North Korea makes another threat to America as Donald Trump and Malcolm Turnbull hold talks, The West Australian , Claire Bickers, Sarah Blake in New York, wires 6 September 2017 Donald Trump’s phone call with Prime Minister Turnbull has been described as warm and constructive.
The two leaders have agreed North Korea poses a grave threat to regional stability and that it is time for the international community to act.
China’s role in putting pressure on Pyongyang to end its nuclear and missile testing program was discussed, along with the emerging threat of Islamic militants in the Philippines.
Earlier, Australian Defence Minister Marise Payne said Australia and its allies sought to avoid a military conflict with North Korea “at all costs”.
The Minister will be travelling to Seoul today to meet with South Korean President Moon Jae-in and to deliver the keynote address at a forum on regional and global security.
“We seek to pursue the sanctions process and to ensure that they are allowed to operate to their fullest effect to send the clearest possible message to the regime in North Korea that their behaviour is unacceptable,” she told ABC radio.
…… There has been speculation North Korea may be planning to fire an ICBM this weekend when the republic celebrates its foundation on September 9. Mr Turnbull told coalition MPs at a partyroom meeting on Tuesday that the action of North Korea was “reckless, dangerous and provocative”.
He echoed the US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley who said the regime seems to be “begging for a war”.
Meanwhile, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten and foreign affairs spokeswoman Penny Wong will meet leaders in South Korea and Japan later in the month. Mr Shorten said he was pleased about the phone call between Mr Trump and Mr Turnbull.
“Australia must use its influence wherever possible to promote a peaceful resolution to this crisis, and I hope this phone call goes some way to achieving this,” Mr Shorten said.
North Korea has attacked Malcolm Turnbull for sending Australian Defence Force personnel to join US-led war games, describing it as a “suicidal act”.
After being singled out by the North Korean regime, the Prime Minister issued a statement late yesterday staring down threats against Australia.
“North Korea has shown it has no regard for the welfare of its own population, no regard for the security and good relations with its neighbours and no regard for international law,” he said.
“We call on all countries to redouble their efforts, including through implementation of agreed UN Security Council resolutions, to bring North Korea to its senses and end its reckless and dangerous threats to the peace of our region and the world.”
North Korea has warned Australia against further aggression in response to the government’s commitment to the Ulchi-Freedom Guardian War Games, which began yesterday.
“Not long after the Australian Prime Minister had stated that they would join in the aggressive moves of the US — even referring to ANZUS which exists in name only — the Australian military announced that they would dispatch their troops to the aggressive nuclear exercises of the US,” said a spokesman from North Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
“This is a suicidal act of inviting disaster as it is an illustration of political immaturity unaware of the seriousness of the current situation.”
Defence Minister Marise Payne sent more than two dozen ADF members to join the 10-day war games between the US and South Korea.
Yesterday, defence analysts warned that Australia must “get used to” thuggish threats from the North Korean regime. The director of the International Security Program at the Lowy Institute, Euan Graham, said this would not be the last time Australia was threatened by Pyongyang, as Australia’s participation “matters” to the regime. Continue reading →
Pacific Islanders forced to leave, The Saturday Paper, Chris Woods 18 Aug 17,“Last month,” Ursula Rakova says, “when I returned home just to visit family and talk to the islanders about the situation, it was really, really hard to see a lot of the land being lost to the sea.”
Rakova is from the Carteret Islands, commonly known as Tulun, the horseshoe-shaped scattering of low-lying coral atolls 86 kilometres north-east of Bougainville. “More and more, palm trees are falling, the scarcity of food is becoming a real issue, and the schools close, and close for long periods,” she says.
With an indigenous population of 2700 on seven small islands with a maximum elevation of just 1.5 metres above sea level, there are few other places on Earth where the injustice of global warming is more apparent than on the Carteret Islands.
The Carterets have been on the front line of climate change for decades: one of the islands, Huene, was cut in half by shoreline erosion about 1984. While seawalls and mangroves had been holding the ocean back until this period, further seawater inundation and storm surges over the past few decades had salinated crops and water supplies, intermittently shut down the island’s five schools due to childhood malnutrition, and destroyed homes.
