207 Monckton tour of Australia; Aborigines, not climate, killed Megafauna

Monckton tour of Australia; Aborigines, not climate, killed Megafauna

(1) Droughts might not be due to carbon-dioxide, says CSIRO
(2) Lord Monckton interview on Sydney radio, Tuesday  January 26
(3) Monckton to Rudd: your Warming policies are killing Millions
(4) Lord Monckton Speaking Tour of Australia, with Ian Plimer
(5) Rudd science based on speculative Himalayan glacier guess
(6) Aborigines, not climate, killed megafauna - report
(7) Humans Caused Demise of Australia's Megafauna, Evidence Shows
(8) Greens & Labor make deals: Green Left vs Aborigines of Cape York

(1) Droughts might not be due to carbon-dioxide, says CSIRO

http://joannenova.com.au/2010/01/droughts-might-not-be-due-to-carbon-dioxide-says-csiro/

Still in the theme of Shock!-The-Media-IS-Reporting-The-News: The Canberra Times announced on its front page that CSIRO is not so sure that droughts are due to increased carbon dioxide <http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/local/news/general/jury-still-out-on-climate-change-csiro/1728307.aspx>. Only a few months ago, they announced the exact opposite. <http://www.theage.com.au/national/its-not-drought-its-climate-change-say-scientists-20090829-f3cd.html>

September 2009: A three-year collaboration between the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO has confirmed what many scientists long suspected: that the 13-year drought is not just a natural dry stretch but a shift related to climate change.

Jan 2010: One of the report’s co-authors, hydrologist David Post, told The Canberra Times there was ”no evidence” linking drought to climate change in eastern Australia, including the Murray-Darling Basin.

Back in September, this long study was based on the old trick of using climate models and “subtracting” the natural causes to see what’s left. It’s also known as “Argument from Ignorance”. Since we can’t predict the climate five years in advance, obviously there are factors or weightings in those climate models that aren’t right. Ruling out “what we know” doesn’t prove anything at all, except that there is a lot we don’t know.

When David Stockwell analysed climate models and Australian droughts, he found that random numbers were more likely to predict droughts successfully. The models failed validation tests. In the end, instead of using climate models, we’re better off with last week’s Lotto numbers. It’s cheaper too.

…instead of using climate models, we’re better off with last week’s Lotto numbers. It’s cheaper too. ...

(2) Lord Monckton interview on Sydney radio, Tuesday  January 26

From: Joe Bryant <succeed@tsn.cc> Date: 21.01.2010 06:37 AM
From: Brian Wilshire [mailto:bwilshire@2gb.com]
Sent: Thursday, 21 January 2010 7:11 PM

Lord Monckton (Greenhoax/world government threat) will be in the studio with me next Tuesday night, 26/1, from 10 PM  to Midnight.

Brian Wilshire

2GB - 873kc AM radio

(3) Monckton to Rudd: your Warming policies are killing Millions

Mr Rudd, your misguided warming policies are killing millions

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/mr-rudd-your-misguided-warming-policies-are-killing-millions/story-e6frg6zo-1225816411782

Christopher Monckton    The Australian    January 06, 2010  12:00AM  

YOU say I am one of "those who argue that climate change does not represent a global market failure". Yet it is only recently that opinion sufficient to constitute a market signal became apparent in the documents of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is, however, a political rather than a scientific entity. There has scarcely been time for a "market failure".

Besides, corporations are falling over themselves to cash in on the giant financial fraud against the little guy that carbon taxation and trading have already become in the goody-two-shoes EU, and will become in Australia if you get your way.

You say I was one of "those who argue that somehow the market will magically solve the problem". In fact I have never argued that, though in general the market is better at solving problems than the habitual but repeatedly failed dirigisme of the etatistes predominant in the classe politique today.

