Timor-Leste wants the permanent maritime border between itself and Australia to lie along the median line. This would give sovereign rights to Timor-Leste over the potentially-lucrative Greater Sunrise oil and gas fields. Source: Timor-Leste's Maritime Boundary Office

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MELBOURNE, Australia, Feb 27 2017 (IPS)

Juvinal Dias has first-hand experience of mistreatment at the hands of a foreign power. Born in 1981 in Tutuala, a village in the far east of Timor-Leste, Dias’ family fled into the jungle following the 1975 invasion by Indonesia.

It was during this time, hiding from the Indonesian military, that his eldest sister died of malnutrition.Widely seen to be central to the maritime boundary issue with Timor-Leste is the potentially-lucrative Greater Sunrise oil and gas fields, reported to be worth some 30 billion dollars.

Speaking to IPS from Dili, Timor-Leste’s capital, Dias told of how “the struggle” against the Indonesian occupation had intertwined with his own family’s history. “I heard, as I grew up, how the war affected the family,” he says.

Dias’ father fought against the occupation with FALANTIL guerrillas, the armed wing of FRETILIN (Revolutionary Front for an Independent Timor-Leste) before surrendering in 1979. Up to 200,000 people are believed to have been killed by Indonesian forces or died from conflict-related illness and hunger during the brutal 1975-1999 occupation.

“People saw the Indonesian military as public enemy number one,” says Dias, now a researcher at the Timor-Leste Institute for Development Monitoring and Analysis, known as La’o Hamutuk in the local Tetum language.

But things have changed. Dias says that it is now Australia that provokes the ire of the Timor-Leste public, who regard their southern neighbour as a “thief country” due to its behaviour towards Timor-Leste over disputed territory in the Timor Sea.

Timor-Leste has long-sought a permanent maritime boundary along the median or equidistance line, as is often the norm in such cases where nations’ Exclusive Economic Zones overlap.

For Timor-Leste’s government, concluding a maritime boundary with Australia is linked to the young nation’s long history of subjugation, including its centuries as a Portuguese colony, its occupation by Indonesia and its treatment by Australia.

“The achievement of maritime boundaries in accordance with international law is a matter of national sovereignty and the sustainability of our country. It is Timor-Leste’s top national priority,” said Timor-Leste’s independence hero Xanana Gusmão last year.

Australia argues that its permanent maritime boundary with Timor-Leste should be based on Australia’s continental shelf, like that of the 1972 Australia-Indonesia seabed boundary. Source: Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade

Australia, for its part, has repeatedly avoided entering into such negotiations. Instead, it has concluded a number of revenue sharing deals based on jointly developing petroleum deposits in the Timor Sea with both an independent Timor-Leste and Indonesia during the occupation years.

Australia argues that any border with its much smaller neighbour be based on Australia’s continental shelf, which extends well into the Timor Sea, and should therefore be drawn much closer to Timor-Leste. Australia has taken a hard-nosed approach over border negotiations for decades with nations to its north.

Widely seen to be central to the maritime boundary issue with Timor-Leste is the potentially-lucrative Greater Sunrise oil and gas fields, reported to be worth some 30 billion dollars. If the median line was accepted by both sides, Greater Sunrise would likely fall within Timor-Leste’s jurisdiction, potentially providing one of the poorest nations in the region with much-needed revenue.

However, under current arrangements based on a 2006 deal, Australia and Timor-Leste have agreed to equally divide revenue from Greater Sunrise.

But this deal is set to expire on April 10 following Timor-Leste’s January notification to Australia that it was withdrawing from the treaty. Timor-Leste had been calling for this agreement to be scrapped following the 2012 revelations by a former Australian spy that Australia bugged Timor-Leste’s cabinet rooms in 2004 to gain the upper-hand in the bilateral negotiations that eventually led to the 2006 treaty.

Australia has also been criticised for a 2013 raid on the offices of Timor-Leste’s Australian lawyer in which sensitive documents were seized.

While Timor-Leste took Australia to the International Court of Arbitration in April last year in the hope of forcing Australia to settle on a permanent maritime boundary, Australia’s 2002 withdrawal from compulsory dispute settlement procedures under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea meant, according to the Australian government, that Australia was not bound by any decision made by the court.

But in a significant development, Australia announced in January that it would seek to establish a permanent maritime boundary with Timor-Leste by September this year.

Ella Fabry, an Australian activist with the Timor Sea Justice Campaign, says that Australia now has an opportunity to go some way in righting the wrongs of the past by negotiating in good faith with Timor-Leste and agreeing to a border along the median line.

“For Timor-Leste, it could mean literally billions of dollars of extra funding for them that could then go on to fund health, education [and] all of those things that a developing country needs,” she says.

Investment in such areas is indeed needed in Timor-Leste. According to global charity Oxfam, 41 percent of Timor-Leste’s population of 1.13 million people live on less than 1.25 dollars per day and almost 30 percent do not have access to clean drinking water.

Australia’s foreign affairs department identifies high maternal mortality rates and poor nutrition – leading to stunted growth in half of all children under five years – as being among key areas of concern.

Whether negotiations eventually lead to the financial windfall for Timor-Leste that some are predicting remains to be seen. A maritime boundary agreement along the median line is far from certain and there are serious concerns over the viability of a gas pipeline connecting Greater Sunrise to Timor-Leste, not least because it must cross the three kilometre-deep Timor Trough.

For Juvinal Dias, what often gets overlooked in the maritime boundary dispute is his nation’s over-reliance on income from petroleum resources, which, he argues, has led to a lack of investment in the non-oil economy.

“The oil money has dominated everything in Timor-Leste,” he says.

Timor-Leste has earned more than 12 billion dollars from its joint petroleum development area with Australia. It set up a petroleum fund in 2005, the balance of which was 15.84 billion dollars at the end of 2016, down some 1.3 billion since its peak in May 2015.

According to La’o Hamutuk, Timor-Leste’s oil and gas income peaked in 2012 and will continue to fall, with the Bayu Undan field expected to end production by 2020. It has also warned that if current spending trends continue, the petroleum fund itself will run dry by 2026.

This is a serious concern in a country where petroleum revenue has provided some 90 percent of the budget, leading to what Dias describes as “a very dangerous situation”.

He says that while there is a growing awareness in Timor-Leste about the importance of diversifying its economy, there is no time to waste.

“If we can’t manage our economy today, the poverty will be even worse in the next decade,” says Dias.

Murrawah Johnson, 21, of the Wangan and Jagalingou Family Council, is among those standing in the way of the huge Carmichael coal mine project in Australia's Queensland state. Photo courtesy of Murrawah Johnson.

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MELBOURNE, Dec 30 2016 (IPS)

Among those leading the fight against the massive Indian-owned Carmichael coal project in Australia’s Queensland state is 21-year-old Murrawah Johnson of the Wangan and Jagalingou aboriginal people, the traditional owners of the land where the proposed mine is to be located.

“Our people are the unique people from that country,” says Murrawah, whose name means ‘rainbow’ in the indigenous Gubbi Gubbi language. “That is who we are in our identity, in our culture, in our song and in our dance,” she adds.The mine’s estimated average annual carbon emissions of 79 million tonnes are three times those of New Delhi, six times those of Amsterdam and double Tokyo’s average annual emissions.

The Wangan and Jagalingou, numbering up to 500 people, regard the Carmichael coal mine as a threat to their very existence and have repeatedly rejected the advances of Adani Mining, the company behind the project. The traditional owners argue the mine would destroy their land, which “means that our story is then destroyed. And we as a people and our identity, as well,” Murrawah, a spokesperson for her people’s Family Council, told IPS.

Adani Mining is a subsidiary of the Adani Group, an Indian multinational with operations in India, Indonesia and Australia cutting across resources, logistics, energy, agribusiness and real estate. In March, the company announced its first foray into the defence industry.

Adani’s Carmichael project envisions a 40km long, 10km wide mine consisting of six open-cut pits and five underground operating for up to sixty years. The company intends to transport the coal to India to aid in that country’s electricity needs. According to the International Energy Agency, 244 million Indians – 19 percent of the population – are without access to electricity.

Should the project go ahead, it would be the largest coal operation here – Australia is already a major coal producing and exporting nation – and among the biggest in the world, producing some 60 million tonnes of thermal coal annually at peak capacity.

But at a time when global warming is a significant threat to humanity, the Carmichael mine is generating substantial opposition. Since the project was announced in 2010, there have been more than ten appeals and judicial processes against the mine.

Shani Tager, a campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, is adamant that the coal that Adani wants to dig up must remain in the ground. “It’s a massive amount of coal that they’re talking about exporting, which will be burnt and used and make the problem of global warming even worse,” she says.

Coal-fired power plants emit large amounts of carbon dioxide, a gas that traps heat within the Earth’s atmosphere and which plays an important role in the phenomenon of human-induced climate change.

According to a 2015 report by The Australia Institute, a local think tank, Adani’s project would release more carbon into the atmosphere than many major cities and even countries.

The report states that the mine’s estimated average annual carbon emissions of 79 million tonnes are three times those of New Delhi, six times those of Amsterdam and double Tokyo’s average annual emissions. It would surpass Sri Lanka’s annual emissions and be similar to both Austria’s and Malaysia’s.

Despite these alarming figures, both the Australian and Queensland state governments are backing Adani’s Carmichael mine. There has been widespread speculation here that the federal government will provide support via a AUD one- billion loan (722 million U.S. dollars).

The Queensland government, anticipating a boost to jobs, the regional economy and to its own coffers as a result of royalties, announced in October that it was giving the project “critical infrastructure” status in order to fast-track its approvals.

“This Government is serious about having the Adani mine in operation. We want this to happen,” Anthony Lynham, state minister for mines, told local media at the time.

In early December, Adani received what the state government describes as the project’s “final major” approval: Adani’s rail line to the port of Abbot Point, from where the coal will be shipped to India.

In 2011, Adani signed a 99-year lease on the Abbot Point coal terminal, which sits immediately adjacent to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. Australia’s iconic reef is the world’s largest coral reef ecosystem and among the most diverse and richest natural ecosystems on Earth.

In November, scientists from Queensland’s James Cook University confirmed the worst-ever die-off of corals in the reef, following a mass coral bleaching event earlier in the year. Heat stress due to high sea temperatures is the main cause of coral bleaching, with bleaching events expected to be more frequent and severe as the world’s climate warms up.

Adani plans to significantly expand the Abbot Point terminal in order to ship larger amounts of coal. This means dredging up the sea floor right next to the Great Barrier Reef.

“The Carmichael coal mine will have a domino effect of bad impacts on the reef, from driving the need for port expansion and more dredging and dumping to increasing the risk of shipping accidents on the reef,” says Cherry Muddle from the Australian Marine Conservation Society.

The reef’s tourism industry provides some 65,000 jobs, with numerous operators also speaking out against both the Carmichael mine and the Abbot Point expansion in recent times.

Despite Minister Lynham’s assurances that “200 stringent conditions placed on this project through its court processes” will protect the reef, others remain extremely concerned.

“Adani has a really worrying track record of environmental destruction, human rights abuses, corruption and tax evasion,” says Adam Black from GetUp, a movement which campaigns on a range of progressive issues.

Among the accusations leveled at Adani operations in India in a 2015 report by Environmental Justice Australia are the destruction of mangroves; failure to prevent salt water intrusion into groundwater; bribery and illegal iron ore exports; using political connections to purchase land cheaply; and obtaining illegal tax deductions.

Adani’s CEO in Australia, Jeyakumar Janakaraj, was in charge of a Zambian copper mine owned by Konkola Copper Mines (KCM) when, in 2010, the mine discharged dangerous contaminants into the Kafue River. Found guilty, the company was fined around AUD 4,000 (2,900 U.S. dollars).

Some 1800 Zambians have since taken KCM and its UK-based parent company, Vedanta Resources, to the High Court in London, alleging they were made sick and their farmland destroyed over a ten-year period from 2004. Janakaraj was with KCM from 2008 to 2013.

Now, with Adani hoping to break ground on its Carmichael coal project in mid-2017, opponents are prepared to continue their hitherto successful campaign of dissuading potential financiers from backing the AUD 16-22 billion project (11.5-15.8 billion U.S.).

“If they can’t get the money, they can’t build the mine,” says Murrawah Johnson.

The Wangan and Jagalingou recently set up what they call a “legal line of defence” against Adani and the Queensland government, consisting of four more legal challenges, with plans to take the matter to the High Court if needs be.

They have also been in contact with the United Nations for some time.

For Murrawah, this battle is about maintaining connection with both the past and the future. “I refuse to be the broken link in that chain,” she says.

Under national security laws, Australians' telecommunications metadata must be retained by service providers for two years. Credit: Stephen de Tarczynski/IPS

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MELBOURNE, Nov 24 2016 (IPS)

For Australian activist Samantha Castro, it was her association with the non-profit publishing organisation Wikileaks that brought her to the attention of the Australian Federal Police (AFP).

She says she’s been followed, her car has been searched, and that the AFP has filmed and photographed her, along with her children, at protests. She believes that authorities have hacked her email account and computer and are responsible for wiping contacts from her phone.Without public scrutiny, without our eyes, as citizens, on what’s being done in our names, then that’s what authoritarianism looks like." -- Associate Professor Sarah Maddison

“They are putting all this time and effort into psychologically disrupting me in the hope that I will stop doing what I’m doing,” says Castro, an operations coordinator at Friends of the Earth who co-founded the Wikileaks Australian Citizens Alliance in 2010 to support the work of Wikileaks.

Wikileaks works to disseminate official and censored documents and files related to war, spying and corruption. While it has won a range of media freedom awards, its release of sensitive material has raised the ire of governments around the world, including Australia’s.

Castro explains that working with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange – an Australian who remains holed-up in Ecuador’s London embassy, fearing extradition to the United States – resulted in significant attention from authorities.

It was these links with Assange’s organisation which, she believes, led to her house being broken into in 2014. She is adamant that the AFP was behind the break-in.

“The reason for that was information and knowledge from when I was with Wikileaks,” Castro, who did not report the matter to police, told IPS.

She says that although nothing was taken from the house, her keys were lined up on the kitchen table alongside a phone that had been opened up. She took the carefully displayed items to mean that she was being monitored.

“I knew straight away. It was a very clear symbol that they wanted me to know that they knew,” says Castro, adding that she spent “a lot of time” searching her house for bugs.

While the AFP does not comment on ongoing operations, a warrant is required to place a person under surveillance. IPS understands that further court approval is needed to enter a premises to covertly plant a listening device.

“I have felt the wrath of the surveillance state since we founded WACA,” says Castro, whose group changed its name in 2014 to Whistleblowers, Activists and Citizens Alliance in recognition of a broadening movement.

It is not only activists from non-governmental organisations like WACA who are feeling under pressure. There is a growing sense here that space for the broader civil society to express dissent or call out abuse is being squeezed. Those who speak out risk public vilification, financial loss and jail time.

On his visit to Australia in October, the United Nations special rapporteur, Michel Forst, expressed surprise at the situation. “I was astonished to observe mounting evidence of a range of cumulative measures that have concurrently levied enormous pressure on Australian civil society,” he said.

Among the issues Forst pointed to were the defunding of environmental and indigenous bodies in response to litigation or advocacy work, anti-protest legislation and intensified secrecy laws, “particularly in the areas of immigration and national security.”

Attorney-General George Brandis last year took aim at environmentalists using legal action to further their cause, labelling them “radical green activists” who “engage in vigilante litigation to stop important economic projects.”

The island state of Tasmania has, according to Forst, “prioritized business and government resource interests over the democratic rights of individuals to peacefully protest”. Similarly, legislation passed in March in New South Wales state means that protestors face up to seven years in jail for interfering with mining operations.

Mandatory data retention laws were introduced just over a year ago, purportedly for national security reasons, under which service providers must retain the metadata of Australians’ telecommunications activities for two years.

Twenty-one government agencies can access the data and all can apply for a Journalist Information Warrant in order to identify a reporter’s confidential source.

Paul Murphy, CEO of the Media, Arts and Entertainment Alliance, a journalists’ union, says the profession’s ethics require journalists to protect the identity of their sources.

“Journalists must work smarter to ensure that brave people can tell their stories in confidence and public interest journalism can continue to play its vital role in a healthy, functioning democracy,” he argues.

Those in the higher levels of statutory bodies have not been spared.

Professor Gillian Triggs, President of Australia’s independent Human Rights Commission, has faced ongoing criticism from government ministers since the release in 2015 of her report into the mental and physical health of children in immigration detention.

Then-prime minister Tony Abbott called the report politically motivated and said the commission “should be ashamed of itself”, while Immigration Minister Peter Dutton said that much of the content was “either dated or questionable”.

In October, another cabinet minister urged Triggs “to stay out of politics and stick with human rights”, while Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull confirmed on Nov.16 that Triggs’ contract will not be renewed when it expires in mid-2017.

Despite the vitriol, Triggs has continued to fight back, a fact that Professor Brian Martin, a long-time whistleblowing activist, says may well inspire others “who might want to resist.”

But there’s a flipside: “You could say that overt attacks, like on Gillian Triggs, provide a warning to others that they better be careful,” says Martin.

Last year also saw the implementation of the controversial Border Force Act, legislation that Forst describes as “stifling”.

In June, a psychologist with extensive experience in the offshore processing centres on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island and Nauru had his contract immediately cancelled after speaking out on the atrocious conditions in the camps.

Although no charges in relation to the Act have been laid, the secrecy provisions of the law allow for a two-year prison term for any immigration and border protection worker who discloses “protected information”, covering all information a worker obtains in the course of their employment.

Some exceptions apply, such in cases of child or sexual abuse, although whistleblowers are responsible for ensuring that any abuse is serious enough to warrant disclosure.

And in what is being seen here as a significant step for transparency into the plight of asylum seekers held indefinitely in the offshore centres, an amendment to the legislation was quietly posted on the website of Australia’s immigration department in mid-October.

The amendment frees doctors and other health professionals, including nurses, psychologists and psychiatrists, from the law’s secrecy provisions.

The government’s concession “is an enormous democratic win,” says Associate Professor Sarah Maddison, co-editor of the 2007 book ‘Silencing Dissent’.

“Without public scrutiny, without our eyes, as citizens, on what’s being done in our names, then that’s what authoritarianism looks like,” she adds.

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MELBOURNE, Aug 28 2011 (IPS)

Concern is growing for the mental health of thousands of people locked up indefinitely in this country’s immigration detention system.

In July, the office of the Commonwealth Ombudsman, a statutory body handling complaints about investigations into government departments and agencies, outlined an inquiry into suicides and self- harm among immigration detainees.

“I was alarmed that in the first week of June when I visited Christmas Island (detention centres), more than 30 incidents of self-harm by detainees held there were reported,” said ombudsman Allan Asher.

The investigation was announced after an increase in such incidents was reported to International Health and Medical Services (IHMS), the contracted health services provider, and following inspections by ombudsman staff at several detention facilities earlier this year.

According to figures released to the ombudsman’s office by the Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC), there were more than 1,100 incidents of either threatened or actual self-harm up to Jun. 30.

A further 54 incidents were reported in the first week of July.

Data from DIAC and IHMS, released at a parliamentary inquiry into Australia’s immigration detention network on Aug.16, threw further light on the situation inside the country’s 19 centres.

In the first six months of 2011, 213 detainees required medical attention after self-harm. More than 1,500 people were hospitalised, including 72 admitted for psychiatric reasons, and 723 treated for ‘voluntary starvation.’ Among the hunger strikers were 17 children.

The conditions inside the four detention centres on Christmas Island, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean, where all those arriving by boat are taken to for initial processing appear to be severe.

From July 2010 to June, 620 self-harm incidents occurred on the island.

Current inquiries – including an independent review of mental health services available to those in detention – follow a host of reports emphasising the health risks for the detainees.

The consensus is that long-term, indefinite detention results in considerable mental distress.

Internal documents from Serco, the international service company contracted by the government to operate Australia’s immigration detention system, leaked to news outlets, reveal evidence of extreme stress.