Part of the reason the area is so vulnerable is that, while the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has reported a global sea level rise of about three millimetres per year from 1993 to 2012, the fact that water expands exponentially as heat is applied means that bodies of water that are already hot rise more swiftly. For the western Pacific Ocean, this has meant an increase of about eight to 10 millimetres a year.
“The western Pacific is a lot hotter than the water is in the eastern Pacific – hotter by about five or six degrees – and where the islands are is amongst the hottest ocean water in the world,” says Ian Simmonds, professor of earth sciences at the University of Melbourne. “Hence a warming of one degree there gives you just so much more of a sea level rise.” Simmonds notes that the same is true for the severity of storms in the region: a warmer planet means more moisture, and, therefore, stronger and more frequent storms.
In response to increasingly severe events, Carteret elders initiated a voluntary relocation program in 2006, named Tulele Peisa, or “Sailing the Waves on Our Own” – outwardly a response to failed talks with neighbouring governments dating back to 2001. The group contacted Ursula Rakova, a Huene expatriate who had gone on to direct a Bougainville-based non-government organisation, to lead the initiative. After unsuccessfully applying for land through official channels, she was given four different locations by the Catholic Church in 2007, and relocation to the first of the abandoned plantation sites started that year.
Now, after more than a decade of leading the first recorded example of forced displacement due to global warming, Rakova has almost completed housing for the first group of 10 families. She has successfully established food gardens and a mini food forest, rehabilitated plantations and begun selling crops of cocoa. New education and management facilities have been set up, and both funding and food relief arranged to be sent back to the Carterets.
But the plight of the Carterets is not unique. Three other atolls within the Bougainville area are facing similar challenges with rising sea levels, and extreme weather events have caused internal displacement everywhere from Bangladesh to Syria to Australia.
The Australian government does not, broadly speaking, have the greatest track record on the issue. Not only did then prime minister Tony Abbott refuse to meet a call from Pacific Island leaders in 2015 to reduce emissions – indirectly resulting in Immigration Minister Peter Dutton’s infamous “water lapping at their doors” quip – but the current budget offers the lowest foreign aid in eight years, at $3.82 billion over 2016-17.
Yet Australia has offered a range of targeted, if less publicised, initiatives in the region, largely funnelled through the Autonomous Bougainville Government, in consultation with Papua New Guinea……..
Australia was also a member of the Nansen Initiative, a program launched in 2012 by Switzerland and Norway intended to strengthen the protection of people displaced across borders by disasters and the effects of climate change. Along with 108 other countries, Australia endorsed its Protection Agenda in 2015, leading to a range of partnerships between policymakers, practitioners and researchers as part of the follow-up Platform on Disaster Displacement.
The director of the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, Jane McAdam, has worked with Nansen and similar initiatives for more than a decade, and advocates Nansen’s “toolbox approach”. Solutions range from better supporting disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation, to developing humanitarian visas in the immediate aftermath of disasters and offering new migration opportunities such as “labour visas, educational visas, bilateral free movements agreements”.
While forced climate migrants are often incorrectly referred to as “climate refugees” – a term that would require persecution – the issues are distinct in a legal sense. The first person to seek asylum on the grounds of climate change, Ioane Teitiota, of Kiribati, lost his New Zealand application in 2015.
McAdam says there is no political appetite to change the United Nations’ refugee convention definition. While there is scope to expand the definition of refoulement, governments are better suited to developing new migration opportunities.
“It’s interesting that both the Lowy Institute and the Menzies Research Centre – two think tanks, one more conservative, the other less conservative – along with the World Bank, all in the last six months or so, have each recommended that Australia enhance migration opportunities from the Pacific,” she says.
“They say this would really make a huge difference to development and assistance generally, livelihoods generally, than would humanitarian assistance – it would cost us a lot less, and it would yield a lot more.”
While Labor offered more overt leadership on the issue while in opposition in 2006, specifically in terms of training islanders for skilled migration programs, neither Coalition nor Labor governments have since restructured our migration system to the extent McAdam recommends……..
