The Tussock Times

is an A4 Newsletter circulating in the

Anembo-Jerangle-Peak View area in New South Wales, Australia.

Our bias is unashamedly pro-rural and pro-Australian.

We can be contacted at thetussocktimes@activ8.net.au

All material on this site is covered by Creative Commons Copyright. You are free to copy, modify and distribute but with attribution to

The Tussock Times.

THE RAIN HELD OFF JUST LONG ENOUGH

Today, Saturday 4 December 2010, the new classroom at Jerangle Public School was formally open and a “Time Capsule” placed in the walls of the earlier demountable room in 1992 was opened and the contents revealed.

After one of the wetest weeks in memory it was a really brave move to plan an outdoor event for today. But the weather for the 10 a.m. start was delightful and the storm did not arrive until all were home for lunch.

The roll up of past students of Jerangle was remarkably, showing that being a student in a small one-teacher school produces good memories.

Being a small school, a photo of the “Class of 2010” would be a photo of just one young girl who is moving to High School next year.

So a photo was taken of all present and past students and teachers and it is still not as big a group as one class in the cities.

Some other photos of the day were:

www.thetussocktimes.com.au/New_classroom_at_Jerangle_school.jpeg

www.thetussocktimes.com.au/Jerangle_students_of_2010.jpeg

www.thetussocktimes.com.au/Mrs_Sonja_Thorvaldson,_school_principal.jpeg

THE PARLIMENTARY YEAR

Many of our readers are Catholic Christians. Many more are not but most will be familiar with the claim by the Catholic Jesuits that if they were given control of a child for the first seven years of life they could then influence that person for the rest of their life.

I think that we are seeing the application of that fact of psychology in the Australian Parliament.

Presently we have both Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition having spent their formative years in the feudal society that was England until recent years. Or is it still?

Having grown up in a society that is built around having multiple classes of people, each class being kicked by the class above them in the pecking order and in turn kicking the heads of those in the class below, neither Gillard nor Abbott can really relate to the egalitarian society that was once the goal of most Australians.

It is hard to work out what really drives Julia Gillard. Maybe it is nothing more than a desire to show her parents that she can succeed in the colony where they failed to. For Tony Abbott there is no uncertainty. He is driven by envy and spite.

While Julia continues to show that she just does not understand the planet, Tony has shown himself to be devoid of ideas at all.

Julia wanted to reduce our Carbon footprint by encouraging us to buy new cars. When she was finally made to understand that such was not a logical move she started to float the idea of subsidising Australians to replace all their electrical appliances with new ones. The Chinese would love that.

She now says that she has to introduce a Carbon Tax in order to get us to reduce our output of carbon dioxide yet she can bring herself to actively support an attempt to get the Soccer World Cup played here. Work out how much carbon dioxide would be generated by thousands (tens of thousands?) of soccer fans flying to Australia. Much better to fly just the members of one soccer team to Qatar from Australia.

Tony Abbott has not yet come up with a constructive idea. He has a pet hate in the National Broadband Network and is now calling for a cost/benefit analysis of the project. Australians want the NBN. Tony Abbotts approach is like that of the Postmaster Generals Department in the 1950's.

In those days one could only have a telephone connected if one could come up with a reason why you needed a phone. But Tony Abbott would not know about those days. Imagine trying to tell people these days that they had to find a serious need for a phone before being allowed to have one.

The NBN will in time, achieve the same level of acceptance as the telephone has today and in time will be seen as one of the essentials of life.

Parliament has risen for the year and we can only hope that the Members will come back after their break with a commitment to working for the welfare of the Nation and not just for their own egos.

IS THIS EFFECTIVE CARBON SEQUESTRATION?

The Minister for the Environment, Greg Combet, today released a new plan that would allow farmers to obtain financial benefit by sequestering carbon on their properties on behalf of airline companies and other major emitters of carbon dioxide. Or would it?

