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Nothing makes me yearn for a whale steak like the sight of Aussie extremists acting all macho on the high seas.

Japanese whaling is roundly condemned by Australians (including me, for the record) but we don’t have much truck with feral activists either.

So when three Forest Rescue campaigners were detained after boarding a Japanese whaling vessel off the WA coast last weekend (with nary a tree or a whale in sight) you could well imagine the collective roll of the eyes in households across middle Australia.

Continue reading "Mmmm whale steak. Sweet, sweet whale steak" »

You get the feeling not much happens on a Saturday morning in Merriwa. The sleepy country town in the Upper Hunter region of New South Wales just hums along quietly. Except for its proud and tidy RSL, where the front bar opens at 10am, horse races flash across the television screens and tickets pump out of the Club Keno machine.

In a stuffy back hall, on neat rows of red vinyl chairs sit the Merriwa Healthy Environment Group; a group of local farmers and landowners who came together in February to unite against the coal seam gas companies as they rode into town.  Seven months later, they feel under attack. 

Their enemy? PEL 456, PEL 468, PEL 4 and PEL 433; coal seam gas exploration licences for Merriwa and its surrounding areas of cattle, sheep and cereal farming land, up for sale to the highest bidder.

Continue reading "Community is the real cost of coal seam gas" »

It seems that everyone is having their say on the impact of a carbon tax on low income earners, except low income earners themselves, the “ordinary” Australian workers on very modest rates of pay. I’m not referring to the $150K “middle-class battlers” of the Budget debate fretting over mortgages and private school fees, but the 20 per cent of the Australian workforce in low paid jobs, who may be taking home just $25K or $35K, and for whom a poorly designed carbon tax may be one blow too many to the family budget.

United Voice represents over 120,000 of Australia’s lowest paid workers in industries like aged care, child care, cleaning, hospitality, tourism and security. We know what “cost of living” pressures really mean, because it is our members whose low pay forces them into making tough decisions like forgoing doctor’s visits or no longer buying meat, even on a full-time wage.

When there’s already nothing left at the end of the week - and while many of our jobs remained casualised and insecure - what will a price on carbon mean?

Continue reading "Ordinary Aussies need to be heard on carbon tax" »