Despite Rakova’s work, which led to a Pride of PNG award in 2008, the Carteret group is struggling to fund homes for the final two families, who are sharing houses, let alone start resettling the remaining 1700 volunteers meant to migrate over the next five years. She says the delay, exacerbated by intercultural challenges and the emotional toll of abandoning ancestral homes, is causing anxiety……..https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/immigration/2017/08/19/pacific-islanders-forced-leave/15030648005088
Pine Gap hardwires Australia into a Korean war https://www.echo.net.au/2017/08/pine-gap-hardwires-australia-korean-war/ Whether we like it or not, Australia would be dragged into a conflict on the Korean Peninsula because of the critical role of Pine Gap in US military operations against North Korea.
Given the geography of Korea and the decades of military preparations of both sides, we could become a participant in a war likely to result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Koreans, with a high likelihood of uncontrollable escalation to involve regional conflict.
Informed commentators recognize that there is no military solution to this conflict, and talking is the only option to avoid unimaginable horror.
Difficult though it is to negotiate with North Korea, there is good reason to believe that its leaders are not bent on suicide. There are indications that negotiations could be possible, but they need to be genuine to have any chance of avoiding war.
The Australian government’s strategic response has for a long time been compliance with whatever constitutes United States policy of the day.
In the hands of President Trump, this places the future of both the Korean Peninsula and Australia in the hands of a deeply delusional narcissist who is incapable of comprehending the consequences of his actions.
The Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap will play a critical role in both conventional and nuclear-armed U.S. attacks on North Korea.
Pine Gap hardwires Australia into US combat operations in Northeast Asia. Pine Gap’s tasking will now be very actively focussed on North Korea.
The logic of nuclear weapons, epitomized by the United States’ nuclear posture, and fully supported by compliant Australian governments, has led to North Korea’s successful path to nuclear weapons state status.
Its goal has clearly been to deter US from attempting regime change, rather than suicidal nuclear aggression.
It is time for Australia to take an independent stance urging the utmost caution on its nuclear-armed ally as well as on North Korea, and actively oppose any action leading to what would be a catastrophic outbreak of war.
But equally, the present crisis makes clear that doctrines of nuclear deterrence – by any country – hold the whole world to ransom, with deterrence failure inevitable in the long run.
It is clear that only the abolition of nuclear weapons will offer any chance of planetary safety.
The Australian government’s craven acceptance of US demands that its allies boycott the treaty to prohibit nuclear weapons adopted at the United Nations indicates that we have no independent foreign policy.
Professor Richard Tanter, senior research associate at the Nautilus Institute and honorary professor in the School of Political and Social Sciences at Melbourne University.
Professor Tanter will address the issue ‘What would an independent Australian foreign policy look like?’ during the upcoming Independent and Peaceful Australia Network National Conference in Melbourne over the weekend of 8-10 September.
Will Australia join in the war if Trump’s USA attacks North Korea?
Australia will join the conflict if North Korea attacks the US: Malcolm Turnbull, SMH Fergus Hunter, 11 Aug 17, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has declared Australia would invoke the ANZUS security treaty for only the second time in its history in response to any attack by North Korea against the United States.
Mr Turnbull also pushed back against calls – including from former prime ministers Tony Abbott and Kevin Rudd – for Australia to develop a missile defence shield to protect the mainland from the threat of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and long-range missile program.
The Prime Minister’s commitment to assist the US caps off days of escalating tensions, with US President Donald Trump threatening to unleash “fire and fury” on the rogue state and the North Korean regime warning it would attack the US Pacific territory of Guam.”The United States has no stronger ally than Australia. We have an ANZUS agreement and if there is an attack on Australia or the United States … each of us will come to the other’s aid,” Mr Turnbull told Melbourne radio station 3AW on Friday……
After invoking ANZUS in 2001, Mr Howard said Australia would consult with the US and consider any requests “within the limits of its capability”.
A month later, the government committed Australian troops to the US-led invasion of Afghanistan.
Opponents have criticised the treaty, arguing it unnecessarily places Australia’s security at risk.
Greens leader Richard Di Natale said: “The last thing we need here is a Prime Minister backing an unhinged and paranoid leader into a conflict that could potentially end life on Earth as we know it.”