This is a photo of 40 year-old regrowth gum trees on a property in the Tinderry Mountain Range near Canberra. By virtue of the changes to the meaning of words introduced in the NSW Native Vegetation Management Act of 2003 it is actually Old Growth Forest.

This is timber protected as part of what many farmers see as a deal between one time Prime Minister John Howard and the State Government of New South Wales to lock up privately owed land without compensation so that the Howard government could claim that Australia was meeting its obligations under the Kyoto Agreement.

These trees germinated following a bush fire about 1960. Soon after that date the land fell into the hands of Real Estate speculators who did nothing to control the regrowth and over the following 50 years the seedlings competed for water and sunlight until they presented an almost impenetrable wall of trees.

In December 2009 a fire lit by an arsonist swept up the Tinderrys and through these trees. About half of them are now dead, some are showing the legendary ability of gum trees to shoot from epicormic buds under the bark and the rest are shooting from the base with all the timber above ground now dead.

Greg Combet proposed today that farmers should plant trees on productive farm land in order to lock up carbon on behalf of airlines and be paid for the amount of carbon sequestered by those trees. If the trees in the photo had been planted as part of such a scheme, where would the carbon credits be now?

All the dead trees and the above-ground portion of those shooting from the base will now start to decay and release their carbon content back into the atmosphere.

If the airlines want to offer carbon-neutral plane travel by planting trees then they will need to lease land on a 30 or 50 year term, plant the trees as part of their own management and then eventually harvest the carbon contained in the timber and store it in some fire and decay proof location.

Nonsensical idea? Yes and so is the whole idea of planting fire-prone trees as a means of sequestering carbon.

STILL NO SOLUTION ON BOAT PEOPLE

Prime Minister Julia Gillard is wandering all around Asia trying to drum up support for what she calls a Regional Processing Centre for people seeking to migrate to Australia.

She does seem to be a little bit naive to believe that Malaysia and Indonesia would want to do any more than give these boat people a drum of fuel and a map showing the way.

Past Australian Governments have shown themselves to “not have the ticker” to handle these arrivals. First there were the Vietnamese, then the Chinese after Tienanmen Square that established the fact that if you could afford to get to Australia, then you could stay there. Because the truth is that inspite of all the public hand wringing by officials, the great majority of boat people after spending some time in a detention centre are very quietly let out into the community and two years later they can have citizenship.

There are a number of options open to the Gillard Government if they are serious about putting an end to People Smuggling. Firstly, make it a Capital offence. I bet you that once the first boat captain and crew were publicly hung on Cable Beach there would be no more boats.

This of course raises the question whether the people on the boats are really refugees from unjustified mortal persecution. If they are then maybe the crews on the boats should be regarded as Good Samaritans, or blokes like Simpson and his donkey.

The way to test the validity of the claims to be refugees from unjust mortal persecution is to offer sanctuary to the refugees, subject to their being surgically sterilised. To offer them our protection not our country. This is not a harsh and unreasonable condition, large numbers of Australians have themselves surgically sterilised because they do not want any more children or even because they do not want any children.

Another alternative is the Abbott policy of turning all boats around, of towing the boats back to the country of origin of the passengers and if they sink their boat of being apprehended, take them back to the maritime boundary of their homeland and put them afloat in rowboats.

Any effective measure would need to be implemented only a few times before word got out that policy had changed and it was no longer possibly to force ones way into Australia.

Once we had put and end to the boat people we can look at the other 300,000 migrants each year. Already we are seeing that the continent cannot cope with the human population. The over allocation of water in the Murray-Darling Basin is a reflection of the need to feed the present population. If the population is allowed to increase at the projected rate, then we can expect to see more and more ecological degeneration as all the new comers seek to live the comfortable lifestyle that attracted them to Australia.

If there is a valid need for migrants to fill work vacancies in Australia then limited term guest-worker visas are the solution. Because when the mining boom ends, and it will end one day, there will not be the work for these people here.

