Saving the Amazon Rainforest

At a time when most news from the environment front is discouraging, I was pleased to read during the Christmas New Year break a report in The Solutions Journal by Doug Boucher titled How Brazil Has Dramatically Reduced Tropical Deforestation.

The report details how Brazil has cut deforestation in the Amazon by 70 percent, compared to the average level in 1996-2005, making zero deforestation by 2020, or even sooner, achievable.

While the Brazilian Government deserves great credit for taking legislative action such as setting up protected areas and increasing the enforcement of environmental laws, the report clearly sets out the key roles played by both non-government bodies, and also by the Norwegian Government.

For example in 2006 Greenpeace released a report called Eating Up The Amazon, which linked the soybean industry to deforestation and water pollution, focusing on two multinational companies, the grain trader Cargill and the fast food chain Mc Donald's. This led to the Brazilian Association of Vegetable Oil Industries and the National Association of Cereal Exporters announcing that their members would not buy any soybeans produced on Amazon farmland deforested after June 2006.

This soy moratorium was followed in 2009 by a beef moratorium, again in the light of hard hitting reports, by Greenpeace and local civil society groups. Slaughterhouses have signed agreements under which ranchers are required to provide the GPS co-ordinates of their property boundaries to the slaughterhouses in order to sell their beef to them. This made it possible to use remote sensing data to detect deforestation and trace it.

Norway also deserves a bouquet. They promised up to $1 billion for Brazil's Amazon Fund, on a strictly pay for performance basis – money flowed only as the goal of reducing deforestation was met. To date over $670 million has been paid under this agreement.
 
It is noteworthy that this is a non-market, non-offset program. Norway does not get the right to emit a single ton more of carbon dioxide in exchange for this funding. It is also noteworthy that the Norwegian contribution to REDD efforts worldwide ($2.5 billion over five years) amounted to $100 annually for each of its citizens, which compared pretty favourably with the US contribution of $1 annually for each if its citizens.

Older Australians Are Not Leaners

I agree with the sentiment of Kaye Fallick in her Age article on Monday Busting myths about the baby boomer burdens. Far from being a burden, they make an undervalued contribution to our society worth billions each year according to Dr Kathleen Brasher from the Council on the Ageing Victoria, a value added amount that GDP overlooks.

In bringing down his now infamous 2014 Budget, Treasurer Hockey emphasised the age of leaners had to end, and then went about outlining an ideological assault on welfare recipients, which included Aged Pensioners, by proposing an increase in the pension eligibility age to 70 and a re-indexation of the age pension.

An ageing population is a sign of success, both individually and collectively. Those societies which are the oldest are also the richest, healthiest and have the greatest life expectancy.

Worrying about getting older devalues older people and the significant contributions older people make to our society. Research constantly shows that older people make a great contribution to our society, providing child care and acting as mentors and role models. A significant increase in women’s participation in the workforce in the past few decades has been facilitated by having grandparents to look after children. Older people have also been found to make more financial contributions to their children and grandchildren than the other way around. Far from being leaners they are in fact lifters. Many age pensioners take on part time and occasional work and should be encouraged and rewarded for these valuable contributions to our community.

The whole ageing workforce scare is based around the idea that the ageing of the workforce will lead to labour shortages. As Dr Katherine Betts, from the Swinburne University of Technology, points out in the article, fears that a reduction in the proportion of tax-paying workers will support a growing proportion of age pensioners are unfounded: “even with no further growth in labour force participation rates, the dependency ratio is expected to decline from a current 53.6 per cent to about 44-46 per cent by 2061….Moreover, the health and cognitive abilities of older people are better today than they were among older people in the past."

The May Budget was seriously flawed in not acknowledging the inputs of senior Australians. The Treasurer would be better placed if he were to recognise older Australians’ contribution to the economy in the form of unpaid work, volunteering, child-minding and intergenerational transfers of wealth.

Inner Melbourne Liquor Licence Freeze

What a silly report in the Saturday Age of January 3, and self-interested nonsense from the Restaurant and Catering Industry Association, about the impact of the freeze on new liquor licences in inner Melbourne over the past few years.

The first problem was that the while the headline screamed "Licence freeze fails to dent crime" the report itself made no reference to crime rates at all! The second problem was that while the report referred to a jump in ambulance call outs, it assumed that the only factor influencing ambulance call out rates was liquor licences. This was a logical fallacy that a Year 10 student would readily identify.

The fallacy was brought home in a big way just two days later, when this morning's Age reported that demand for illegal narcotics such as ice is growing at breakneck speed. This time the facts were very much in evidence – use and possession offences for all drugs have skyrocketed by 68 per cent in the last five years. The highest rate of offences by a mile is in Melbourne City, the 3000 postcode, which in 2013/14 had 898 drug use and possession offences and 288 drug production offences.

Given such an increase it is entirely foreseeable that the rate of ambulance call outs in inner Melbourne would have risen. We can only guess at what the rate would have been if successive State Governments hadn't restricted the issuing of new liquor licences and the amount of alcohol being served after 1 am.

 
No doubt we need to do more to tackle the ice epidemic. But allowing more liquor to be served in the early hours of the morning will not make Melbourne a safer or better place to live in – quite the opposite.