The questions I address are a) whether there is a climate problem at all; and b) even if there is one whether waiting and adapting, if necessary, is more cost-effective than attempting to mitigate the supposed problem by trying to reduce the carbon dioxide our industries and enterprises emit.

Let us pretend, solum ad argumentum, that a given proportionate increase in CO2 concentration causes the maximum warming imagined by the IPCC.

By the end of this month, according to the Copenhagen Accord, all parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change are due to report what cuts in emissions they will make by 2020. Broadly speaking, the Annex 1 parties, who will account for about half of global emissions over the period, will commit to reducing current emissions by 30 per cent by 2020, or 15 per cent on average in the decade between now and 2020.

Thus, if every Annex 1 party to the Copenhagen Accord complies with its obligations to the full, today's emissions will be reduced by about half of that 15 per cent, namely 7.5 per cent, compared with business as usual. If the trend of the past decade continues, with business as usual we shall add 2 parts per million by volume/ year, or 20 ppmv over the decade. Now, 7.5 per cent of 20 ppmv is 1.5 ppmv. One-fiftieth of a Celsius degree of warming forestalled is all that complete, global compliance with the Copenhagen Accord for an entire decade would achieve. Yet the cost of achieving this result - an outcome so small that our instruments would not be able to measure it - would run into trillions of dollars.

You say "formal global and national economic modelling" shows "that the costs of inaction are greater than the costs of acting". Yet, every economic analysis except that of the now discredited Lord Stern, with its near-zero discount rate and its absurdly inflated warming rates, comes to the same ineluctable conclusion: adaptation to climate change, if necessary, is orders of magnitude more cost-effective than attempts at mitigation. In a long career in policy analysis in and out of government, I have never seen so cost-ineffective a proposed waste of taxpayers' money to stop the tide from coming in.

I have done this calculation on the basis that everyone complies with the Copenhagen Accord yet precedent does not look promising. The Kyoto Protocol has been in operation for more than a decade. So far, after billions spent, global CO2 emissions have risen.

Remember, too, that we have assumed the maximum warming that might occur in response to an increase in CO2 concentration. Yet even the IPCC's central estimate of CO2's warming effect, according to an increasing number of serious papers in the peer-reviewed literature, is a five-fold exaggeration. If those papers are right, warming forestalled may prove to be just one-thousandth of a degree.

You led a delegation of 114 people to Copenhagen to bring back a non-result. Half a dozen were all that was really necessary. If you and your officials are not willing to tighten your belts, why should the taxpayers tighten theirs?

You say that our aim, in daring to oppose the transient fashion for apocalypticism, is "to erode just enough of the political will that action becomes impossible". No. Our aim is to ensure that the truth is widely enough understood to prevent the squandering of precious resources on addressing the non-problem of anthropogenic "global warming". The correct policy response to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing.

You say that I and others like me base our thinking on the notion that "the cost of not acting is nothing".

Well, after a decade and a half with no statistically significant "global warming", and after three decades in which the mean warming rate has been well below the ever-falling predictions of the UN's climate panel, that notion has not been disproved in reality.

However, the question I address is whether the cost of taking action is many times greater than the cost of not acting? The answer is yes.

Millions are already dying of starvation in the world's poorest nations because world food prices have doubled in two years. That was caused by a sharp drop in world food production, caused by suddenly taking millions of acres of land out of growing food for people who need it, to grow biofuels for clunkers that don't. The policies that you advocate are killing people by the million. At a time when so many of the world's people are already short of food, the UN's right-to-food rapporteur, Herr Ziegler, has rightly condemned the biofuel scam as "a crime against humanity".

Yet this slaughter is founded upon a lie: the claim by the IPCC that it is 90 per cent certain that most of the "global warming" since 1950 is man-made. This claim - based not on science but on a show of hands among political representatives, with China wanting a lower figure and other nations wanting a higher figure - is demonstrably false. Peer-reviewed analyses of changes in cloud cover over recent decades - changes almost entirely unconnected with changes in CO2 concentration - show that it was this largely natural reduction in cloud cover from 1983-2001 and a consequent increase in the amount of short-wave and UV solar radiation reaching the Earth that accounted for five times as much warming as CO2 could have caused.