He accused Mr Turnbull of putting a target on Australia’s back and called on him to tell the US President to “back off”.
“If there was ever a clearer example of why Australia needs to ditch the US alliance and forge an independent, non-aligned foreign policy, this is it. Malcolm Turnbull now needs to pick up the phone, he needs to talk to Donald Trump and urge him to de-eascalate.”
The Japanese city of Hiroshima of around 350,000 people, was the first city to be attacked with a nuclear weapon when a single bomb was dropped by the USA on August 6, 1945 towards the end of World War 2.
The bomb and its firestorm destroyed two-thirds of the city, with an estimated 70,000 ordinary people killed immediately and a similar number over the next five years. These deaths resulted from the immediate explosion, burns, radiation and cancers.
The city was devastated with destruction of most buildings. Photos appear to show a scene from hell with the city burned out, and civilians with horrendous burns and injuries.
Nuclear proliferation has ensued internationally since then, with an estimated 19,000 nuclear weapons now in existence, all much more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The threat of nuclear war was strongly present throughout the Cold War, and is again rising today.
The cost of nuclear weapons is enormous with an estimated $40 billion spent annually by the US alone.
Countries known to possess nuclear weapons are Russia, USA, UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea — not necessarily all reliable international citizens whom we would trust to have a finger on the nuclear trigger, particularly in view of recent inquiries confirming that unreliable information led to the recent war in Iraq with ongoing consequences.
Some countries such as Australia without nuclear weapons choose to be under the US “nuclear umbrella”.
Today, the use of nuclear weapons would result in extraordinary numbers of immediate deaths, devastation of medical facilities to care for those injured, and destruction of infrastructure of a city on a much larger scale than seen in Japan.
It is also predicted that the atmospheric debris from a limited regional nuclear war could cause global cooling and prolonged worldwide famine.
The good news is that a new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has been adopted by the United Nations in July this year.
This treaty prohibits states from developing, testing, possessing, transferring or deploying nuclear weapons under any circumstances.
This treaty was passed by 122 nation, unfortunately not Australia, as our government decided not to attend these discussions. Unsurprisingly, those countries with nuclear weapons are also non-participants.
Nuclear weapons will now join the list of banned weapons such as chemical and biological weapons and cluster bombs, which seems highly appropriate given that they are designed primarily to indiscriminately cause death to massive numbers of civilians. In a recent poll about 75 per cent of Australians support nuclear disarmament.
Our government believes that the US nuclear umbrella provides protection for Australia.
Australia’s official view is that a “building block approach” is required towards improving global nuclear weapon safety, with the initial step being increased transparency regarding nuclear stockpiles among those possessing them, which seems highly unlikely to happen given the secrecy surrounding military matters.
Somewhat ironically, international nuclear weapon treaties until now have made it legal for those signatories with nuclear weapons to continue to have them, but illegal for non-nuclear countries to manufacture or buy them.
The current international situation with escalating conflict between North Korea and the US and their respective leaders, illustrates what a precarious situation the world is in with the threat of nuclear weapons being used again very real. There is also the possibility of terrorist groups gaining nuclear weapons.
Nuclear weapons are abhorrent to a civilised society. Whilst in existence they are a threat to all.
Their cost is enormous. The existence of nuclear weapons cannot enhance international safety
The only winners in the nuclear arms race are the arms manufacturers. Australia still has an opportunity to participate in this current UN nuclear abolition treaty, and truly make our country — and our planet — safer.Sally Atrill is Tasmanian GP and the Tasmanian convener for the Medical Association for Prevention of War.
Australia doesn’t ‘get’ the environmental challenges faced by Pacific Islanders http://theconversation.com/australia-doesnt-get-the-environmental-challenges-faced-by-pacific-islanders-81995 Steven Cork, Adjunct Associate Professor, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, Kate Auty, Vice Chancellor’s Fellow, University of Melbourne, August 7, 2017 What actions are required to implement nature-based solutions to Oceania’s most pressing sustainability challenges? That’s the question addressed by the recently released Brisbane Declaration on ecosystem services and sustainability in Oceania.
