Mission & Justice

Andrew Fraser & Sarah Elks; 16/5/08

The Queensland Government will tell the family of Steve Irwin they must excise an area claimed for mining on Cape York from a nature refuge it is planning for the area. The Irwin family was last year given $6.25 million by the Howard government to buy a 135,000ha property on Cape York that was to be converted into a nature reserve. Mining company Cape Alumina claims to have an exploration permit over parts of the property that allows it to explore for bauxite. Earlier this week, Steve Irwin’s widow Terri launched an online petition to save “Steve’s Place” and said the ecological integrity of the property was under threat from mining.

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Matthew Denholm; 15/4/08

ANZ Bank says it is examining whether the Gunns pulp mill proposed for northern Tasmania will destroy high conservation value forests before deciding whether to finance the project. Environment Minister Peter Garrett, his predecessor Malcolm Turnbull and the Tasmanian Government all refused to consider the impact on Tasmania’s forests of the mill’s appetite for up to four million tonnes of woodchips each year. However, ANZ - Gunns’ banker and a proposed financier of the $2 billion project - earlier this month adopted a policy committing it to “avoiding” support for projects that destroy high conservation value forests.

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Padraic Murphy; 14/5/08

Cape York indigenous leaders have strongly attacked Steve Irwin’s widow, Terri, for trying to stop a mine going ahead on a 135,000ha property on Cape York that the Irwins were given last year. The Howard government last year gave $6.25 million to the Irwins to acquire a 135,000ha former cattle station on Cape York, which the family promised to turn into the Steve Irwin Wildlife Reserve to continue the conservation work of Irwin, who died in September 2006 after being struck by a stingray. But since then, mining company Cape Alumina, which has mining leases over about 10 per cent of the property and had been negotiating with Aboriginal councils and traditional owners about mining adjacent properties, has been unable to access parts of the property that contains bauxite deposits they want to mine.

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13/5/08

Six countries in the region are working on their submissions to the United Nations (UN) to claim extra ocean space. According to Fijilive, the six island nations ‘are beginning to feel the pressure to complete their submissions to the United Nations to claim extra ocean space, with only one year remaining to the May 2009 deadline, says the Pacific Islands Applied Geoscience Commission (SOPAC)’. ‘The Maritime Boundaries Project Officer with SOPAC, Emily Artack said Fiji along with Solomon Islands, Kiribati, Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, Tonga and Papua New Guinea have a credible claim to more than 1.5 million square kilometres of additional space beyond their current 200 mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ)’.

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13/5/08

The Kavieng District Court has banned logging on Tatau Island in New Ireland province. The ban came last week after two clans on the island complained that logging was threatening some of their sacred sites, including their burial grounds and their source of food. They claimed that logging was also endangering their environment, their river and marine life. The landowners of Tatau Island belong to Damok and Barbar clans.Restrained from logging are Tavak Investment Ltd, a purported landowner company owned by John Same and his brother Joseph Panga, the Niugini Forest Planning and Management Ltd and Vanimo Jaya Ltd.

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12/5/08

Landowners at Bougainville Copper Ltd’s Panguna mine area have “unanimously” agreed to invite the company to consider re-establishing the big open pit mine. A response from Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG) and BCL was not immediately available, but industry sources believe it will cost at least US$1 billion to reopen the mine and it could take three or four years before it is brought back into production. In a brief statement released last Friday, they said the two main landowner groups, the Panguna landowners association and directors of road mining tailing leases “have met with BCL” and unanimously agreed the company should return to Bougainville. The statement was signed by the chairman of PLA and RMTL Michael Pariu, the vice chairman of PLA Chris Damana, director of RTML Severinus Ampaoi and RTML’s director and company secretary Lawrence Daveona.

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11/5/08

Many more underage Australians believe it is acceptable to drink alcohol on a regular basis today than they did 16 years ago, according to a national survey. The Dolly Youth Monitor, which has surveyed thousands of teenagers between the age of 10 to 17 since 1992, found there has been a sharp increase in the numbers that approve of alcohol use. The latest edition of the bi-annual survey found that 80 per cent believed regular drinking was acceptable, while back in 1992 only 64 per cent thought so.

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6/5/08

Government identifies three key sectors to take over from logging Tourism, Fisheries and Agriculture sectors have been identified by the CNURA government to take over from logging. Acting Finance Minister, Gordon Darcy Lilo made the announcement in a press conference with local media last week. “It is so important to prepare ourselves structurally, with the sector that will be able to take over the burden of generating economic benefits to the country that is currently being done by the logging sector.”

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Matthew Denholm; 6/5/08

Taxpayers will pay timber company Gunns up to $15million if further forest protection affects the supply of wood to its proposed pulp mill. The compensation is promised to Gunns in a 20-year deal signed four months ago but only made public late yesterday by the Tasmanian Government. State Treasurer Michael Aird said the compensation, part of a “sovereign risk” agreement between Gunns and the state-owned Forestry Tasmania, was “accepted practice”. However, conservation groups said the deal was “dodgy” and would make it harder for federal and state governments to protect further forests as national parks or as carbon sinks.

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Sarah Smiles; 1/5/08

Aborigines living in poverty in the Kimberley could be the biggest winners from a future multibillion-dollar gas development off the West Australian coast, according to the Kimberley Land Council. They stand to receive billions in royalties from the resources project — potentially the biggest in Australia’s history — and could use it to take control of health, housing and education services, it says. “We aren’t letting governments off the hook from these responsibilities,” the land council’s director, Wayne Bergmann, said in a speech to the National Press Club yesterday. But he said Aboriginal people needed to take control of their economic future.

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