Nor is the IPCC's great lie the only lie in the official documents of the IPCC and in the speeches of its current chairman, who has made himself a multi-millionaire as a "global warming" profiteer.

It is also a fact that, while those of the UN's computer models that can be forced with an increase in sea-surface temperatures all predict a consequent fall in the flux of outgoing radiation at top of atmosphere, in observed reality there is an increase.

In short, the radiation that is supposed to be trapped here in the troposphere to cause "global warming" is measured as escaping to space much as usual, so that it cannot be causing more than about one-fifth of the warming the IPCC predicts.

It would be kinder to your working people to wait another decade and see whether global temperatures even begin to respond as the IPCC has predicted? What is the worst that can happen if you wait? Just 0.02C of global warming that would not otherwise have occurred. It's a no-brainer.

(4) Lord Monckton Speaking Tour of Australia, with Ian Plimer
From: mail@aefweb.info Date: 20.01.2010 09:15 AM
Subject: AEF Newsletter - 20 Jan, 2010

http://listentous.org.au/

LORD CHRISTOPHER MONCKTON SPEAKING TOUR OF AUSTRALIA:

Along with Professor Ian Plimer, Lord Monckton will tour most capital cities from January 27th to February 9th and give a series of hour long presentations on climate issues that conclude with questions.   Professor Plimer recommends that all who can, should hear Lord Monckton as he is a skilful and knowledgeable speaker.

Tour details:

 Lord Monckton in Australia
There are still details to be finalised for the tour, but basically the program for Lord Monckton's public lectures is:

Sydney January 27th       Sheraton on the Park, 5:30 pm
Newcastle January 28th    Banquet Room, City Hall, 12:30 pm
Brisbane January 29th     Irish Club, 3:00 pm
Noosa January 30th        The J , 2:00 pm
Melbourne February 1st    Sofitel Hotel, 5:30 pm
Canberra February 3rd     Program yet to be determined
Adelaide February 4th     Intercontinental Hotel, 7:30 pm
Perth February 8th        Parmelia Hilton, 5:30 pm

The response to this tour has been amazing which underlines the timeliness of it.  
 
Direct all queries to:

Case Smit BSc CIH(ret) CP(Env) FAusIMM      
Noosaville Qld. 4566      
case.smit@gmail.com            
0418 521 304    

or

John Smeed D.MechE FIEAust CPEng RPEQ  
Noosa Heads, Qld. 4567
johnsmeed@adna.com.au      
0417 269 216                      

THE NUCLEAR DEBATE WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?

A public debate organised by Intelligence2 will be conducted at Melbourne Town Hall on March 4th 2010 at 5.30pm with the proposition 'Australia should embrace nuclear power'.  Speakers will include Dr James Hansen from NASA, Dr Ziggy Switkowski, chairman of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation and former Clinton presidential advisor, Molly Harriss Olson.  This should prove to be a lively public discussion.  Bookings can be made via http://www.trybooking.com/DAV

http://www.iq2oz.com/

AEF has, from its inception, sought to encourage evidence based public debate on nuclear energy instead of the ideologically driven discussions and comment we have seen for the last decade, so we welcome this initiative.  
CONFERENCE VIDEO EXTRACTS ON AEF WEBSITE:

Our webmaster has been busy and has uploaded some extracts of three of our 2009 Conference speakers which can be found on our website under the heading EAF 2009 Conference. Quadrant was also impressed with our speakers.  ==

LESS THAN HALF OF AUSTRALIANS SUPPORT AN ETS:

Polling released by Roy Morgan Research a few days ago shows a continuing downward trend in support for an emissions trading scheme, It is now down to 46% support, evidence that the more people learn about the ETS the less they like it.