There once was an Island
Compiled following a forum earlier this year in Brisbane, featuring researchers, politicians and community leaders, the declaration suggests that Australia can help Pacific Island communities in a much wider range of ways than simply responding to disasters such as tropical cyclones.
Many of the insights offered at the forum were shocking, especially for Australians. Over the past few years, many articles, including several on The Conversation, have highlighted the losses of beaches, villages and whole islands in the region, including in the Solomons, Catarets, Takuu Atoll and Torres Strait, as sea level has risen. But the forum in Brisbane highlighted how little many Australians understand about the implications of these events.
Over the past decade, Australia has experienced a range of extreme weather events, including Tropical Cyclone Debbie, which hit Queensland in the very week that the forum was in progress. People who have been directly affected by these events can understand the deep emotional trauma that accompanies damage to life and property.
At the forum, people from several Pacific nations spoke personally about how the tragedy of sea-level rise is impacting life, culture and nature for Pacific Islanders.
One story, which has become the focus of the play Mama’s Bones, told of the deep emotional suffering that results when islanders are forced to move from the land that holds their ancestors’ remains.
The forum also featured a screening of the film There Once Was an Island, which documents people living on the remote Takuu Atoll as they attempt to deal with the impact of rising seas on their 600-strong island community. Released in 2011, it shows how Pacific Islanders are already struggling with the pressure to relocate, the perils of moving to new homes far away, and the potentially painful fragmentation of families and community that will result.
Their culture is demonstrably under threat, yet many of the people featured in the film said they receive little government or international help in facing these upheavals. Australia’s foreign aid budgets have since shrunk even further.
As Stella Miria-Robinson, representing the Pacific Islands Council of Queensland, reminded participants at the forum, the losses faced by Pacific Islanders are at least partly due to the emissions-intensive lifestyles enjoyed by people in developed countries.
Australia’s role
What can Australians do to help? Obviously, encouraging informed debate about aid and immigration policies is an important first step. As public policy researchers Susan Nicholls and Leanne Glenny have noted, in relation to the 2003 Canberra bushfires, Australians understand so-called “hard hat” responses to crises (such as fixing the electricity, phones, water, roads and other infrastructure) much better than “soft hat” responses such as supporting the psychological recovery of those affected.
Similarly, participants in the Brisbane forum noted that Australian aid to Pacific nations is typically tied to hard-hat advice from consultants based in Australia. This means that soft-hat issues – like providing islanders with education and culturally appropriate psychological services – are under-supported.
The Brisbane Declaration calls on governments, aid agencies, academics and international development organisations to do better. Among a series of recommendations aimed at preserving Pacific Island communities and ecosystems, it calls for the agencies to “actively incorporate indigenous and local knowledge” in their plans.
At the heart of the recommendations is the need to establish mechanisms for ongoing conversations among Oceanic nations, to improve not only understanding of each others’ cultures but of people’s relationships with the environment. Key to these conversations is the development of a common language about the social and cultural, as well as economic, meaning of the natural environment to people, and the building of capacity among all nations to engage in productive dialogue (that is, both speaking and listening).
This capacity involves not only training in relevant skills, but also establishing relevant networks, collecting and sharing appropriate information, and acknowledging the importance of indigenous and local knowledge.
Apart from the recognition that Australians have some way to go to put themselves in the shoes of our Pacific neighbours, it is very clear that these neighbours, through the challenges they have already faced, have many valuable insights that can help Australia develop policies, governance arrangements and management approaches in our quest to meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
This article was co-written by Simone Maynard, Forum Coordinator and Ecosystem Services Thematic Group Lead, IUCN Commission on Ecosystem Management.
Donald Trump’s environment boss Scott Pruitt heading to Australia, ABC News , Exclusive by defence reporter Andrew Greene, 4 Aug 17, A climate science critic and one of the most controversial figures in the Trump administration will soon tour Australia in a visit environmental activists are likely to target with protests.
Key points:
Critics accuse Pruitt of trying to weaken the EPA
Liberal backbencher Craig Kelly says Australia should welcome Pruitt “with open arms”
Greenpeace says visit could spark protests and is not helpful for Australia as it tackles climate change policy
Critics accuse the former Oklahoma attorney-general of trying to weaken the EPA since assuming his role as administrator in February.