Dating from May and June, the documents pertain to the company’s operations on Christmas Island and repeatedly instruct: “Hoffmans to be worn by all officers at all times.” Hoffmans are knives used by detention centre staff to help release detainees who attempt to hang themselves.

In one staff briefing sheet, dated May 20, Serco officers are warned to be alert to detainees engaging in “abnormal behaviour.”

“Clients are creating a self-harm culture, using self-harm as their bargaining tool,” alleges the brief.

But such assessments of the motivating factors behind detainee self-harm are disputed.

“Self-harm is a stress reduction technique,” says Victoria Martin-Iverson, spokeswoman of the Refugee Rights Action Network, an advocacy organisation based in Western Australia state.

“It’s not necessarily something that is done to even get a reaction from the guards; it’s often something people do because when they’re so stressed and there’s no outlet for that, they turn it in on themselves,” she added.

There is also concern at a bilateral agreement signed with Malaysia, in July, to transfer up to 800 “irregular maritime arrivals” – government-speak for people who arrive by boat in Australia to claim asylum – to Malaysia in exchange for resettling 4,000 refugees here over the next four years.

While the deal’s implementation remains stuck in the courts following legal steps taken by asylum seekers and their representatives, it remains a key aspect of the governing Australian Labour Party’s approach to “combat people smuggling.”

This approach, considered harsh by its critics, is to be complemented by the contentious reopening of an Australian immigration processing centre on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island under an agreement signed on Aug.19.

The Australia-Malaysia “refugee swap” deal has been pilloried by refugees and human rights advocates who accuse the Australian government of backing out of obligations to ensure the well-being of people who seek refuge here.

Concerns are being raised over Malaysian authorities’ treatment of an estimated 90,000 refugees presently in that country.

Malaysia is not a signatory to the United Nations refugee convention, which sets out to safeguard the rights of asylum seekers and the responsibilities of countries in which people hope to find protection.

“There is a risk that in sending asylum seekers to Malaysia, Australia could breach its non-refoulement obligations under other international treaties including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child or the Convention Against Torture,” said Catherine Branson, president of the Australian Human Rights Commission, a statutory body.

“We are also concerned that transferring anyone who has a family member already in Australia could breach their right to family unity,” Branson added.

Excerpt:

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MELBOURNE, Jul 14 2011 (IPS)

Australia has taken a major step in reducing its future greenhouse gas output with the announcement of a plan that will initially place a tax on every tonne of carbon pollution produced by hundreds of the country’s major emitters.

“Most Australians now agree our climate is changing. This is caused by carbon pollution. This has harmful effects on our environment and on the economy and the government should act,” said Prime Minister Julia Gillard in a televised address to the nation on Jul.10, just hours after the full details of the carbon scheme had been revealed.

The tax is the first step in the design that proponents say will see Australia reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent on 2000 levels, an increase from the previous target of a 60 percent cut.

Australia is responsible for around 1.47 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, similar to Iran and France, according to 2005 data from the World Resources Institute, the latest year for which statistics are available. Yet on a per capita basis, Australians are the biggest polluters among developed nations.

Despite this, there remains heated debate about how – and even if – Australia should reduce its carbon output.

Protests against implementing a carbon price and questioning human-induced global warming have been held in numerous Australian cities over the past few months – albeit often opposed in other areas by larger rallies calling for far-reaching government action. Climate scientists at leading universities have reported receiving death threats and abusive telephone calls.

Gillard has also faced severe criticism for walking away from a pledge made in the lead-up to last August’s election that “there will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.”

Explanations by the first woman to ever lead this country that, after failing to win enough seats to form government independently, the Australian Labor Party was forced to cut a deal with the environmentally-focused Greens party, in addition to two independents, appear not to have been accepted by all.

Polls suggest the government would lose badly if an election were to be held now.

Regardless, the plan is now in place and a supportive parliament is expected to usher through the required legislation over the next few months.

Under the scheme, around 500 of Australia’s worst greenhouse gas polluting businesses will be charged a tax of 23 Australian dollars for every tonne of carbon they release into the atmosphere from July 2012.

This price will be fixed for the first three years, after which the amount per tonne that polluters will be required to pay will be determined by a market-based system. Known as an emissions trading scheme, a limited supply of emission permits will be bought and sold by polluters in the second stage of the strategy.

The overall plan is to encourage major emitters to move to lower polluting technologies by making greenhouse gas releases increasingly more expensive while at the same time giving a major boost to the country’s renewable energy sector.

Ten billion Australian dollars has been set aside to invest in clean energy technology while a new independent body, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), has been established to run the research and development projects in solar, geothermal and biofuel energy already under way.

“It has been obvious for years that renewable energy programmes in Australia are a mess of badly designed photo opportunity schemes subject to changed rules and timeframes at the whim of ministers,” said Senator Christine Milne, the Greens’ deputy leader, at a press conference following the government’s carbon tax announcement.

“By bringing all these programmes under the independent authority, ARENA, we can finally deliver the consistent, systemic support the industry needs in order to challenge entrenched coal,” added Milne, who played a big part in the formation of the plan as co-deputy chair of the seven-member Multi-Party Climate Change Committee, established in September 2010 to thrash out a deal on introducing a price on carbon.

Coal is big business here, where around ten percent of the world’s reserves are located.

Australia is the fourth largest coal producer in the world – behind China, the United States and India – yet the most prolific exporter, supplying about 27 percent of global demand. The burning of coal at power stations also accounts for more than 83 percent of this country’s own electricity generation.

The carbon tax plan includes a commitment to close the larger coal-fired power plants by 2020. Despite a 1.3 billion dollar fund set aside to compensate workers for anticipated job losses in the sector as part of an overall 9.2 billion dollar assistance package available to affected industries over the scheme’s first three years, “entrenched coal” has been staunchly opposed to the plan.

“Coal is the industry that protected Australia from entering a deep recession during the GFC (global financial crisis), a fact widely recognised by most economists. It is Australia’s biggest export industry and contributes 3.5 percent to our nation’s economic growth,” said Ralph Hillman, executive director of the Australian Coal Association (ACA) in an address to the National Press Club on Jul.6.

“We should be leaping at the unique historical opportunity offered by the industrialisation of China and India to maximise the return on our resource endowment. The carbon tax will diminish that opportunity. Other countries will step into our shoes, reap the rewards and send emissions sky high,” argued the ACA boss.

Excerpt:

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MELBOURNE, Jun 23 2011 (IPS)

Any Australian government efforts to have two of its citizens spared from the death penalty in Indonesia have been made more difficult by past refusals to intervene on behalf of three Indonesian Islamists in the lead-up to their executions in 2008.

Time is running out for Australian citizens Andrew Chan, 27, and Myuran Sukumaran, 30.

The two men were sentenced to death by firing squad in Indonesia in 2006 for their roles in organising the attempted smuggling of more than eight kilograms of heroin from the Indonesian island of Bali to Australia in April 2005.

Acting on information provided by the Australian Federal Police, Indonesian authorities swooped, arresting Chan, Sukumaran and seven other members of the trafficking group, since dubbed the ‘Bali Nine’.

Although six members of the group actually received death sentences, Chan and Sukumaran are the only two still on death row.

Bali Nine couriers Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen, Matthew Norman and Si Yi Chen had their sentences downgraded to life in prison in 2008 following a roller-coaster ride of appeals and counter-appeals. Initially awarded life terms, their sentences were reduced to 20 years and then upgraded to death before finally settling back where they started – at life in prison.

Another member of the group, 24-year-old Scott Rush, experienced similar ups and downs in his appeal process. Rush’s final appeal against the death penalty was commuted to a life sentence on May 10 this year.

That same day, Chan’s last available judicial effort to save himself was rejected, although the Indonesian Supreme Court only revealed its decision on Jun. 17.

It means that an appeal to Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who has the power to grant clemency in such cases, is Chan’s only hope of avoiding being executed.

Clearly, the court’s decision to uphold Chan’s death sentence does not bode well for Sukumaran. Both men launched their final appeals, known as judicial reviews, last August.

Although the outcome of Sukumaran’s review has yet to be announced, the likelihood is that he, like Chan, will not be given a reprieve. Instead, it is likely that both will be pinning all their hopes on the mercy of President Yudhoyono.

The Australian Government has pledged to do all it can to help Chan. Sukumaran can expect the same assistance if his appeal fails.

“I’ll be happy to do whatever is necessary to put as much force as we can into the appeal for clemency for Andrew Chan, including personally involving myself,” said Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who also reiterated the government’s opposition to the death penalty, the day after the rejection of Chan’s judicial review was made public.

Foreign minister Kevin Rudd also spoke of backing Chan, committing “to use every form of representation to government concerned in support of that person.”

In approaching Yudhoyono, who became the first Indonesian head of state to address the Australian parliament in March last year, Australian leaders can highlight the close relations that exist between Indonesia and its southern neighbour.

Presently, the two countries cooperate on a range of issues of concern to both, including counter- terrorism, people smuggling and illegal fishing. Additionally, some 400 Australian firms operate in Indonesia and bilateral trade was worth 11.3 billion Australian dollars in 2009. Close to 14,000 Indonesian students studied here in 2010.

Indonesia is also the largest recipient of Australian aid funds, worth an estimated 458.7 million Australian dollars in the last twelve months alone, according to Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

While this strong and growing bilateral relationship places Gillard government representatives in a good position from which to call on Yudhoyono to grant clemency to Chan and, if required, Sukumaran, considerable obstacles stand in the way of achieving that goal.

Indeed, Yudhoyono’s own views on the matter loom as a major challenge for Australian officials. The Indonesian leader is regarded as a staunch supporter of capital punishment, including for those convicted of drug trafficking. Since coming to power in 2004, he has consistently maintained that he will not pardon drug convicts.

But any Australian efforts to influence a change of mind in Yudhoyono will undoubtedly be severely weakened by the attitudes of previous governments to the death sentences handed down to three Indonesian Islamist militants in 2003.

Convicted for their roles in the 2002 Bali bombings in which 202 people died, including 88 Australians, the three men were executed by firing squad in November 2008.

Despite Australia’s long-standing opposition to capital punishment, former prime minister John Howard stated in 2007 that he would not intercede for the Bali bombers while then foreign minister, Alexander Downer, was particularly blunt.

“The Australian government will not lift a finger to support these three people who killed 88 Australians in Bali,” Downer famously said.

One month prior to leading the Australian Labor Party to victory in elections that year, then-opposition leader Rudd said that his government would never seek clemency for a terrorist on death row, despite having previously argued that the death penalty “is unacceptable in all circumstances and in all jurisdictions.”

The Gillard government now faces an uphill battle to persuade Yudhoyono to grant clemency to Chan and, in the most likely scenario, to Sukumaran too.

Excerpt:

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MELBOURNE, Apr 18 2011 (IPS)

Supporters of asylum seekers here say that the government’s response to recent suicides in Australian immigration detention centres ignores what is already well-known: that indefinite, long-term detention in crowded facilities results in deaths.

“We’ve had so many reviews and they’ve all pointed to the same thing,” says Ian Rintoul, spokesperson for the Refugee Action Coalition (RAC), which has been vocal in calling on successive governments to abandon the policy of mandatorily detaining “unauthorised arrivals”.

Under this policy, people are held while identity, health and security checks are carried out. These checks can take considerable time.

Rintoul says that there are thousands of people who have languished in immigration detention for six months or more, and hundreds who have been detained from one year to 18 months. Several have been held for even longer.

“Until you deal with the underlying cause, until you deal with the lack of certainty and the anxiety associated with mandatory detention, nothing is going to change. It’s very obvious.”

Refugee advocates and human rights defenders are among those who have long been opposed to what they regard as the harsh, unfair treatment of those who claim asylum in Australia, often fleeing persecution in their homeland.

The Refugee Council of Australia, the national body representing more than 130 organisations, has been calling on the governing Labour party to abolish indefinite, mandatory detention and implement the reforms it announced back in 2008.

The government’s pledges included ending what then minister for immigration Chris Evans called “dehumanising” long-term detention and removing children from immigration centres. But these have never been put into practice.

“We would say that the system is broken,” says the Council’s Sophie Peer.

The latest available figures from the department of immigration and citizenship (DIAC) show that there were 6,758 people in Australian immigration detention on Feb.18, up from less than 500 midway through 2009. More than 95 percent of these are asylum seekers who arrived here by boat, labelled by authorities as “irregular maritime arrivals”.

One of these “irregulars” was a 20-year-old Afghani who was found dead at the Curtin Immigration Detention Centre in Australia’s remote north-west late last month. While DIAC has not released details about the young man’s death, refugee advocates have identified him as Mohammed Asif Atay.

According to advocates, he hanged himself on Mar. 28, allegedly in response to delays and a lack of information regarding his application for asylum.

The Curtin facility was controversially reopened in June last year for Australia’s spiralling immigration detainee population after it had been closed in 2002 following a spate of protests and self-harm incidents.

Mohammed’s death followed the apparent suicide of another 20-year-old male detainee from Afghanistan, also an “irregular maritime arrival”, on Mar. 16 at the Scherger Immigration Detention Centre in north-eastern Australia.

These cases brought the total number of suicides among the immigration detention population in a six-month period to five.

A Fijian national committed suicide at the Villawood facility in Sydney last September and an Iraqi man killed himself there in November. Also at Villawood, a British man detained for breaching his visa conditions committed suicide in December.

DIAC has reacted to these deaths by recently agreeing to establish an independent review of mental health services available to those held in its immigration detention centres. This decision was apparently based on advice the department received last December from its Detention Health Advisory Group (DeHAG), whose work focuses particularly on issues of mental health.

“The department is progressing a review of the psychological support programme and its implementation within places of immigration,” a DIAC spokesperson confirmed to IPS on Apr.15, adding that the organisation or person to undertake the review has yet to be determined.

Prof. Louise Newman, director of the Centre for Development Psychology and Psychiatry at the Monash Medical Centre in Melbourne and chair of DeHAG, says that although the impact of the mandatory detention regime on detainees’ mental health is well known, the review represents an opportunity to alter the atmosphere inside the detention system.

She argues that DeHAG has been attempting to instil “a culture within the detention centres that is not about law and order and maintaining a population in a state of virtual imprisonment. It’s also about looking at how we might have a better system that actually recognises the vulnerabilities of these people and prevents some of the incidents that we’ve seen.”

But with suicides and incidents of self-harming continuing, DeHAG appears to have much to do.

A 26-year-old Tamil man who had recently been transferred to Curtin from Australia’s offshore detention centre on Christmas Island attempted suicide on Mar. 30, as did a 30-year-old Afghan national on Apr. 7.

The RAC’s Ian Rintoul says the situation at Curtin is critical.

“I’m told both by detainees and people who work there in various capacities that you’re looking at a self-harm incident, effectively, daily.”

For Rintoul, the review of mental health services will only amount to an audit that will highlight the inadequacy of what is offered to detainees. He argues that psychologists, psychiatrists and pills are not what people in immigration detention require.

“What they need is to get out…until that’s remedied, we are simply going to see repeats – and constant repeats – of the self-harming and attempted suicides that we’ve got now.”

Excerpt:

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MELBOURNE, Mar 29 2011 (IPS)

Many countries view nuclear energy as a way to meet growing electricity demands without releasing large amounts of greenhouse gasses. And as a major uranium exporter, Australia is keen to capitalise on future opportunities despite the ongoing nuclear emergency at Japan’s Fukushima reactors.

Along with Kazakhstan and Canada, Australia is one of the world’s largest suppliers of uranium, which fuels electricity-generation at nuclear power stations.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the world’s nuclear watchdog, says that there are 442 nuclear reactors in operation in 30 countries, including Taiwan. A further 65 are currently under construction across 16 nations, with 27 being built in China alone.

Prior to the Japanese radiation emergency, the IAEA anticipated that up to 25 countries that do not have a nuclear power station at present would have access to the technology by 2030.

“There are probably 11 or 12 countries that are actively developing the infrastructure for a nuclear power programme,” said the IAEA’s Anne Starz in February.

“The region where we see the largest number of active countries is in Southeast Asia,” added Starz. “There is also interest in Africa, the Middle East, Europe and Latin America.”

The cause of this growing interest in nuclear power is two-fold. The current level of global energy demand is expected to double over the next two decades, with nuclear energy seen as one way of meeting the world’s needs. Also, nuclear power plants emit negligible levels of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere – unlike coal-fired power stations. Nuclear energy’s lack of emissions is regarded as a means to combat global warming and avoid dangerous climate change.

Some 9,000 to 10,000 tonnes of uranium oxide concentrate – the form in which the partly processed uranium is exported – is shipped from here in an average year, according to the local industry’s representative body, the Australian Uranium Association (AUA).

This equates to about one-fifth of global demand. All of the uranium mined in Australia is sent overseas for use in civil power stations in countries that have signed up to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) as well as to a bilateral safeguards agreement with Australia.

Roughly 15 to 17 percent of annual Australian uranium exports go to Japan – one-fifth of that country’s requirements. Among other destinations for Australian uranium are the U.S., United Kingdom, France, Finland, South Korea and Taiwan.

According to figures from the trade department, these exports generated some 679 million Australian dollars in revenue in 2009 – just 0.7 percent of the total earned by Australia’s booming minerals and fuels export sector.

But uranium’s small contribution – relative to coal and iron ore – of export earnings could grow if global interest in nuclear power continues along the prevalent trend prior to the Japan crisis.

The IAEA expects that 70 percent of the growth in global energy requirements by 2030 will come from developing nations – with China and India at the forefront.

Australia signed a safeguards agreement with China in 2006 and began sending uranium there in 2009. An AUA spokesperson told IPS that export levels to China are “very much” expected to grow.

There remains debate here over whether to supply India, a non-signatory to the NPT, with uranium for its nuclear power stations. A deal to do so was struck by the conservative government of John Howard in 2007 but was reversed when the Australian Labour Party, which remains in office, came to power later that year.

Despite the crisis in Japan, Australia remains keen to capitalise on its resource, although considerable opposition exists from environmentalists and others concerned about the dangers of nuclear energy.

Besides the revenue generated, the AUA argues that billions of tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions could be avoided if the industry was allowed to expand to its full potential.

Around 40 percent of the globe’s recoverable uranium is in Australia, with the single biggest deposit in the world contained at the Olympic Dam site in South Australia state. BHP Billiton, which fully owns Olympic Dam and which sent a 1 million dollar donation to the Red Cross to assist with disaster relief in Japan, is currently exploring expansion opportunities at the mine.

But exploration and mining of uranium is currently only permitted in three of Australia’s eight states and territories. The Uranium Industry Framework, a joint industry-government partnership, was established in 2005 to help develop the industry and take advantage of increasing global demand.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard has made clear that her government’s position regarding the export of uranium has not been altered by radiation escaping from Japan’s stricken power station.

“What is happening in Japan doesn’t have any impact on my thinking about uranium exports from this country,” said Gillard, “We do export uranium and we will continue to export uranium.”

Uranium industry officials have also expressed similar sentiments. Speaking at a uranium conference held in the southern city of Adelaide last week, Michael Angwin, chief executive officer of the AUA, said that the factors which motivate countries to use nuclear power remain unaffected by events in Japan. “Countries turn to nuclear energy because they wish to improve their energy security and expand their electricity generating capacity in a way that does not increase their carbon emissions. That remains the case today.”

Excerpt:

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MELBOURNE, Jan 26 2011 (IPS)

When an outbreak of dengue fever occurred in the hot and humid north of Australia’s Queensland state in late 2008, Nicola Strange was among hundreds of locals that contracted the mosquito-borne disease.

Now, together with her husband, Nicola Strange is volunteering their property for use in a scientific field trial that researchers hope will be the next step in an ambitious plan to eradicate dengue fever, an infection that leads to thousands of deaths in tropical areas of the world every year.

“I’ve never felt so unwell,” says Nicola, recalling her experience of type- two dengue.

Her fever lasted “for a good week”, with a high temperature accompanied by an intense headache, vomiting and severe pain behind her eyes and in her back.

