Mission & Justice

Matthew Franklin; 29/8/08

The man who made his fortune singing about his distaste for uranium mining yesterday gave his personal approval for the expansion of South Australia’s Beverley uranium mine. Peter Garrett, previously the lead singer with Australian band Midnight Oil, yesterday completed his transition from activist to pragmatic establishment politician by ticking off Heathgate Resources’ expansion plans in his role as the Rudd Government’s Environment Minister. Mr Garrett, who was also a founding member of the Nuclear Disarmament Party, said he was satisfied the rigorous scientific process had been conducted to examine the proposal and that he had imposed conditions requiring the company to monitor the effects of its operation on ground water.

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Kevin Pamba & Jason Som Kaut; 27/8/08

Three Chinese employees of China Metallurgical Construction Company (MCC), the developers of the Ramu Nickel resource, were savagely attacked by about 100 armed landowners at the Basamuk project site at Rai Coast last Sunday morning. They are recovering in Madang town. Work at the Basamuk refinery and wharf site had been stopped and police and senior company officials are in the area to control the situation. In a separate incident, Papua New Guineans working up at MCC’s proposed nickel mine site at Kurumbukari in Usino-Bundi have stopped working while Chinese nationals working there have been evacuated to Madang town in fear of attacks over the weekend. The three Chinese injured at Basamuk were evacuated to Modilon General Hospital in Madang where they were treated.

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Sean Parnell; 25/8/08

The mining industry has launched a savage attack on the Bligh Government for announcing a two-year moratorium on shale oil projects, labelling it a politically motivated decision aimed at saving a marginal seat and appeasing environmental groups. Already under fire over the Government’s refusal to allow uranium mining but its willingness to sell exploration permits, Premier Anna Bligh flew to north Queensland yesterday to formally announce that a $14 billion shale oil project would be blocked. The Queensland Energy Resources project would have involved the bulk sampling and exploration of about 400,000 tonnes of rock in the McFarlane deposit, 15km south of Proserpine. Ms Bligh heeded the concerns of community and environmental groups, who feared the Whitsundays tourism industry and the Great Barrier Reef were at risk.

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13/8/08

Indonesia’s richest man, Aburizal Bakrie, says a firm linked to his family is not responsible for a massive mud disaster in East Java, but will still pay victims compensation. The cause of the Sidoarjo mud volcano, which has displaced more than 50,000 people, is disputed. Some scientific studies blame drilling by Lapindo Brantas Inc, a firm linked to Mr Bakrie’s family, while Lapindo and Mr Bakrie say an earthquake near Yogyakarta in 2006 triggered the disaster. Mr Bakrie, the country’s chief welfare minister, said Lapindo had been cleared of wrongdoing by two Indonesian courts. The company is paying compensation for the flooded land, houses and factories, and has built new housing for victims.

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Harlyne Joku, 13/8/08

One of the founding fathers of the PNG Constitution, John Momis, warned yesterday that the concerns of the people of Bougainville must be addressed before the Government could consider reopening the Bougainville copper mine. Mr Momis, PNG’s ambassador to China, made the remarks as one of the key-speakers at the 2008 UPNG Waigani Seminar which started at the University of PNG’s main lecture theatre yesterday. He said the Bougainville crisis of the late 1980s and 1990s was inevitable as successive Governments refused to listen to the pleas and grievances of the landowners and people of Bougainville.

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Mark Forbes; 2/8/08

Waht do you get for instigating a nation’s worst human-made disaster, flooding 600 hectares with toxic mud from an unsafe gas well, cutting key highways and displacing about 40,000 people? In Indonesia, you get a government award for complying with safety and environmental standards. A public relations campaign by gas company Lapindo, owned by the Peoples Welfare Minister Aburizal Bakrie, has been boosted by the Environment Ministry’s “Oscar”. Since a drilling well erupted in an unstoppable torrent of mud in East Java two years ago, Lapindo has gone to extraordinary lengths to escape blame.