THE RECENT RAID ON CHANNEL 10 SHARES

Was it a masterly bit of forecasting by James Packer that saw him buy some 16% of the shares in Channel 10 at a price that was significantly above the market on that day?

Of course when Channel 10 released it's Annual Report a couple of days later we could see his move in a different light. Since James Packer was not on the Board at the time there can be no suggestion of insider trading. Or does acting on a tip from an insider still constitute insider trading?

I remember many years ago when I had money in the Share Market that almost every unexplained dramatic movement in the price of a Share would be explained a few days later when the Company released a statement of a profit or loss that made the recent movement in the share price fully justified.

One of the most blatant of these moves happened during the term of the Hawke/Keating Government. Like many country people, I have always relied upon ABC radio to keep up to date on events. For share prices, no longer given at lunch time, and by a report on the days activities by the Stock Broker, Wal Cooper.

I remember for a period of days, Wal was commenting on the rapid rise in price of a large number of stocks. He even commented that he could not understand why somebody should be so aggressively buy in these shares at inflated prices.

The next week the Government announced the end of the double taxation of dividends and suddenly it all made sense. Insiders who knew what the Government was about to do were spending every dollar they had or could borrow to buy shares in the knowledge that with the ending of the double taxation of dividends, prices of those shares would almost double.

POOR BEHAVIOUR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL

Did you listen to the speech by the Governor-General, Quentin Bryce, at her swearing-in of the new Prime Minister, Julia Gillard?

For a long time we have put up with the activities of one-time Victorian Premier, Joan Kirner, but when the Governor-General in the process of swearing in the new Prime Minister, reveals that she sees the election of the Gillard government not so much as an expression of the will of the electorate or a fine display of the depth of commitment to democracy in Australia, but as a victory in some imaginary war between the sexes.

All that the Governor-General thought worth enthusing about was the fact that Julia Gillard was a woman.

Imagine the furore if Michael Jefferies in swearing in John Howard had made some comment like “he might be a mean and tricky lowlife scumbag but at least he is a man and we have kept those women out”

He would have been accused of sexism and hounded out of office. How is it that when a female Governor-General acts in that manner it is not sexism?

COOMA-MONARO SHIRE COUNCIL MEETING

The Meeting of the Council on Monday 11 of October was one of the most interesting that this watcher has attended in the past six years.

The main item was the decision to be made on the Development Application lodged by two persons who seek to establish an airstrip on a property adjacent to the Monaro highway, between Michelago and Colinton.

Something like 15 persons sought to speak in Open Forum with some even asking to speak last. In response to this request, the Mayor choice to draw names at random to determine the speaking order.

The curious fact is that because the piece of land is zoned as agricultural, the owners have an automatic right to an air strip for mainly agricultural purposes. Most of the objectors argued that because the owners planned to have only a small number of stock on agistment they could not argue that the airstrip was primarily for agricultural activities.

That objection could not carry much weight because those objectors themselves were using their blocks outside of its zoning category. Owning 100 acres and running a few horses or cows and commuting to Canberra daily does not constitute “primarily agricultural usage”. That lifestyle constitutes Rural Residential which is a different classification.

It was argued that the proposed airstrip was far too long for the nominated type of aircraft, that was countered by a speaker for the application, a commercial pilot, who argued that for safety reasons a landing strip could never be too long.

The applicants read out to Council a letter of support from one Dick Smith, a one time importer of electronic devices. Dick Smith pointed out that he does not get complaints about his private airstrip at Gunning because he does not fly over the township. I am not sure what that had to do with the application before Council and I am not sure that it did anything for their cause.

Noise was an issue raised by many but given the fact that highway traffic generates a volume of noise that can be heard many miles away and that has not detered people from living along the highway it could not be seen as a valid issue.

Given that use of aircraft is a perfectly legal activity is Australia (I would get dragged off to Court if I began shooting down low-flying aircraft over my property) it would seem that Councils role should be to look after the interests of all landholders.