“Even when all those symptoms had subsided, I was very weak for many weeks after,” she tells IPS.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), some 50 million people are infected with one of the four serotypes of dengue each year. The disease is endemic in more than 100 countries with around 2.5 billion people worldwide now at risk, particularly in tropical urban and semi-urban environments.

Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific account for 75 percent of all dengue cases, while areas of Africa, the Americas and the Eastern Mediterranean are also threatened.

A small percentage of people infected with dengue develop the potentially- fatal dengue haemorrhagic fever (DHF).

Children are particularly susceptible to DHF. First recognised in the 1950s in the Philippines and Thailand, DHF is now a leading cause of hospitalisation and death among youngsters in Asia.

Of the 500,000 DHF cases – mostly children – that the WHO estimates require hospitalisation each year, around 2.5 percent succumb to the disease. This fatality rate increases substantially without proper treatment.

Recent decades have seen a dramatic rise in dengue infections. Prior to 1970, only nine countries had experienced DHF epidemics. By 1995, more than four times that number had also seen similar outbreaks.

Such is the situation facing the international team of scientists from the ‘Eliminate Dengue’ project.

Hailing from Australia, Thailand, Vietnam and the U.S., the scientists are currently focusing their efforts on the Aedes aegypti mosquito, responsible for most of the world’s dengue infections, with separate research also being undertaken on the Aedes albopictus mosquito, a secondary dengue vector.

The project’s 12-week field trials got under way in the northern Queensland town of Cairns in early January.

“These trials are the next step in a long sequence of work we’ve been doing for many years where we’re moving out into the field. We’re all very excited in taking that next step,” says ‘Eliminate Dengue’ leader Professor Scott O’Neill from the University of Queensland.

O’Neill’s team is hopeful that a naturally-occurring bacterium called Wolbachia will spread through the Aedes aegypti populations in the trial areas by mating with mosquitoes already infected with the bacterium.

These mosquitoes were purposely infected with Wolbachia, which cannot be transmitted to humans, in a laboratory in Cairns and are being released in stages from the yards of residents like Nicola Strange.

The project’s organisers received regulatory approval from the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority, a government agency, to carry out their research and their methods were given the lowest possible risk rating from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation.

The researchers had previously focused on Wolbachia’s ability to reduce the lifespan of mosquitoes. In 2009, the team found that Aedes aegypti’s lifespan of 30 days was cut by half when infected with certain strains of Wolbachia.

This was significant because Aedes aegypti is unable to transmit dengue until it is between 12 and 15 days old, drastically reducing its ability to transmit dengue to humans.

But cutting lifespan is no longer the focus of the project.

“In the course of our studies, we found out that the bacterium, when we put it in the mosquito, actually blocked the ability of dengue to replicate in the mosquito. And so we shifted away from life-shortening (strains) to strains of Wolbachia that don’t really do life-shortening but just interfere with dengue replication,” O’Neill tells IPS.

It is hoped that this will disrupt the transmission cycle in the wild mosquitoes, which do not naturally carry the dengue virus. Instead, Aedes aegypti must acquire the disease from a dengue-infected person before it can transmit dengue to another person.

After the Cairns field trials conclude, the researchers will spend several months trapping mosquitoes in order to determine how well the Wolbachia bacterium spreads into the populations.

If successful, the ‘Eliminate Dengue’ team will undertake larger-scale trials in Vietnam later this year, followed by further trials in Cairns in 2012.

“If those experiments are successful then we might expect to see full implementation and control of dengue in the Cairns region in a two to four- year timeframe. If we encounter unexpected difficulties, for example if we were to determine that the Wolbachia infection did not spread easily into wild mosquito populations, then it may take a longer time to fine-tune the technology until we are ready for full deployment,” says O’Neill.

For Nicola Strange, volunteering her yard for the trial was an easy decision.

Although she is now immune to type-two dengue, she remains at risk from the others and has an increased chance of developing DHF if she contracts dengue again.

“If they can find a way of eliminating dengue fever, then I’m all for it,” she says.

Excerpt:

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MELBOURNE, Jan 25 2011 (IPS)

More than 70 years ago, an elderly Aboriginal man led the only known privately- organized demonstration against Kristallnacht (Night of the Broken Glass), the mass anti-Jewish pogrom across Germany and Austria.

That year, 1938, close to 100 Jews were killed while 36,000 others were interred in Nazi camps, and Jewish property and businesses destroyed.

Then already 77 years old, William Cooper led a march to the German consulate in Melbourne, condemning the treatment of Jews by the Nazi government.

It was a remarkable act of international solidarity by Cooper who, as an Aborigine, faced severe discrimination in his own homeland. Yet it was also in keeping with his character.

By then, Cooper was an experienced activist. Earlier in the decade, he had petitioned King George V to improve the lot of Aborigines. In 1934, Cooper helped found Australia’s first Aboriginal political organization, the Australian Aborigines League.

Cooper continued to campaign for Aboriginal rights until his death in 1941. He was also involved in the first mass strike by Aboriginal people, when residents of the Cummeragunja mission in rural New South Wales state walked off their reserve in 1939 to protest their conditions and treatment.

But Cooper’s efforts have only recently been properly recognized. In Israel, trees have been planted in honour of his stance against the abuse of Jews while Melbourne’s new court complex, the William Cooper Justice Centre, was named in his honour when it opened last October.

In December, Israel once again paid tribute to Cooper when Yad Vashem, Israel’s centre for research and commemoration of the Holocaust, named an academic chair named after him.

Cooper’s great-grandson Kevin Russell travelled to Israel to witness the opening of the Chair for the Study of Resistance During the Holocaust, in tribute to William Cooper, and spoke to IPS about his ancestor’s life and legacy.

Excerpts from IPS correspondent Stephen de Tarczynski’s interview with Kevin Russell: Q: Aborigines were still experiencing overt discrimination in many forms here in Australia when Kristallnacht happened. Does the fact that William Cooper demonstrated at such a time give us some insight into the type of man he was? A: Most definitely. That was towards the end of a very long campaign for justice for many peoples, including his own, the Jews, black Americans, Fijians, the Maoris. Wherever there was injustice, William stood up. That certainly reflects the man that William was and what he stood for.

His biggest message was that we shouldn’t be silent in the face of evil because that leads to even more evil. That’s what was happening around Kristallnacht when everyone was silent. No one was doing anything, yet William chose to act.

If we reflect back to that year of 1938, the Kristallnacht protest was in the first week of December. Earlier that year, as Australians celebrated 150 years of colonization on Australia Day in 1938, William was leading a ‘Day of Mourning’ protest for Aboriginal people, saying ‘we, the indigenous people, the original inhabitants of this land, have nothing to celebrate. While you celebrate 150 years of your colonization of this country, we’ve got nothing to rejoice about. It’s a day of mourning for us. We don’t have rights, we have poor health, are restricted in our movements and denied our language. We’re denied basic human rights.’ He was saying even then that we’ve got nothing to rejoice about.

Q: He obviously saw similarities between the treatment of Jews in Europe, particularly under the Nazis, prior to and during the Second World War and the abuses suffered by indigenous Australians at the same time? A: Without doubt. William had lost his own son during the First World War, so he knew what it was like to have a son die for a country that didn’t recognize him or his son as citizens of that country.

William knew what it was like to be persecuted and oppressed. He saw what conditions were like on Cummeragunja mission and what was happening to our people. He certainly would have recognized the similarities of oppression and persecution. Like I said, wherever there was a wrong, William was the first to stand up and that’s the leadership of the man. He was a visionary and way ahead of his time in so many ways.

Q: You must be very proud of your great-grandfather, who has been honored in Australia and also, most recently, in Israel. But does he get the recognition he deserves? A: That’s the second time I’ve been to Israel when William’s been honoured by the Jewish community. He’s honoured across the world yet in Australia we’re still only learning of who William Cooper was. In the last couple of years there’s certainly been some movement at local and state level of government regarding recognition.

But while I was in Israel I called for federal acknowledgement of the man, for what he tried to achieve in Australia for his own people. And we’ve had backing for that to happen. I know that as we speak there’s a steering committee being formed and a number of ideas as to how his legacy will be honoured. It’s only early days for that but we certainly need to acknowledge the legacy of William Cooper in his own country and in front of his own people.

Q: Why is it important that William Cooper be honoured in Australia and elsewhere? A: Here in Australia we seem to be a leader in multicultural and immigration policies. We have a very multicultural society and William was an ambassador for that as well. Bringing people from different walks of life together, he was a leader in that field. To have something to honour William’s legacy which reflects that – which is what Australia promotes itself as being – would be quite fitting and in tune with what William stood for, with that human element of everyone having equal opportunities and the right to equal citizenship, access to health, education and work opportunities.

Q: And these, I guess, are universal values that could be promoted elsewhere? A: The message is the same and can certainly be adopted at an international level. Many of William’s messages could be used to make the world a better place and a safer place for us all.

Excerpt:

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MELBOURNE, Australia, Nov 23 2010 (IPS)

Mohsen Soltany Zand knows life inside Australia’s immigration detention system. Now an Australian citizen, Zand sought political asylum here after fleeing Iran in the late 1990s.

He was held by Australian authorities in several detention facilities between 1999 and 2003. “My experience was unbelievable. (I suffered) a lot of mental damage and many shocking things (happened). It was absolutely like hell,” he says.

The most difficult aspect of his detention was the lack of certainty regarding his fate. “You don’t know if you’re going to be deported, you don’t know what will happen in your future. You don’t know how long you have to be there, you don’t know anything,” Zand told IPS.

He remains in contact with a group of about 20 Iranian and Kurdish asylum seekers currently held at the Villawood detention centre in Sydney, where Zand also spent two of his four years of detention. The detainees are struggling mentally with “very high levels of stress and anxiety,” he says.

Villawood hit the headlines recently after 41-year-old Iraqi man, Ahmad Al-Akabi, committed suicide there on Nov.16. Al-Akabi had reportedly had several claims for asylum rejected.

His death followed the suicide, also at Villawood, of Fijian national Josefa Rauluni, 36, in September.

Tragically, these deaths are not isolated incidents.

In October, the Australian Broadcasting Corp quoted an unnamed “whistleblower” as saying that suicide attempts had taken place at a detention centre in the northern city of Darwin.

In early November, Amnesty International Australia reported that “incidents of self-harm and suicide attempts were visibly on the rise” at the detention centre on Christmas Island, a remote Australian territory in the Indian Ocean, compared with previous visits there by the organisation.

Around 10 detainees on the island sewed their lips together in protest following Al-Akabi’s death, and there have also been reports of hunger strikes.

Figures provided to IPS by the Australian government’s Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) also show an increase in detainee self-harm.

From Jul.1 to Sep. 20, 2010, 25 incidents of self-harm among those held in immigration detention occurred. This compares to 39 recorded self-harm incidents between Jul.1, 2009 and Jun. 30, 2010 and 10 in the 12 months to Jun. 30, 2009.

DIAC insists that many detainees arrive in Australia with pre-existing mental health issues and maintains that asylum seekers are provided with access to mental health care while in detention.

But detainee numbers have exploded in 2010, making for crowded facilities and inhibiting the ability of the system, including mental health services, to cope.

As of Oct.15, the most recent date for which statistics are available, more than 5,300 people were held in Australia’s immigration facilities, about 96 percent of whom arrived by boat. More than 2,200 are Afghani, while there are also substantial numbers from Iran, Sri Lanka, Iraq and Indonesia.

To ease the pressure, several new centres have been opened. The government of Prime Minister Julia Gillard has also had talks with neighbouring countries, including East Timor, Indonesia and Malaysia, about establishing an offshore Australian detention facility.

Refugee advocates blame the government’s policy of mandatorily detaining all “unauthorised arrivals” for exacerbating the mental anguish of people seeking refuge in Australia.

Ian Rintoul, spokesman for the Refugee Action Coalition, describes immigration detention centres as “factories of mental illness” where asylum seekers can languish for years without having their claims for refuge resolved.

He says that three Tamil asylum seekers have been held at Villawood for 18 months and that one man has been there for four years.

“Unlike a prison sentence there is no set date for when there is going to be a definite answer and this just creates tremendous mental anxiety,” says Rintoul.

Australia’s mandatory immigration detention system was introduced in 1992 and has been backed by the country’s major political parties – the centre-left Australian Labor Party (ALP) and the conservative liberal-national coalition.

The coalition, under former Prime Minister John Howard, held power from 1996 to 2007 and was widely criticised for what many here viewed as its particularly harsh treatment of asylum seekers.

The ALP, which has governed since its 2007 election victory, was believed to have a more lenient attitude towards refugees. It ended the Howard government’s ‘Pacific Solution’ – whereby asylum seekers were held in detention centres in Nauru and on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island – and introduced reforms to mandatory detention policy.

These reforms were designed to minimise the time that asylum seekers were held in immigration centres and included only detaining asylum seekers while they underwent health, identity and security checks; placing the onus on the government to justify a person’s continuing detention; and bringing an end to the practice of detaining children.

But the government has since introduced what advocates have labelled the ‘Indian Ocean Solution’ by establishing detention facilities on Christmas Island. Children also continue to be detained – although in October, immigration minister Chris Bowen committed to moving hundreds of children into “community-based accommodation” by June 2011 – and people still remain in immigration detention for prolonged periods of time.

Mohsen Soltany Zand, the former detainee who, in August, released a collection of poems about his time in immigration detention titled ‘Inside Out’, understands why those in detention are losing hope.

“When you go to bed, you don’t know what will happen tomorrow. When you wake up, you don’t know what will happen today, whether you’ll be alive at the end of the day,” he says.

Excerpt:

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MELBOURNE, Australia, Nov 17 2010 (IPS)

Environmentalists here are on the verge of a significant victory in their efforts to reduce Australia’s greenhouse gas pollution, as the Victorian state government negotiates with the owner of the country’s “dirtiest power station” to shut down the coal-fired facility.

Protestors call for the entire Hazelwood power station to be shut down. Credit: Stephen de Tarczynski/IPS

The 1600-megawatt Hazelwood power station, located 150 kilometres east of the state capital, Melbourne, produces up to a quarter of Victoria state’s electricity requirements.

An information war kicked off between environmentalists and the plant’s owner, International Power, following a 2005 report by conservation group World Wildlife Fund that ranked Hazelwood the largest carbon dioxide-emitting power station in the industrialised world.

Campaigners now say that Hazelwood is Australia’s “dirtiest” power plant, producing in excess of 16 million tonnes of greenhouse gas pollution each year. Additionally, they argue the plant is a massive user of water – some 27 billion litres per year – and is the country’s single biggest emitter of dioxin.

The campaigners say that Hazelwood, first commissioned in 1959, has become outdated and needs to be replaced with renewable energy technology.

International Power, for its part, argues that the WWF study was “highly biased” and that “Hazelwood is well down the list of the world’s CO2 emitting power plants.” It also rejects claims that the plant is the most polluting in Australia.

The company, whose global operations outside Australia include power plants in Pakistan, Thailand and Indonesia in addition to interests in North America, Europe and the Middle East, argues that Hazelwood’s actual water usage is less than half of that claimed by environmentalists and also denies that the plant emits dangerous pollutants.

International Power purchased the previously state-owned Hazelwood for 2.35 billion Australian dollars (2.3 billion U.S. dollars) in 1996 with a 40-year life. The company admits that the plant releases large volumes of carbon dioxide – 13 percent of Victoria’s emissions, equating to three percent of Australia’s total – but it dismisses claims by green groups that Hazelwood was due to close in 2005 and was only saved by an extension to its lease.

Instead, the company points to a government-approved environmental impacts statement which, in 2005, allowed International Power to move a road and the course of a river in order to access brown coal reserves at Hazelwood in return for a 445-million tonne cap on the plant’s total greenhouse gas emissions.

But with the Victorian government now in preliminary negotiations with Hazelwood’s owner to shut down a quarter of the plant by 2014 as part of a process to close the entire power station in stages, environmentalists are on the verge of a big win.

Walker told IPS that he is surprised at the campaign’s seemingly rapid growth. “Just over a year ago, I really think this wasn’t on the agenda of the state government and they have come a very long way,” he says.

The Victorian government, led by Premier John Brumby, has committed to reducing the state’s greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent, based on 2000 emission levels, over the next decade.

While Brumby has sought federal financial backing in order to compensate International Power for closing Hazelwood, the Premier says that his government will act “on our own” if no assistance is forthcoming.

International Power also appears ready to step back from its investment. The company submitted a plan to the federal government in 2008 in which it outlined a phased closure of Australia’s older coal-fired power stations over a 10-year period “in return for a tariff that reflected the market value of the asset and reflected the equity invested by the owners.”

Company spokesman Trevor Rowe says that “nothing has changed” in International Power’s position since this submission was made.

While media reports here have suggested that the payout to International Power will be hundreds of millions of dollars, Rowe refused to discuss with IPS the amount of compensation that the company is seeking.

Regardless of the dollar amount that is ultimately paid to International Power, environmentalists are keen to make the most of the situation.

“It would represent the first coal-fired power generation that’s been turned off in Australia for climate change reasons, so it would be a significant step forward,” says Mark Wakeham of Environment Victoria, one of a host of green non-governmental organisations campaigning for the closure of Hazelwood.

Wakeham, who was involved in early protests against the power station in 2005, has seen the campaign grow from actions by local campaigners and environmental groups to a movement that receives considerable media coverage on the back of widespread community concern about Australia’s greenhouse gas pollution.

“I think the Hazelwood campaign has very effectively told a clear story about what we need to do if we’re going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but also that it’s possible to do so in a very quick period of time,” he says.

The key to the campaign’s hitherto success has clearly been its ability to result in tangible outcomes.

“For all the talk on climate change over the last ten years, we haven’t had governments taking action to stop polluters polluting. Until that happens, emissions aren’t going to actually fall,” says Wakeham.

Excerpt:

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MELBOURNE, Australia, Oct 24 2010 (IPS)

Ken Wyatt stood, draped in a traditional kangaroo-skin shroud. In a voice wavering at times with emotion, the only indigenous Australian ever elected to this nation’s lower house of Parliament presented his inaugural address.

Referring to the landmark apology made to the members, families and communities of the ‘Stolen Generations’ by former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in February 2008 in the House of Representatives, the Aboriginal man of Noongar, Yamitji and Wonji heritage said that the apology had led him to “shed tears for my mother and her siblings.”

They, along with many others, were Stolen Generations members — those indigenous Australians forcibly removed from their families by the state and its agencies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Wyatt, who is preceded by two indigenous senators in the federal Parliament, said that Rudd’s widely welcomed words “would have meant a great deal” to his mother and her siblings had they been alive to hear them.

Explaining that he “felt a sense of relief that the pain of the past had been acknowledged and that the healing could begin” upon the apology being made, Wyatt noted that at the time “the standing orders (of Parliament) prevented an indigenous response.”

These rules meant that not until Wyatt’s first speech in Parliament on Sep. 29 – after he was elected in the August general election – did an indigenous person get to reply to the apology in either the same chamber in which Rudd spoke or in the Senate.

This would not have been the case if seats were reserved in Parliament specifically for indigenous Australians, a system currently being advocated by high-profile lawyer and activist Michael Mansell from the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre.

“If you’re going to have representative democracy it’s got to be real, not imagined. And the best way to do that is to allow Aboriginal people to elect our own people to represent us in the federal parliament,” Mansell told IPS.

The concept is not a new one. As far back as the 1930s, Aboriginal leader William Cooper petitioned King George V for indigenous representation in Australia’s Parliament and similar calls have continued to be made over the intervening decades.

While opponents of the proposal have always held sway in Australia, supporters point to other countries that have some form for indigenous representation in their legislatures as examples from which to learn, including New Zealand, Fiji, Malaysia, Norway and Canada.

Mansell is dismissive of the argument that establishing reserved indigenous seats in Australia’s parliaments would be too problematic. “Under the Australian Constitution, the Parliament can simply change the electoral laws,” he says.

The veteran campaigner for indigenous rights says that eight seats – one from each of Australia’s states and territories – could easily be set aside in the federal Senate for indigenous people. He is calling for three seats to be reserved for Aborigines in the next Tasmanian state Parliament.