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Michael McKenna; 1/8/08

Swiss mining giant Xstrata will for the first time face daily independent monitoring of its lead emissions over Mount Isa after more than 10 per cent of children in the central Queensland town were found to have dangerously high levels of the metal in their blood. After decades of inaction, the Queensland Government will next month take over Xstrata’s self-regulation of its heavy metal emissions control to provide openness and public confidence amid a series of looming civil trials over alleged negligence and widespread air, water and soil contamination. The crackdown - in which Xstrata will also be compelled to release its own monitoring reports, which will then be made public every month - follows recent revelations by The Australian that an independent study had found household dust samples contained lead levels up to 40 times greater than in international guidelines.

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Helen Hughes and Mark Hughes; 26/7/08;Emeritus professor Helen Hughes is a senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies and Mark Hughes is an independent researcher.

Kevin Rudd’s community cabinet meeting in Yirrkala this week left untouched the failures of public policy in the town’s region of the Northern Territory, East Arnhem Land. The cabinet’s decision to support a constitutional amendment to recognise indigenous Australians will not close the gap in living standards. East Arnhem consists of two contrasting parts: the prosperous mining town of Nhulunbuy, with more than 4000 non-indigenous inhabitants on the one hand, and 10,000 Aborigines Living in Third World conditions. About 800 of these Aborigines live close to Nhulunbuy in Yirrkala and Marngarr, but the rest of the East Arnhem population is widely spread. There are alcohol-free Aboriginal communities in the Laynhapuy homelands. But Yirrkala itself was notorious for high rates of alcoholism and associated violence, against which women’s night patrols struggled in vain.

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Natasha Robinson & Matt Chambers; 24/7/08

One of the most bitter chapters in the life of Arnhem Land leader Galarrwuy Yunupingu was belatedly sweetened yesterday as mining company Rio Tinto promised to join hands with northeast Arnhem Land communities to drive economic development. As Kevin Rudd flagged a referendum on the constitutional recognition of indigenous people, another deal that hopefully will propel remote Arnhem Land communities into the real economy was being negotiated in thebackground. Rio Tinto, the owner of a bauxite mine and alumina refinery at Nhulunbuy, has pledged to help drive economic development in a deal that will help heal decades of resentment felt by Yolngu leaders over a federal government decision in 1963 to excise Crown land for the mine. The creation of the bauxite mine, originally owned by Nabalco, then by Alcan, and now by Rio Tinto, which acquired Alcan late last year, was the catalyst for the land rights movement in the Northern Territory after indigenous leaders challenged the government’s unilateral decision to excise the land.

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Mineral Policy Institute; 1/6/08

Seventh Session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues; Interventions at the forum by Jethro Tulin (Ipili, Papua New Guinea), Neville Chappy Williams (Wiradjuri, Australia), Carrie Dann (Western Shoshone, USA) and Larson Bill (Western Shoshone, USA) all voiced the serious concern these communities have with large scale mining on their lands, particularly by Barrick Gold Corporation.
Extract from Jethro Tulin’s intervention at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. “Madam Chair, ours is a clash of civilisations. Propelled largely by state services, the Engan and Huli people have shot from the so-called Stone Age, an age of true sustainability, to the space age in one generation, with stunning results for some. Tribesmen, who in their youth wore grass aprons and sported fantastical wings studded with bird of paradise feathers, now have health care and modern homes. But others are reeling from the impact of cash-for-land deals that have turned their traditions upside-down and their ancestral home into an industrial moonscape patrolled by guards and police, including one of PNG’s notorious “Mobile Units”, renowned for savages human rights abuses, including killings. The Porgera Mine Death and Injury case [Shooting Fields of Porgera Joint Venture, Papua New Guinea, 2005, by Jethro Tulin] is a textbook case of what can go wrong when large-scale mining confronts Indigenous Peoples, ignoring the impacts of its projects and resorting to goon squads when people rebel against it. This outrages local Indigenous communities, especially when the mine is right next to our homes; my people are exposed to dangerous chemicals like cyanide and mercury; some of our people drown in the tailings and waste during floods; and fishing stocks, flora and fauna are depleted down the river systems, leading to indigenous food sources being threatened.”

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