The ABC has confirmed the Republican politician is scheduled to fly to Australia this year, joining other Trump administration figures who have already made the journey, including Vice-President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defence James Mattis.
Federal Government backbencher and climate change sceptic Craig Kelly has welcomed Mr Pruitt’s impending visit……..
What is more pressing for the Canberra apparatchiks is what a base like Pine Gap does in the context of spats with other powers which Australia shares ties with. The China rise is particularly problematic, given the teeth-gnashing belligerence being shown over maritime disputes.
Even as Chinese nationals purchase Australian real estate, tremors between Washington and Beijing can be felt as the base celebrates its half-century. A happy birthday it would have been, but only for some.
The Pine Gap Anniversary Partyhttps://intpolicydigest.org/2017/07/30/pine-gap-anniversary-party, Blony Kampmark /30 JUL 2017It all happened without much fuss, since fuss was bound to be the enemy. Dignitaries, guests and various partners lined up for a gathering at Alice Springs in Australia’s Northern Territory on Saturday, commemorating the secret base’s half-century.
The Alice Spring News Online described it, not inaccurately, as a “stealth party.” The Convention Centre hosting the dinner was tight lipped throughout the week about the guest list. “Unfortunately the details of this weekend’s event are not available for public release.” Not for residents in Alice Springs; not for the electors, or even the politicians. This would be an imperial, vetted affair.
A sense about how the base functions in a defiant limbo, one resistant to Australian sovereignty, can be gathered in various ways. The local federal member, Chansey Paech, whose constituency hosts the base, was not invited. Senator Nigel Scullion’s query about the exclusion of media from the event was rebuffed by the Defence department, with the Defence Minister keen to hold the line against her own colleague.
The Institute for Aboriginal Development (IAD), charged with supplying the indigenous “welcome to country” gathering at such bashes, seemed less than pleased to supply details. When the intrepid Alice Springs News Online dared ask, the CEO Kerry Le Rossignol responded with a dismissive “No comment.”
On July 25, a Defence spokesperson insisted that, “The Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap is proud to commemorate its 50th anniversary. However, celebrations are restricted to site personnel and invited guests only.” Power without perusal; might, without scrutiny. Continue reading →
At a time when recent US administrations have become more proactive about the need for solidarity within US Global Alliance Systems, there is a pressing need for elected leaders of both government and opposition parties to be more concerned about protection of our national sovereignty.
The Conference of The Independent and Peaceful Australia Network (IPAN) in Melbourne between 8-10 September 2017 will provide peace activists with a chance to interact with an array of local and overseas speakers
There is a problem for our national sovereignty if Australia’s official voice on the terrifying issue of nuclear proliferation is not being expressed to support the representatives of Ireland, Austria, South Africa, Brazil and Mexico as co-sponsors of the Draft Treaty on new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Support for the UN Draft Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, or more comprehensive US nuclear weapons umbrellas?July 28, 2017, by: The AIM Network By Denis Bright
Where are the cheers across Australia for the new Draft Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons as finalized by the recent UN Conference on 7th July 2017?
In the past, Australia developed a bipartisan balance between continued membership of the Australia-US Alliance, support for the Charter of the United Nations and commitment to its own national sovereignty.Article 1 of the ANZUS Treaty of 1951 indeed rejected the need for sabre-rattling in the settlement of international disputes.
Barry McGuire – Eve Of Destruction
New Zealand officially left the Alliance in 1986 after continued participation compromised its national sovereignty (Office of the Historian, Bureau of Public Affairs, US Department of State Online).
In 1984, the ANZUS Treaty began to unravel when New Zealand declared its country a nuclear-free zone and refused to allow U.S. nuclear-powered submarines to visit its ports. Two years later, U.S. Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Australian Foreign Minister Bill Hayden concluded a series of bilateral talks by confirming that their countries would continue to honor their obligations to one another under the ANZUS Treaty, in spite of the fact that the trilateral aspects of the Treaty had been halted. On September 17, 1986, the United States suspended its treaty obligations toward New Zealand.