“You can’t tell me that an all-white parliament, whether it be at the federal level or the state level, can possibly stand up with any credibility and say it represents all people in Australia. Because that means there are 500,000 Aborigines who are not represented,” says Mansell.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics’ estimates the country’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population at 517,000, some 2.6 percent of Australia’s total population, based on data collected in the 2006 census.

Currently, indigenous Australians are nominally represented by the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples (NCAFP). Established in May 2010 but still in its formative stages, the NCAFP “will create a national and collective voice, conduct research, be a partner for government and industry, (and) a think-tank for our issues and our peoples,” according to the Congress’ website.

The NCAFP is the successor organisation to two failed indigenous representative bodies, the National Indigenous Council and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, which were disbanded in 2008 and 2005, respectively.

Mansell describes these organisations as “just ‘Mickey Mouse’ bodies,” arguing that reserving parliamentary seats for indigenous Australians would provide “direct access to the decision-making process for Aboriginal people.”

Patrick Sullivan, a Canberra-based researcher with extensive experience working with Aboriginal organisations, particularly in Western Australia’s Kimberly region, supports the concept of reserving parliamentary seats for Indigenous Australians “in principle.”

He told IPS that with Aborigines being a widely disbursed minority, albeit with areas of significant concentration, “their electoral clout is small indeed.”

“The result of this is that Indigenous affairs policy is largely produced for non-Indigenous Australians. Because however the indigenous Australians feel about it, they’re unable to make those feelings felt through the ballot box,” argues Sullivan.

He regards the controversial Northern Territory Intervention as an example of this. Implemented under the conservative government of John Howard in 2007 ostensibly as a means to counter widespread child abuse in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory, the intervention has been dogged by criticism that it is a top-down measure imposed by Canberra without sufficient community consultation.

But while Sullivan believes that reserving parliamentary seats for indigenous Australians could play a part in bridging the divisions between indigenous people and the broader Australian society, he opines that significant difficulties remain in implementing such a measure.

“How does that person manage to be representative of the diversity of indigenous views, indigenous experiences, and indigenous histories and cultures throughout the country? I see that as the major problem of the proposal,” he says.

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By Stephen de Tarczynski
MELBOURNE, Australia, Oct 14 2010 (IPS)

As the Australian government steps up its efforts to establish a regional processing centre for asylum seekers in East Timor, refugee advocates remain watchful for signs that any deal could result in the involuntary removal from Australia of people seeking protection here.

Australia’s Immigration Minister Chris Bowen spent this week in East Timor, Indonesia and Malaysia, where he canvassed views on developing a regional approach to managing the continuing arrival of asylum seekers by boat in Australia and elsewhere in the region.

More than a hundred boatloads of asylum seekers have been intercepted by Australian authorities in 2010. Many asylum seekers are believed to have paid substantial amounts of money to people smugglers for the journey to Australian waters, often on crowded, rickety vessels.

“A (Regional Protection) Framework involving our regional partners is the most effective way to holistically address irregular migration in the region and to remove the incentive for people to undertake the dangerous sea voyages that put lives at risk,” said Bowen prior to departing Australia.

While the development of an overall framework for this regional approach by the government of Prime Minister Julia Gillard remains at a consultative stage, central to this idea is the establishment of an offshore regional processing centre to be funded by Canberra.

Although East Timor’s Parliament voted in July to reject Australia’s initial proposal for locating such a processing centre on the young nation’s soil, the Gillard government has insisted that interest in the idea remains among the upper echelons of power in Dili.

Addressing the media in the East Timorese capital after discussions with East Timor President José Ramos Horta on Oct.12, Bowen was upbeat. “There have been no points of disagreement between East Timor and Australia on this issue. The President and I had a very constructive discussion,” he said.

Officials from Australia and East Timor will meet in a month’s time to continue developing the idea, with the aim of putting a final proposal to both governments in early 2011.

While negotiations are at an early stage and details of the proposed processing facility are yet to be thrashed out, Australian refugee advocates are keeping a watchful eye on proceedings.

Kate Gauthier from the Refugee Council of Australia, the umbrella body representing some 130 refugee and asylum seeker organisations here, says that a regional approach could be a positive step if it develops a “system that really creates alternative protection options for people that doesn’t require them to go through people smugglers.”

Yet she also remains wary that establishing a holding and processing centre in East Timor could signal a return to similar policies of the past. “If what they’re really doing is simply setting up an alternative to the Pacific Solution where we are just sending people back there as a way of diverting them from Australia, that’s an incredibly negative step,” Gauthier told IPS.

The so-called ‘Pacific Solution’ was introduced by the conservative government of John Howard in 2001 as a deterrent to people seeking to arrive in Australia by boat. Under the policy, asylum seekers apprehended outside Australia’s migration zone were sent to detention centres in Nauru and on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island.

The policy was scrapped under the leadership of former prime minister Kevin Rudd after the Australian Labor Party swept to power with victory in the 2007 election. But the arrival by boat and subsequent treatment of asylum seekers remains a hot political issue in Australia.

Advocates have long held the view that clamour by the Labor Party and the conservative opposition – as both major parties attempt to outdo each other on “tough” border protection policies – is out of proportion to the number of people seeking refuge in Australia.

Statistics from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees show that Australia received 6,206 new claims for asylum out of a worldwide figure of 1.18 million in 2009. This equates to just 0.5 percent, with Australia ranking 33rd in terms of total number of asylum applications in that year.

Regardless of the relatively small number of asylum claims made in Australia, the mandatory detention of asylum seekers, the incarceration of children and the continuing use of a processing centre on the remote Australian territory of Christmas Island – located in the Indian Ocean some 2,600 kilometres north-west of Perth, the capital of Western Australia state – are among ongoing concerns for many Australians sympathetic to the plight of asylum seekers.

The idea that the proposed facility in East Timor could result in Australia once again sending asylum seekers to another country to await the processing of their asylum claims would be “inherently unlawful,” according to Amnesty International Australia’s Dr Graham Thom, the organisation’s refugee campaign coordinator.

The involuntary transfer to a third country once people have already entered Australia’s jurisdiction “contravenes the intent and purpose of the right to seek asylum set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the protection regime established by the Refugee Convention,” Thom blogged in an entry dated Oct.13.

Australia was one of eight nations involved in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 and is party to the U.N. Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. The refugee convention, as it is widely known, is the key legal document for determining who qualifies as a refugee, their rights and the legal obligations of states.

Excerpt:

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MELBOURNE, Australia, Oct 4 2010 (IPS)

Proponents of renewable energy say that a planned large-scale solar power plant in Australia’s northern Victoria state, which will produce enough output to provide electricity to 60,000 homes, is just a fraction of what could be achieved if federal and state governments were fully committed to harnessing solar energy.

The proposed 180-megawatt Mallee Solar Park power station, to be built near the town of Mildura – some 550 kilometres northwest of Melbourne – will become the largest of its kind in Australia upon its anticipated completion date in 2015.

Belonging to TRUenergy, one of Australia’s largest energy companies, the project recently received the financial backing of the Victorian Government, which committed 100 million Australian dollars (96.6 million U.S. dollars) in late September to the Mallee Solar Park.

“Together with Victorians, we are rising to the challenge of climate change by driving new initiatives to cut emissions and create a cleaner, greener future for Victorian families,” state premier John Brumby said on Sep. 21.

Solar generated electricity, along with other renewable sources like wind and hydro, is increasingly being viewed as a potential major power generator as countries around the world look to transition to low-carbon economies.

But even with the state government’s financial support, TRUenergy still requires federal dollars to proceed. “The eventuality of the Mallee Solar Park project is only feasible with the support of both the state and federal governments,” says Richard McIndoe, TRUenergy’s managing director.

The Mallee Solar Park, which will use solar photovoltaic technology, has been shortlisted alongside three other prospective solar photovoltaic power stations and four solar thermal projects for financial backing as part of the federal government’s 1.5 billion Australian dollar (1.45 billion U.S. dollar) Solar Flagships Programme (SFP).

Photovoltaic plants convert the sun’s radiation directly into electricity, while solar thermal technology generates electricity by using steam from solar-heated water to drive a turbine.

Under the SFP, one solar photovoltaic project and one proposed solar thermal plant will be selected to receive federal funding, with the recipients to be announced in the first half of 2011.

The SFP is a section of the federal government’s Clean Energy Initiative, a 5.1 billion Australian dollar (4.92 billion U.S. dollar) programme that also includes funds for other renewable and “clean coal” technologies.

In total, 52 proposals were entered for SFP funding. Tony Mohr, from the Australian Conservation Foundation, told IPS that this represents an “astounding response” to the programme, which he argues should be expanded in order to realise Australia’s potential to generate solar power.

“Australia has much more abundant solar energy than pretty much any other developed country or continent,” says Mohr.

“Germany is a world leader in solar power but it has half as much sun per square metre as Australia,” he adds.

Solar energy remains a largely untapped resource in Australia. According to the Australian Energy Resource Assessment, solar energy accounts for only 0.1 percent of total primary energy consumption here as well as globally.

And solar power is in direct competition with coal- generated electricity.

Australia has an estimated nine percent of the world’s total coal reserves and is the largest exporter of coal, feeding demand for coal-fired power stations in China, India and other developing countries.

Despite the burning of coal resulting in large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions, three quarters of Australia’s electricity is also sourced from coal.

Environmentalists argue that political will, rather than technological feasibility and cost, is the key obstacle in overcoming Australia’s reliance on coal.

For the Victorian Government, backing the Mallee Solar Park project is part of its action plan – contained in its Climate Change White Paper, released in July – to tackle greenhouse gas emissions in Victoria, which it has committed to cutting by at least 20 percent by 2020.

The Brumby government also intends to support the development of between five and 10 large-scale solar power stations in Victoria over the next decade in order to reach its target of solar generated electricity accounting for five percent of the state’s output by 2020.

Mark Wakeham, campaigns director for local green organisation Environment Victoria, describes the state’s target as “really encouraging for large-scale solar” but is highly critical of plans for a new coal-fired power station to be built in Victoria.

The state’s Environment Protection Agency (EPA) has received a works approval application from Dual Gas, a subsidiary of the Australian-owned energy company HRL, for a 600-megawatt plant in the Latrobe Valley east of Melbourne.

While China National Electrical Corp, a state-owned Chinese company, has already signed on to build the proposed plant, Wakeham wants both the EPA and the Brumby government to block the development.

“Building a polluting coal-fired power station that’s going to operate until 2040 or 2050 is madness and should not be approved,” he told IPS.

Besides being “inconsistent” with the state’s emissions reduction target, the project “would be inconsistent with the Climate Change White Paper which started to map out a pathway for cleaning up Victoria’s energy supply, including a plan to replace one quarter of Hazelwood (power station),” said Wakeham.

The coal-fired Hazelwood Power Station, also located in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley, provides up to 25 percent of the state’s electricity. The plant’s owner, International Power Australia, rejects claims by environmentalists that it is Australia’s dirtiest power plant.

But activists from the Switch Off Hazelwood protest group are adamant that it be shut down, with a rally outside the plant’s gates planned for the International Day of Climate Action on Oct. 10.

Excerpt:

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MELBOURNE, Australia, Aug 10 2010 (IPS)

Late on a hot summer morning in January 2008, 46-year-old Aboriginal elder Mr Ward climbed into the back of a prisoner transport van for the 360- kilometre, four-hour journey from the small Western Australian goldfields town of Laverton to Kalgoorlie, a larger mining centre, where he was due in court to face drink driving charges.

But Ward, whose full name cannot be used for cultural reasons, never made it.

Instead, with outside temperatures that day topping 40 degrees Celsius and the airconditioning unit not working inside the stifling enclosed section of the van in which Ward was being transported, he collapsed and was taken directly to Kalgoorlie Regional Hospital, where he was pronounced dead after efforts to revive him failed.

A post-mortem examination found that Ward died of heatstroke, which Western Australian state coroner Alistair Hope last year concluded was “a result of being held in the rear pod of the (prisoner transport) vehicle in conditions of grossly excessive heat.”

But no criminal charges will be laid despite Hope’s finding that the state’s Department of Corrective Services and GSL – the company that was contracted to provide custodial services in Western Australia and that has since changed its name to G4S – as well as the two GSL transportation officers all contributed to Ward’s death.

The western state’s Director of Public Prosecutions Joe McGrath considered the case but in June reported that “there was no reasonable prospect for conviction” of anyone involved.

To compensate Ward’s family, the state government announced on Jul. 29 that it would be making ex-gratia payments totalling 3.2 million Australian dollars (2.96 million U.S. dollars) to his widow Nancy and their children.

While the state’s voluntary payment has been welcomed, there remains a strong sense here that those responsible for Ward’s death have escaped justice.

“Financial compensation is not unimportant in such circumstances, but it is no substitute for justice and the systemic review and reform that should flow from the proper application of justice,” wrote federal Member of Parliament Melissa Parke on the social media website wangle.com.au, two days before the ex-gratia payment offer was made public.

“No amount of money can ever compensate for the enormous loss suffered by Mr Ward’s family and community,” added Dennis Eggington, chief executive officer of the Aboriginal Legal Service of Western Australia (ALSWA). Ward, whose talents included hunting, land care and art, was a highly respected elder within his community at Warburton, located south of the Gibson Desert in Western Australia.

He was also a leader and activist, having battled for his people’s rights within the Gibson Desert Nature Reserve for years and representing the Ngaanyatjarra cultural group’s lands in Australia and overseas, including as part of a delegation to China.

The ALSWA will consult with Ward’s family about possible civil proceedings against the government and G4S, while WorkSafe WA, the state’s work safety watchdog, has until January 2011 to investigate and decide whether to lay civil charges.

The ALSWA is also calling on G4S to match the government’s compensation payment, although such a voluntary response appears unlikely, at least for now. A company spokesperson told IPS that while G4S accepts responsibility for its part in Ward’s death, the issue of whether it will also be making an ex- gratia payment “hasn’t been discussed.”

Marc Newhouse, chair of the Deaths in Custody Watch Committee (DICWC) of Western Australia, said that despite the government’s payout, Ward’s family is “still angry and adamant that…there should be some form of justice.”

The DICWC was established in 1993 by a range of organisations and individuals including church groups, unions, lawyers and Aboriginal organisations to monitor the implementation of the 339 recommendations stemming from the 1987-1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.

The Commission was set up in response to concerns regarding the high number of indigenous deaths in custody, with exactly 100 indigenous Australians dying prematurely while incarcerated from the beginning of 1980 to the end of May 1989.

The commissioners found that the deaths of indigenous inmates were roughly proportionate to their over-representation in Australia’s prison population.

Newhouse says that one of the key recommendations of the Royal Commission “was that imprisonment should be used as a last resort and that’s clearly not the case under this state government and previous Labor (Party) governments.”

In his report, Coroner Hope noted several procedural errors after Ward was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol, including the way in which he was refused bail and the fact that bail was not considered as an option.

“One of the most disturbing issues to come out of the death of Mr Ward is how the litany of errors that occurred highlights how the system operates in ways that result in unequal outcomes for Aboriginal people who come into contact with the justice system,” Newhouse told IPS.

While an inquiry into the transportation of detainees, prompted by Ward’s death, is before the Western Australian parliament, Newhouse wants “an independent public inquiry into systemic racism in the administration of the justice system” to be established.

Aboriginal people “simply don’t have confidence or faith in how the current system works,” he said.

The controversy surrounding Ward’s death comes at the same time as fallout continues from the 2004 death in a Queensland state police cell of Aboriginal man Mulrunji Doomadgee.

Excerpt:

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MELBOURNE, Australia, Jul 29 2010 (IPS)

In early July, whales from the world’s largest population of humpbacks began arriving in the warm, subtropical waters off Australia’s north-west coast to breed and nurse their young.

From May each year, some 22,000 humpbacks make the pilgrimage up Australia’s west coast from their Antarctic feeding grounds before beginning the return journey in September.

The whales, which usually grow to between 12 and 16 metres when mature, constitute just a tiny fraction of the wide variety of life supported by Australia’s marine ecosystem, considered to be the most biologically diverse on the planet.

But in recent months, environmentalists around Australia have been expressing concern that the marine environment is largely unprotected from threats like overfishing and the exploration and production of oil and gas.

While the government of Prime Minister Julia Gillard is aiming to have a system of marine reserves in place by 2012, less than five percent of Australia’s Exclusive Economic Zone is currently protected.

For the Aug. 21 general election, green groups are calling on the two major parties, Gillard’s Australian Labor Party and the conservative opposition coalition, to commit to establishing an extensive network of large marine parks immediately in order to safeguard the humpback whales’ breeding grounds and other important marine environments.

“Numerous scientific and economic reports have demonstrated that a network of marine sanctuaries will protect marine life, help to make fisheries sustainable and bring long-term economic benefits,” said Piers Verstegen, director of the Conservation Council of Western Australia (CCWA), the state’s peak environment organisation, on Jul.17.

In October 2009, Western Australia’s leader, Premier Colin Barnett, announced that his state government intended to declare the humpbacks’ breeding area “a (protected) marine park”. But action has yet to be taken on this.

“There has been delay after delay and everything we are hearing is that protective measures within the park are being watered down,” said the Wilderness Society’s Peter Robertson.

“There is every indication that commercial fishing will continue throughout the marine park, putting marine life at risk,” he added.

Of additional concern to environmental groups is the federal government’s continued release of offshore areas for oil and gas exploration. In May, Minister for Resources and Energy Martin Ferguson announced the release of 31 marine areas across five submarine basins for petroleum exploration.

Twenty-six of these areas are in waters off Western Australia.

“These are primarily in deep water and as we’ve seen in the Gulf of Mexico, the industry is completely ill-equipped to deal with deepwater oil spills and oil blowouts,” the CCWA’s Tim Nicol told IPS.

Described by U.S. President Barack Obama as an “unprecedented” environmental disaster, an April explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig – owned by oil giant British Petroleum – in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 people and led to the uncontrolled leaking of millions of barrels of oil into the sea.

While the flow of oil appears to have been halted, concerns remain over the short and long-term environmental consequences of the massive spill.

Australia has not been without its own spills. Following a blowout at the Montara wellhead platform in the Timor Sea off Western Australia’s northern coast in August 2009, oil and gas leaked for some 74 days before being plugged.

The Australian Greens party and World Wildlife Fund- Australia say the spill was worse than the government has hitherto admitted.

Martin Ferguson, the resources minister, commissioned an inquiry into the incident – the report of which he received on Jun.18 – but remains tight-lipped on the subject. A ministerial official contacted by IPS would give no indication as to when the report will be publicly released.

One of the zones made available for exploration is located at the Mentelle Basin off Western Australia’s south- west coast, some 70 kilometres from Margaret River, which boasts clear water and pristine beaches. The Margaret River region, a few hours’ drive south of the state capital Perth, is also a renowned wine-growing region.

Environmentalists warn that any oil or gas leaks in the Mentelle Basin would likely have a disastrous effect on the local economy, similar to what has occurred along areas of the United States’ coast.

And like the Gulf of Mexico spill, local marine life would also suffer. The Mentelle Basin is in “an area of important deepwater habitat,” according to Nicol. “It’s the area where the southern right whales and humpback whales and even blue whales migrate through every year.”

But the government has so far rejected calls for a moratorium on the release of acreage for petroleum exploration. Ferguson said that stopping the process would “do nothing to improve industry safety.”

“All petroleum exploration and development activities are subject to stringent environmental standards, approvals and reporting requirements set out in petroleum-specific environmental legislation,” said the minister when the acreage release was announced.

Ferguson has also linked oil and gas exploration to Australia’s energy security, a point supported by the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association (APPEA), the industry’s peak representative body.

“Australia’s oil production peaked ten years ago. From meeting nearly 100 percent of Australia’s needs in 2000, we have fallen (to) just over 55 percent in 2010. And without major new discoveries, it’s anticipated to be just 32 percent by 2017,” said APPEA’s chief executive Belinda Robinson.

