On 21 June 2007, the Australian Government announced a ‘national emergency response to protect Aboriginal children in the Northern Territory’ from sexual abuse and family violence. The "Intervention" as it became known was an attempt to assist indigenous people move beyond child abuse, alcoholism and improve educational outcomes; going to the extreme of using the military to bolster police presence in traditional lands. Background reading:
The Howard Government’s Northern Territory Intervention: Are Neo-Paternalism and Indigenous Development Compatible? - 19 pages and Command in action: the NT intervention case - brief overview.

Today the review, Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage was released: an epic FAIL. Over $AUD85 million in funding has not achieved any significant results.
The depressing details reported here and here.

little children are sacred was the name of the original report, they remain sacred, but not helped :(

June 25

The Independent - Wallabies snacking in opium poppy fields are getting "high as a kite" and hopping around creating crop circles.

Tasmania is the world's largest producer of legally-grown opium for the pharmaceutical market.

Tasmania attorney-general Lara Giddings told a budget hearing yesterday that she recently read about the wallabies in a brief on the state's large poppy industry.

She said: "We have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles.

"Then they crash. We see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high."

It's got screaming panic inducing headlines down-under in Australia "Killer Flu". Plans to immunise half the population, government warnings on the radio and television. Tamiflu and Relenza buy-ups by the government. Cruise liner problems, footballers and the known infections double and triple daily over the past week, with dire warnings of an upsurge in cases over the coming weekend. Australians love of sport is also being posited as increasing the spread this weekend at sporting events. There's reports of the usual 3000 annual flu deaths tripling this year.

So is the panic overrated?

Stephen de Tarczynski | Melbourne | May 27

IPS - The Rudd government’s recently-released defence white paper outlines a substantial boost to the nation’s military capabilities and places a high priority on stability in neighbouring countries, including Indonesia and South Pacific states.

After the principal task of defending Australia from direct attack, "our next most important strategic interest is the security, stability and cohesion of our immediate neighbourhood," says the paper - specifically noting Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and East Timor.

The white paper signals naval, air and special forces capabilities as areas for improvement over the next twenty years.

The build-up to what the Kevin Rudd-led government calls ‘Force 2030’ will include additional submarines, destroyers and frigates for the navy, while the air force will receive around 100 Joint Strike Fighter aircraft.

Wellington | May 28

DPA - More than 1.4 tonnes of jet fuel can be saved on a 12-hour flight powered by a new biofuel obtained from the seeds of the African jatropha plant, Air New Zealand said Thursday.

The airline said that scientists made the estimate after Air New Zealand conducted the world's first commercial aviation test flight using a 50-50 blend of jatropha fuel and standard jet fuel in a Boeing 747-400 powered by Rolls-Royce engines in December.

Captain David Morgan, Air New Zealand's chief pilot, said that the highest blend of any type of biofuel was used in that test flight, a joint initiative with Boeing and Rolls-Royce.

He said the blend would now be submitted to rigorous industry evaluation with a view to being certified for everyday use.

Morgan said the blend would save 1.43 tonnes of fuel on a Boeing 747-400 12-hour flight over 5,800 nautical miles, keeping about 4.5 tonnes of carbon-dioxide emissions out of the atmosphere.

When shorter-range flights were included, overall savings were estimated to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 60-65 per cent compared to jet fuel derived entirely from petroleum, he said.

May 23

ABC.net.au - Residents in low-lying beach front areas on Queensland's Sunshine Coast are bracing for severe weather that is expected within the next few hours.The high tide is expected about 7.30pm (AEST) on the Sunshine Coast and later in Brisbane, with seven metre swells offshore.The weather bureau says high winds combined with a high tide and the giant offshore swell is likely to cause severe flooding problems along the south-east Queensland coast tonight.
_________________________________________
ABC.net.au - Over the past three days much of coastal north east NSW and South East Queensland have been under water, with over 20,000 people evacuated. newsclip

Air New Zealand bares all!

Adelaide | May 10

NYT - A zoo in Australia was evacuated Sunday after an ''ingenious'' 137-pound orangutan short-circuited an electric fence and hopped a wall surrounding her enclosure.

The ape, a 27-year-old female named Karta, jammed a stick into wires connected to the fence and then piled up debris to climb a concrete and glass wall at the Adelaide Zoo.

Zoo curator Peter Whitehead told reporters Karta sat on top of the fence for about 30 minutes before apparently changing her mind about the escape and climbing back into the enclosure.

''You're talking about an animal that's highly intelligent,'' Whitehead said. ''We've had issues with her before in normal day-to-day operations where she tries to outsmart the keepers. She's an ingenious animal.''

