Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s proposed ‘solution’ to our sixty year radioactive waste legacy has lit the fuse on a major confrontation between the Australian Government and everyone else.
Isn’t it interesting that anyone who asks where the Liberal Party’s nuclear power stations will be constructed, is immediately accused of running a scare campaign?
And so we go into the first long night of the CPRS bill. The deal has been done, with enough Liberal Senators giving the Government the numbers to extend sitting hours late into tonight and all the way into next week if necessary.
Senator LUDLAM (Western Australia) (1.17 pm 24 November 2009) – I rise to add my remarks on the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill 2009 [No. 2] and related bills with a sense of deja vu, because we were here a couple of months ago debating not just the same bill that we are now confronted with but, evidently, we are debating a bill that has been made substantially worse as a consequence of the horse-trading and deals that have been going on behind the scenes.I would like to acknowledge that we have been joined by a couple of school
One moment last week sums up why I wouldn’t swap this job for anything. At about 11am on Tuesday morning the Senate Environment, Communications and the Arts (ECA) Committee is confronted with an unusual sight in the Felton Valley, about 20 km south of Oakey on the Darling Downs in southern Queensland. A crowd of people have taken over the road; a sea of green T-shirts and triangular yellow placards, kids lined up with banners, hand-made signs; all the essentials for a home-grown demonstration.
Net filtering got a run in senate question time again yesterday. See if you can spot the difference:
The September sittings opened and closed with unplanned symmetry. Opened with a line in the desert sand drawn by Aboriginal elders refusing any further compromise with the uranium miners. Closed with the tabling of a meticulous two hundred page manifesto for the rapid abolition of nuclear weapons, signed by the ALP, the Greens and the Coalition.
It’s rare to hear the phrase “war on terror” these days — it has been seemingly purged from the official lexicon as the superficial certainty of the Bush/Howard years gives way to darker and more ambiguous terrain. Australia is still a nation at war: one and a half thousand troops on the ground in Afghanistan, backing NATO’s installation of a brittle democracy in a violent failed state where the distinctions between friend and terrorist change by the day. But something is going on at home as well: a determined, coordinated expansion of the internal security estate that is permanently
August 6th is the 63rd anniversary of the atomic bombing of the city of Hiroshima. I’ve just spent four days in a city where the memories are not only fresh, but engraved in stone, protected in world heritage-listed monuments, and taught urgently to young and old, local and foreign alike. The Japanese have a word for the survivors of the twin atomic attacks on August 6 and 9, 1945. They call them Hibakusha, those for whom nuclear weapons signify something other than peace marches.