Excerpt:

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MELBOURNE, Australia, Jul 12 2010 (IPS)

The high-profile case of an accused Australian paedophile in India and the recent arrest of an Australian man on child sex charges in Thailand represent just the “tip of the iceberg” when it comes to Australians involved in child sex tourism in the Asia-Pacific, children’s rights advocates here say.

“The ones that we hear about are the unlucky ones, the ones that get caught,” says Bernadette McMenamin, chief executive officer of the child protection agency Child Wise, the Australian chapter of End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography, and the Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes (ECPAT) International.

One of those “unlucky” people is Paul Henry Dean, who fled Australia in 1976 on a false passport after allegedly embezzling funds from the travel company where he worked. He is accused of sexually abusing young men and boys in India, where he has lived and worked with charities for three decades, posing variously as a priest and a doctor.

Although not a tourist, Dean falls under most definitions of a child sex tourist, which generally refers to people who sexually abuse children while in a foreign country. The term ‘child sex tourism’ not only includes tourists but businessmen, expatriates and other travellers as well.

Dean was initially charged in 2001 and faced similar charges in 2008. Although nine years have passed since he was first arrested, his trial has still yet to be concluded. Dean remains free on bail and on Jul. 9, the trial was again delayed. Up to now, none of his alleged victims have testified against Dean in court.

In what is a rare move for Child Wise, McMenamin is calling for Dean to be extradited from India because “in this case we feel that he would be better prosecuted in Australia.”

According to McMenamin, Australians and others in Dean’s situation can use money to avoid facing justice. “They just pay the kids. They pay off the families, they pay off the police,” she says.

Another Australian facing child sex charges in Asia is 90-year-old Karl Joseph Kraus. Arrested on Jun. 29, German-born Kraus is alleged to have raped four sisters – believed to have been aged between five and 13 when the abuse began – at his home near the city of Chiang Mai in northern Thailand.

Giorgio Berardi, the programme officer for combating child sex tourism with ECPAT International in Bangkok, told IPS that Thailand has been unable to shake “the unenviable label of a haven for child sex.”

He argues that although Thailand has the legislation to crack down on child sex tourists, these laws not being enforced. But this is just one factor in understanding and tackling what is “an extremely complex phenomenon,” says Berardi.

The ECPAT International officer singles out Cambodia from the likes of Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines, as a country that has taken action to curb the problem. “Over the last few years, arrests and trials in the Khmer kingdom have exceeded those in any of the other countries,” says Berardi.

The cases of Dean and Kraus are far from isolated incidents of Australians accused of sexual crimes against children in Asia.

A report titled ‘International Sex Tourism’ released in 2007 by the Protection Project, a human rights research institute at the Johns Hopkins University in the United States, documented Australians who had been arrested on child sex charges in Cambodia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.

Australian child sex tourists figured prominently in the cases outlined in the report, as did nationals of the United States, Germany and Britain.

Largely due to cases of sexual abuse only coming to public attention when a complaint has been made by a victim or an alleged perpetrator has been arrested, data regarding the extent of child sex tourism remains scarce. However, McMenamin describes the scope of the problem as “huge.”

Fuelled by demand and often facilitated by factors such as organised crime, corruption, underdevelopment and poverty, child sex tourism is clearly not going away any time soon. Some two million children worldwide estimated to fall victim to paedophiles yearly, according to advocates’ estimates.

In an effort to reduce the number of Australians involved in child sex tourism, the federal parliament here amended a child sex offences law in April. The new legislation increases the penalties for crimes related to child sex tourism to a maximum of 25 years in jail for child sex offences committed overseas.

Additionally, the amendments introduce new offences related to preparing to sexually exploit children outside Australia, with those convicted facing up to 10 years in jail. New penalties relating to child pornography also came into force, with up to 25 years in prison for those engaging in such activity.

“The sexual abuse of children is abhorrent and we’re doing all we can to stop it from happening and punish those who commit these sickening offences,” said Home Affairs Minister Brendan O’Connor on Jun. 29.

The minister was speaking at the launch of a campaign to make Australian travellers aware that the new laws are in place. Signs at Australian international airports, advertisements in newspapers, information brochures and even an online word search have been employed by authorities to warn the public.

McMenamin welcomes the changes to the child sex offences legislation and the advertising campaign, both of which Child Wise lobbied for. “These laws have been amended because of reality, because of people who have escaped justice,” she says.

Excerpt:

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MELBOURNE, Jun 28 2010 (IPS)

Australia’s newly appointed prime minister, Julia Gillard, has hardly warmed her seat, yet she has already been urged to take action on climate change.

“We call on Prime Minister-elect Gillard to make good on her party’s promise to take the threat posed by climate change seriously,” said Dr Linda Selvey, chief executive officer of Greenpeace Australia Pacific, last week after Gillard replaced Kevin Rudd as Australia’s prime minister.

Gilliard, who was sworn in Australia’s 27th prime minister on Jun. 24, is the first woman to hold this country’s highest political office.

The parliamentary members of the governing Australian Labor Party (ALP) last week lost confidence in Rudd’s ability to lead the ALP to consecutive election wins after a disastrous few months and elevated 48-year-old Gillard, Rudd’s former deputy, to the top job.

Despite riding high in opinion polls conducted in the first two years of his term, Rudd’s popularity had shrunk considerably in recent months.

While part of this slide can be attributed to policy blunders, including the failure to counter the conservative Opposition’s claims that the Rudd government was soft on border security and the recent battle with mining companies over increased taxation, Rudd’s perceived inability to match action with his own rhetoric on climate change was a decisive factor in his downfall.

Rudd, who famously dubbed climate change as “the great moral challenge of our generation,” led the ALP to victory in the 2007 election partly as a result of perceptions that he had better policies on climate change and the environment than the then incumbent John Howard.

But while Rudd was widely applauded for immediately taking steps to ratify the Kyoto Protocol – under which countries committed to reductions in greenhouse gases (GhG) and which Howard had refused to back – his government was heavily criticised when it announced in December 2008 that its target for 2020 was just a five to 15 percent reduction in GhG emissions on 2000 levels.

This was even less than the cut of between 10 and 25 percent that had earlier been recommended by Prof Ross Garnaut, the Rudd government’s chief climate change advisor, and which had also been slammed.

But things went from bad to worse for Rudd, who had been banking on an emissions trading scheme (ETS) to deliver the 2020 reduction target.

Also known as a cap-and-trade system, an ETS puts a price on carbon emissions to encourage major polluters to reduce their emissions.

The ETS legislation failed on three occasions to make it through parliament, with the Opposition and the minor Australian Greens Party both against the scheme, albeit for quite different reasons.

The Opposition was divided over climate change policies while the Greens regarded the ETS as too weak to be effective.

This led Rudd to delay the ETS, which he did in April, declaring that his government would not seek to implement the scheme again until after the current Kyoto commitment period concludes at the end of 2012.

“By the end of that period the governments around the world will be required to make clear their commitments for the post-2012 period. And that will provide, therefore, the Australian Government with a better position to assess the level of global action on climate change prior to the implementation of [an ETS],” said Rudd at the time.

For a prime minister who promoted himself as a genuine leader and who, last November, slammed suggestions that Australia should wait until after the Copenhagen climate conference before acting to reduce its GhG emissions as “absolute political cowardice” and a “failure of leadership,” such weak policies undermined his own image and added to growing disquiet among voters.

“The electorate felt betrayed by Kevin Rudd when he walked away from such a fundamental commitment. It is clear the government vastly underestimated the desire in the community for real action on climate change,” said Selvey.

That desire does seem genuine. According to a poll conducted in March and released earlier this month by the Lowy Institute, a Sydney-based think tank, 72 percent of respondents wanted Australia, among the world’s biggest carbon polluters per capita, to take action to reduce its GhG emissions even without a post-Kyoto global agreement in place.

And that is what the new prime minister, aiming to get a mandate on action from an election likely to be held within months, is now being implored to do.

“I congratulate Ms Gillard and urge her to lead an Australian shift from a pollution-dependent economy to a clean economy and a healthy environment,” said Don Henry, CEO of the Australian Conservation Foundation, a non-governmental community-based organisation.

Others, including representatives from the Investor Group on Climate Change, which represents investors concerned with the impact of global warming, and the Climate Institute, an independent research organisation, have also called on her to act.

For her part, Gillard has labelled climate change as a top priority of her government in a nationally broadcast media conference last week, along with refugees and reaching an agreement on the mining tax.

“If elected as prime minister [at the next election], I will re-prosecute the case for a carbon price at home and abroad,” said Gillard, who has also raised the possibility of introducing a carbon tax to promote renewable energy sources to reduce GhG emissions if no broad-based support for an ETS exists.

Whatever policies she makes on climate change, failure to match her words with action is likely to be as politically fatal to Gillard as it was to Rudd.

Excerpt:

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MELBOURNE, Jun 23 2010 (IPS)

The lack of debate here concerning Australia’s military involvement in Afghanistan is unlikely to change in the near future despite the recent deaths of five Australian Defence Force (ADF) personnel in the war-ravaged nation.

It's big news when Australian soldiers die in Afghanistan, but this country's involvement in the war-torn nation is otherwise rarely questioned. Credit: Stephen de Tarczynski/IPS

Their deaths bring the number of Australian losses in the long-running conflict to 16, with more than 100 injured.

Australia’s media have provided extensive coverage of the latest casualties, with the news dominating the front pages of the country’s daily newspapers as the stories broke.

But it is only when spikes in ADF losses occur that such coverage, including the questioning of Australia’s involvement in Afghanistan, is devoted to the war.

Australia is the leading non-NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) contributor to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) – which was established to secure long-term peace and stability in Afghanistan – with around 1,500 troops on the ground at any given time.

Yet with only a relatively small number of ADF deaths in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion, front-page headlines like “A Very High Price to Pay,” which Australia’s most widely read paper, ‘The Herald-Sun’, declared the day after the three commandos died, have been rare.

During the long periods where the ADF has not experienced fatal losses, the questioning of Australia’s war effort has been relatively muted. Only occasionally has the mainstream media raised the issue.

One writer that has consistently questioned Australia’s role in Afghanistan, as well as highlighting the lack of debate surrounding this country’s involvement in the war, is lawyer Kellie Tranter.

In an opinion piece published by ‘The Age’ newspaper in April, Tranter bemoaned the paucity of media debate in addition to similar silences in parliament and on the streets of Australian towns and cities.

In an interview with IPS, she says this general silence could be challenged by parliamentary debate.

“Parliamentary debate will generate media interest, and with media interest the public becomes more informed,” says Tranter, also a member of the advisory panel to Business and Professional Women International’s standing committee on the environment and sustainable development.

But there was no debate or green light from parliament when former prime minister John Howard announced Australia’s commitment to the U.S.-led coalition three days before the bombing of Afghanistan commenced on Oct. 7, 2001, and there has not been any since.

Under Australian law, parliamentary approval is not required for the government to deploy forces or declare war.

And with both the governing Australian Labor Party and conservative opposition supporting the military’s continuing deployment to Afghanistan, a formal debate does not appear likely any time soon.

However, there have been attempts, albeit unsuccessfully, by representatives of the small Australian Greens party to formally debate Australia’s role in Afghanistan in parliament.

As it stands, members of parliament wishing to express dissenting views have only occasional opportunities to do so, such as by responding to the infrequent ministerial statements of defence minister John Faulkner.

This is despite recent evidence showing that an increasing majority of Australians want the ADF out of Afghanistan.

A poll conducted in March and released in May by the Lowy Institute, a Sydney-based think tank, found that 54 percent of respondents want Australian forces withdrawn from Afghanistan, up from 46 percent in 2007.

A more recent survey, conducted by Essential Media Communications, a public affairs, research and social marketing firm, in the week to Jun. 21, showed that 60 percent believe the government should bring the troops home, up from 50 percent in March last year.

However, such opposition has not resulted in widespread, active protest, and Tranter is not surprised.

“On a personal level, I don’t know anyone who supports the war but I could count on one hand the number of people I know who are actually doing anything about it,” Tranter says.

Tranter believes that this is due to a “feeling of individual powerlessness, exacerbated by the 24-hour news cycle helping citizens digest, then forget, sanitised versions of human horrors; by the modern introverted psychology promoted by selfishness, advertising and lack of community; and most of all by the fact that the major parties join together to smother true debate.”

Tranter has also written of apathy being a factor in the lack of public protest, and as the war nears its nine-year mark, Australian authorities will be banking on both powerlessness and apathy among the public, much like their counterparts in other ISAF member nations.

A confidential memo from the United States’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) released by WikiLeaks, an organisation facilitating the anonymous leaking of information, reveals CIA concerns that increased fighting in Afghanistan could undermine the apathy that some NATO members, particularly Germany and France – the third and fourth largest contributors to ISAF – have relied upon to increase their troop levels in the country.

The memo, dated Mar. 11, also warns “that a spike in French or German casualties or in Afghan civilian casualties could become a tipping point in converting passive opposition into active calls for immediate withdrawal.”

For Australia, ISAF’s tenth biggest contributor, a similar situation prevails.

But the outcomes of inquiries into civilian casualties at the hands of ADF personnel and the imminent withdrawal of Dutch forces – to which most of the Australian deployment is attached – will only be factors in galvanising passive opposition here into widespread debate and protests if the ADF sustains continuing and increased personnel losses.

The Australian government is aware that such a casualty increase would further weaken its position, particularly as a general election approaches.

This week’s announcement by defence minister Faulkner that U.S. forces will take the leading role in Oruzgan when the Dutch contingent departs comes as no surprise.

Excerpt:

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MELBOURNE, Jun 7 2010 (IPS)

Geraldine Martin, Sara Stilianos, both 20, and Erin Murphy, 24, are like many young Australian women: bright, articulate, well presented, they have high hopes for their futures. Yet all three are homeless.

“A week after my 17th birthday, my Mum kicked me out of home,” says Geraldine.

After spending the following 18 months “drifting” around her home town of Adelaide, often sleeping on friends’ couches – couch surfing, as the practice is known in Australia – Geraldine moved to Melbourne where she has experienced periods of relative stability with employment and renting private property.

She has also stayed in two refuges for homeless young people and currently lives in government-supported transitional housing. However, Geraldine is required to move out of her current accommodation at the end of the year.

While she says both refuges “were really good,” Geraldine has since given birth to a baby girl and is eager to find private accommodation, no easy task in Australian cities where rents have exploded in recent years and competition for housing is high.

“I don’t want to take my baby to a refuge where I have no choice over who we live with,” Geraldine, who plans to become a youth worker and is currently undertaking high school-equivalent studies, explains to IPS.

Brett McDonnell, acting manager of Frontyard Youth Services – a one-stop shop tackling the physical, social and emotional needs of homeless or marginalised young people aged 12 to 25 in Melbourne – says that “a lot of Australians associate homelessness with the media stereotype of a middle- aged man with a flagon of wine covered in newspaper on a park bench.”

He argues that this perception of homelessness is misguided. “We don’t have a large, visible street-sleeping population [in Australia], for example, but we do have a lot of young people that couch surf. But the general population doesn’t think of that as being homeless.”

According to Homelessness Australia, the nation’s peak body addressing the issue, a person is homeless if he or she “does not have access to safe, secure, adequate housing.”

Despite Australia’s relative prosperity, some 105,000 people around the country are homeless on any given night.

A report released in April by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, a government agency, found that one in every 105 Australians sought support from a government-funded specialist homelessness agency in the 12 months to July 2009.

The most highly represented demographic was young women aged 15 to 19, with one in every 50 women in this age bracket accessing services such as meals and showers.

Such statistics do not come as a surprise to McDonnell. “I guess because of the volume of young people that we see here,” he explains.

The young women who arrive at Frontyard often have more complex experiences of homelessness, according to McDonnell. “I think it’s when you unpack some of their story that you realise that their experiences of homelessness have actually been going on for a lot longer than some of the young men,” he says.

For 24-year-old Erin Murphy, originally from Brisbane, homelessness has been a constant for years. She moved out of her mother’s house at 16 after their relationship broke down and currently resides at a backpackers’ hostel in Melbourne. Erin has stayed in various hostels and boarding houses as well as sleeping rough at times.

“It’s really hard when you’ve got nothing to actually get out of the cycle of having nothing,” she says. “Nobody is on the street because they want to be.”

Erin, who has forsaken custody of her three-year-old daughter while she seeks work and a place to call home, feels a sense of “guilt” that her daughter is growing up without her. But she says that her daughter is at least in a stable situation now.

“Kids pick up on the stress of not being able to know where we are going to stay on a particular night,” says Erin.

Sara Stilianos says being homeless is “so stressful” that it gives her chest and stomach pains. She has stayed at a friend’s house for the past three weeks but does not know how long the arrangement will last.

Prior to staying there, she lived at a different house for 11 days and at another address for a month before that. It is a pattern she has often experienced since leaving home at 15 following her mother’s nervous breakdown.

“I’ve been moving around for the last six years, all over. I went to Cairns, Adelaide, Sydney, all over Melbourne,” says Sara.

While her future plans include creating a shelter for young people “who have nowhere else to go on the exact night that they’re looking for housing” as well as getting a job and a secure home so that her infant daughter can live with her, Sara says she feels stuck at present.

“It feels like every time I have something to look forward to, there’s always something else that comes and ruins it,” she says.

When Sara has nowhere to go, she says that her options include staying with people she meets on Melbourne’s streets or going to the open-all-hours casino.

Erin concurs that some homeless young women will sleep with a stranger in order to get off the streets. “Women can always pick up a guy in a pub,” she says.

Excerpt:

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MELBOURNE, Australia, May 27 2010 (IPS)

At the beginning of 2011, Australian Aboriginal woman Megan Davis will join a select group of indigenous experts from around the world.

Aborigine Megan Davis has been elected to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Credit: Megan Davis

The UNPFII, whose advisory function is transmitted through the U.N.’s Economic and Social Council, is mandated to discuss a range of issues pertaining to the world’s 300 million-plus indigenous people, based on World Bank data. These include development, the environment, health, education, culture and human rights.

Davis, the director of the Indigenous Law Centre at the University of New South Wales, was elected to the 16-member UNPFII during April’s session of the Forum, along with the likes of Finland’s Eva Biaudet, the Congo’s Simon William M’Viboudoulou and Mirna Cunningham from Nicaragua. Their term runs until December 2013.

Members of the UNPFII are initially nominated by governments or by indigenous organisations and then must be elected to the Forum.

Davis, whose professional interests include indigenous peoples and democracy, women’s legal issues and international human rights law, is the first Aboriginal Australian to be nominated by the government for a United Nations role.

She spoke with IPS via telephone from Sydney.

Q: Firstly, congratulations on being elected to the UNPFII. What do you plan to bring to the Forum? A: I think one of the aspects of the Forum’s mandate that enables any one member to really bring their own expertise and interests to it is the third aspect of the mandate, which permits you to prepare and disseminate information on indigenous issues.

Under that aspect I would like to do more work around Aboriginal women and gender issues pertaining to violence as well other issues such as leadership opportunities that women have.

I think this is a great opportunity to be able to progress to an international level some of the work that I’ve already been doing on Aboriginal women in Australia.

Q: Is it significant that you’re the first Indigenous Australian woman to be elected to the Forum? A: I think what’s really important about that is that the federal government actually nominated a woman and nominated somebody on the basis of merit. I think that in Aboriginal affairs, Aboriginal women have been overlooked a lot, and I think there’s been a very recent, contemporary discussion in Aboriginal communities and broader communities about the way in which men dominate important leadership positions in Australia.

That was a really important development for the Australian Government to choose a woman to be nominated to this position, so to that extent it is [significant] because for young Aboriginal girls coming through, it’s important to have female role models in positions such as at the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.

There’s a lot of narrative in communities about Aboriginal women being leaders behind the scenes and leaders in communities, but I think Aboriginal women also need to be leading from the front as well and to hold positions of real power and real decision making roles.

Q: Do you see other indigenous peoples around the world also facing this issue? A: I think it’s a mainstream problem and we know that women aren’t well represented in many of our parliaments, both at federal and state levels across the country. And we know from a lot of the literature that it does occur in a lot of the western liberal democracies in the world.

