It would seem that the "Rural Radical Greenie Watch" is powering on as a recent trip to the bush by our aircrew of Snoop76667 harvested some great footage that will remain in a clandestine evidence room until required.

Word to me is that the Victorian Gestapo has sold cattle mustered in their gold plated, but well incinerated National Park. It is alleged that purchaser was a beef processor well known to SOS-NEWS for short hammer auction purchases across the rural lands.

Catching up has been an email nightmare but replies are well in hand for tomorrow's postings.

They never give up trying to attack our network, but as usual these humble hackers from Melbourne left tracks like a bleeding elephant in the snow. We will have a surprise on the way to them very soon, and their masters, they will remember for years.

Mal Davies (Editor)

As the Macquarie Bank and the Malcolm Turnbull's of this world gear for water marketing along with the new commodity, carbon trading. They cannot wait for the lolly shop to open.

Billions of $$$$$ will be generated from "sky-juice" and "fresh air" by these leaches on society - then we see the other side of the coin.

Peter Spencer having had his farm systematically dismantled by environment legislation forcing him into bankruptcy is holding collateral in carbon credits to the tune of millions of dollars and is being shunted around the courts by government lawyers to avoid compensating him for the theft of his farm and source of income.

Read below what Joel Dullroy had to say in the Perth Sunday Times.

Editor


A QUEENSLAND farmer is $1m richer after signing over carbon dioxide stored in 3500ha of trees to mining giant Rio Tinto for 120 years in a record deal for carbon emissions trading in Australia.

In a historic transaction, mining company Rio Tinto bought the rights to carbon dioxide stored in 3500ha of Peter Allen's heavily vegetated property, 575km northwest of Brisbane.

Instead of clearing the land to run cattle, Mr Allen, a third generation farmer, will preserve the trees for 120 years to ensure they soak up carbon dioxide.

When you hear talk of carbon offsets, this is where the money goes.

Many of the state's farmers stand to reap multimillion-dollar incomes from selling carbon rights to large corporations or individuals wishing to become carbon neutral.

"It's not like I have won the lotto or that I'm a tree-hugger. It was a purely financial decision," Mr Allen is quoted as saying.

"We looked at the return on developing that land for grazing, compared to the return from the carbon rights.

"We had to think hard before we decided to lock that land up for the next 120 years.

"If it had been any less money, we wouldn't have done it."

This time last year, Mr Allen had eight bulldozers ready to knock down a swathe of trees on an investment property just outside Charleville.

Under the State Government's moratorium on land clearing, farmers were given until December last year to enact one final clearing permit.

Rio Tinto stepped in, offering Mr Allen and five other farmers money in exchange for their inaction.

A total of 12,060ha was spared, the carbon rights secured under a legally binding contract.

It is believed to be Australia's biggest carbon-trading deal.

The carbon industry is expected to boom after the Prime Minister's Task Group on Emissions Trading hands down its blueprint next Thursday.

But as the carbon industry gears up, questions have been raised about the lack of regulation over the voluntary offset market - the system through which airline passengers, rock festival patrons and motorists can pay for their pollution.

Green watchdogs say the voluntary market is open to exploitation, with no controls on who can sell carbon and no checks on the work carried out.

Further questions have been raised about the effect of tree-planting, the popular method used by most carbon off setters.

What Do You Think?


Snowy Hydro Gas Over

The Snowy Mountains Scheme and Snowy Hydro Ltd (SHL) remain in the news, due in the main to record low Scheme storage levels as a result of the drought.

This has seen the managing director of SHL, Terry Charlton, out and about talking to the local press, councils and the Country Women's Association State Conference in Jindabyne.

Whilst these are quite legitimate activities for a managing director to take, his underlying theme - that the Scheme was suffering a starvation of capital due to its public (government) ownership, a constraint that needed to be remedied to enable it to build more gas fired power stations to conserve water - is of concern as this implies that the only way forward is privatisation, as increased debt and additional government equity has previously been discounted.

It needs to be recognised that SHL's desire to build gas fired power stations is not about water conservation - as any water released will be stored in Hume and Blowering Dams for future needs - but about its need to underpin its electricity price risk management (financial hedge) contracts, its trading business. As the current drought has been progressing since 1997, getting progressively worse in the last few years, SHL has had ample opportunity to restructure its contracts portfolio to align it to lower Scheme storages thus reducing its trading risk and need to rely on gas fired plant. Low water storages are not a basis for supporting the building of additional, inefficient, open cycle gas fired plant nor for increasing the licenced operating hours of gas plants already owned by SHL.

It is also not reasonable for Mr Charlton to maintain that SHL is starved of capital as at the end of the 2005/06 financial year it had around $500 million in retained earnings - more than necessary to build a further gas plant - and has annual incomes in excess of $400 million, more than sufficient to operate and maintain the Snowy Scheme's infrastructure. Should Mr Charlton be able to convince share-holding governments that SHL desperately needs additional capital then governments should forego future dividends and/or return some of the significant dividends they have received since the Scheme was corporatised. Privatisation in any guise is not necessary nor acceptable.

