Killarney, I have some sympathy for your position. What needs to be done is that the two major parties need to fragment from their anachronistic Boss-Worker traditions.

If we had more parties, then the Corporations would find it more difficult to control the Government and the Government, made up of diverse voices, would have to compromise more rather than follow the party line.

P.S. The suggestions from KAEP suggest he should seek psychological advice.

Our environment is not the most important thing in the lives of most people. They have other concerns, more immediate to them, like work and family and education. Governments have to respond to those concerns too.

With respect to the Great Barrier Reef, which you see as 'threatened', I wrote the following passage the other day:

'In early June a UNESCO report expressed concern about port developments in Queensland that might threaten the Reef. That was followed by a conference of scientists in Cairns in mid July which said that the Reef was in great danger from climate change. Oh, and port development, shipping, ocean acidification, tourism, population growth, agriculture — you name it. The threats were dutifully reported in the media, because of the Reef’s status as an Australian ‘icon’ and our standard-bearer on the World Heritage List.

My long memory tells me that it was the Crown of Thorns starfish that was the first of the many ‘threats’ we now hear about, and that was in the early 1960s. We were told then that the reef would die, and both the Queensland and Commonwealth Governments put money into finding out more about the starfish and what to do about it. It is a widespread organism, found across the Pacific and the Indian Oceans, and infestations seem to come and go. The starfish doesn’t in fact kill the coral, and after infestations the infected reef recovers quite quickly.

But more to the point, the way we hear about the Reef is always as a threatened jewel. I doubt that most people have any real conception of what the Great Barrier Reef is, even those, like me, who have visited sites on it many times. It is, first of all, an enormous ‘structure’, 2,000 kilometres long, containing over 3,000 reefs and several hundred islands. Hardly any of it is regularly inspected or even visited. Most of it is well away from the coast, out toward the fringing reef at the edge of the continental shelf, and there is no great population centre anywhere near it.

(continued in a second post)

(continuation):

Wikipedia will tell you that anthropogenic global warming is the Reef’s great enemy, and that coral bleaching caused by elevated sea temperatures will become an annual event. It hasn’t done so yet, and a likely cause is a combination of winds and currents keeping warm water in place. In any case, the coral reefs near Papua New Guinea flourish in water that is a couple of degrees warmer than that in the southern parts of the Reef. And the threat caused by rising sea-levels is the silliest I’ve heard: corals grow, and you can see how much lower the sea-level was if you dive down a little on the edge of any reef. The sea has risen 120 metres since the end of the last ice age, and corals have coped by growing upwards. They would strongly dislike a lowering of the seas!

It is much the same with the other scares. All of them are possible, but none of them is as yet real. ‘Ocean acidification’, for example, is a scary way of saying that the seas may have become, on average, a little more alkaline over the past couple of decades. But we really don’t know, and the ph levels of the sea vary horizontally and vertically. Yes, ships come to grief in the Reef (forgive the rhyme), and more than 1500 have done so since Europeans began sailing there. Yes, oil has spilled (not much of it). But as we saw in the Caribbean, oil is seen as a food by other organisms, and they break it down quickly. It may or may not be true that the seas are becoming appreciably warmer — at the moment I think it is an open question.

(final continuation — sorry it's long!)

Yes, nutrients wash down the rivers, and so do pesticides, and so does soil and debris after floods. The Reef seems to take it all in its stride. Storms damage bit of it, as does bleaching, as do the starfish. But it is a giant system, and nothing yet seems to have occurred on a system-wide basis.

Let u by all means keep a watchful eye on it, but it would be pleasant if we heard bit less of ’imminent threats’, and a bit more of what is pristine and unspoiled in the Great Barrier Reef.There is a lot of that.

Labor and Julia Gillard surely are a "narrative of conflict" (not that the Libs are much better). How can anyone take this woman seriously? She whacks a whopping big carbon tax on our economy because of the climate "crisis", whilst overseeing the coal seam gas invasion onto farmland. She overreacts to a POTENTIAL environmental crisis, whilst fostering a REAL environmental crisis. The woman is a lunatic. Power at all costs is the only principle she appears to have.

The Great barrier Reef is not a reef. But rather a series of reef systems, or if you will a couple of submerged mountain ranges with bits of coral growing on the tops.
Coral that is repeatedly damaged by fierce tropical storms and natural events, like the recent record flood events.
There is already enough Co2 in the atmosphere to virtually guarantee the destruction of the reef?
Yet we continue to import and use fossil fuels, that produce four times as much Co2, than that which we and the world would use, if we but used the vast resources, locked up in the reef?
If the reef is to survive, we simply cannot afford to substitute Canadian tar sands etc, for much lower carbon producing products; produced, by actually mining the reef.
Tourism instead?
Try telling that to the bankrupt tourism operators/empty resorts, or redundant service providing workers.
Not all that long ago, greenies predicted the vast loss of marine habitat, with the exploitation of Bass Straight reserves!
Nothing further from the truth, with rigs acting as brand new habitat instead.
If we would understand, that the green element is the natural home of rigid recalcitrant radicals and cloud dwellers, we need look no further, than some of these posts?
We confront a global economy that is already teetering on the brink of a financial catastrophe; that could make the Great Depression look like a Sunday school picnic in comparison?
We need to protect ourselves and the global environment from this event as best we can!
We might be actually able to do that by providing recovering economies, with a range of comparatively low carbon, lower cost hydrocarbons; and, use the additional export incomes to create examples here, of vastly lower cost endlessly sustainable, energy alternatives.
We still could, even now, prevent the world from crossing a tipping point from which there is no possible return, by choosing lower carbon alternatives as an interim measure, regardless of where they come from!
Rhrosty.