If you have a look at the Aboriginal women’s literature, it’s very clear that there’s a paucity of Aboriginal women’s leadership in a lot of important decision making roles right around the world.

Q: How do we judge the efficacy of the Forum itself? How will work done at the Forum impact the everyday lives of the world’s indigenous people? A: I think that’s a really important question, and there are two things I’d say about the Forum. The first thing is that it is primarily an advisory body to the Economic and Social Council and if I was to be really cursory about what it does, then what it does is help the United Nations. Its mandate is totally focused at improving the way the United Nations, its programmes and agencies, deal with indigenous issues. The second aspect of its work is to raise awareness within the U.N. system, so really the bulk of the Forum’s work is intra-United Nations.

[The UNPFII] is not like the Working Group on Indigenous Populations – that no longer exists – that had really substantive impacts on Aboriginal people’s lives because ultimately its work led to the development of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

There was a clear domestic consequence of that kind of advocacy. I think you see it less with the Forum, and I think that it’s important that Aboriginal communities realise that but also that the Forum is honest too about what it can achieve within its limited mandate.

[But] I would like to aim some of the work squarely back at the international human rights committees and get some greater elaboration and direction on how Aboriginal people should be able to enjoy particular human rights within their own domestic states.

Excerpt:

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MELBOURNE, Australia, May 9 2010 (IPS)

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s Labor Party has made much of its plans to tackle climate change even before it came to power with victory in the country’s 2007 election.

Little wonder, then, that the government has faced heavy criticism following its decision to delay the introduction of its centrepiece emissions trading scheme (ETS) until at least 2013, a move which goes against the international trend for climate change policies. “What absolute political cowardice. What absolute failure of leadership….The inescapable logic of this approach is that if every nation makes the decision not to act until others have done so, then no nation will ever act,” trumpeted Rudd in November, responding to suggestions that Australia should wait until after last December’s climate change conference in Copenhagen before taking action to reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions.

But the man who famously dubbed climate change as “the great moral challenge of our generation” appears now to be contradicting himself.

Despite the government stating previously that it wanted the ETS operational this year, on Apr. 27 Rudd declared that the implementation of the scheme would not occur until after the current Kyoto commitment period concludes at the end of 2012.

The Kyoto Protocol was adopted in December 1997 at the meeting of the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Convention on Climate Change in Kyoto, Japan to fight global warning.

“By the end of that period the governments around the world will be required to make clear their commitments for the post-2012 period. And that will provide, therefore, the Australian Government with a better position to assess the level of global action on climate change prior to the implementation of a CPRS,” said the Prime Minister.

The Rudd government’s ETS – dubbed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) – is the central pillar in the government’s plan to achieve its stated 2020 target of a five to 15 percent reduction in emissions on 2000 levels.

Schemes like the CPRS place a price on carbon pollution to encourage major polluters to reduce emissions and are widely regarded as the most effective way to cap the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere.

Unsurprisingly, Rudd’s spectacular backflip in delaying the CPRS has elicited some heated responses.

“To put comprehensive climate action in the too-hard basket until 2013 would be bad for the environment, de-stabilising for business and totally unacceptable to the millions of Australians who want government leadership on climate change,” says Don Henry, executive director of the Australian Conservation Foundation.

GetUp, a progressive political movement claiming 350,000 members, was also vocal in its criticism. “Time and again, Kevin Rudd has betrayed the support Australians gave him last election. And yesterday, he broke faith with us,” said the organisation in an emailed newsletter on Apr. 28.

The government, for its part, says that it had little choice. Both Rudd and climate change minister Penny Wong have repeatedly pointed to what they call “political realities” to explain the delay of the CPRS.

The domestic “reality” is that the proposed legislation for the scheme has been blocked twice in the Senate since December by both the conservative opposition and the left-leaning Greens.

The opposition remains internally divided over its own climate change policies and will not support the bill, while the Greens argue that the CPRS was too weak to be effective.

“The CPRS, as it stood, would have locked Australia into a high-polluting future for years to come,” says Greens senator Christine Milne, urging the government to negotiate with her party to get the bill passed.

And that appears to be what Australians, ranked among the world’s worst carbon polluters on a per capita basis, want. According to results of a poll conducted by Galaxy Research, 72 percent of respondents want the government to work with the Greens, independents and other senators to ensure passage of the bill.

Some are also seeing the failure of the current legislation, which provided for large-scale support to emissions-intensive industries in the form of free carbon permits, as a positive.

“The wildly excessive compensation handouts to polluting industries made it an expensive solution while the appallingly low [emission reduction] targets and the ability of polluting industries to purchase unlimited international offsets would have made it largely ineffective in reducing Australia’s growing greenhouse gas pollution,” blogs Greenpeace Australia Pacific climate campaigner Paul Winn.

A report released Apr. 22 by the Grattan Institute, a public policy research organisation, slammed the support for emissions-intensive industries as a “$20 billion waste of taxpayers’ money.”

“The proposed free permits scheme should be recast. Rather than being ‘free’, the industry assistance will be very expensive,” says the institute’s chief executive officer John Daley.

But the government, which maintains that it remains committed to action on climate change, argues that it also took stock of the international “political reality” in deciding to delay the CPRS.

“International progress had been slower than we had hoped. The world will deal with this. The world is acting. Just not quite as fast as we would have hoped and our position reflects that reality,” says Minister Wong.

However, that version of reality is opposed by a report into global climate policy by the Climate Institute, a Sydney-based research outfit.

Released Apr. 30, the report found that some 154 new policy announcements have been made around the world since October 2009, the highest ever in a four-month period. Additionally, national pledges to tackle climate pollution have been made by more than 100 countries since the Copenhagen summit.

“Australia’s international climate credibility is teetering on the edges of ruin,” says Erwin Jackson, the institute’s deputy CEO.

Excerpt:

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MELBOURNE, May 3 2010 (IPS)

Sara Aboueid, 15, and Jamillah Noordin, 16, wear uniforms similar to countless numbers of footballers around the world.

A footballer in hijab is in action for the Brunswick Zebras team. Credit: Stephen de Tarczynski/IPS

Wearing the hijab, an Islamic headscarf which covers women’s hair and necks but not their faces, “means a lot because it is my religion and I can’t go against that. If I did take it off [to play football] I would be doing something wrong,” Aboueid, a goalkeeper for the Brunswick Zebras, a football club in inner-suburban Melbourne, tells IPS.

While both Aboueid and Noordin have always played football in the hijab without experiencing problems, controversy surrounding a footballer’s right to wear the religious headscarf continues to make headlines.

In 2007, an eleven-year-old girl was barred from playing football in Canada because of her hijab while most recently, the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA), the sport’s governing body, replaced the Iranian girls’ football team with Thailand for the upcoming Youth Olympic Games in Singapore.

FIFA’s ruling, made public in April, was that the hijab, which the Iranian players wear, contravenes players’ on-field equipment rules. According to law four of the international rule book, a player’s “equipment must not have any political, religious or personal statements.”

Under FIFA regulations, either the game’s governing body or the competition organiser can impose sanctions where breaches of this law occur.

Despite the Iranian Olympic Committee writing letters of protest to FIFA, the International Olympic Committee, the Olympic Council of Asia, the Association of National Olympic Committees and the Asian Football Confederation, the Iranian girls will not be joining some 3,600 athletes aged 14 to 18 at August’s inaugural youth Olympics in the island-state.

Noordin questions why wearing the hijab on a football field is problematic as “it does not give the team wearing the hijab an unfair advantage.”

Responding to FIFA’s implication that the hijab is a religious statement, the young Brunswick Zebras midfielder tells IPS that “this is my identity. And if that is a problem, then go to every soccer player with a tattoo of a cross on their body and tell them to remove it.”

“That is equal and that is the same and once that happens, we will accept that we can’t play with a hijab on,” adds Noordin.

In Australia, where football has taken great strides in popularity and participation levels of late, it remains unclear how the sport’s local authorities will react to FIFA’s banning of the hijab.

Australian football’s governing body, Football Federation Australia (FFA), has yet to reply to IPS despite several attempts to clarify the legality of the hijab being worn on football pitches here.

The sport’s governing bodies in Victoria and New South Wales (NSW), Australia’s two most populous states, have provided some information.

A spokesperson for Football Federation Victoria (FFV) tells IPS that players are permitted to wear the Islamic headscarf “on the proviso that the hijab is the same colour as the main colour of the playing shirt.”

While this response gives the all-clear – at least for now – for players in Victoria, where the Brunswick Zebras compete, local media has reported that Football NSW will follow the lead of the FFA.

But like Aboueid and Noordin, former player Afifa Saad opposes FIFA’s banning of the hijab.

“I think they need to re-visit the actual rule itself. You can’t stop people from participating. People have choices: If they want to wear the scarf, it’s their choice; if they want to play soccer, it’s their choice,” says Saad.

“Big bodies like FIFA shouldn’t be discouraging females from playing. Considering it’s a universal game, it’s played worldwide, what message are they sending?” she adds.

Saad, a Muslim of Lebanese background, began wearing the hijab at secondary school. While playing at an elite level for the South Melbourne football club in 2004, she was at the centre of a storm of controversy after a referee told her to remove her hijab.

Saad failed to comply with the referee’s demand. “That incident was an absolute shock,” she recalls. “Two minutes before kick-off, he actually told me that I couldn’t take part in the game.”

Despite receiving support from her teammates and opposition players, as well as explaining to the referee that the hijab “was a religious thing,” Saad was not allowed to take the field.

The FFV, then known as the Victorian Soccer Federation, later ruled that Saad had not been a victim of religious discrimination and that the referee had only wanted the player to wear a hijab of a similar colour to her team’s uniform.

This is not how Saad, who played variously as a forward, a midfielder and a goalkeeper, remembers the incident. The FFV “had to back him up. He didn’t want me to wear the scarf at all,” she says.

Now a physical education teacher, Saad intends to play indoor football following the birth of her child. But she will not play without wearing the hijab.

Saad argues that instead of being banned, hijab-wearing footballers should be an inspiration.

“A lot of people have the misconception, including Muslim women, that once you wear a scarf, you can’t do anything, that you can’t work or play sport. That’s a total myth. You can do whatever you want to, the sky’s the limit,” she says.

(ENDS/IPS/AP/CR/HD/DV/IP/WO/ST/TBB/10)

Excerpt:

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MELBOURNE, Apr 26 2010 (IPS)

Aboriginal landowners in Australia’s far north are battling government plans to construct this country’s long-term nuclear waste storage facility on their land.

Diane Stokes, an indigenous woman from the Warumungu and Warlmanpa tribes in the Northern Territory, is opposed to radioactive waste being dumped on her clan’s land at Muckaty Station, a former cattle station located some 200 kilometres north of the Territory town of Tennant Creek.

“We don’t want it to come to the Northern Territory. Nobody wants it there,” said Stokes at a public meeting held in the southern city of Melbourne on Apr. 21.

The question of what to do with Australia’s radioactive waste from the country’s medical, industrial, agricultural and research use of nuclear material has been ongoing for decades and remains far from resolved.

The waste is currently stored at numerous sites around the country. Some Australian radioactive waste is also stored in Scotland and France.

The current Kevin Rudd-led government, as well as the previous government under John Howard, have regarded these sites as temporary and have looked to develop a permanent facility at which to store the waste.

A bill presently before parliament rules out the possibility of using one of three previously nominated sites on Australian Defence Force land in the Northern Territory, effectively leaving Muckaty Station as the only potential site currently up for consideration.

While the Minister for Energy and Resources, Martin Ferguson, said that the bill “means that a site can no longer be automatically imposed on a community in any state or territory,” the proposed legislation also recognises the “voluntary” nomination of the Muckaty site made by Ngapa clan members in 2007.

The clan is one of several aboriginal family groups who are the traditional owners of land at Muckaty Station.

“We made our decision; we nominated our land because we wanted to make a better life for our children,” said Ngapa spokeswoman Amy Lauder at a senate hearing into the bill on Mar. 30.

Lauder and her kin are expected to receive upwards of $12 million Australian dollars (11.14 million U.S. dollars) as compensation for building the waste facility on their land.

“We are satisfied that the waste can be stored safely, provided it has been through the environmental impact process to be followed over the next few years. We are united on this decision as the Ngapa clan,” Lauder told the senate committee.

It is a position supported by the Northern Land Council (NLC), which represents aboriginal landowners in the north of the Northern Territory. The NLC nominated the Muckaty site on behalf of the Ngapa clan in 2007.

“The Ngapa people have taken a courageous stand in putting forward their traditional land for consideration as a potential site for a facility to house the nation’s radioactive waste,” says Kim Hill, chief executive officer of the NLC.

Hill argues that “not one person is disputing that the area in question belongs to the Lauder clan.”

But that is exactly what appears to be in dispute.

“The waste dump that they’re going to put in that land is not Amy Lauder’s country,” Diane Stokes told those in attendance at the Melbourne public meeting.

Stokes is not alone in disputing the issue of land ownership.

A joint letter from members of the Milwayi and Wirntiku clans, as well as other Ngapa clan members, was read out at a second senate hearing on Apr. 12. The letter states that the proposed site is actually on Milwayi land rather than on land belonging to Lauder’s family group.

“We are demanding to see the anthropologists’ evidence provided to the Northern Land Council regarding Ngapa clan,” say the letter’s signatories.

Australian Greens senator Scott Ludlam has called for Muckaty to be scrapped as a potential site for radioactive waste storage as the nomination process for the site was “flawed.”

“Numerous traditional owners outlined how they and their people were completely excluded from the shared decision making process, which is the norm in aboriginal custom on issues to do with kinship of land. Despite claims to the contrary, it is clear that they were not consulted and have never given consent,” says Ludlam.

Dave Sweeney, an anti-nuclear campaigner at the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), has slammed Minister Ferguson for breaking away from the principles set out by his own party regarding radioactive waste.

The ACF activist said that in 2007 the governing Australian Labor Party promised “a new process, a new site selection study based on community inclusion and consent, based on best science, based on robust and transparent processes and principles.”

Sweeney argues that much is at stake “with radioactive waste that lasts thousands of years, that can be cancer causing and gene changing, that can mobilise into the external environment, that can affect bush food and people’s perception of their relationship with the land.”

Dr Bill Williams, president of the Medical Association for the Prevention of War, said that a leak from a radioactive waste facility could easily reach humans through food and water, while an airborne leak could be breathed directly into the lungs.

“There is no such thing as a safe dose of ionising radiation to any of us,” he warns.

Excerpt:

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MELBOURNE, Australia, Apr 12 2010 (IPS)

The police “picked me up, they put me in the back of the car. Then they took me to (locality withheld) and beat (expletive) me, and they left me there,” a young person of African background said in a new study into the treatment of youths of African background by Australian police in Melbourne.

The ‘Interventions into Policing of Racialised Communities in Melbourne’ report, released in mid-March, is part of a project into racism here managed by three community legal services in Australia.

It found that young African-Australians in the country’s second-largest city are over-policed, that police harassment and violence is either under-reported or inadequately investigated by the relevant oversight bodies, and that police often resort to hostility and aggression when young people assert their rights.

Thirty youths, 27 males and 3 females aged 15 to 27, were interviewed for the study. Many had Sudanese or Somali backgrounds.

Most of them had been subjected to negative and often violent experiences with Victoria state police officers, including harassment, racist comments and serious assaults. None were identified in the study for fear of potential police retribution.

One interviewee reports being racially abused, spat on and slapped around the head by police before being taken to a police station where he was “beaten up for about ten minutes.”

After being released though the station’s rear exit, the youth re-entered the building at the front entrance, telling the officer on duty that he wished to make a complaint. According to the youth, the officer then “called one of the coppers that were beating me up. Another copper came in and goes to me, “If you don’t get out of here now, I’ll pull you back in’. And I left.”

Tredwell Lukondeh, president of the Sydney-based Federation of African Communities Council (FACC), says that he is not surprised by the report’s findings. “What is surprising is the degree to which the report highlights the problems. We do have concerns from various community leaders about the issue in question,” Lukondeh told IPS.

The FACC, which groups African groups from around Australia, is now collating data regarding police treatment of African-Australians to present to both the police force and the state government. But Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Simon Overland argues that police have done much to strengthen relations with different ethnic communities, including the African community. These efforts include community forums, the appointment of more multicultural officers, police-youth camps and joint sports activities.

Overland says that tension between police and young immigrants “is not a new problem.”

“With every wave of migration we’ve had problems with youths. If you go back far enough it was the Italian wave, the Greek wave, the Vietnamese wave and what we’re seeing now is a wave of migration coming out of Africa. And predictably we’re seeing tensions with youth,” Overland told the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s local radio in March.

While no African nation was among the top 10 source countries of the more than 158,000 people migrating permanently to Australia in the 12 months prior to Jun. 30, 2009 – the latest period for which figures are available – Australia’s African community has swelled in recent years.

Africans have figured prominently among recent visa recipients under Australia’s humanitarian programme, which is reserved for refugees and others requiring protection.

Nationals of Sudan, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, Liberia and Sierra Leone were among the top 10 countries of origin for humanitarian visas granted in the 2008-2009 year.

Although Lukondeh admits that police have taken positive steps to address issues with African-Australians, he believes that much more can be done. “We should establish that corridor of learning about the cultural background of new immigrants. It is very important because, in essence, it’s that ignorance that enflames these problems,” said the FACC president.

Any progress made by police efforts to create better relations appears to be undermined by the report’s findings as well the revelation of a racist email circulating among Victoria police officers.

While Overland has vowed to take action against officers in the wake of the report “if there is evidence to support those allegations,” up to 100 officers are purported to be under investigation in relation to the email, which local media have reported depicts a man being tortured.

The report into police treatment of youth of African backgrounds comes as the furore over allegedly racially motivated attacks on Indians in Australia – and Melbourne in particular – appears to be fading.

It follows November’s findings by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) – a statutory body responsible for media regulation – that three popular Melbourne television broadcasters breached the Commercial Television Codes of Practice in 2007 in reports regarding Sudanese refugees in Melbourne’s south-east.

ACMA found that the news reports of channels Ten, Nine and Seven, which focused on racial tensions, gangs and the decision by the government of former Prime Minister John Howard to reduce the intake of African refugees, were inaccurate.

Ten and Nine breached the regulatory body’s fair and impartial requirement for news presentations. “ACMA considered that both of their segments contained an unfair selection of material, were unfairly juxtaposed and created an unfair presentation, overall, of Sudanese people as being particularly prone to commit violence and crime,” said ACMA’s statement.

Excerpt:

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MELBOURNE, Australia, Mar 31 2010 (IPS)

The Australian Defence Force (ADF) may have reduced its numbers in East Timor as that country’s stability improves, but the controversy created by its troops’ behaviour continues to raise questions about their sensitivity to the political situation there.

Last week, the ADF abandoned a social research study in East Timor after complaints of inappropriate behaviour were levelled at members of the Australian-led International Stabilisation Force (ISF), which consists of about 400 Australians and 150 New Zealand Defence Force personnel.

The ISF was deployed in 2006 at the behest of the East Timorese government following an outbreak of political violence in the fledgling nation. But it has downsized its size in recent months due to the improved security situation in East Timor, which became an independent state in 2002 after decades of Indonesian occupation.

In an early March letter to the rights group La’o Hamutuk – also known as the East Timor Institute for Development Monitoring and Analysis – a village chief in Lautém district in the far east of East Timor, complained that Australian “military observers” acted improperly by asking sensitive political questions of local people at a meeting called by the foreign forces.

The meeting was part of an Australian Department of Defence study to seek East Timorese’ views on issues surrounding peace and stability in the country of more than one million people.

“They asked our community which government is better, the previous government or the current AMP government,” wrote chief Mateus Fernandes Sequeira of the Feb. 23 meeting in the Lore I subdistrict, referring to the Parliamentary Majority Alliance led by Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao that came to power after East Timor’s 2007 elections.

“Then they also asked of our community that whoever accepts the AMP government should raise their hands,” Sequeira added.

The AMP coalition succeeded the leftist Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (FRETILIN), which had been the governing party since independence.