Tom A. Peter | Round Up Article | May 3

CSM - Australia cites China, India, as reasons for a major military buildup
Prime Minister Rudd proposes $72 billion in new spending. US military can't protect it, say analysts.

Almost two decades after the end of the cold war, a new arms race may be under way in the Pacific. Responding to the expansion of China's military, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd sparked a storm of controversy on Saturday when he released a report calling for a $72 billion expansion of the military over the next 20 years.

Among other upgrades, Australia would purchase 100 F-35 fighter jets, 12 hunter-killer submarines, 46 Tiger helicopters, and 100 armored vehicles, while also investing in cyber and electronic warfare technologies, according to the 140-page report titled "Defending Australia in the Asia-Pacific Century: Force 2030."

The report cited the threats of North Korea and Iran's nuclear programs, cyber attacks, and piracy, but it points to the rise of China and India as the most imminent concern in the coming years. It also adds that US military dominance is now uncertain and therefore its assistance to Australia is no longer guaranteed.

Apr 28

BBC - A court in French Polynesia has begun hearing complaints from former workers at France's nuclear weapons test sites.

The cases, being heard for the first time, relate to work in Mururoa and Fangataufa and seek recognition and compensation for ill health.

Eight cases have been lodged, although five of the workers have already died of what have been called radiation-linked diseases.

In March, the French government enacted legislation to allow compensation.

This could apply in cases relating to nuclear tests in the Pacific and Africa.

Kathy Marks | Apr 10

The Independent - As Anzac Day approaches, campaigners want Australia's war memorial to recognise the forgotten Aborigines killed by white settlers

The Australian War Memorial, an imposing building on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin in Canberra, honours the dead of two world wars as well as other conflicts, including Korea, Malaysia and Vietnam. But the bloody and prolonged battles that accompanied white settlement of Australia, and claimed at least 20,000 Aboriginal lives, rate barely a mention.

More than 200 years after the First Fleet landed at Sydney Cove, white Australians are still struggling to come to terms with their colonial past. Long erased from official accounts, the clashes and massacres that took place on the frontier remain a contested area of history, often replaced by more palatable stories of rugged pioneers conquering an inhospitable land.

The descendants of the early white settlers served the British Empire, and later Australia, overseas; their deeds are celebrated in the War Memorial, and are recalled on 25 April, the anniversary of the First World War campaign at Gallipoli. This year, though, as Anzac Day approaches, there are demands for the memorial to commemorate a less heroic aspect of military history: the dirty wars fought on Australian soil.

A lithograph of British troops killing black warriors in 1838 at the aptly named Slaughterhouse Creek is the only reference to those wars in the monument's displays. Yet they raged across the continent for nearly 150 years, the last recorded incident being at Coniston, in the Northern Territory, where 70 Aborigines were shot dead in 1928 by an official force, which was subsequently exonerated.

April 11

New Strait Times - The 14th Asean Summit is cancelled, the Thai government announced in Pattaya today.

A bilateral meeting between Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and his Malaysian counterpart, Datuk Seri Najib Razak was cancelled today, among the victims of anti-Thai government protests held outside the Royal Cliff Hotel here. As the number of red-attired supporters of former Thai premier Thaksin Shinatwatra swells outside of the Asean and related summits venue, meetings between foreign ministers earlier planned was also cancelled.

DPA -Officials decided to cancel the ASEAN summit after anti-government protestors broke into the summit venue at Pattaya, a seaside resort town about 100 kilometres south of Bangkok. The Thai government said the meeting of the 10 ASEAN members and six dialogue partners including China, Japan and India, was cancelled out of concerns for security, and would be held again into about two months time.

Apr 10

BBC -

Fijian President Ratu Josefa Iloilo has announced that he has taken over the country's government.

It comes a day after a court ruled that the current military leadership was illegally appointed after a 2006 coup.

In a nationally televised address, the president said he had annulled the constitution, assumed all governing power and sacked the country's judges.

He spoke after meeting Commodore Frank Bainimarama, the army chief who toppled the civilian government in the coup.

"I hereby confirm I have abrogated the 1997 constitution and appointed myself as head of state in the new order," Mr Iloilo said.

Mar 22

BBC - A man has been bludgeoned to death by a group of Australian motorcycle gang members in full view of dozens of people at Sydney airport.

Witnesses described bikers swinging poles "like swords" at each other's heads as the brawl spilled over two floors of Sydney's domestic terminal.

Four suspects have been arrested and the others are said to have fled.

Police believe the fight broke out when one group of bikers coming off a plane was ambushed by a rival gang.

Police did not name any gangs thought to be involved, but Australian media reported that the brawl, on Sunday afternoon, was between the Hell's Angels and Comancheros gangs.