Turkish President Hopelessly Wrong About Birth Control

The Turkish President has described birth control as a form of treason! He says that a declining birth rate may undermine economic growth. But in fact it is the other way around. There is a direct relationship between rapid rates of population growth and declining economic conditions in developing countries. The economies of many developing nations, such as those in Africa, are damaged by the fact that a high percentage of personal and national income is spent on the immediate survivable needs of food, housing etc, leaving little income at the personal or national level available for investment capital.

Last century, no nation made much progress in transitioning from developing to developed until they brought their population growth under control. In Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, The Bahamas and Barbados, rapid economic development, as measured in GDP per capita occurred only after the country reduced its population increase below 1.5 per cent per year and its average number of children per woman to 2.3 or less.

On the other hand, of the 41 countries designated as "heavily indebted poor countries" by the World Bank, 39 fall into the category of high-fertility nations, where women on average have four or more children. Countries like Thailand with low fertility rates are improving, but countries like The Philippines, Egypt and Nigeria with rapid population growth are basket cases. Is this really what President Erdogan wants for Turkey?

I note the response by a member of Turkey's Platform to Stop Violence Against Women that "I don't think it's a co-incidence that he made the comments about birth control just a day before his ex-ministers were being questioned about the corruption allegations against them".

Instead of absurdly accusing women who are doing the right thing by both their family and their country in using birth control of treason, the Turkish President would be better advised to conscientiously root out corruption from within the government's ranks. Now that would genuinely improve Turkey's future.

Alannah MacTiernan Right About 457 Visas

Alannah MacTiernan, Labor's Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Western Australia, is absolutely right to raise concerns about the way the 457 visa program is being used to damage the job prospects of Australian workers and undermine their working conditions.

Earlier this year the Liberal Government removed the requirement for offshore resources companies to test the Australian labour market before employing overseas workers. This was the wrong thing to do. It is only reasonable that employers should be required to ascertain whether there are Australian workers ready, willing and able to do a job before bringing in migrant workers to do it.

Now Alannah MacTiernan has noted that the pipe-laying contractor Saipem has advised workers that it is exploring using non-Australian labour to lay pipes for the Inpex project in Western Australia's north. At a time when Australia when over 750,000 Australians are out of work, this should not be allowed.

But it is even worse. The workforce is being told – surprise, surprise – they need to agree to move to four week swings, from the current three weeks – if they are to have any chance of saving some jobs for Australians. These jobs involve working 12-14 hours a day. So migrant workers are once again being used as a battering ram against working conditions for Australian workers.

 
The claim that 457 visas don't hurt Australian workers is yet again revealed as false.

Australia's Rapid Population Growth Continues

Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show Australia's population reached 23 and a half million at the end of 2013/14, having increased by around 365,000 during the past year.

The natural increase in population – the number of births minus the number of deaths – was over 150,000 for the eighth year in a row, again making a nonsense of claims that without migration Australia's population would stop growing.

Net overseas migration was over 212,000. This is consistent with the average for this decade so far, which is nearly 50,000 higher than the average of 165,000 during the previous decade, and two and a half times the 80,000 average of the 1990s.

There is no precedent for Australia running such a migration program at a time of 6 per cent plus unemployment. It is a certain recipe for rising unemployment, long-term unemployment and job insecurity, with all the personal misery and social problems which arise from that.

Rapid population growth also leads to wildlife habitat destruction, increasing carbon emissions, rising cost of living, and makes it harder to balance the books. It is a short-sighted and greedy drive for profit from the big end of town which prejudices the future of our young people.

Senator Leyonhelm's Gun Madness

Senator Leyonhelm's opposition to John Howard's gun laws, and his view that the world would be a safer place if we all carried arms, is plain madness.

After 35 people, including small children, were killed at Port Arthur in 1996, the Australian Police Ministers Council agreed to a national plan for the regulation of firearms.

Since these laws were enacted Australia has not had a repeat of the massacres we had before they came into effect. The number of gun deaths in all categories – homicides, suicides, and accidental shootings – has declined dramatically since 1996, and thousands of Australian lives have been saved as a result.

Australia's deaths by firearms homicides dropped by 59 percent in the decade after the gun laws were tightened. Britain also achieved a decline in murders involving firearms after banning all private ownership of automatic weapons and virtually all handguns in 1996, after 16 children and their teacher were killed by a gunman in Dunblane, Scotland. Japan has very strict laws about guns – in 2008 only 11 people were killed with guns in Japan, while 12,000 people were killed by firearms in the United States!

In Australia people going for a jog are not at risk of being murdered by young thrill seekers, as happened to my former constituent Chris Lane, shot in the back in the United States last year. The United States has the lax gun laws that Senator Leyonholm admires, and it has one hundred times as many gun deaths each year as we do.

This is because, as research on the matter has shown, when you own or carry a gun, you are more likely to be the victim, perpetrator or accessory to a crime that wouldn't take place without it in the first place.

Before Adam Lanza killed 20 little schoolchildren and six teachers at Sandy Hook primary school, he killed his mother with a gun she had bought to enhance her safety. When Aaron Alexis killed 13 people in the Washington Navy Yard rampage last year, he killed a security guard with a shotgun he had purchased legally, took the guard's weapon and killed another victim with that after his shotgun ran out of ammunition.

The fewer guns there are in Australia, the safer we all are.