Sequeira explained that publicly showing support for or against a political party can have negative consequences in a country that has fresh scars from decades of violence. “We, as leaders of the community, see that this can create conflict,” he wrote.

Political divisions between sectors of East Timorese society have long led to violence. Conflict between pro-Indonesian and pro-independence groups began prior to the full-scale Indonesian invasion in 1975. By the end of the 24-year occupation by its giant neighbour, East Timor’ death toll had reached up to 200,000.

The 2006 crisis and the 2008 assassination attempts on the lives of Gusmao and José Ramos Horta, East Timor’s president, are more recent examples of political ruptures.

Charles Scheiner, a U.S. national working for La’o Hamutuk, says that during the Indonesian occupation it was common for soldiers to go into villages and question locals about their political leanings. Scheiner was one of two officials from the rights group to meet with ISF commander Col Simon Stuart, Australian ambassador Peter Heyward and New Zealand ambassador Tim McIvor on Mar. 12 to discuss the incident in Lore I.

The soldiers “would gather people together, asking each person ‘are you for integration with Indonesia or are you for independence?’ If people said they were for independence then they risked being killed or tortured, and if they said they were against independence then after the soldiers left they risked being retaliated against,” Scheiner told IPS in a phone interview from East Timor.

“When you have a traumatised population and a people having had lots of horrendous experiences with foreign soldiers coming into the town, people have flashbacks, people remember that,” he added.

But the ADF says it maintains a strictly neutral stance in East Timor. “At no point during any community forums have questions been posed by researchers about political alignment. Participants in the (Lore I) forum were not asked to indicate political alignment by raising their hands,” a defence department spokesman said in response to questions by IPS.

The ADF suggests that mistakes may have been made by the two interpreters at the forum, where English and the local languages Tetum and Fataluku were used.

While Scheiner admits that this is possible, he says that Australian-led forces have been accused of political interference before.

When the ISF arrived in the midst of the 2006 political crisis “there were many reports of the ISF telling people ‘don’t be part of FRETILIN, don’t listen to FRETILIN’. There were cases of them (the ISF) obstructing the peaceful activities of FRETILIN and in general saying that FRETILIN was a bad entity,” said Scheiner.

Foreign troops were called in after what began as soldiers’ anger over discrimination in the military expanded to general violence in East Timor four years ago.

In 2007, Australian ISF troops were accused of confiscating and desecrating FRETILIN flags amid claims that Australia, which has played a major role in East Timorese affairs since 1999, maintained an anti-FRETILIN stance.

The incident in Lore I follows the deaths of two East Timorese civilians who were involved in accidents with ISF vehicles in recent years. The ISF, which operates outside the United Nations chain of command in East Timor and whose members are regarded as having virtual immunity, has been criticised for its lack of response to such incidents.

On Mar. 8, La’o Hamutuk called on ADF chief Angus Houston, who visited East Timor later in the month, to improve the ISF’s accountability for incidents involving locals.

Excerpt:

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MELBOURNE, Australia, Mar 25 2010 (IPS)

“We don’t want to have any part of this. We want to move out of it so we have a bit of freedom and be able to determine our own future,” says Richard Downs, an elder of the Alyawarra people of central Australia.

Downs, spokesman for the Alyawarra community at Ampilatwatja, located some 300 kilometres north-east of Alice Springs, is referring to measures that the federal government has been imposing supposedly to help indigenous communities in the Northern Territory.

In July 2009, Ampilatwatja members abandoned their settlement en masse in a double-barrelled protest to highlight the dilapidated conditions of their public housing and to avoid the measures the Australian government is pursuing with the aim of providing them with better basic services, ranging from education to child protection.

To counter what Downs calls the “total disempowerment” of life under this programme, the Alyawarra have taken matters into their own hands and set up a new camp several kilometres away from Ampilatwatja, where some 40 Alyawarra elders reside. An Alyawarra ‘protest house’ was opened in this new camp in February.

The government’s programme that the Alyawarra reject — called the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER) or ‘the intervention’ — covers 73 prescribed areas, ostensibly to counter child abuse in Northern Territory Aboriginal communities.

Aboriginal communities make up some 2 percent of Australia’s 22 million people and many are among the poorest and most disadvantaged groups. Indigenous Australians comprise more than one-third of the Northern Territory’s population of more than 220,000.

The NTER was established three years ago following the release of the landmark ‘Little Children Are Sacred’ report, which found that the sexual abuse of Aboriginal children was “serious, widespread and often unreported.” Introduced by the conservative government of John Howard in June 2007 and continued under the current leadership of Kevin Rudd’s Labor Party, the intervention remains controversial.

It provides for additional child protection workers, more police and expanded drug and alcohol rehabilitation services.

But critics have slammed the government for its lack of consultation with indigenous Australians. They label the intervention as a “paternalistic” imposition from the capital Canberra and a “blanket punishment” that targets everyone in the Aboriginal communities, regardless of whether they were involved in child abuse.

They argue that provisions such as the quarantining of 50 percent of a recipient’s welfare benefits for essential items, the compulsory acquisition of Aboriginal land through five-year leases and the banning of alcohol and pornography in prescribed areas are too controlling and racially discriminatory.

Prof James Anaya, the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on indigenous rights who visited the Northern Territory in August on a fact-finding mission, released a damning report on the emergency response in February. While the government is obliged to “ensure the security of Aboriginal women and children as a matter of urgency”, Anaya says that the NTER measures do not conform to the nation’s human rights obligations.

“In several key aspects, (it) limits the capacity of indigenous individuals and communities to control or participate in decisions affecting their own lives, property and cultural development, and it does so in a way that in effect discriminates on the basis of race, thereby raising serious human rights concerns,” reports Anaya.

To implement the measures, parliament also suspended part of the Northern Territory’s Racial Discrimination Act (RDA) in 2007. After the Rudd government pledged to reinstate the RDA, legislation to do so was introduced in parliament in November last year and is now before the Senate.

The parliament has passed one of two bills that amend sections of the NTER legislation to conform to the anti-discrimination law, which is part of the government’s efforts to “make it (NTER) effective for the long-term,” says Indigenous Affairs minister Jenny Macklin.

Still, there are worries that the anti-discrimination law could be superseded by the NTER legislation.

The Australian Human Rights Commission, the Law Council of Australia and the Northern and Central Land Councils want the inclusion of a ‘notwithstanding’ clause that would ensure that the anti-discrimination law prevails even if there are contrary provisions in the NTER legislation.

Meantime, Downs of the Alyawarra says there were more than 250 people living at the new community site at its peak, but that a lack of water resulted in younger members returning to Ampilatwatja until a bore is constructed.

“We’re (now) outside the measures of the NTER,” says the spokesman of the new site.

Downs told IPS by telephone that moving out of their settlement in Ampilatwatja came after the Alyawarra’s attempts at creating a partnership with the government on its future were rejected. “We were continually pushed aside and just used as tokens where we had no say, no control of the direction that the measures were taken,” he says.

The government, for its part, insists that the NTER is working. From its hundreds of consultations in mid-2009, the government says that partly as a result of NTER measures, children, women and the elderly were safer and better fed, with more money being spent on food, clothing and school-related expenses.

But a Mar. 12 report by the Australian Indigenous Doctors’ Association (AIDA) cautions against proclaiming initial improvements in physical health as evidence of its success and warns of “profound” long-term damage due to the intervention.

The NTER measures “will leave a negative legacy on the psychological and social well-being, on the spirituality and cultural integrity of the prescribed communities,” AIDA predicts.

Excerpt:

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MANILA, Nov 18 2009 (IPS)

Although women have long made major contributions to science, their efforts have often been overlooked. For the past 12 years, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) has teamed up with cosmetics giant L’Oréal to highlight the achievements of female scientists.

The UNESCO-L’Oréal For Women in Science partnership announced the five 2010 laureates on Oct.15.

Representing five distinct geographical regions, professors Rashika El Ridi, Lourdes J. Cruz, Elaine Fuchs, Anne Dejean-Assémat and Alejandra Bravo were chosen as winners from almost a thousand female scientists who were nominated for the awards in life sciences.

Each laureate will receive 100,000 dollars in recognition for their outstanding contributions to science and will be presented with the awards at a ceremony at UNESCO’s Paris headquarters on Mar. 4, 2010.

Professor Lourdes J. Cruz, from the Marine Science Institute at the University of the Philippines in Manila, is the laureate for the Asia-Pacific region. The first Filipina to win the prestigious award, Professor Cruz was recognised for discovering toxins from marine snails which can be used as tools to study brain function.

Professor Cruz spoke with IPS about the award and the situation for women scientists in the Philippines.

IPS: Firstly, congratulations on being one of the five winners of the 2010 L’Oréal-UNESCO award. You must feel very proud to be recognised like that? LOURDES J. CRUZ: Yes, certainly. I thought I really didn’t have a chance because there are so many other women who are qualified and deserving. But this is the first time for a Filipina to receive the award, so we’re all very happy.

IPS: What is the significance of this award? LJC: Well, in sciences, I guess like in other fields, there are certainly more men that are pushing their careers, that are recognised. I think this is why the L’Oréal-UNESCO [award] was set up, to give importance to the role of women and their contributions to science.

IPS: The World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index rates the Philippines among the top 10 countries in the world in terms of gender parity. Does this reflect the situation for women in science here? LJC: Well, 61 percent of the graduates in science at the University of the Philippines in the past year were women. But as they go up and pursue their career, I think more women drop out, maybe because of family concerns. More women, I guess, stay at home and the males are the ones who will earn the living. If there are many kids, then the woman is the one to stop her career in favour of the husband earning for the family.

IPS: 61 percent of science graduates being women is a very high figure. LJC: It is very high. In the university there are, I think, more women [than men] faculty members. But the factor is not just gender. It’s the economic situation in the Philippines [too] because the salaries of academics are lower than those in industry.

So, if both husband and wife are working, generally the woman would stay in academia, teaching, while the husband tries to get a position in industry to earn more for the family or go into business. You see that in many situations. Still, even when it comes to, say, the outstanding young scientist award given by the [Philippine] National Academy of Science, there you see that from the 61 percent of women graduates, the percentage of women recipients drops down to 33 percent. It’s a big drop.

IPS: Is there discrimination against women in science in the Philippines? LJC: Well, here we don’t feel it. Even here at the Marine Science Institute you don’t feel discrimination. In fact, everybody’s very encouraging and we act like a team.

Maybe overall that’s the trend but you will see that there is a difference with respect to fields in science. You will see more women in the biological and life sciences and more men in physics and maybe maths.

I didn’t feel that [discrimination] when I was a chemistry student here in the university because there were actually more women. Chemistry is one of the fields that attract more women than men. Engineering attracts more men, physics attracts more men. So, since chemistry is dominated by women, I didn’t feel it.

IPS: One part of the L’Oréal-UNESCO award that you’ll receive next year is obviously related to the science. But another major aspect of it is recognising women in science. Why do you think it’s important to specifically recognise women in the scientific field? LJC: If you look at the major prizes in science the percentage of women [winners] is very low. Of course, the highest recognition is the Nobel prizes. Only one or two percent [of winners], maybe in physics, and much less than ten percent in others, are women.

IPS: Is funding for women scientists a problem in the Philippines? LJC: The major problem with respect to funding here is that overall the funding level is low … If your level of funding is low you try to equalise it as much as possible.

IPS: In terms of major prizes like the Nobel awards, where there is this huge difference in male versus female winners, how do we address this discrepancy? Should we be trying to get to a position where 50 percent of winners are women? LJC: For me, I guess, one has to be objective. If you’re judging science you judge only the science. If it’s a pool of men and women scientists that you are judging, you should not just give the award because they are women. If it’s a science award then it has to be judged on the science. But I think this [L’Oréal-UNESCO award] makes for encouraging women in science.

IPS: Now that you’re going to be one of the recipients of the L’Oréal-UNESCO award, do you see yourself as somewhat of an ambassador for women in science? LJC: Yes. Hey, we can do things! But there are still communities or societies here in the Philippines where women are discouraged from going to school. But I think what’s important is to give equal opportunity.

IPS: How do you feel as being held up as an example for women’s achievement in science? LJC: It’s nice and I’m very happy about it but in a way it also carries certain responsibilities, so I hope I can do well.

*This is the second of a two-part series that looks at discrimination against women scientists.

Excerpt:

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MANILA, Nov 9 2009 (IPS)

While pessimism continues to dog the lead-up to next month’s climate change talks in the Danish capital of Copenhagen, a new Philippine law aimed at streamlining the country’s efforts to mitigate and adapt to the effects of global warming has received a guarded welcome by environmental groups here.

Brother Martin Francisco, chairperson of the Sagip (Save) Sierra Madre Environmental Society Inc., told IPS that the Philippine Congress had made a positive move in passing the legislation but stressed that this was only the initial step.

“The law itself is not the complete answer. It’s just the beginning since many things need to be done, especially the [formulating of the] implementing rules and regulations that, according to the law, must be enacted by the [Climate Change] Commission in the span of six months,” says Francisco.

Besides establishing the Climate Change Commission (CCC) to set up, monitor and coordinate action plans to prepare the country for extreme weather events that bring about floods and landslides, the Philippine Climate Change Act of 2009 aims to mainstream climate change mitigation into broader government policy through a National Framework Strategy and Programme on Climate Change.

The CCC is to be chaired by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who enacted the law on Oct. 23, just weeks after two devastating tropical storms, ‘Ondoy’ and ‘Pepeng’—known internationally as ‘Ketsana’ and ‘Parma’, respectively— led to floods and landslides in metro Manila and other areas of the northern island of Luzon, which killed around one thousand people.

Although Arroyo has not held back in praising the legislation—saying it “ushers in a new era in the way the Philippines will tackle climate change in both the short and long terms, for the benefit of Filipinos today and Filipinos yet unborn,” upon enacting the legislation into law—environmentalists say that the law’s implementation will be the key to its success.

“In our Philippine experience there is this dichotomy between the law in letter and its implementation,” says Francisco, adding that non-governmental organisations must monitor the Climate Change Act’s implementation closely.

Greenpeace Southeast Asia has also welcomed the new legislation, calling on the CCC to formulate the Philippines’s mitigation and adaptation measures “as a matter of urgency,” while Joey Papa, president of Filipino environment protection group ‘Bantay Kalikasan’ (Nature Watch), warned against expecting too much from the act “without its correct and immediate implementation.”

Yeb Saño, head of World Wide Fund for Nature-Philippines’s climate change and energy programme, believes that the law “is a step in the right direction.” But in order to be successfully implemented, he says that other laws related to the environment also need to be enforced.

It is “important that the Philippines be serious about enforcing environmental laws, including laws on forest, laws on fisheries, laws on solid waste, laws that protect watersheds, otherwise the new law won’t be as effective as it should be,” says Saño, who will be part of the official Philippine delegation— along with representatives of other NGOs—at the Copenhagen climate conference in December.

Although the effective implementation of laws is a common concern regarding many areas of Philippine legislation, the characteristics of the threat that climate change poses to this nation of nearly 100 million people has elicited particular unease.

The Philippines is widely regarded as being very susceptible to the effects of global warming. Sea-level rises, increases in ocean temperatures, and more frequent and intense tropical storms and typhoons are just some of the adverse impacts that the Philippines is expected to have to deal with—or is even dealing with already—as the earth gets hotter.

While such impacts have the potential to be disastrous for the Philippines, the effects are likely to be magnified if the country does not ready itself to cope.

Speaking at a senate committee hearing on climate change in late October, Jerry Velasquez, a senior coordinator with the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction body, warned that the Philippines must act to prepare for disasters greater than the recent storms.

“The Philippines is one of the very hotspots for climate change,” said Velasquez. “What happened during Ondoy and Pepeng was not the worst. The worst is still to come.”

In a nation whose booming population already eats more rice than it is able to grow—the Philippines imports 10 percent of its rice, the staple diet of most Filipinos, from the likes of Vietnam and Thailand—Saño argues that food security is the number one issue facing the Philippines when it comes to climate change.

He says that extreme weather events will damage crops—as the recent storms did, with rice particularly hard hit—while a change in rainfall patterns is also already evident.

“Rain has been heavy in areas where you don’t need it [and] has been absent where rain is badly needed,” says Saño.

“This has affected the planting and harvest seasons for famers as well as the harvest season for fisher folk,” he told IPS.

A report by the Asian Development Bank, released in April, warned that if measures are not taken to mitigate and adapt to climate change, then rice production in the Philippines could fall by up to 70 percent by 2020.

And while the new law intends to prepare the Philippines for the adverse effects of a warming planet, it also replaces the structures through which climate change issues have hitherto been addressed.

It abolishes previously established environmental bodies, including the Presidential Task Force on Climate Change and the Inter-agency Committee on Climate Change, whose functions will be incorporated under the CCC mantle.

As for mainstreaming climate change issues into other areas of government policy, based on the new legislation, Saño says that such a requirement may be more difficult to put into practice.

“It’s always easy to say that we are mainstreaming a certain issue into the mandates of [government] agencies, but it’s another thing to be able to actually see that into implementation,” he says.

Excerpt:

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MANILA, Nov 1 2009 (IPS)

Philippine political affairs are rarely straightforward. The former Spanish and U.S. colony, which also endured occupation under Japan during the Second World War, has experienced major upheavals since independence was finally achieved—and recognised, this time—in 1946.

Massive human rights abuses, censorship and corruption on an unprecedented scale occurred in the 1970s and 1980s under the dictatorship of then President Ferdinand Marcos while the decades-long insurgencies of communist guerrillas and Moro secessionists continue to claim lives.

The more-recent addition of militants like the Abu Sayyaf Group, a radical Islamist organisation, in southern areas of Mindanao have added the proverbial ‘fuel to the fire’ and the continuing presence of U.S. military "advisers" on the ground guarantees further controversy.

All this in a country that remains religiously, ethnically, geographically and economically differentiated—with a relatively weak central state—and where poverty and corruption are rife.

Little wonder, then, that much political intriguing and second-guessing regarding the May 10, 2010 elections have already taken place.

Alberto Lim, executive director of the Makati Business Club, which makes up the country’s largest corporations and a staunch critic of the current administration, sat down with IPS recently to discuss some of the upcoming election’s issues, including those related to current president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino III, the man who is presently the favourite to replace her.

IPS: How do you see the lead-up to next year’s elections? Do you suppose that the most likely scenario, still, is that the elections will be held in May and then Arroyo will stand down at the end of her term in 2010?

ALBERTO LIM: Well, that’s the one we’re hoping for, especially now that it seems Noynoy represents a good future for us if he wins. It could be the best of all [possible] outcomes.

IPS: Is Noynoy’s popularity best explained by the life, and even the death in August, of his mother, former President Corazon Aquino, boosting his own popularity? Is that a major factor in how he is perceived by the electorate?

AL: Yes, I think that explains half of his popularity. People who say they will vote for him, half of them say that it’s because of his mother and father [Benigno Aquino, Jr., assassinated in 1983 and the symbolic head of those opposing Marcos], although more his mother.

The other half, or maybe a third, would say it’s because of his integrity, his honesty. He has no record of corruption. He’s still a very simple guy, he wears simple clothes and isn’t flashy. He has no bank account. So, that explains his popularity. He does not have a brilliant record as a legislator, [with] no major laws passed, no experience as an executive. Basically, it’s his honesty, and that’s what we need: good governance.

IPS: And that’s a major shift from the perception of President Arroyo.

AL: [It’s a] 180-degree shift. And I think that’s what we need. I like this quote of Warren Buffet. He says, ‘when I hire somebody, an executive, I look for three things: integrity, intelligence, and energy. Without the first, the other two will kill you.’ So, that’s what we’ve been lacking, integrity. We have enough laws. We don’t need more laws; we need to implement the laws. That’s where we’ve been very weak.

Noynoy has inherited the good-governance legacy of his parents. I guess that’s where his strong suit is, his political experience more than his executive experience. He can let people around him run the government.

IPS: President Arroyo appears to be particularly concerned about what will happen to her and her immediate circle—in terms of being chased after in the courts—following the elections. Does this explain why she may want to remain as president beyond her elected term?

