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Time to sack Bass Coast councillors

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  The views of Grantville residents and regional sand extraction operators were detailed to Bass Coast councillors and senior shire officers at a meeting today, just two days after a Directions Hearing on Bass Coast councillors’ refusal to allow clearing to facilitate the sealing of Stanley Road . All sand extraction in the region must comply with the Regional Sand Extraction Strategy Lang Lang to Grantville, gazetted by the Victorian Government in 1995. The strategy requires community and Council participation in an Environmental Review Committee, The committee was supposed to be funded by the State government but since 2019 the Grantville Quarries Reference Group has been self-managed, with an Independent Chair and administrative assistant, fully funded by the participating quarry operators. Anne Westwood lives in Stanley Road, Grantville and is a community representative on the reference group. She was the convenor and principal researcher for Grantville Action Group w...
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Missile strikes on Israel nuclear facilities

  The latest strikes by Iran on Israel have highlighted the extent of military problems for Israel and the United States. Reports by international warfare experts confirm that up to now, Iran has relied on less advanced missile types to deplete Israel’s ballistic missile interceptor arsenal, but the ability of hypersonic glide vehicles to bypass them entirely has posed an entirely different kind of threat. Vice President of the leading Israeli missile defence system developer Rafael Advanced Defence Systems, Yuval Baseski,   highlighted   that this had forced the firm and the Israel Defence Forces to develop an entirely new approach to missile defence. “Hypersonic missiles open a new era in air defence,” he stated, observing: “Every air defence system today is based on flying faster than the target. But this principle does not apply to hypersonic missiles. To intercept an object moving at Mach 10, one would need a defence moving at Mach 30, which is impossible ...
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New gun laws not the answer to stop violence

  Knee-jerk gun laws introduced by John Howard after the Port Arthur killings did not make Australia safer for our citizens as demonstrated by the Bondi shootings where the main perpetrator had several high powered rifles. How was he able to acquire them if the gun laws had been properly implemented? The culture of violence is now entrenched in Australia -particularly in our cities where throngs of machete-wielding thugs run rampant. The fundamental problem is the culture of intolerance engendered by our politicians. The abusive rhetoric spewed in Parliament and the self indulgent actions of politicians and bureaucrats have reduced the bar of civilised behaviour and established shocking examples for the community.
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Getting Australia's population aware of implications of war

  Setting up small farms close to townships has become increasingly important as the prospect of a prolonged war threatens.   William Stolz, director of the Melbourne Security Forum says:  intensifying great power competition between the People’s Republic of China and the United States has meant the possibility of future war in the Indo-Pacific region has become a regular feature of Australia’s national discourse. It is surprising how little attention has been given to what day-to-day life could look like if a war actually did break out. We need to take the necessary steps to improve Australia’s preparedness. the government has a detailed understanding of how war could impact domestic supplies of critical goods and international freight transporting supplies to Australia. There are three categories of goods that would be most impacted by war: energy and fuel pharmaceuticals smart devices and electronic components. These  are ...
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Sand Strategy protects environment and allows resource extraction

  Comments by Ken Henry, Chair of the Australian Climate and Biodiversity Foundation, about Australia's environmental protection laws failing to stop the degradation of our natural environment really hit home. Speaking at the National Press Club in Canberra, he argued that the failure held back economic growth. The need for a better approach to planning and environmental issues has been apparent for some time. The community in Bass Coast Shire recognised this in the early 1990’s when plans were revealed for major sand extraction operations in the district. The community was adamant that a landscape-scale approach to planning should be introduced to limit cumulative impacts rather than the existing policy which only allowed each planning application to be considered in isolation. Residents formed the Grantville Action Group and gathered data to demonstrate the need for a massive change in planning and enviromental regulations. The Minister for Planning agreed and a working group was...
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Trump sounds like a Providentialist

  Is US President, Donald Trump a providentialist? He sees himself as a modern day Oliver Cromwell who seized power in England and killed the King Charles 1. Cromwell firm ly belie ved in providentialism -that God was actively directing the affairs of the world, through the actions of "chosen people" God had provided for such purposes.
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Australia needs to dump preferential voting

 The stupidity of our political system has been highlighted again by the latest Federal election. For years successive Governments have been enmeshed in internal party politics. Politicians owe more allegiance to their parties than to voters in their electorates. The people do not elect Prime Ministers – they elect local members to Parliament who appoint the PM. The best way forward is to dump preferential voting and go back to a ‘first past the post’ system for elections. That would eliminate the absurdity of candidates winning a seat (particularly in the Senate when they only receive a handful of votes. The only point of voting is to to provide an effective and stable form of Government – but that is not what happens in Australia. In recent years, our ridiculous preferential voting system has seen a host of dubious individuals elected even though they garnered just a sprinkling of votes. Not only that, political parties select leaders on a whim – which has seen the farce of...
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