Mar 19

The Independent -

Scientists sailed today to inspect an undersea volcano that has been erupting for days near Tonga — shooting smoke, steam and ash thousands of feet into the sky above the South Pacific ocean.

Authorities said the eruption does not pose any danger to islanders at this stage, and there have been no reports of fish or other animals being affected.

Spectacular columns are spewing out of the sea about 6 miles from the south-west coast off the main island of Tongatapu — an area where up to 36 undersea volcanoes are clustered, geologists said.

Trade winds continued to blow gas and steam away from the island today.

Tonga's police deputy commander Taniela Faletau said coastal villages close to the roiling ocean site were not yet at risk and that no warnings had been issued.

Police were waiting for a government team of officials and scientists to survey the area and report on their observations before taking any action. More pictures here

Asher Moses | Mar 17

smh.au - The Australian communications regulator says it will fine people who hyperlink to sites on its blacklist, which has been further expanded to include several pages on the anonymous whistleblower site Wikileaks.

Wikileaks was added to the blacklist for publishing a leaked document containing Denmark's list of banned websites.

The move by the Australian Communications and Media Authority comes after it threatened the host of online broadband discussion forum Whirlpool last week with a $11,000-a-day fine over a link published in its forum to another page blacklisted by ACMA - an anti-abortion website.

ACMA's blacklist does not have a significant impact on web browsing by Australians today but sites contained on it will be blocked for everyone if the Federal Government implements its mandatory internet filtering censorship scheme.

Mar 16

Reuters - Australia will cut its intake of migrants for the first time in a decade, the government said today, amid concern that skilled foreign workers could stoke resentment by taking jobs at a time of rising unemployment.

With a recession looming and the centre-left government expecting unemployment to reach 7 per cent by mid-2010, Immigration Minister Chris Evans said the intake of skilled migrants would be reduced by about 14 per cent.

Australia goes to the polls in late 2010 and immigration has been a charged issue in past polls, particularly following economic downturn.

A leading migration expert, former government official Bob Kinnaird, said record recent migrant arrivals in a fast shrinking job market were leading to "highly combustible" conditions in regional areas, where many new arrivals had settled.

Australia is a nation of immigrants and has been enjoying a boom in new arrivals for the past decade to help meet labour shortages as a China-fuelled mining boom drove unemployment rates to 30-year lows.

But six of Australia's major trading partners are now in recession and economic growth has stalled. The country moved a step closer to recession this month with the first contraction in eight years and the economy shrinking by 0.5 per cent.

Kathy Marks | Sydney | Mar 12

The Independent - Marine biologists believe they have solved a long-standing puzzle: what do endangered loggerhead turtles get up to in their early years, after hatching on an Australian beach?

The answer is, they hitch a lift on ocean currents that transport them all the way from Queensland across the Pacific to South America then back to Australia – a round trip of more than 12,000 miles.

The migratory behaviour of the juvenile turtles was confirmed by marine biologists at Queensland's James Cook University, who did genetic testing on loggerheads found stranded on the Australian coast and captured by long-line fishing vessels off Peru. Turtles at the two locations on opposite sides of the Pacific shared the same genetic background.

While loggerheads can be found around the world, in tropical and sub- tropical waters, scientists are particularly anxious to find out more about the Queensland nesting population, which has declined by up to 80 per cent over the past decade. The latest study has helped fill in the "lost years" of the juveniles, whose early movements were a mystery until recently.

Melbourne | Mar 4

AFP - Australia stands on the brink of recession after shock figures showed the economy shrank for the first time in eight years, analysts said Wednesday.

The economy contracted 0.5 per cent in the December quarter, well below market expectations of 0.1 per cent growth, official data showed, ending a long run of expansion on the back of a China-driven resources boom.

The figures came despite government attempts to kick start the economy with two stimulus packages worth more than A$50 billion (US$32.5 billion), and sent currency and share markets plummeting.

While the economy grew 0.3 per cent for calendar 2008, economists said the slip into negative territory dashed hopes the nation once dubbed "the lucky country" could avoid the global recession.

Treasurer Wayne Swan said the figures were a "sobering reflection" of an extremely difficult global environment that was likely to get worse before it improves.

"Although the Australian economy has held up better than most other economies, the inevitable impact of the global recession is clearly evident in today's data," he said.

Mar 2

The Independent -

Rescuers used jet skis, excavators and human muscle to save dozens of whales and dolphins stranded on a beach in southern Australia today, officials and news reports said.

The 194 pilot whales and half a dozen bottlenose dolphins became stranded on Naracoopa Beach on Tasmania state's King Island yesterday evening — the fourth beaching incident in recent months in Tasmania.

Strandings happen periodically in Tasmania as whales go by during their migration to and from Antarctic waters, but scientists do not know why it happens. It is unusual, however, for whales and dolphins to get stranded together.

