Mission & Justice

Valerie Lawson; 19/7/08

Elma Kris was 16 when she discovered her family secret. The couple she called Uncle Ben and Aunt Lizzie were her parents, her cousin Ricky was her brother and two schoolmates were her sisters. Her biological parents gave Kris away when she was very young and relatives raised her on Thursday Island. Adoptions like these were common among Torres Strait Island families but traditions did not ease the pain of Kris’s discovery. Kris’s biological dad, a bit tipsy after a Christmas visit to her home, told her the truth. “He asked me to go down the street to catch the bus. He put his arm round my shoulder and as were were walking, he said, ‘Do you know who I am?’ “I said, ‘Yes, you’re my Uncle Ben’ and he said, ‘No, I’m your father.’

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Andrew Darby; 17/7/08

A new hurdle has been raised to Gunns Limited’s pulp mill, with opponents claiming up to a third of affected landowners in the Tamar Valley will refuse access for the project’s vital water pipeline. TV and radio gardening presenter Peter Cundall said their opposition would block the $2 billion project. “If they refuse, the mill’s had its blooming lot,” he said yesterday. But Gunns said it was confident of reaching agreement with all affected landowners.

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Natasha Robinson; 16/7/08

The Northern Territory Government has been accused of underspending on remote indigenous communities and other social services, after federal documents revealed an apparent massive gap between commonwealth grants and subsequent Territory government funding. The accusation from the Northern Territory Council of Social Service came as a former senior economist in the chief minister’s office, Rolf Gerritsen, said fiscal and ethical standards in the Territory were so poor that the federal Government should be in charge of every town and community outside Darwin. The harsh criticism for Paul Henderson’s Government adds to growing dissent outside Darwin over the northern-based administration’s lack of spending in central Australia. Treasurer Delia Lawrie defended the Government’s spending on indigenous services yesterday, which she said amounted to half of its total funding from the commonwealth.

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Adel Safty; 14/6/08

Recently unsealed US court records shed light on the inner world of war profiteers. According to the Chicago Tribune, the records show how bribery and kickbacks played a role in securing Iraq war contracts for serving the US military even before the war started. Four former supervisors from Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), the defence firm that secured some of the largest contracts, a US Army officer, and five KBR executives, were among 36 people “indicted to date on Iraq war-contract crimes”. An investigation by the Boston Globe revealed that the leading American war contractor for Iraq - KBR, until recently a subsidy of Halliburton Corporation - had avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes, by hiring workers through shell companies in the Cayman Islands. These revelations come on the wake of other revelations about those who are profiting from the Iraq war.

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14/7/08

George Bush, the US president, has lifted an executive ban on oil drilling on the US outer-continental shelf, the White House has said, improving prospects for oil exploration projects to go ahead in the region. Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman, said earlier on Monday that Bush had lifted the executive order because the Democrat-led congress had failed to act on his recommendation in June that restrictions on offshore drilling be lifted. Perino said Bush’s order to drop the ban would not automatically clear the way for exploration because “congress has to act as well” to lift legislative restrictions on drilling activity. The move towards exploiting regions off US shores is strongly opposed by environmentalists.

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Paige Taylor; 14/7/08

Eleven years ago, Lynn Dunn’s Martu people were united in opposition to uranium mining on their desert land in Western Australia’s Pilbara, and to show it they travelled to Alice Springs to sign a joint declaration with the Mirrar, Arabanna, Murran and Gangalida peoples. But today Ms Dunn, a 46-year-old mother of four, is part of a Martu leadership team with a different view of what is possible for the massive Kintyre uranium deposit in the land where she grew up hunting lizards, gathering bush tucker and watching the lakes fill and empty in season. The Martu’s Western Desert Lands Aboriginal Corporation has given its approval to Rio Tinto’s planned $500 million sale of Kintyre to Canadian and Japanese mining giants. Ms Dunn, a member of the governing body of the Western Desert Lands Aboriginal Corporation, has taken what she regards as a practical stance and is not opposed to a uranium mine at Kintyre so long as her people own some of it.

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Tom Hyland; 13/8/08

Australian troops in southern Afghanistan face worsening security and their battlefield successes against the Taliban are not winning the support of local people, a confidential report and secret polling show. Coming less than a week after the sixth Australian soldier died in Afghanistan, the findings undermine claims of progress and reinforce Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s warning of more troop deaths. The Sun-Herald has obtained a confidential security report that warns the capital, Kabul, will become virtually cut off from the rest of the country and is likely to be the target of a “spectacular” terrorist attack.

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Susan Maushart; 12/7/08

I hate to gush, but after a decade of participation in the public swilling of that lifestyle beverage we used to call H20, Elizabeth Royte’s new book, Bottlemania: How Water Went On Sale And Why We Bought It, makes the great bottled-water boondbggle crystal clear; there really is a sucker born every minute, and that’s not even counting the sippers, guzzlers and slurpers. “Bottlemania,” I explain to the kids, “is a reference to ‘tulipmania’ - y’know, that 17th-century thing that happened in the Netherlands when tulip bulbs became more valuable than gold?” The silence that greets this is so pure, it sifts Vermeer-like across the table. “You know,” I persist, “tulipmania.” “Didn’t Scarlett Johansson get that?” someone offers.

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Lenore Taylor; 12/7/08

Nineteen years ago as a young reporter, I travelled to the banks of the Murray River to hear then prime minister Bob Hawke deliver what he modestly called “the world’s greatest environment statement”. It involved $500 million over 10 years to plant one billion trees. (Actually it started out as 500,000 trees but then a young prime ministerial adviser called Craig Emerson bounded on to the press bus to say the figure had been bumped up to one billion by factoring in self-seeding.) Hyperbole aside, that day was the start of political and popular public recognition that something was terribly wrong with our most important river system. Unfortunately it didn’t make much of a start on solving the problem.

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Christian Kerr & Stuart Rintoul; 11/7/08

The Murray-Darling crisis has worsened, 18 months after John Howard promised $10 billion for the struggling river system and despite two COAG meetings under Kevin Rudd at which the ailing state of the river was debated at length. As scientists launched a renewed attack on the lack of action on addressing the crisis, the Murray-Darling Commission yesterday released figures indicating that June inflows had been the lowest on record, with just 95gigalitres flowing into the river system. That was 11 gigalitres down on the previous low of 106 gigalitres in June 2006 and a fraction of the long-term average June inflow of 680 gigalitres. Wendy Craik, chief executive of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission, said that if the Murray was a patient, its condition would be “critical”.

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