs, and the mill would bring about $7 billion worth of economic activity to the region, studies suggest.
The mill would be fed by a mix of old-growth forests and plantation timber.
Opponents of the mill believe logging of established forests should be stopped and have pointed to examples of alleged collusion between the Tasmanian Government and Gunns staff in the preparation of environmental plans.
The Wilderness Society believes that, rather than bringing jobs to Tasmania, the mill would actually cost the state $300 million to operate, once government subsidies are factored in, based on a report released last January.
smh.com.au, with AAP