Greens MPs

The Greens, Coalition & independents have come together to unite in the need for immediate action on the Murray Darling Basin.

Senator Rachel Siewert (Greens spokesperson on water), Greg Hunt MP (opposition Environment Minister) & Senator Nick Xenophon (Independent) joined GetUp! National Director Simon Sheik in Canberra yesterday to call for Government action on the Water Bill and save the Murray Darling.

GetUp! presented the politicians with a petition signed by almost 50,000 Australians concerned about the Murray's future.

There are two fundamental problems with the current approach to reform in the Murray Darling Basin:

1. Basin communities have not been part of the consultation and negotiation process for the new arrangements. The only key stakeholders from the Rudd Government's point of view have been the State Governments.
2. Commonwealth investment in water buyback, infrastructure improvements and structural adjustment are being rolled out slowly in an ad hoc fashion, with no consideration for the social, economic, environmental or structural impacts of where water is bought, or irrigation infrastructure investments are located.

What we need is a targeted and integrated approach.

The last three days have been quite a revelation of exactly what's going on in Tasmania's forests. Regardless of the rhetoric of sensitive management of the forests, the real story is one of wantonly sending species towards extinction and viciously attacking those brave souls who stand up for protection.

On Monday, Bob Brown launched a new report by Margaret Blakers and Isobel Crawford into the state of the Swift Parrot

I was very pleased today to launch an excellent new publication by Rod Randall, from the Weeds CRC, which will be an invaluable tool in the fight against weeds in Australia. It's a book, but it's also free to download online!

Everyone knows that weeds and feral animals - alien invasive species - stand beside habitat destruction and climate change as the main drivers of biodiversity loss worldwide. But many people don't realise how widespread invasive species are in Australia.

Thirty years after his first anti-uranium benefit gig at Sydney Town Hall, Environment Minister Peter Garret approved the expansion of the Beverley Uranium mine in South Australia.

The Beverley uranium mine is 520km north of Adelaide, deep in the heart of the South Australian desert. This is an area of low rainfall with sparse vegetation, reliant on underground water for development. Discovered in 1969, the ore body of approximately 21,000 tonnes of uranium oxide has an average grade of 0.18% and stretches four kilometres by 500 metres.

Yesterday morning we learned that a major bushfire was burning out of control in the magnificent Tarkine wilderness in remote north-easternwestern Tasmania, destroying precious, unique rainforest.

The Caring for our Country program is an ill-thought-out rush-job, more designed to quieten the unrest of regional communities and environment groups than to target the conservation and resource management needs of Australia's future.

It's getting very close to Christmas time again, and thoughts of decent presents must be worrying us all. But how to offset rampant consumerism and commercialisation of the holiday season with our environmental, ethical morals?

You might want to check out the latest scores on the Commitment to Development Index. The 2007 CDI was released in London today by the Centre for Global Development. It scores the world's nations on their commitment to development on a number of key indices - Aid, Trade, Investment, Migration, Environment, Security and Technology.

Australia has generally done pretty well on its combined score (ranking fifth overall) ... largely as a result of its high performance in a couple of areas (peace-keeping, trade and immigration) ... but it has been noticeably slipping during the last 5 years. However our performance on the Environment is quite frankly and international embarrassment. Equal third last.

I was horrified to hear, from Rosslyn Beeby at the Canberra Times a couple of weeks ago, that a tremendously important piece of Australia's cultural heritage - Judith Wright's property, Edge, where she wrote much of her later work - was up for sale on the open market.

I immediately wrote to the Environment Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, calling for emergency heritage listing of the property, as well as to the Duke of Edinburgh Award, calling on them to withdraw the property from sale.