http://www.roymorgan.com/news/polls/2010/4459/

Chairman Alex Stuart and Max Rheese were interviewed by radio stations in Canberra, Sydney and Brisbane on the issue today and were able to broadcast our campaign web address at ListenToUs and direct people to the online petition.  This saw a spike in signatories in the few hours after the interviews, almost all from the Sydney area.  Andrew Moore from 2GB did give us a generous mention and praised our work, which no doubt helped. ==

ETS TO GO BACK TO PARLIAMENT IN FEBRUARY:

The government's stated intention is to present amended ETS legislation to the parliament next month.  We will continue to speak out on this issue and seek you support through encouraging people to sign the online petition and contribute via donations at the website.  We need your support to help defeat this costly and unnecessary legislation.

Sign The Petition against the ETS
http://listentous.org.au/

Max Rheese
Australian Environment Foundation
Ph:   03 5762 6883
Fax: 03 5762 3069
info@aefweb.info
http://www.aefweb.info    

http://aefweb.info/index.php

(5) Rudd science based on speculative Himalayan glacier guess

http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2010/01/based-on-a-lie

“Today’s debate about global warming is essentially a debate about freedom. The environmentalists would like to mastermind each and every possible (and impossible) aspect of our lives.”

Vaclav Klaus
Blue Planet in Green Shackles

Rudd science based on a lie

by Sinclair Davidson

January 20, 2010

Will Garnaut and Rudd retract?

The Rudd government’s White Paper into the CPRS at page 2-3 contains this statement now know to be false:

Melting of the Himalayan glaciers. These glaciers feed several of the most important rivers in Asia, which underpin the livelihoods of some of the most populous nations. Decreased freshwater availability could affect more than a billion people in Asia by 2050.

While the government has a disclaimer on the paper, nonetheless the greatest moral issue of our time can’t be based on a lie.

It seems the Garnaut Report also swallowed the Himalayan glacier story. At page 99:

After the polar regions, the Himalayas are home to the largest glacial areas. Together, the Himalayan glaciers feed seven of the most important rivers in Asia—the Ganga, Indus, Brahmaputra, Salween, Mekong, Yangtze and Huang. These glaciers are receding faster than any other glaciers around the world, and some estimates project that they may disappear altogether by 2035 (WWF Nepal Program 2005).

Rivers fed from glaciers are projected to experience increased streamflows over the next few decades as a result of glacial melt, followed by a subsequent decline and greater instability of inflows as glaciers begin to disappear altogether, leaving only seasonal precipitation to feed rivers (WWF Nepal Program 2005). Glacial retreat can also result in catastrophic discharges of water from meltwater lakes, known as glacial lake outburst floods, which can cause considerable destruction and flooding downstream.

But wait, there’s more, at page 147:

The melting of the Himalayan and Tibetan plateau glaciers illustrates the complex nexus of climate change, economic security and geopolitics. Well over a billion people are dependent on the flow of the area’s rivers for much of their food and water needs, as well as transportation and energy from hydroelectricity. Initially, flows may increase, as glacial runoff accelerates, causing extensive flooding. Within a few decades, however, water levels are expected to decline, jeopardising food production and causing widespread water and power shortages.

Sounds terrible. Thankfully we now know that isn’t true. Actually we know a bit more; Walter Russell Mead uses the F-word:

One of the most alarming predictions of the IPCC, the scientific panel that is considered the world’s most authoritative source of information on global warming, turns out to be a total fraud.

He says heads should roll. Yes, I think so.

(6) Aborigines, not climate, killed megafauna - report

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/aborigines-not-climate-killed-megafauna-report/story-e6frf7jx-1225822435609

By Mahesh Sharma of The Australian   NewsCore   January 22, 2010 10:48AM  

THE giant marsupials, reptiles and flightless birds - known as megafauna - that inhabited Australia more than 40,000 years ago were most likely killed off by early Australians, according to new research that shows mankind and the huge beasts co-existed only for a short period, The Australian reported.