I am pleased to report that Councillors McDonald and Taylor seemed to understand that (is this the collaborative style that we are told is distinctively female?) and sought to move an amendment that would allow the applicants to have an airstrip within the parameters of their application with the total number of landings and take-offs limited in order to restrict the effect upon neighbours.

Unfortunately the amendment was lost at the vote and then when the original recommendation to refuse the D.A. was put to the vote it was passed with only two Councillors voting against it. Also passed was a requirement that the applicants remove some shipping containers on the property.

The applicants had with them a “Council Advocate” who works within the Eurobodalla Shire area and he assured this writer that the Council decision will not stand up before the Land and Environment Court and that the Councillors had by their action cost the ratepayers $200,000. I hope he is wrong.

Also passed at the Meeting was an application by Tony Deluca to have the private road serving his property and one neighbour, named as Naylor Lane in memory of his recently deceased wife Donna Deluca.

Jerangle-Captains Flat Road Users Community Association

The advertised meeting of the Association was held at Captains Flat Bowling Club on Saturday 25^th of September 2010. Attendance was not as good as it could have been due to the selection of an unsuitable date by the secretary. It turned out that some members were attending a family gathering on that evening and the provision of an unexpected long weekend in the A.C.T. meant that some who might have attended found other attractions more enticing.

The meeting did resolve to continue efforts to have a meeting with Council staff in order to resolve the vexing question of the non-provision of a garbage service which has been paid for by an annual levy over the past several years. It was also resolved to continue enquires into to possibility of secession from Cooma-Monaro Shire Council.

An exciting development was the commitment by one member to develop a web site for the association with the capability of accepting uploaded photos from member as a means of creating a visible record of motor accidents, road failures and even Council activities.

IS THIS THE BEGINNING OF THE

U.N. TAKEOVER OF AUSTRALIA?

Most of us who grew up in Australia in the twentieth century did not know if we had ever seen a Jew or what it was that made them different from other people.

Yes, we knew that they had killed the Christian God, Jesus, and for that reason maybe they deserved to be killed. But that did not stand up to serious consideration when we learnt in Bible classes that Jesus had wanted to be killed and that the Jews had been duped into doing the deed.

When we saw the pictures from Germany and learnt what Hitler had been up to in his plan to get rid of all Jews, it really did seem to be a bit of an over reaction.

But still we did not learn why. Why did the Europeans hate the Jews so much? Why were they so determined to get the Jews out of Europe?

Our politicians told us that it was right and proper that the Jews should be given a “homeland” of their own and that Palestine was a good place to put them.

We were really gullible in those days and nobody thought to ask the Palestinians if they wanted their homeland to be given to a group of religious weirdo's from Europe.

Many, many years later we did learn that the Palestinians had pointed out that if the surviving Jews deserved to be given real estate as compensation for the killing of other Jews by the Germans then it should surely be part of Germany that they were given.

But the Europeans would not have that, they were determined to get the Jews out of Europe and through their power in the U.N. And with the support of the all-powerful United States of America, the Palestinians were stripped of their homeland and driven into concentration camps. Named Gaza and West Bank.

Now 70 years later, the Palestinians are still putting up a futile resistance to the occupation of their homeland by a foreign power which seeks to secure its hold by importing more and more Jews from all around the world and using them to press the Palestinians into smaller and smaller areas of their homeland.

And maybe we are now beginning to see why it is that the Europeans were so determined to get the Jews out of Europe.

What has all this got to do with Australia?

Ever since the U.N. and America decided to sponsor the takeover of Palestine, a lot of Australians have been concerned that the same approach might be taken towards Australia.

We all have seen how Europeans are unable to accept that Australians occupy a continent at a much lower population density that is they case in Europe where deep fertile soils and reliable heavy rainfall make such dense population possible.

Now we see, in an age of internet and mobile phones, people in various countries wanting to move to what they see as a largely unoccupied continent.