AL: That’s definitely the main concern. It’s the reason why she is even considering running for Congress, although I don’t know how that will help her to prevent prosecution for alleged crimes.

It’s the reason why she would even contemplate martial law. We don’t need martial law. But that’s not to say that it would be the main agenda for Noynoy. I mean, running after her is only doing what is just. It won’t necessarily be the first priority for his government, which is to lift the people from poverty, create jobs, make us more competitive by attending to education and people’s health.

IPS: But it is still likely to happen?

AL: I hope it happens. But it depends, as we don’t have a very good track record of running after past regimes, unlike the Koreans or the Taiwanese. The justice system has been weak, so that will take a bit of time before we turn things around. But hopefully, it happens.

IPS: Do you put any credence in the idea that martial law or a state of emergency is a possibility?

AL: Well, earlier in the year we did, as one of the several scenarios that would help the president stay in power. But as elections draw nearer, while that possibility is still there, it seems less likely now, because the people’s minds are so geared towards the election. Also, during the funeral of Mrs Aquino, the behaviour of the military then was such that they would not condone extra-constitutional behaviour.

IPS: What were the signs that led you to think that?

AL: Well, maybe it’s the expectation that they would be very much in the background. But they came out very visible, and as you know, the former president, Aquino, was critical of the [current] government. If they were loyal to the administration, they wouldn’t have been so visible in giving honour to the past president. But they were there; they were out in force.

When her body was brought to the wake the honour guard, with all the services represented, stood in the rain. It was a clear signal that the military would not go for, at least, this present leadership. Of course, the scenarios earlier in the year were that they would change the [military] leadership and appoint someone loyal [to the President]. That was part of the scenario: that the class of 1978 would be taking over. But it looks less likely.

IPS: What could be a pretext for declaring a state of emergency or martial law that the Arroyo administration could use?

AL: Well, if the ‘war on terror’ was brought to Manila with bombings—that’s one possible way of bringing about the need for martial law.

IPS: There is also a rumour regarding the potential assassination of Noynoy Aquino as a pretext to crack down on the outcry, which would undoubtedly follow. The theory goes that this would pave the way for martial law to be implemented so as to cancel or postpone the elections, thereby allowing Arroyo to maintain power or boost the likelihood of a more favourable result for her. Have you heard this rumour?

AL: Well, that’s a possibility. I haven’t heard that but there has been concern about his safety. That could backfire, though, because he’s the leading candidate. More than half the country would vote for him if the elections were held today. That would bring a 1983 scenario again. People would come out on the streets and there would be a lot of unrest.

IPS: It would also be looked upon disapprovingly by the international community, particularly the United States.

AL: Yes. It would be a repeat of what happened with his father. That doesn’t necessarily mean that’s a winning strategy [for those who would benefit from the assassination of Noynoy], because whoever emerges as the symbol of the opposition would benefit from that. It could, like I say, backfire. That’s one possibility but that would not go down well, even within the military.

Excerpt:

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MANILA, Oct 29 2009 (IPS)

Even in the wake of the tropical storms that lashed the northern parts of the Philippines recently, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo took time out to visit her home province.

Arroyo has gone to Pampanga in central Luzon—one of the country’s three island groups—at least 30 times during her presidency. Her administration has justified her frequent visits by saying she was there to inspect numerous government projects, among other reasons.

Despite Pampanga escaping relatively unscathed from the massive destruction wrought by tropical storms Ondoy—known internationally as Ketsana—and Pepeng, Arroyo maintained her interest in the province at the height of the crisis.

She went to northern Pampanga in late September to attend the wakes of people killed by a landslide caused by Ondoy’s torrential rains. There she handed out cash and food parcels to residents.

She also found time to tour several villages in the province on Oct.23 before flying to Thailand to attend the Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit, which opened on the same day.

This focus on Pampanga has led to persistent rumors that Arroyo—who is constitutionally required to step down from the presidency following the elections, as Philippine presidents are limited to one six-year term in office— is preparing to run as a congressional representative of Pampanga’s second district if only to avoid prosecution when her presidential term ends next year. The seat is currently held by her son, Juan Miguel “Mikey” Arroyo.

Winning a seat in the House of Representatives would likely place the president in a better position to avoid or battle the raft of legal concerns that Arroyo and her inner circle are anticipated to face following the elections.

“There are lots of cases that could be filed against the [Macapagal-Arroyo] family and even against the presidency,” says Patrick Patiño, chairman of the board of trustees at the Institute for Popular Democracy (IPD), a Manila- based research and advocacy organisation.

Potential cases that Arroyo, who came to power in 2001 after the ousting of Joseph Estrada, could face include charges relating to her 2004 election victory—widely seen here as fraudulent—as well as the alleged misuse of budget funds and even human rights abuses.

Additionally, Arroyo’s husband Jose Miguel “Mike” Macapagal-Arroyo has been the target of numerous corruption claims, as have other family members, including son Mikey. They would also be likely targets of prosecution in the post-election period.

But if Arroyo is to avoid the experience of her predecessor, then she may require the victory of an empathetic presidential candidate. Estrada was tried and convicted for plunder following his ignominious departure from office, although he was pardoned by Arroyo and released from detention in 2007.

However, recent results from electoral polls show that Senator Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III of the opposition Liberal Party is now the voters’ favourite candidate.

Noynoy announced his entry into the presidential race following the death on Aug.1 of his mother, Corazon “Cory” Aquino, the charismatic former president who came to office with the People Power Revolution of 1986.

Cory was reluctantly thrust to the forefront of the opposition to then- President Ferdinand Marcos—who turned into a virtual dictator after he imposed martial law and whose reign was marred by widespread corruption, political repression and human rights violations—in 1983 as a replacement for her husband, Benigno Aquino Jr., who was assassinated at Manila’s international airport upon his return to the Philippines from exile in the United States.

The legacy of the restoration of democracy that occurred under the presidency of Cory Aquino, as well as her husband’s popularity, has been transferred to Noynoy, says Alberto Lim, executive director of the Makati Business Club, an independent business organisation composed of senior executives from the country’s largest enterprises.

Although Noynoy “does not have a brilliant record as a legislator, [with] no major laws passed,” Lim argues that the senator’s honesty, integrity and down-to-earth character—a “180-degree shift” from the perceptions of Arroyo, he adds—also explain his popularity.

Noynoy “has no record of corruption. He’s still a very simple guy, he wears simple clothes and isn’t flashy,” Lim says.

Percival Cendana, chairperson of the Akbayan Citizens’ Action Party, a Congressional party-list organisation, said the “Noynoy euphoria represents a very real threat to the Arroyo administration because the electoral landscape has been radically altered.”

Cory’s son “has emerged as the alternative to President Arroyo because he represents everything that she is not,” says Cendana.

While a Noynoy victory would likely lead to the investigation and possible prosecution of Arroyo and those surrounding her, there has also been speculation on the political grapevine here that the current president and her cohorts may seek dubious means by which to either hold on to power or to influence the election’s outcome in order to avoid prosecution.

One possible way in which Arroyo could remain in power is by implementing either martial law—which many Filipinos experienced under Marcos—or a state of emergency so as to delay or even cancel the 2010 vote. The Malacañang Palace, the seat of the presidency, has denied this persistent accusation, saying there is no reason to impose martial law in the lead-up to the elections. “Let us not go back to the dark days of martial law,” said presidential spokesman Gary Olivar on Sept. 20, the eve of the 37th anniversary of the declaration of martial law by Marcos.

Still, concerns that the administration could do exactly that have lingered.

Ramon Casiple, executive director of the non-government Institute for Political and Electoral Reform, says that the possibility of martial law or a state of emergency being declared “exists from today until the end of her term. That is June 30, 2010.” However, he believes that the likelihood of such a declaration has decreased over the past few months.

“One of the reasons for this is that there is already a strong public sentiment against it…the other is that the armed forces itself is political, and it’s also monitoring the public sentiment,” explains Casiple.

Although the powerful Armed Forces of the Philippines—whose support would be critical if martial law was to be declared—also appears to be backing the electoral process, the IPD’s Patiño warns Filipinos to beware.

“The Arroyo administration is so wily, so smart politically, that they could think of anything,” he says.

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Although the enacting in August of the Magna Carta of Women (MCW) – a major law aiming to end discrimination against women across the archipelago – was well-received here, there remain concerns about whether the legislation will be fully implemented.

Advocates hope that women will benefit fully from the new law. Credit: Stephen de Tarczynski/IPS

Mary Joan Guan, executive director of the Centre for Women’s Research, a Manila-based advocacy and training organisation, says that the efficacy of the MCW relies on its implementation going against the trend of previous women’s rights legislation.

The Philippines “already has 27 laws concerning women’s rights…[but] in reality these laws are not implemented at all,” she says. It ratified the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in 1981.

The Magna Carta is the end product of two separate bills introduced in Congress in 2002. After years of debate and opposition, it was finally signed into law by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo on Aug. 14.

While Guan welcomes the MCW, she remains circumspect regarding its implementation, due to occur following the formulation of the rules and regulations of the MCW by February next year.

“We hope that it won’t be, again, more lip-service from the government,” she says.

Under the terms of the legislation, the Philippine government is the primary duty-bearer for implementing the law. It is charged with protecting women from discrimination and upholding and promoting their rights.

She regards the enacting of the law as just the end of the first phase of the struggle. The second phase – that of the MCW’s implementation – is yet to come.

“We have won a battle but not quite the war,” says Rodriguez.

The MCW nonetheless represents a considerable success for the cause of women’s rights in the Philippines.

Included among its provisions are that Filipino women are legally protected from all forms of violence and from discrimination in employment, education and training; that women are guaranteed security in times of disaster or other crises; that they are provided with comprehensive health care and information; and that women are afforded equal treatment before the law and in matters relating to marriage.

The MCW also has a particular focus on marginalised Filipino women. It guarantees the rights of women such as small farmers and rural workers, informal sector workers and the urban poor, indigenous women and those with disabilities, as well as older women and girls.

These guarantees include the right to food security, affordable and secure housing, employment, the recognition and preservation of cultural identity, and to women’s inclusion in discussions pertaining to development and peace issues.

Rodriguez supports this highlighting of marginalised Filipinas. She says that while the Philippines is often “touted to be some kind of a model of gender responsive practice in the region” the experiences of many women in Asia’s only predominantly-Catholic nation is very different.

The Philippines rates relatively well in terms of gender parity. According to the United Nations’ 2009 Human Development Report, the country is 40th out of 155 nations – ahead of the likes of South Africa and Australia – when the gender-related development index is compared directly to the human development index.

Filipino women also rank better than their male compatriots in regards to life expectancy, literacy rates and education.

But Rodriguez argues that in a country where women can aspire to become president – Macapagal-Arroyo is the second female president of the Philippines; the late Cory Aquino was the first – the majority of women here remain particularly vulnerable.

“Indeed, there are women who can make it to the top but they’re just a minority,” she says.

“We should recognise that even among women there is what we might call ‘layered levels’ of discrimination,” adds Rodriguez.

Guan supports this view, telling IPS that most Filipino women live on the fringes of society, where many undertake low-skilled irregular or contractual employment.

“The opportunities for women are still limited and even though their labour-force participation is increasing – but still less than men’s – they are not given the opportunities in the higher levels,” she says.

Guan views the MCW as “an additional help” to CEDAW, the landmark international treaty on women’s rights which was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1979.

The Philippines was the first of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to ratify CEDAW, and it has also adopted the convention’s Optional Protocol which came into force in December 2000.

By Stephen de Tarczynski
MANILA, Oct 18 2009 (IPS)

“It’s very difficult,” says Joseph, 39, who has lived with his wife and three children in central Manila’s Rizal Park for the past six months after their home, a squat built on government-owned land, was demolished. “There are many people who are experiencing a lot of hardship here,” he adds.

Joseph sells picnic mats to people who come to the park to enjoy its greenery and open spaces. These visitors take advantage of the pleasant surroundings to escape from the Philippine capital’s clogged urban sprawl.

But for Joseph and many others like him, Rizal Park is now home. They sleep along the edges of the park’s pond, hoping the police do not come to arrest or evict them.

Joseph’s children, aged three, five and eight, go to “bed” hungry if their father does not sell enough mats to satisfy the family’s needs, and Joseph does not earn enough to send them to school.

It is a situation that the global ‘Stand Up and Take Action’ campaign is aiming to rectify, with millions of people around the world involved in events from Oct. 16 to 18 to demand the eradication of poverty and hunger.

Ending extreme poverty and hunger is one of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of objectives to which most countries around the world, along with a host of agencies, have committed themselves to achieving by 2015.

While some progress has been made toward attaining the MDGs, the consensus is that the bulk of the work is yet to be done—and there are just six years before the deadline.

In a statement issued on Oct. 17, the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for the redoubling of efforts around the globe toward this end.

“We are at a critical juncture in the fight against poverty. Now is the time to amplify the voices of the vulnerable and ensure that the world follows up on its pledges,” said Ban.

In the Philippines, where poverty remains rife, a National Week for Overcoming Extreme Poverty (NWOEP) has been held annually from Oct. 17 to 23 since 2004, when it was established by President Gloria Macapagal- Arroyo.

According to Domingo Panganiban, secretary of the National Anti-Poverty Commission (NAPC)—a government agency charged with overseeing poverty reduction efforts—some 35.2 million Filipinos participated in last year’s observance of the NWOEP.

Panganiban is keen to improve this turnout in 2009 to increase public awareness of the plight of poor Filipinos and to encourage support of the Arroyo administration’s poverty eradication programmes.

But in a speech delivered during a ‘Stand Up and Take Action’ event held on Oct.17 in Rizal Park—just metres from where Joseph and other homeless people sleep—Panganiban said that around 27.6 million Filipinos remain impoverished despite the “dramatic results” which have come from “new technologies and new economic opportunities.”

“Still too many among us are forced to live under conditions of extreme poverty, with little to eat and much less to hope for in the future. Still too many of our children die of curable disease or otherwise grow into the responsibilities of adulthood without access to basic education,” said the NAPC Secretary.

Sem Cordial, also from the NAPC, told IPS that while there are “islands of success as far as poverty eradication is concerned,” impoverishment remains a massive problem in the nation of almost 100 million inhabitants.

“That has been the overarching development problem of the country that has preoccupied the government since I can remember,” says Cordial.

But although both Panganiban and Cordial were keen to highlight the government’s involvement in efforts to lift millions of people out of poverty, the latter also admitted that the situation was actually getting worse.

“I think over one-third of the Philippine population lives below the poverty line. A big part of that is in the rural area and the number [of people in living in poverty] appears to be increasing,” Cordial says.

That the situation is deteriorating is not news to many Filipinos. Another person who lives in Rizal Park, Nonie Entanes, has witnessed the park’s increasing population of homeless people.

The 52-year-old Entanes, a single man, told IPS that he has lived in the park since 1980 and believes that the park has “become crowded.”

“Before, there were only a few people living here in Luneta [Rizal Park’s former name]. But now, as time goes by, there are many people staying here.”

One of the newer arrivals is Jason Reoganis, 15. The youngster has been living and sleeping in the park—or along the nearby boulevard, which skirt’s Manila Bay—for the past two months.

Jason, who left his family home in Pasay in metro Manila’s southern zone to escape the beatings handed out to him by his drug-addicted parents, only studied up to grade four.

He says he does not think about the future. “Maybe if I’d been able to finish school then I’d have a job,” he says.

To survive, Jason collects plastic bottles from the garbage with a friend, 29- year-old Samuel Quijano. The pair then sells the bottles to a local junk shop.

Quijano told IPS that he makes about 30 pesos (64 U.S. cents) a day, but if there are no plastic bottles to collect, then he will ask a nearby restaurant for burnt rice that the business cannot sell to customers or beg passersby for money to buy food.

“It’s very hard, staying and sleeping in the street or on a bench by the sea,” he says.

And while those involved in the ‘Stand Up and Take Action’ events in the Philippines and elsewhere clearly empathise with people who are less fortunate, the immediacy of need for those who live in dire conditions can sometimes be misjudged.

Joseph, the mat seller, tried and failed to get some food from the NAPC- organised event in the park. “It’s nice that there is this [poverty awareness] day, but it would be nicer if we could benefit too,” he says.

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By Stephen de Tarczynski
MANDAUE CITY, Philippines, Oct 9 2009 (IPS)

Despite experiencing an unsuccessful first foray into the world of commerce, the members of the Canduman Women's Co-operative (CWC) remain focused on producing a profit to aid their families' day-to-day living expenses.

Even the small amount of money that CWC's members take home has been beneficial. Credit: Stephen de Tarczynski/IPS

The co-op, based in a small building in Canduman Haven – located about 30 minutes drive from the centre of Mandaue City – is aimed at alleviating some of the residents' financial hardship.. Mandaue is a resettlement site for families displaced by development in nearby Cebu City

Rowena Alensonorin, executive director of the Centre for Integrated Development at the Ramon Aboitiz Foundation Inc. (RAFI), which is assisting the co-op, says the idea for a rug making venture in order to supplement their husband’s income was spawned at a meeting she called with local women in 2007.

The co-operative, with financial and practical assistance from RAFI and others, including Mandaue City Mayor Jonas Cortes and Canduman’s local government unit, started out with seven sewing machines and an initial capital of 15,000 pesos (320 dollars).

But in what has proven to be part of a steep learning curve for CWC's 15 members, the initial idea of rug making has fallen short of expectations.

In fact, the enterprise has been operating at a loss. The rags are sold for just one peso each and do not cover the cost of production as 5 kgs of raw material – from which 101 rugs are made – cost 175 pesos (one dollars is roughly 46 pesos).

While such an outcome may make some cut their losses and lose hope, the women of the CWC appear only to be looking forward.

The co-op's president, Jennifer Ferraren, who lives in the adjacent Kobe resettlement zone along with several other members, says the women are looking to diversify their production. Carry bags made from recycled drink containers and dress making are just two possibilities being considered.

Ferraren argues that the co-op is about more than generating additional income for the members' families. With gambling among female residents a common pastime, she says that the CWC's "focus is not just on their livelihoods but also on their social lives."

Even the small amount of money that the CWC's members have been able to take home so far has been beneficial.

CWC member Rosalinda Tacay told IPS that being financially rewarded "makes me realise that working with this co-operative can help our husbands with expenses," while another member, the recently-married Flordeluna Amaro, agrees.

Both women say that their husbands support their involvement in the co-op. Approval by the husband is particularly important within Philippine families, especially among the lower socio-economic classes where the man's will often prevails.

CWC president Ferraren, a commerce graduate, says that while her husband also supports her participation in the co-op, her other responsibilities must not be overlooked.

"He said 'it's okay as long as you manage your time so as not to neglect the children'," says the mother of three.

According to Ferraren, most of the members' husbands have been encouraging.

Alensonorin from RAFI agrees that the majority of men are "very supportive". But she adds that traditional Filipino familial gender attitudes, whereby "women stay in the house while their husbands go out to work", have fuelled a backlash in some instances.

She has heard from several "women who report that their husbands get mad [and ask] why are they spending their time in the co-op? Why don’t they stay at home? Who cares for the children?"

Alensonorin admits that in these cases the members' involvement in the co-op "becomes even a cause of conflict and quarrel in the household."

But she argues that household conflict stemming from this is small compared to that caused by want. "Most of the time the lack of money, the lack of food or the lack of income to provide for the family becomes the number one source of quarrels among husbands and wives," she says.

Husbands who may have previously opposed their wife's involvement in the co-op can see the benefits that extra income can make, says Alensonorin. She argues that this indicates that women's participation in the CWC can also result in an educational process for men.

"When income is added into the family [budget] food is put on the table and it creates harmony. That's where the husband now understands," she says.

And if the co-op's expansion plans are realised and bear financial fruit then conflict within the family, in addition to related hunger pangs, is likely to be reduced.

Ferraren hopes that family budgets – principally the responsibility of the wife in many Philippine families – will receive a much-needed boost from the CWC's potential operations.

In the future "when we add our income to the income of our husbands maybe we can eat enough to fill our stomachs," she says.

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