The findings challenge the long-held theory that climate change wiped out the animals, which included giant wombats and kangaroos.

Fresh analysis of the age of megafauna bones found at Cuddie Springs in northern New South Wales disproved previous findings, which indicated humans and megafauna lived together for about 20,000 years.

It was previously thought the Cuddie Springs remains were from between 40,000 and 30,000 years ago, but research performed by Reiner Grun, of the Australian National University, last year found they date back to 51,000 and 40,000 years ago.

It is the last piece of the puzzle in the debate, because Cuddie Springs was the only site in Australia that did not date the extinction of megafauna to between 51,000 and 40,000 years ago.

Writing in the journal Science, geochronologist Bert Roberts, of the University of Wollongong, and earth scientist Barry Brook, of the University of Adelaide, claimed the cause of megafauna extinction coincided with the arrival of the first Australians between 60,000 and 45,000 years ago.

"There are two theories. One is people came in and did so much burning of vegetation and that caused hardship and the megafauna died of starvation," they wrote.

"The other is they (humans) only had to eat a very few each year and they still would have driven the species to extinction."

Professor Roberts said the findings were "damning evidence" that humans are to blame for the extinction of megafauna.

(7) Humans Caused Demise of Australia's Megafauna, Evidence Shows

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100121141109.htm

ScienceDaily (Jan. 21, 2010) — A new scientific paper co-authored by a University of Adelaide researcher reports strong evidence that humans, not climate change, caused the demise of Australia's megafauna -- giant marsupials, huge reptiles and flightless birds -- at least 40,000 years ago.

In a paper published in the journal Science, two Australian scientists claim that improved dating methods show that humans and megafauna only co-existed for a relatively short time after people inhabited Australia, adding weight to the argument that hunting led to the extinction of large-bodied species.

According to Professor Richard 'Bert' Roberts from the University of Wollongong and Professor Barry Brook from the University of Adelaide, new methods to directly date bones and teeth of extinct species show that megafauna fossils and Aboriginal tools do not all date from the same period.

"Debate about the possible cause of these late Pleistocene extinctions has continued for more than 150 years, with scientists divided over whether climate change or the arrival of humans has been responsible for their demise," Professor Brook says.

"Australia was colonised during a time when the climate was relatively benign, supporting the view that people, not climate change, caused the extinctions here," he says.

But one site in western NSW -- Cuddie Springs -- stood out as an anomaly. Fossils of super-sized kangaroos, giant birds and the rhino-sized Diprotodon (the largest marsupial ever to roam Australia) were found in the same sedimentary layers as stone tools, leading some scientists to previously claim "unequivocal evidence" of a long overlap of humans and megafauna.

However, Professor Roberts -- the lead author of the Science paper "And Then There Were None?" -- says direct dating of fossils shows that the artefacts and megafauna fossils at the Cuddie Springs site were mixed together over many thousands of years, long after the giant animals had died.

"These results provide no evidence for the late survival of megafauna at this site," Professor Roberts says.

"Given that people arrived in Australia between 60,000 and 45,000 years ago, human impact was the likely extinction driver, either through hunting or habitat disturbance," he says.

Professor Brook says previous claims for sites containing younger megafauna -- such as in Kangaroo Island, eastern Victoria and the highlands of Papua New Guinea -- should also be considered suspect in the light of these revised, older dates for the Cuddie Springs fossils.