The future management of the Scheme must be in the optimisation of its water resource to the overall benefit of irrigators, communities and the environment. I understand that Mr Charlton has discounted such an outcome as not being remotely possible because of SHL's constitution, National Electricity Market needs, debt reasons and shareholder value. These reasons, however, do not hold water - pardon the pun - because;

- SHL's enabling legislation and constitution can be amended by shareholding governments
- there is no obligation on SHL - or any market participant for that matter - to provide a particular amount of electrical energy or support services to the National Electricity Market
- optimisation of the Scheme's water resource does not preclude SHL from operating within the National Electricity Market or from trading with other market participants so as to generate sufficient income to service its debt and to operate and maintain the Scheme
- shareholder value is only of relevance if an entity is listed on the stock exchange or is to be sold.

It is time that all those responsible for the Snowy Scheme, from share-holding governments down, stopped flying privatisation kites and got firmly behind its future management as a public owned, increasingly valuable and irreplaceable water resource.

Max Talbot
Cooma

"We have argued from the outset that the benefits of continuing to use 1080 far outweigh the adverse effects and associated risks," Department of Conservation research, development & improvement general manager John Ombler said today.

Mr Ombler was delivering in Wellington the Department's closing address to the Environmental Risk Management Authority hearings on the future of the use of 1080 poison in animal pest control in New Zealand. Hearings began on 14 May.

"In terms of the HSNO Act that will guide your decision making, we cannot emphasise too strongly that the use of 1080 is vital to ensure the sustainability and indeed the very survival of many of our native plant and animal species."

He told the hearing that the "silent forests" about which anti-1080 submitters were concerned had lost their birdsong to the ravages of introduced animal predators, not to 1080.

"The painstaking radio-tagging of more than 250 birds from nine threatened species and monitoring them before and after various aerial 1080 operations found that only two individuals died from poisoning, a morepork and a weka. All the rest survived."

"More than 80 kiwi have now been monitored with radio transmitters through several aerial 1080 operations. All have survived."

"So it is not 1080 that is silencing our forests. It is the silent killers that are responsible - the stoats, rats and possums - aided by feral cats and dogs. While we can, in hindsight, rue the short-sighted decisions that introduced these species, our dubious legacy is to have to try to rectify the consequences."

The consequences included the loss of native forest canopy in the North and South Islands, and the alarming decline in bird species such as kokako and kereru, Mr Ombler said. As a result, there were fewer birds to disperse seeds, further impacting on the long-term viability of forest tree species.

"We are faced with not only a threat to the sustainability of individual species, but also to the life-supporting capacity of native ecosystems. This brings economic risks."

"Healthy ecosystems underpin much of New Zealand's tourism sector. They also provide quality recreational experiences, and supply valuable services for primary producers, for example, through their roles in purifying and regulating water flows, reducing flood and erosion damage and building up soils."

Like any toxin, the use of 1080 carried risks to non-target species and continuous improvements had been made over the last 30 years to manage these risks, he said. They included a 10-fold reduction in the amount of 1080 applied per hectare, better delivery technology and better bait design.

"While the search for alternative methods of control will continue, it is clear that there is no method just around the corner, with the benefits that we currently get from 1080."

"But I must stress that the call for alternatives implies that 1080 is the only tool we currently use or that we are stuck in a kind of either/or situation which simply doesn't correspond to reality. Because the salient fact is that we need every tool we can lay our hand on and we welcome alternatives but not at the expense of 1080."

Naturally, there was concern in the community about the use of 1080 and the Department was assiduous in its consulting with interested groups, including Maori, wherever 1080 operations were proposed. Improvement was always possible, and the HSNO Act's "codes of practice" for consultation with Maori could be explored as a mechanism.

Mr Ombler praised ERMA for conducting its hearings in an open and respectful way that allowed full and frank discussion on the issues surrounding the use of 1080.

"The heartening aspect of this reassessment process is that all those who have participated have a common vision for protecting the species and places that are unique and special to us all as New Zealanders."

Intelligence gathering requires cunning and there is nothing more cunning than a "Shithouse Rat".

We now introduce to you the greatest of them all "The Toilet Rodent" or TR.

Discovered in 1988, working the public service and corporate dunnies around the nation, TR developed incredible skills that have been fine-tuned and honed as to retrieve invaluable information from the source of most skulduggery - the ablution blocks.

Each Monday TR will report his findings from which we will publish the finer points of exposure and clandestine information the people in power do not want you to know.


Western Australian Corruption and Crime Commission (CCC) has spent $8 million investigating the lobbying activities of Brian Burke (Ex-WA Labor Premier), and Julian Grill ( former WA Labor Government Minister).

Chief Executive of the CCC, Mike Silverstone has spent $4 million on the Smiths Beach inquiry and that the current inquiry into lobbyists has cost another $4 million which is 1/3 of their annual budget - and the inquiry is still continuing.

It would seem that not only a mining boom is all around WA, we have the fat cat lawyers and contracted services riding the taxpayer dollar waves with no sign of terminating this cash cow in sight.

INVITING ALL VOLUNTEER FIRE FIGHTERS TO JOIN THE VOLUNTEER FIRE FIGHTERS ASSOCIATION.

For further information please contact Peter Cannon - (02) 6869-7634
Mobile - 0428-697-634 or 0427-697-608

NSW Volunteer Fire Fighters - JOIN TODAY

NSW Volunteer Fire Fighters have united under the VFFA Banner to have their voice heard above the RFS "White Shirt" dictatorship within the RFS-Association. On the ground knowledge is ignored and volunteers are treated as if they do not know anything about fire fighting - those with senior years and senior service are hung out to dry.

There is no bushfire service without volunteers so join your open forum to the RFS by becoming a member of the VFFA.
Confidentiality is assured of membership at all times

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