It is probably a racist policy that enables governments here to consider it reasonable that hundreds of thousands of Europeans should be allowed to migrate each year or at least overstay their tourist visa's with impunity.

But the U.N. has other goals. It wants to solve friction in some of the world's trouble spots. The technique they have opted for is to enable some of each warring group to leave their homeland.

Where do these warring persons want to go? Australia of course. They have seen the maps that show vast unoccupied spaces, they have heard of the fabulous wages and easy working conditions and the peaceful nature of the natives.

Unfortunately for us, one of our Commonwealth Governments at some early date had signed up to some secret agreement with the U.N. that we would provide a homeland for “refugees”. It is not a coincidence that the U.N. is able to find that almost every person from Iraq or Sri Lanka or Afghanistan is a refugee and under the terms of that secret agreement we are obliged to accept and resettle these people, so many of whom are more refugees from the law in their homelands.

Australians “enjoy” freedom of religion but in many countries that is not the case. That does not mean that these people are persecuted, it is simply the law of their homeland that they belong to the religion of the State.

Few Australians realise that they are not free to live outside of Christian concepts. Try enjoying the Moslem policy of having several wives. Or the custom of north-east India of a woman having several husbands. Does the prohibition on those customs mean that we are persecuted. Probably.

Clearly the U.N. is using the concept of being a refugee from persecution to over ride the Human Rights of Australians. Yes. Human Rights. We have a Human Right to protect our homeland from invasion by other persons, no matter that they do not like the conditions or wages in their homelands.

We can all agree that the English did the wrong thing when they invaded Australia and dispossessed the Aborigines. We are today in the position that the Aborigines were in more than 200 years ago with the imminent loss of our homeland and our customs to outside invaders.

GOODBYE VICTOR

It was a bitterly cold afternoon on the 26^th of August 2010 when a large crowd gathered at “Dundee” Jerangle to mark the passage of Vic Karja the previous week.

Vic was a wool grower through and through. From his early days working in Wool Stores in Sydney where he gained his Wool Classers qualification, to his years of growing some very lovely superfine wools at Dundee, to his involvement in Wool Broking in Cooma and then to his decision that the wool industry had come close to destruction and his decision to apply himself to other livestock.

He entered into growing Damara sheep and Boer goats, aware that the growing population will require protein and that meat cannot be made other than by growing livestock.

He and his wife Lorna also imported Tori horses from Estonia and were in the process of developing a breeding nucleus of these versatile horses.

We extend our sympathy to Lorna and to their sons Karl and Rein.

Goodbye Vic. We valued your friendship.

JERANGLE PROGRESS ASSOCIATION

After about ten years of dormancy the Jerangle Progress Association has been resurrected with new office holders but with the same objectives of improving aspects of life in the district, especially concerning the Cooma Monaro Shire Council.

Among the objectives discussed were the problems with the condition of the Jerangle Road, the need for regular working bees at the Jerangle Cemetery and the lack of a Rural Domestic Waste Service after paying a specific levy for such a service for almost ten years.

Office bearers elected were; President Duncan Rowland, Vice President Denis Starrs, Secretary Lisa Goodman, Treasurer Lisa Phillips, Rep. On Council Weeds Committee Bill Stephens, Cemetery Sub-Committee Bob Boate, Lynette Tozer, Kate Minniss, Angus Fergusson, Jane Wilkes and Ellen Hopkins. The sub committee has yet to elect a President, Ellen Hopkins has been acting in that position.

Jerangle Bush Fire Brigade

The Brigade held a training day at the C.W.A. Rooms on Saturday 18^th of September. At least 20 persons attended which was quite a good roll-up for the event. Not all attendees were members of our Brigade, some had come up from Michelago in order to get the training in map reading that was the main subject. Also covered was the use of GPS devices, this was a hands-on exercise which involved finding various GPS locations and recording what was at that location. Local knowledge provided some shortcuts there.