In Australia, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction towards greater solidarity with the US Alliance and away from a diversity of foreign policies which required the US to adjust to policy diversity over issues like the Suez Crisis of 1956, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the War in Vietnam and even the presence of nuclear powered ships carrying nuclear weapons into New Zealand during the 1980s. Continue reading →
And in a provocative address in Brisbane, Dow Chemical boss Andrew Liveris revealed that spiralling domestic gas prices had forced the multinational firm to review its Australian operations.
As the head of Mr Trump’s manufacturing council, Darwin-raised Mr Liveris is working with the embattled administration to deliver a key election promise to revitalise US manufacturing, while engineering one of the biggest corporate mergers in history between Dow Chemical and DuPont.
Warning that environmental sustainability was “no longer an initiative, it’s a business model”, Mr Liveris said Mr Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the Paris accord should not halt international co-operation on greenhouse gas mitigation. “We cannot as citizens of the world let that move impede our collective progress and our determination to remove carbon from the atmosphere,” he said, to applause from the crowd of 1500 that turned out for the UQ ChangeMakers forum, put on by his alma mater the University of Queensland and supported by The Weekend Australian.
“Many businesses in the US, NGOs and states have re-upped and picked up the commitment of what’s become the slack left behind by the federal government.
“I believe the US will re-engage ultimately with Paris and I am certainly being part of the solution to make that happen.” But he distanced himself from Mr Trump’s handling of the issue, saying it was “very unfortunate” the President had said the US was withdrawing from the 2015 Paris agreement, when the aim was to “redefine its engagement”. Under the UN-backed accord, Australia is committed to reduce greenhouse emissions by 26-28 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030. Mr Liveris said: “They are actually not withdrawing, they just want to re-engage on different terms. So if you think about it that way, I would say the odds would be very high of a re-engagement.”
Mr Liveris was one of the first business leaders to warn of the “gas cliff” that has deepened eastern Australia’s energy crisis, prompting intervention by the federal government to limit LNG exports and boost domestic gas supplies. He said yesterday that the gas price paid by Dow Chemical in Australia had rocketed from “roughly five or six dollars” to $20 in less than a year, jeopardising the business. “So my leader of Australia-Pacific … he’s got a proposal in front of us to look at exiting Australia right now in terms of uncompetitive energy prices.
We are not alone. We … can see the future in terms of the trajectory … you need to fix supply and you have got to basically recalibrate demand so that 90 per cent of the gas isn’t exported.”
Backing the controversial Finkel report to the government on energy security, Mr Liveris said it offered a “great series of policy solutions” and business would accept a target for renewables. The country, however, needed “policies that outlive” the government concerned. “What I would say is give me a policy that has a renewable target, give me time to develop it and I will develop a partnership model with you, in an innovation hub … to develop the technologies over time,” he said.
Australia quietly makes first uranium shipment to India three years after supply agreement, ABC Radio The World Today By South Asia correspondent James Bennett, 18 Jul 17 Three years after signing a civilian nuclear supply treaty, the Federal Government confirmed overnight the first shipment of Australian uranium has left for India.
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop provided little detail about the inaugural sale, saying only that it was subject to commercial negotiations.
The supply deal with India, signed in 2014, is the first of its kind Australia has made with a country not party to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty…….
Details of inaugural shipment unclear
It is not clear how big the shipment is, where it departed from, or where in India it might be heading.
Indian officials were unable to immediately provide comment, while the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said only that the details were subject to commercial negotiation.
Parliament only passed the final legislation enabling sales last December, following years of debate about supplying uranium to a country with a strategic nuclear weapons program and that refuses to sign the non-proliferation treaty.
Parliamentary hearings to ratify the supply treaty in 2014 heard the International Atomic Energy Agency still had concerns about India’s safeguards.
More than 120 countries have approved the first-ever treaty to ban nuclear weapons at a UN meeting in New York boycotted by all nuclear-armed nations overnight.
Only one country, the Netherlands, voted against it while Singapore abstained.
Greens senator Scott Ludlam says he travelled to New York at his own expense to witness the historic vote. He’s urging the Turnbull government to sign the treaty when it opens in September, insisting Australia is on the wrong side of history.
“We don’t have nuclear weapons but, for some reason, we’re against having them banned, which is directly at odds with what the government says that it wants,” he told the ABC on Saturday.
