Make a Difference

Day: November 30, 2009

Land Rights Lunacy

One native title claim over the whole of Kangaroo Island has already been made, by the Ngarrindjeri people, the Murray River people.

Our local paper, The Islander, reports another native title claim over the entire island, this time by the Ramindjeri.

According to most sources (eg Tindale), the Ramindjeri are a small local sub-group of the  Ngarrindjeri, resident at Encounter Bay and the Inman Valley.

There is no evidence of indigenous occupation of Kangaroo Island for about 10, 000 years prior to European settlement. Neither Ramindjeri or Ngarrindjeri have lived on the island at any time since 7,000 years before the pyramids were built.

SA Native Title Services executive officer Parry Agius said the claim would be difficult. “It requires the traditional owners to prove their physical, spiritual and cultural connection to the land. It comes down to evidence and it will be a long haul.”

Given there is no evidence either group has any physical connection with the island at all, it should be a very short haul.

But Agius is probably right. It will be a long haul, involving large amounts of taxpayer funds being handed to ‘local’ consultants, solicitors and anthropologists.

Lunacy.

Update:

After readng Matthew’s comment below I have done some further reading and research, and acknowledge that indigenous people may have lived on kangaroo Island more recently than I indicated above.

The SA Museum, for example, suggests that some sites may have been occupied until about 4300 years ago.

It is not clear who the first people to live on Kangaroo Island were. Whoever they were, they almost certainly did not call Kangaroo Island ‘Karta.’ That is a later, Ngarrindjeri name.

Although the dating of the most recent indigenous occupation is uncertain, there appears to be little doubt those early inhabitants were not related to either of the claimant groups.

I can understand that either or both of  the Ngarrindjeri or Ramindjeri believe they had some cultural or spiritual connection with the island.

If this was shown, and it probably could be, I don’t see why anyone would have any issue with acknowledging it to be so.

What I think is lunacy (and I mean that in the ordinary sense of being not proportional or grounded in reality) is simultaneous landrights claims by two groups of people who have never lived on the island.

I am quite happy to be shown this is not so, but I am not going to be convinced by people calling me names or telling me I have no right to ask questions or to express an opinion.

Washington Post On Climategate/Warmengate/Climatequiddick

Climatequiddick is best, because it reflects the media’s reluctance to acknowledge the problem posed by the evidence of fudging, fraud and bullying in the CRU emails and documents.

The media treated the embarrassment of Chappaquidick, and the fact that saving his career and reputation were more important to Edward Kennedy than the life of Mary Jo Kopechne, in the much the same way:

‘Let’s just hope it goes away.’

The almost miraculously reality denying Australian ABC radio presenter Jon Faine is a perfect example of this attitude:

“It was a small, even a tiny fragment of a sidebar of a secondary issue to the edge of the periphery of something people were talking about other than the main game. That’s how I saw it.”

Get some new glasses, Jon.

Mann, Briffa, Jones, et al were the ‘main game.’

Chappaquiddick didn’t go away, and the Hadley CRU documents won’t go away either.

The Washington Post has joined a few other mainstream media outlets in attempting to assess wht the CRU emails really do mean for the future of climate science and climate change policy:

Scientific progress depends on accurate and complete data. It also relies on replication. The past couple of days have uncovered some shocking revelations about the baloney practices that pass as sound science about climate change.

It was announced Thursday afternoon that computer hackers had obtained 160 megabytes of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in England. Those e-mails involved communication among many scientific researchers and policy advocates with similar ideological positions all across the world. Those purported authorities were brazenly discussing the destruction and hiding of data that did not support global-warming claims. …

Repeatedly throughout the e-mails that have been made public, proponents of global-warming theories refer to data that has been hidden or destroyed. Only e-mails from Mr. Jones’ institution have been made public, and with his obvious approach to deleting sensitive files, it’s difficult to determine exactly how much more information has been lost that could be damaging to the global-warming theocracy and its doomsday forecasts. …

The content of these e-mails raises extremely serious questions that could end the academic careers of many prominent professors. Academics who have purposely hidden data, destroyed information and doctored their results have committed scientific fraud. We can only hope respected academic institutions such as Pennsylvania State University, the University of Arizona and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst conduct proper investigative inquiries.

Most important, however, these revelations of fudged science should have a cooling effect on global-warming hysteria and the panicked policies that are being pushed forward to address the unproven theory.

The wheels are turning!

Darn!

Anyone who says nature abhors a vacumn has never read the Adelaide Sunday Mail. 112 pages of nothing, plus multiple vacumny inserts.

I bought a copy yesterday for the second time in my life. I had breakfast at McDonalds, and glanced through the Sunday Mail while munching my hotcakes.

I was interested in their poll on the ETS and the Liberal Party leadership. I didn’t have a pen to write the figures down there,  so I had to go to newsagent and buy a copy.

Then I lost it. Darn.

Well, I wasn’t going to buy another copy, so here goes from memory:

In relation to the ETS/CPRS/RAT scheme the poll said that a substantial majority of voters, both Liberal and Labor, want the implementation of an ETS delayed till after the Copenhagen bullfest.

Both Liberal and Labor voters said they needed more information about the ETS.

They certainly do. The mainstream media has failed to provide the public with any substantive information on the costs of an ETS (huge) or its environmental benefits (none).

On the Liberal leadership, Joe Hockey was in the lead, with Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott slightly and equally behind.

An unsurprising result. Turnbull is not a viable leader for the Liberal Party (and never has been, in my view). Hockey is affable and charismatic.

But as I said two days ago, the current strife in the Liberal Party is not about personality. It is about policy. It would be madness to appoint as leader someone who is, like Turnbull, unable to distinguish his policies from those of Labor, simply because people like him.

Leadership isn’t about being liked. It is about doing the right thing for the right reasons, and convincing others to do the same. Despite his earlier dithering, Tony Abbott is the man for the job 

Whoever leads, the future of the Liberal Party depends on clear enunciation of policies developed on the basis of evidence, not on the basis of wishful (or doomsday) thinking.

So Joe, if you do get the nod, don’t sell your soul, just use your brain.

© 2024 Qohel