Australia

This week, I will be the first person to be prosecuted for protesting against Woodside’s Burrup project. This is the story of the raid on my home and the six-month wait for a hearing.

Federal Labor has binned hundreds of millions of Kyoto “carryover” carbon credits, permanently removing the option for them to be used in to shrink Australia’s emissions reduction task and shirk its climate responsibilities.

Federal energy and climate minister Cris Bowen announced the move on Friday, day two of the 10th Australasian Emissions Reduction Summit in Sydney, and confirmed it in person at the event.

“My colleague, assistant minister Jenny McAllister, has signed the instruction which cancels them, they’re gone,” he told the summit on Friday morning.

Australia’s surplus Kyoto credits, which had amassed to more than 700 million, have for years been a blight on Australia’s climate efforts, even when those efforts themselves amounted to the better part of nothing at all.

In 2019, the Morrison Coalition government had sought to use the credits, created under the Kyoto Protocol through soft targets and convenient accounting loopholes, to further minimise its already paltry climate mitigation efforts.

The judge said the former Sydney school teacher used a degree of manipulation and exploitation to breach the girl's trust in the 1980s.

The dangerous erasure of Australian history by Jacinta Price cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged

Key points:

• The disability royal commission is wrapping up after four-and-a-half years
• Emotions ran high at the commission's ceremonial closing, attended by people with disability from across the country
• The inquiry's chair says the media hasn't given the inquiry the attention it deserves

Solidarity with all my fellow disabled folks today.

The mother of a young man who died after being arrested in Toowoomba says reading a statement "tailored" to the police service would have defeated its purpose.

Exclusive: Marlene Longbottom says police are ‘comfortable with the status quo’ and unwilling to confront real problems in the ranks

G'day all! Just thought I'd chuck up this random thread for a bit of a yarn. You know, sometimes it's nice to have a chinwag about anything and everything – could be your latest DIY project, a recipe you're stoked about, or even just how your day's been. It's all about sharing the good vibes and having a fair dinkum chat. So, what's the goss? Jump on in and let's have a good old chit-chat, like a bunch of mates sitting 'round the table. Cheers!

Qantas faces a high-profile verdict in the High Court over its decision to stand down 1700 ground staff in 2020.

I am not here to make the case that cats should be kept indoors for the sake of local wildlife – that case has been made over and over and over and over again. Cat owners know these arguments, and if they have not been persuaded by the fact that cats kill more than 6 million native animals in Australia a day they will not be persuaded by me.

There is a fairly tedious assumption that if you love wildlife you must hate cats, and visa versa. And nothing will turn cat people off faster than encountering a person who hates cats.

I understand this. I also hate people who hate cats. So let’s set the birds and the bettongs to one side for the moment, and consider the other, obvious fact: cats should be kept indoors for the sake of cats.

I think that these are firmly embeded in many peoples minds. Very catchy and has a great message!

Exclusive: Lack of punishment follows repeated promises by police commissioner Katarina Carroll to crack down on racism and mysoginy within service

If you've moved house recently as most australians have since this new government and accompanying housing crisis begun then you have to update your details, or at least just make sure that your registration matches what is written on your photo ID

Labor says non-payment of super should be in the same category as wage theft, but [they have not included it as a criminal offence in their industrial relations bill and] the ATO has never used existing criminal powers [as far as I could tell from the article the only powers the ATO has is fines, and fines mean next to nothing when a business has already declared bankruptcy]

The fight over “net zero” at the National Party over the weekend was all a bit of a charade. Yes, it garnered attention from mainstream media, but it was essentially meaningless.

The Nationals, and the Liberal Party coalition partners, are in furious agreement: They are not the slightest bit serious about strong climate action, and the only difference between former National leader Barnaby Joyce and current leader David Littleproud is that Joyce wants to stop the pretence.

Littleproud, let’s remember, believes that net zero 2050 means not having to do much any time soon. Like too many corporates, and the fossil fuel industry in particular, it’s an excuse to sit around and do nothing – make some grand promises and wait for some new technology to come along that doesn’t disrupt their business plan.

Nuclear, and small modular reactors, are a perfect tool for this. SMRs don’t exist in any western country, do not have a licence to exist, and no-one – even in the nuclear industry – seriously believes they will be in commercial production within a decade, if then.

The Minerals Council of Australia recently shipped over a medical doctor from Ontario to spruik nuclear and SMRs, presumably because they couldn’t find anyone who actually knows anything about electricity grids to do the same.

He seemed a nice fellow, got a huge write up in the AFR and on Sky News, another nuclear supporter. He did not get asked about costs, nor timings, which if anything shows a singular lack of curiosity on the part of the journalists.

Just for the record, the Ontario government – which really likes nuclear – doesn’t go into costs either.

But says while it it is hopeful it can get one SMR built by the end of the decade, if it can get a licence for it, it won’t be able to complete the next three until the middle of the next decade – and this in a country with an established nuclear energy industry and know-how.

In the meantime, it is spending $C12 billion upgrading its existing nuclear fleet, or about $1 billion per gigawatt.

Sweden is much the same. The election of a new governming Coalition, including a far right wing party, had led to the inevitable decision to make a big deal out of nuclear. It promised 10 reactors by the end of the 2030s, before pulling down that announcement from its web-site.

Why? Because it can’t do it. Vattenfall is the country’s state owned energy company that operates Sweden’s six nuclear reactors, which have all been operating since the 1980s.

Vattenfall recently published an interesting analysis on SMRs on its own website, titled Small nuclear reactors, the next big thing.

It makes a couple of interesting observations: One is that SMRs are interesting for countries that don’t have much in the way of renewables, particularly solar. And that they may be used to replace existing ageing nuclear.

Vattenfall has started a study on adding SMRs to its nuclear facility, and notes that the earliest it could be done is the early 2030s or mid 2030s. “SMRs are not just around the corner,” it notes.

Remember, this is a country with a well established nuclear industry. The story is the same in both Sweden and Canada, similar sized middling economies as Australia.

Australia, by the mid 2030s, because it does indeed have magnificent solar and wind resources, should be at net 100 per cent renewables.

The International Energy Agency says that net zero by 2050 means having zero carbon grids by 2040, at the very latest. In Australia, there is even a blueprint of how this can be done, the Integrated System Plan, which is being updated every two years.

Littleproud, however, contends that Labor is accelerating the net zero path “from effectively 2050 to 2030. And that’s putting pressure on your energy building every day of the week.”

Labor is having a go, but its target remains steadfastly modest at a 43 per cent cut in emissions by 2030, which it may struggle to reach in any case. This, amid repeated warnings of heatwaves and natural disasters, as the world continues to go off-track with its Paris climate commitments.

The problem with Joyce, Littleproud and Liberal leader Peter Dutton’s argument is that they don’t care wether nuclear is a viable option or not. Their intent – re-iterated again in the Murdoch media on Monday morning – is to bring new wind and solar to a halt.

The people who are advocating for nuclear – Littleproud, Joyce, Matt Canavan, Ted O’Brien, just to name a few, are the same who are arguing that coal should be kept going, or even that new coal plants should be built. In the self-perpetuating nuclear shill industry, nothing much changes.

Greens leader Adam Bandt and housing spokesperson Max Chandler-Mather say minor party will now support Housing Australia Future Fund

ALP had pledged to give parliamentary intelligence committee certain powers to enable an investigation of Timor-Leste bugging scandal

Archived version: https://archive.ph/QwL01

Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20230909221459/https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/sep/10/aboriginal-children-buried-wa-missions-moore-river-carrolup-new-norcia