(8) Greens & Labor make deals: Green Left vs Aborigines of Cape York

The Green Left is made up of a variety of minority groups - Green, Feminist, Gay, Black etc. At times, they are forced to choose, and the leadership then show their priorities.. They have sided with Feminists against traditional Aboriginal marriage practices; and with Gay Rights when indigenous practice disagrees. Now they are siding with Greens who want to lock up the rivers & forests, against Aborigines wanting multi-use.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/labor-connives-with-green-alliance-to-control-indigenous-growth/story-e6frg6zo-1225820154890

Labor connives with green alliance to control indigenous growth

Noel Pearson

January 16, 2010

NEXT time you bump into a koala conservationist begging for money in the street, ask what it thinks of Noel Pearson and his opposition to the Queensland government's wild rivers laws. The koala will tell you that I am a rapacious developer who wants to mine, clear-fell, pollute and pillage the unique environment of Cape York Peninsula. The koala will tell you that I do not speak for Aboriginal people from the region, and that the laws are strongly supported by them.

The Wilderness Society has an army of teenagers out on the streets saying that about those of us resisting its attack on the land rights of Aboriginal people in the cape. As in all propaganda campaigns, its main currency is to push its side of the story.

It spent years laying down the groundwork before Premier Anna Bligh announced three wild river declarations after the state election last March. The first step was to cause great alarm about the threats facing Cape York. From Indooroopilly to Surry Hills it distributed pamphlets and held public meetings in the suburbs talking up the threats to Cape York. Threats can be the lifeblood of campaigns such as those routinely run by the Wilderness Society.

It helps when citizens on the southeastern seaboard of the country - not the least those in the marginal seats of Brisbane - are saturated with images of the Gunns Paper Mill in Tasmania and the disaster of the Murray-Darling. Not to mention global warming.

For an environmentally anxious public, the Wilderness Society conflated Cape York Peninsula with clear-felling of old-growth forests in southern Australia and the Murray-Darling, and it had a winner.

Add a good brand name - Wild River - and there you have it: the perfect product to sell to an environmentally troubled public. The name corners the market on motherhood and apple pie, and whatever protests affected landowners in remote regions may make, they have no chance in the propaganda war because they are by the very definition of speaking against Wild Rivers, environmental vandals.

The Wilderness Society spent years campaigning about the threats facing Cape York. But when you examine what possible source of threat it is talking about, you find very little.

Take clear-felling of forests for paper mills and the like. None. Never has been. Never will be.

Take timber. There is only one small sawmill in the entire region the size of Victoria that cuts a single species, Darwin Stringybark, a dry forest timber abundant across northern Australia.

Take mining. There are only two operating mines in the entire region, both of which have been in existence for 50 years, the Mitsubishi silica mine at Cape Flattery and the Comalco bauxite mine at Weipa.

There are two new bauxite mines proposed. One is to be developed by Chinese company Chalco, which was awarded the opportunity by the Queensland government. The Chalco mining area, on the northern side of the Archer River, was excluded from the Wild River declarations announced by Bligh, but on the southern side the Aurukun community lands were included.

The Chalco mining area is an example of hypocrisy for two reasons. First, the Queensland government says mining can be consistent with the use of Wild River areas. Therefore why exclude the Chalco mining area from the Wild River declaration?

Second, the Wilderness Society has never expressed its position on the Chalco mine. Why has it not insisted the Chalco mining area be included in the Wild River areas?

The second bauxite mine is proposed by a start-up company called Cape Alumina on a pastoral property purchased by the federal government for the owners of Australia Zoo. Terry Irwin has been campaigning against this mine. This area has not been excluded from a proposed Wild River declaration of the Wenlock River, and, therefore, Irwin and the Wilderness Society have been arguing that this mine is a grave threat to the environment of what Australia Zoo promotes as Steve's Place.

The Wilderness Society is campaigning vigorously against "strip mining" by the Cape Alumina mob, but seem silent on the Chinese proposal. Why?

It is because this was the terms of the deal the Wilderness Society cut with former Queensland premier Peter Beattie. Beattie insisted the Wilderness Society could get blanket Wild Rivers over the blackfellas' land - without providing anything to the blackfellas other than a few make-work ranger jobs - provided the Chalco mining area was excluded.

This is why the Wilderness Society is silent on Chalco and screaming loud on the other mine.