It was an “enormous shame” Australia failed to play a part in shaping the treaty despite Labor and coalition governments insisting they supported nuclear disarmament, he said.
He accused Australia of being “massively hypocritical” for supporting nuclear disarmament and opposing North Korea’s provocations while happily selling uranium “bomb fuel” to other countries.
The treaty will come into force when 50 countries have ratified it.
Elayne Whyte Gomez, president of the UN conference that has been negotiating the legally binding treaty, said 129 countries signed up to take part in drafting it but all nuclear states and NATO members have boycotted the negotiations except for the Netherlands, which has US nuclear weapons on its territory and was urged by its parliament to send a delegation to the negotiations.
The treaty requires of all ratifying countries “never under any circumstances to develop, test, produce, manufacture, otherwise acquire, possess or stockpile nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.”
It also bans any transfer or use of nuclear weapons or nuclear explosive devices – and the threat to use such weapons.
None of the nine countries known or believed to possess nuclear weapons – the United States, Russia, Britain, China, France, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel – is supporting the treaty.
Senator Ludlam said the treaty was a circuit-breaker amid a growing nuclear threat from North Korea and as countries like the US modernise their nuclear weapons, amounting to a “geopolitical suicide pact”.
There is no point in Australia waiting to be a pallbearer at the funeral. We need to use what influence we have to shape a better response in Washington and other capitals.
We should also open a line of communication with Pyongyang — to see if there is any dialogue that might help to prevent conflict.
Australia can play a role here. Our embassy in Seoul is accredited to Pyongyang, where there hasn’t been a US embassy for years. We should co-ordinate this with key allies, but Australia should look to open a line of dialogue with the regime.
Australia has performed a similar role in Iran, where the US hasn’t had diplomatic representation since 1979.
Has Australia got the gumption to do this, or will we just wait for the conflict to start and hope others fight the war for us?
The members of the G20 are meeting during one of the most serious global situations since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
Then the Soviet Union was intent on deploying nuclear-armed missiles to an island a few minutes’ flying time from America’s southeast.
The risk was not only what missiles could be launched from Cuba but whether a conflict might spiral out of control and lead to an all-out nuclear war between Washington and Moscow.
Today the situation on the Korean peninsula is just as uncertain. With help from Pakistan and China, North Korea is within a sprint of developing a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile, with a widely dispersed arsenal of such weapons able to be launched from silos, mobile vehicles and, in time, from submarines.
The North already has about 20 nuclear devices and although these may not fit on missiles, it is possible they could be detonated inside submarines sent on suicide missions to Seoul or Tokyo.
After an American strike in response, we don’t know how China might react to the destruction of its ally. Once the nuclear threshold is breached we face a global situation as dire as those 13 days in October 1962 when nuclear war seemed likely. Continue reading →
Australia will join US in fight against North Korea if war breaks out, Yahoo News, JULY 6, 2017 Australia would join military action against North Korea if the rogue nation fires a nuclear warhead at the United States, acting Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce has confirmed.
As Malcolm Turnbull heads to Germany for talks with other G20 leaders, Mr Joyce is ramping up pressure on China to step in and “stop this madness”.
His call comes after US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley warned that America would use force “if we must” against North Korea, after Pyongyang tested an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) with the potential to reach Darwin or Alaska.
“No one should ever go too far in testing the resolve of the United States of America,” Mr Joyce told Sky News on Thursday.
“If North Korea was to deliver a warhead into the United States of America then the ANZUS alliance would be called in.”……One of Australian’s most senior military commanders insists the risk of a strike on the country’s north by North Korean remains low.
Chief of Joint Operations Vice Admiral David Johnston says that despite Pyongyang’s aggressive demonstrations, the range and capability of the missile launched this week is still to be determined.
“There is very little risk at the moment to the northern part of our country,” he told reporters in Canberra……Given the low threat to Australia’s mainland, Vice Admiral Johnston says there hasn’t been an immediate focus on amassing a system to defend against missiles.
The focus now was on applying diplomatic pressure on North Korea to stop their nuclear program and the development of missile technology.
Antinuclear 