Chris Arthur, of Tasmania's Parks and Wildlife Service, said 54 whales and seven dolphins were still alive when the rescue effort began. 48 animals had been returned to the sea by officials and more than 100 King Island residents who had volunteered to help.

Feb 20

Reuters - in response tohey australia welcome to the global recession from late 2008:

Australians are a stubborn people: they just refuse to accept that they, like most of their trading partners, should be in deep recession by now. Eighteen months into the global credit crisis, Australians are still shopping and taking out new home loans, the economy has slowed but not yet shrunk, unemployment remains at generational lows and banks are still making decent profits. Still, six of resource-rich Australia's top 10 trading partners are already in recession, and global economic gloom is deepening.
after the jump some reasons why Australia remains "the lucky country", and some clues on when its luck may finally run out:

Kathy Marks | Feb 15

The Independent - Up to one in five residents died in a village at the centre of the bushfires in Victoria. Yesterday, the survivors went back. Kathy Marks reports

It was the journey home that they fervently desired, yet dreaded. Exactly a week after the Victorian bushfires obliterated the picturesque village of Marysville, survivors were allowed back to view the destruction yesterday – and one of the first sights to greet them in the desolate streets was a refrigerated truck being used as a morgue.

Marysville, a mountain resort north-east of Melbourne, popular with honeymooners and nature lovers, is at the centre of Victoria's "Black Saturday" conflagration. Police are still retrieving bodies from the ruins of houses, but they believe that up to 100 residents – one in five of the population – perished when a fireball roared through. That would push the death toll from last weekend's fires, Australia's worst peacetime disaster for more than a century, to nearly 300. It currently stands at 181.

Sydney | Feb 6

Reuters -

Firefighting helitanker unloads water onto bushfires Photo: EPA

Firefighters with aircraft and thermal imaging equipment tackled bushfires in and near Australia's two largest cities late on Friday as the country's densely populated southeast braced for a major heatwave.

Forecasts that searing hot weather over the weekend could bring the worst bushfires for decades put much of the country on alert, with fire bans in three states and warnings that arsonists would be harshly dealt with.

Nursing homes were warned to be ready after several deaths during a heatwave last week. The temperature in the outback town of Ivanhoe in New South Wales (NSW) state is forecast to reach 47 degrees Celsius (116 Fahrenheit) on Saturday and the coastal cities of Sydney and Melbourne will bake under 40-plus Celsius.

Late on Friday, fire fighters said a fire broke out in a national park in the Sydney suburb of Lane Cove, while another hit the city's northern outskirts.

Aircraft were also water-bombing a fire east of Melbourne where 120 ha (300 acres) of parkland was destroyed, Victoria's Country Fire Authority said. A spokesman said there were fears the fire in the Bunyip State Park could spread on Saturday. "It is still going. It is not under control," the spokesman said. more after the jump

Update - Feb 8: Australian wildfires rage on after killing 128
Troops and firefighters fought raging Australian wildfires on Monday that have left at least 128 people dead. A number of the smouldering ruins are now surrounded by crime scene tape as police probe whether arsonists were to blame.

Geoffrey Lean & Kathy Marks | Feb 1

The Independent - Leaves are falling off trees in the height of summer, railway tracks are buckling, and people are retiring to their beds with deep-frozen hot-water bottles, as much of Australia swelters in its worst-ever heatwave.

On Friday, Melbourne thermometers topped 43C (109.4F) on a third successive day for the first time on record, while even normally mild Tasmania suffered its second-hottest day in a row, as temperatures reached 42.2C. Two days before, Adelaide hit a staggering 45.6C. After a weekend respite, more records are expected to be broken this week.

Ministers are blaming the heat – which follows a record drought – on global warming. Experts worry that Australia, which emits more carbon dioxide per head than any nation on earth, may also be the first to implode under the impact of climate change.

Kathy Marks | Jan 27

The Independent -

A rare reptile has become a father at the age of 111 for the first time. Henry, a New Zealand tuatara, confounded experts who believed he was past it when he succumbed to the charms of Mildred last year.

The female, who is estimated to be in her seventies, laid 12 eggs and yesterday, after 223 days of incubation, 11 baby tuatara successfully hatched.

Henry, a long-time resident of the Southland Museum and Art Gallery, on South Island, had previously ignored female tuatara, or even attacked them. As well as finally proving Henry’s virility, the hatchlings will give a much-needed boost to the genetic diversity of an endangered species.

Tuatara, which resemble lizards and can claim a lineage dating back 220 million years, are estimated to number 50,000, with most living in predator-free sanctuaries or on New Zealand’s offshore islands.