Like moving pieces in a massive game of chess, the leaders of the Wilderness Society sit down with Labor Party principals in front of a map of Queensland and they make deals about what they want and what they're prepared to give away. You give us the Traveston dam, we give you Cape York. You can fight Cape Alumina, but don't fight the Chinese.

This is how you get the Greens party in Queensland not opposing the Traveston dam at state election time. The charade of participatory democracy can be seen in every region of the state where there are networks of "catchment management groups" and "natural resource management groups". Farmers, local communities, indigenous representatives and shire councils sit down with state government bureaucrats and representatives of green groups and supposedly work out consensus solutions to land use and environmental management. But what the mug stakeholders from these communities do not realise is these processes are tokenism.

The real decisions are made in Brisbane. The people who actually live in these regions and who strive to make a livelihood out of the land, are reduced to being bit-part "stakeholders", while the real players are those cutting the deals in Brisbane.

Griffith University academics James Whelan and Kristen Lyons, in a 2004 paper examining the methods successfully employed by environment groups in getting tree-clearing bans in Queensland, report that one of the principals of the Wilderness Society, Lyndon Schneiders, called community consultation processes under legislation for land-clearing management "an exercise in futility" and "a long suicide note".

The organisations funded by the state and commonwealth to facilitate these stakeholder processes are controlled by the purse-strings of government. Their employees end up compromised because jobs and funding programs are dependent on everybody toeing the line that the governments and environment groups insist on.

From the far north to western Queensland you can see what is happening. The poor buggers who live in these places are no match for the corporatist power of organisations such as the Wilderness Society and the wealthy US outfit, the Pew Foundation, who bankroll these campaigns.

If you accept that Cape York Peninsula is not threatened by wholesale commercial or industrial development, and that the best prospect will be small-scale sustainable developments that preserve the region's environment, you are then left with the tragic conclusion that the entire argument about Wild Rivers is misconstrued.

Bligh has consistently rejected that Wild Rivers was all about election deals. But that wasn't always the community perception. Whelan and Lyons reported on the land-management campaign: "Interviewees considered TWS [the Wilderness Society] had demonstrably influenced the outcome of recent Queensland elections. The Labor Party's environmental commitments had been rewarded by TWS campaigns in marginal electorates, which boosted Labor candidates, notably [in 2004] by reducing the vote of a popular Green candidate who might otherwise have won the party's first parliamentary position."

This should be the last thing consuming the attention of Aboriginal people in Cape York. We should be devoting our political and organisational energies into the abject problems of health, education, housing, child protection and criminal justice afflicting our communities. Instead we have to fight a rearguard action to preserve our rights to sustainable development against a bunch of people from the Wilderness Society who desperately want their names listed on the pantheon of environmental heroes who saved Cape York Peninsula. But saved it from what?

IN the week before Christmas, The Weekend Australian featured a story on Eddie Woibo, from Hopevale in Cape York. Eddie is a hard-working indigenous man who set up a small-scale passionfruit farm on his native land. Woibo and his family developed the land for 25 years, building a home and putting in miles of fencing, planted pasture and irrigation infrastructure, waiting for formal land title from successive Queensland governments. His land and home is a dead asset. Because he does not have title to his lands, he has never been able to leverage any further capital investment into his property through loans from banks. More than 80 other indigenous families are in the same position.

Eddie was struck by a heart condition and was hospitalised in December. While he was in recovery a bushfire gutted his property, wiping out his enterprise and ruining most of his infrastructure. Normally, Woibo would have had insurance for his passionfruit business. But he could not insure his property because he did not have title. Woibo has been waiting 25 years for title to his land, and he's still waiting.

The article published last year was to draw attention to the need for land tenure resolution and to appeal for financial help on Eddie's behalf. Any donation would be much appreciated.

Please contact info@cyi.org.au

Noel Pearson is director of the Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership.