Aborigines Use Ancient Weather Forecasting Methods To Predict Coming Rains

For more than 60,000 years, Australian Aborigines have been reading the land, the clouds, the stars, the plants and the animals to predict how the cycles of nature would affect their hunting and gathering in the season ahead.

Using that ancient knowledge, some of the world's longest surviving cultured people are seeing a bit of good news in the natural world for some areas of Australia devastated by mega-drought.

So don't start evacuating the cities just yet, drought breaking rains might not be as far away as previously thought :

With wattle trees blooming across southeastern Australia and native birds and cockatoos on the wing, Aboriginal weather watchers say rain is on the way – giving some hope to parts of the country ravaged by drought.

"The cockys are flocking everywhere. That's usually a good sign that rain is coming," said Jeremy Clark, from Victoria.

"The way the flora and plants and shrubs are starting to react, I'd certainly be expecting rain."

For the first time, the forecasts from Clark's Brambuk community, which covers five Aboriginal homelands, are being taken seriously by Australia's Bureau of Meteorology as it looks for different ways to better understand the changing climate.

Bureau climate meteorologist Harvey Stern said the traditional Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring seasons have little relevance in Australia's tropical north – or even in the temperate south, where aborigines have six seasons based on the weather and changes to the natural environment.

The bureau's Indigenous Weather Knowledge programme taps into the Aboriginal philosophy that all of nature is connected, and subtle changes to plants and animals can give clues about the climate and weather.

Mr Clark, chief executive of the Brambuk community which covers most of western Victoria, including the Grampians mountains and national park, said Aborigines have always had different ways of looking at the weather, reading landscape rather than a calendar.

"It's still practised. We won't go fishing for eels, for example, until wattles start flowering and the animals start moving, and the full moon comes. Then you know the eels are running on the migratory journey to the sea," he said.

Australia Accused Of Helping Fund And Arm Tamil Tiger "Terrorists"

If it wasn't enough that the Howard government helped keep Saddam Hussein supplied with enough cash to buy more human shredding machines and testicle shock kits - by repeatedly turning many blind eyes to the flood of memos pouring across the desks of the prime minister and foreign minister all but screaming out "Pay attention morons! Your wheat contractor is bribing Saddam with hundreds of millions of dollars!" - now the very same government is accused of not only allowing the Tamil Tigers to raise funds in Australia to fight their insurgency in Sri Lanka, but also stand accused of helping them to arm up and put together their own air force as well (as minor as it is).

If this keeps up, Australia is going to become a prime target of the 'War on Terror'.

After all, it was John Howard's good mate President Bush who has often said that if you hide, feed, supply weapons to, or help fund, terrorists, then you are as bad as the terrorists.

Just like when dump trucks full of cash were backing up to Saddam's palace gates in the late '90s, and early 2000s, Australia's foreign minister Alexander Downer knew all about how the Tamil Tiger sympathisers were raising cash and buying equipment that could be adapted to fight their insurgency in Sri Lanka :

...Downer admitted yesterday the Government had been aware for some time that money raised in Australia was being siphoned to the Tigers' cause in Sri Lanka.

Singapore-based terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna says the Tigers have been procuring aircraft, arms, explosives and other technological devices from Australia for more than a decade.

Dr Gunaratna says Australia's involvement extends beyond just fundraising.

"The failure of Australia and other countries to act in a timely way enabled the Tamil Tigers to procure aircrafts and other capabilities that have enabled them to develop a successful terrorist air wing."

"For Australia, it was never a priority to curb the non-Islamist terrorist groups operating in Australia," he said.

Wait a minute....non-Islamic terrorism?

Could there really be such a thing?

If the regular propaganda stream pouring from the mouths of the prime minister and foreign minister, and their media droogs, is to be believed, you'd be forgiven for thinking that there wasn't such a thing as non-terrorist Islam, let alone non-Islamic terrorism.

So Australia has been helping to fund and arm Tamil Tiger "terrorists"?

The 'Axis Of Evil' will clearly have to widened to the 'Quadra Of Nasty', so Australia can be included.

If only Australia had major mining or business interests in the disputed Sri Lankan territories that the Tamil Tigers are claiming as their homeland, we would have put these insurgents out of business a decade ago.

Australia Faces World's Most Extreme "Climate Change Challenge"

Two Australian Cities Face Ruin Without Rain

How Long Before The Mass Evacuation Of Cities Begin?

How dry does an Australian city or major town have to get before the state and federal governments consider mass evacuations?

The evacuation of the entire human population, by force, of at least two Queensland towns is now on its way to becoming a reality. It sounds like hype, but it's not, read the truth for yourself here.

But what about the bigger towns? What if an entire city of a million or more Australians ran utterly dry of drinking water supplies?

What then?

Without fresh water, any large town or city becomes uninhabitable. You simply cannot truck in enough water to keep a city of a million or more people alive.

The Queensland town of Killarney currently has its drinking water trucked in, at a cost of some $8000 per week. Eight grand a week for a town of less than 2000 people. What dry city could afford an 'imported' water bill clocking up a few million dollars a week?

If the Australian government was eventually forced to evacuate a city like Adelaide or Brisbane, where would all those people go to? There's not a lot of room in the other Australian cities. They're all experiencing, or facing, water shortages of their own. And once you get out of the city and their suburbs, the vast majority of Australia is already suffering scary to shitscary levels of drought.

If we can't pack off the millions of residents of Adelaide and Brisbane to somewhere else in Australia, we're going to have to look overseas.

How about Canada? They're looking for a few hundred thousand new immigrants in the next few years. But be warned 'exported' Queenslanders, it's mighty cold in Alberta, where all the new jobs in the shale-into-oil industries are waiting to be filled. Pack your woollies.

Of course, all these Australian climate change refugees might find a new home in the rapidly melting lands of the Arctic. The ice-free Arctic coastlines of Canada, the US, Russia and Greenland are going to be the new homelands for tens of millions of climate change refugees in the coming decades.

The bizarre irony of Australians possibly being forced to evacuate their towns and cities due to the severe effects of climate change is that Australians were recently debating whether or not we should welcome the expected human tide of climate change refugees from the islands of the South Pacific, some of which are already being consumed by rising sea levels.

How hardcore climate change effects Australia is likely to only get more weird, from here on in.

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According to this international news story, Australian Of The Year Tim Flannery, the superbly apocalyptic Climate Change Voice Of Doom, is "the country's most recognised scientist".

Well, maybe. He's certainly Australia's most recognised Australian Of The Year.

According to Flannery, who tends to beef up his Voice Of Doom when speaking to journalists on the international beat :

Australia faces the world's most extreme climate change challenge as millions of city dwellers try to cope with water shortages, according to the country's most recognised scientist.

Flannery said the drought meant two of Australia's largest cities, Brisbane and Adelaide -- home to a combined total of almost three million people -- would run out of water by the year's end unless the so-called "Big Dry" ended.

"We could see a catastrophic situation developing here by the end of the year. It's become a huge issue," Flannery told AFP.

"Even a year ago this would have been unthinkable. I think it's the most extreme and the most dangerous situation arising from climate change facing any country in the world right now.

"We have a situation where, if there are no flows in the Murray-Darling (river system), Adelaide, a city of one million people, has only 40 days' worth of water left in storage.

"If we don't get any rain this year Adelaide and Brisbane may be facing diabolical problems."

Catastrophic situation? Diabolical problems? Cut all the soft talk and sugar-spin, Flannery, and tell the bowel-loosening truth : If it doesn't rain in volumes that would have made Noah hire on extra ark builders, Adelaideans are going to be evicted from the city and packed off to the colds of Canada, via cruise ship.

Nobody wants to be the first to say it, but now I've said it. It's done, there you go. So deal with it, Adelaide, or start towing Antarctican icebergs into your ports.

It's always interesting to take a look at the international media stories on how Australia is being hammered by climate change, and the subsequent water shortages, crumbling coast lines, destroyed crops and mega-drought. They don't tend to hold back on the heavy stuff like the local media does.

There was a spectacularly doom-laden feature in the UK Independent a few weeks back, which I sat down to read after I finished liberally hosing off the path, wastefully washing the car, filling the swimming pool, flushing the toilet repeatedly to get rid of a fly that was doing laps in the bowl, and turning on the front and back lawn sprinklers for four or five hours, not because the grass was dying, but just because I love the way the sunlight glistens in all that watery spray.

If it's good enough for key members of the Australian media and the federal government to be deniers of global warming and climate change, then I can be a water-shortage denier.

And so much for all that.

But seeing a point-by-point mini-history of how the mega-drought and water shortages have impacted Australia in the past couple of years can make for some pretty freaky reading, even more so if you live in a city or town where water shortages have already hit hard :

The drought, which has lasted a decade in parts of the country, has slowed Australia's overall economic growth by an estimated 0.75 percent as crops have fallen 62 percent.

The impact on rural communities has been devastating. Many farmers have been forced off the land and counselling services have reported unusually high levels of suicide in rural areas.

Children have water conservation messages drummed into them from an early age at school and householders face hefty fines, or can even have their water disconnected, if they are found to be wasting the precious resource.

The government is also concerned that Australia's tourism industry, which earns billions of dollars a year, will be hit by "jet guilt" -- a reluctance by holidaymakers to take the heavily polluting, long-haul plane flights that are the only practical way to reach Down Under.

Authorities are also considering culling some of the million-plus feral camel population after dromedaries "mad with thirst" rampaged through a remote desert community.

Researchers warn the drought could drive Australia's iconic koalas to extinction within a decade.

The scale of the problem hit home for many Australians in April when Prime Minister John Howard said there would be no water for farms in the Murray-Darling river basin unless the drought broke soon.

Covering more than one million square kilometres (400,000 square miles) in the southeast of Australia, the Murray-Darling basin is the country's largest river system, almost three times bigger than Japan and four times larger than Britain.

It is Australia's rural powerhouse, producing more than 40 percent of the nation's agricultural produce, worth 10 billion dollars (8.3 billion US) a year.

The Murray-Darling supports half the nation's sheep flock, a quarter of the cattle herd and three-quarters of irrigated land.

It's clearly time to evacuate the residents of Brisbane and Adelaide to the wilds of Canada and divert their fresh water river flows to Sydney and Melbourne, where they are needed most.

The Brisbanians and Adelaiders won't be happy, but harsh sacrifices must be made in such times of national emergency. Sydneysiders and Melbournians will appreciate the sacrifices made by their fellow Australians. We might even send these new Canastralians a post card, or two, but only if they ship back an ice berg or two, if there's any left by then.


Prime Minister Says "Pray For Rain", Renowned Priest Says Begging God To Stop The Drought Is "Pointless"

Melbourne Also Running Out Of Water - Vegetable Crops Production To Drop By Two-Thirds

Australia's Mega-Drought To Cripple Local Food Supply

The "Armageddon Solution" To Water Shortages - Start Evacuation Of Queensland Towns

"Patriotic" Movies That "Glorify War" Won't Face Ban Under New Anti-Terror Censorship Laws


This from the Sun Herald :

Patriotic movies or games that glorify war will be specifically excluded from tough new anti-terrorism censorship laws.

So Australia faces a new regime of media censorship that will aim to define what acts of violence and bloodshed constitute acts of terrorism, and which are patriotic and glorify war?

What's the difference between glorifying acts of war that decimate civilian populations and glorifying acts of terrorism that decimate civilian populations?

It may all come down to what is deemed to be "patriotic" by a censorship board.

So what about the peoples' movement of Fretelin in East Timor? They rose up against the Indonesian government - a government backed by Australia and armed by the United States (amongst the many nations that sold them weapons of mass destruction) - in the mid-1970s, and fought back against the depopulation of their nation. They used what would now be called terrorism to fight for their freedom.

Would an Australian made movie about this 'terrorist group', that showed how they waged their insurgency against the Indonesian government, not be deemed to be "unpatriotic" under these new guidelines? After all, Australia was a close ally of Indonesia during the very worse years of East Timor's depopulation, which may have claimed more than 200,000 lives.

Or what about the insurgency waged by the Kooris in New South Wales against the English occupation of their native lands in the late 1700s and early 1800s?

There is no doubt that the Aboriginal warriors terrorised the civilian population of Sydney and Parramatta back then, as the English terrorised and decimated the Aboriginal tribes.

In a movie about the Aboriginal uprising against the English invaders, which side would be deemed "patriotic"?


Go To 'Your New Reality' For The Full Story

Former Prime Minister On John Howard & George W. Bush's "Evil Purpose"

Former prime minister of Australia, Malcolm Fraser, gave a speech at the Australian National University yesterday where he spoke of his disgust at how the Australian and US governments conspired to ignore, and over-ride, the Rule Of Law when it came to the illegal detention of David Hicks for five years in Guantanamo Bay.

Hicks pleaded guilty to supporting terrorism in a plea deal and was sentenced to nine months jail. He is set to be returned to Australia in the coming weeks to serve out the remainder of the sentence in an Australian jail and is expected to be set free on December 31.

Fraser cut loose in his speech, and pointed out that what happened to Hicks is not an isolated incident, in Australia or the US, but the most prominent in a long string of violations of human rights and the right to fair trials and due process :

So David Hicks will be home by the end of the year, partially gagged. The gag order which was undermined by information provided to the British Government and subsequently published in his application to become a British citizen and subject to the same treatment as other British citizens formerly held in Guantanamo Bay.

And so this story comes to an end but at what a price. The main story is not David Hicks. The main story is a willingness of two allegedly democratic governments prepared to throw every legal principle out the window and establish a process that we would expect of tyrannical regimes. That our own democracies should be prepared to so abandon the Rule of Law for an expedient and as I believe, evil purpose should greatly disturb all of us. But how many are concerned? Too many are not concerned because they believe that such a derogation of justice can only apply to people who are different, in some indefinable way.

Only the other day I was speaking with somebody who quite plainly believed that Hicks deserved anything that was metered out to him because he was what he was, the Rule of Law did not need to apply. For somebody who has done terrible things, why does he deserve justice? That denies the whole basis of our system, the necessity of a civilised society which cannot exist unless there is an open, predictable justice system that applies equally to every person.

David Hicks at the best was clearly a very foolish young man. He was terribly misguided and may well have done some terrible things. I do not know. But if our Government says he has had his day in court, he made a plea bargain, therefore he deserved what he got, it only emphasises its lack of commitment to the Rule of Law for all people.

If the Government believes it to be expedient, we now know that it is prepared to push the Rule of Law aside. That is a larger issue than the tragedy of David Hicks.

A number of Liberals have spoken out about these and similar issues in relation to asylum seekers or refugees, or people improperly treated in Department of Immigration detention centres. Too many have remained silent.

In an op-ed piece published in The Jurist, Fraser elaborated on what he determined to be part of an "evil purpose" in how David Hicks was 'prepared' to face the military commission, and that methodology of preparation allowed the military commission to avoid facing the full glare of a supposedly open hearing and trial :

I believe it likely that the United States authorities did not want the weakness of their evidence publicly exposed, even in a fraudulent military tribunal. Even though cross-examination would have been extremely limited, it could still have exposed the secrecy by which evidence had been collected. The defence would have exposed the fact that they were not properly advised of the evidence, of the means by which it was obtained, that it was in fact a very secret process, designed to achieve one verdict. If the process had gone to open court, each hour would have demonstrated that justice was not being served, that this was not a court of law.

The best alternative for governments, with some semblance of their credibility preserved, was to have Hicks under such pressure that he would accept a plea bargain.

This does explain the solitary confinement of over twelve months. It does explain the other pressures placed upon him, pressures which would have included the threat of continuing jail in Guantanamo Bay for twenty years or more. What person amongst us would not have accepted a plea bargain that achieved some element of freedom at the end of nine months?

Good question. But don't expect an answer from those who cry out for democracy and free societies in the Middle East, but are quite happy to see those very same institutions and rights undermined, poisoned and tarnished, in their home countries.


The Cost Of Prosecuting And Jailing David Hicks? $3 Million

Australian Government Has Had Secret Plan For Hicks' Return To Australia Since September, 2006

Attorney General Vows To Change Laws Retrospectively So Hicks Can Never Profit From Telling His Story

From The "Worst Of The Worst" To A Bumbling Wanna-Be And Al Qaeda "Liability" - US Military Prosecutors Now Claim Hicks Was Not Dangerous At All

Publishers Want Hicks Story In His Own Words - At Any Cost


Tomorrow : Why David Hicks Could Earn Up To $4 Million From Media Deals To Tell His Story

John Howard's Shocking Anti-Americanism

Prime Minister Blasts Americans Over Iraq War

Here's the latest attack on the American public from prime minister John Howard :

"The American domestic resolve is weakening..."

He said that because more than 70% of Americans back the US Congress in trying to force the Bush administration into bringing the Iraq War to an end... :

"...it is wrong, and I don't think it is doing anything other than giving great comfort and encouragement to Al-Qaeda and the insurgency in Iraq....They are looking at all this, they read newspapers, they see it on television and they say, 'The American domestic resolve is weakening, therefore we should maintain our resolve.'

"If there is a perception of an America defeat in Iraq, that will leave the whole of the Middle East in great turmoil and will be an enormous victory for terrorism."

Howard is high on NeoCon propaganda if he really believes that garbage. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, and the Iraqi insurgency is concerned, the US is already defeated in Iraq. That is not giving aid and comfort to the enemy, that is facing reality before another 3300 American and half a million Iraqi lives are lost.

How utterly disgusting.

How dare Howard try and present an anti-American front simply because the vast majority of Americans, like Australians, oppose the Iraq War. This is not about the reality of war, or the reality of the world, this is about Howard's ego, and his devotion to President Bush.

This news story featuring Howard's shocking anti-Americanism was featured prominently on the Drudge Report for chrissakes. This means that any of the tens of thousands of American journos who daily access the site will see this story and may choose to use it as a dramatic example of fractures in the Australian-American alliance.

It's clearly time to re-name it : The Howard-Bush alliance.

A very separate and distinct alliance to that between the generations of Australians and Americans who have called each other friends and allies, regardless of who is in government.

Howard clearly has no intention of preserving the alliance when the Democrats take control of the White House in 2009. He knows he is going down and will not win the federal election later this year, and he doesn't care.

The prime minister is damaging the alliance and disgracing the name of Australia in front of a war-shattered, grieving nation.

It's time for John Howard to shut the hell up, and keep his nose out of America's internal affairs.

Towns May Be Evacuated Over Water Shortages

The "Armageddon Solution" To The Australian Mega-Drought

1800 Australians may be forcibly removed from their homes in two Queensland towns as councils and state governments consider increasingly drastic measures to cope with the worst drought in Australia's recorded history.

Disturbingly, Killarney, one of the towns that may be "evacuated", is situated near the source of the Murray-Darling river system : the essential water system that stretches through three Australian states and is now drying up, and has completely stopped flowing in dozens of locations.

Drinking water is being trucked into Killarney at a cost of $8000 a week, but the expense means this measure to keep the town alive may not last for long :

Senior state bureaucrats have discussed the possibility of moving residents from Leyburn, population 200, and Killarney, home to 1500 people.

Water Services Association executive director Ross Young said the Government had the power to move people.

"I'm not sure it has ever been used in Australia...The reality is with no water, you can't live anywhere for long."

Warwick Shire Mayor Ron Bellingham called evacuation an "Armageddon solution", but admitted it was a possibility for Leyburn.

If the drought doesn't break soon, which would require vast stretches of Australia to receive unprecedented and sustained rainfalls, the evacuation of towns that rely on bores and rivers for their fresh water will become a reality for thousands, if not tens of thousands, of Australians in the years ahead.

ANZAC Day Draws 100,000 Australians Together To Remember Our 100,000 War Dead



By Darryl Mason

In 110 years of international war fighting, Australia has lost more than 100,000 soldiers, with hundreds of thousands more wounded in battle, many of whom were left permanently, physically or mentally, maimed.

In a haunting coincidence, 100,000 Australians are estimated to have gathered today to remember ANZAC Day, and to pay tribute to the dead from the dozens of wars and conflicts Australians have fought in through the past 11 decades. They gathered in groups by the dozens and the tens of thousands, with the greater percentage of those paying tribute under the age of 30 years old.

While ANZAC Day has, traditionally, focused on the Australian defeat and withdrawal from Gallipoli, in 1915, more media attention this year has rightly turned to the tragic human destruction of the Western Front and the successful battles Australians fought in France, which helped to end World War 1.

There's an excellent collection online here from the Australian War Memorial on 'Australians In France' during that period.

And, finally, the media has woken up to the fact that more than 500 indigenous Australians served in World War 1, and more than 5000 served in World War 2. Hundreds more fought in Korea and Vietnam.

Yet, most Australians are unaware of the enormous sacrifices they made, and the inhuman treatment they received at the hands of governments aligned to the English Crown who refused to recognise their service for decades. They were denied medals, war pensions and the land grants that were made available to almost all Australian veterans of World War 2.

Today, 'Koori' diggers marched in a separate ANZAC Day march in Redfern, though there was no official recognition of the event by the state or federal governments. Perhaps next ANZAC Day the prime minister find the time to visit such an event.


The coverage by ABC Radio & Television of ANZAC Day has been truly superb, particularly features on the 7.30 Report and Lateline over the past few days.

Here's some of the highlights :

Gallipoli Landings Remembered, 92 Years On

Australian War Brides In The US Finally Granted Dual Citizenship, 60 Years Later

Surviving Rats Of Tobruk Get To Keep Their Special Meeting Hall After Benefactor Buys Melbourne Building For Them - Diggers Donate The $1.7 Million They Received To Charity

POW Reunions Help To Heal The Old Wounds - For The Diggers And The Children Of Those Who Didn't Survive


Here's a quick summary from the 7.30 Report of just how monumental the contribution of Australians to the English side of the war in the Middle East and Europe actually was :

From an Australian population then no more than five million, 300,000 men enlisted. Half were wounded. 60,000 died and were buried on the battlefield, most in the green fields of France and Belgium.

...almost 40 per cent of all Australian males aged 18 to 44, enlisted.

From a population less than one quarter of today's, 60,000 of these young Australians would die in battle. More than half would be wounded or gassed, the lucky ones taken prisoner.

The numbers of killed and wounded are breathtaking, all but incomprehensible.

It is stunning to visit small outback Australian towns and villages today and to learn that from local populations of only 200 or 300, more than 40 or 50 men went to World War I, with children as young as 13 and 14 travelling to larger regional towns to sign up under fake birth dates so they could go on 'the great adventure'.

Some small towns lost, literally, most of their young men in the war. World War I devastated Australian society in ways that are rarely discussed, and all but destroyed the Australian economy, leaving the nation hundreds of millions of pounds in debt.

ANZAC Day has been more popular with Australian youth in recent years than at virtually any other time in the past 90 years. But they do not come to celebrate fighting, or war, as the surviving diggers would not want them to. They come to say thank you, and to pay their respects to the men and women who did what they believed they had to do, and what they were told to do, in an Australia of the past that today seems both familiar and remarkably distant.

More than 4000 Australians are currently serving in the Australian Defence Forces today, in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Solomon Islands, East Timor, and more than a dozen other locations around the world.


Youth Swell The Ranks On ANZAC Day

From Byron Bay To Baghdad, The Diggers Were Done Proud

"I've Got To Be The Proudest Blackfella In Australia"

ANZAC Day In Images

Australia Vs New Zealand Dispute Over Origin Of ANZAC Day

Former War Time Enemies Gather As Friends

Two Australians Injured In Iraq Insurgent Attacks On Eve Of ANZAC Day

Excellent Collection Of ANZAC Day Images

An ANZAC Day Special (Photos And Articles)

Tens Of Thousands Gather In Sydney Despite Teeming Rains

Australia's 'Mega-Drought' To Cripple Local Food Supply

"Pray For Rain," Says Desperate Howard

Priest Says Praying For Rain Is Pointless

How bad is the Australian drought? Bad enough for it to be called a mega-drought. And bad enough for the prime minister, John Howard, to urge Australians to, literally, "pray for rain".

The Murray-Darling river system is only weeks away from drying up enough to force the prime minister to take action that will cut off fresh water flows to irrigators in Victoria's farmlands, known as "Australia's food bowl". Farmers and irrigators are claiming such action will result in the loss of more than 40% of Australia's fresh fruit and vegetables supply in the coming years, and will see Australia forced to relax its extremely strict quarantine measures to allow imports of foreign fresh food.

We're already hearing that we may soon be forced to pay four or five times what we currently do for some fruit and vegetables. The fast food chains must be clapping their hands in delight. How many young working families with shocking mortgage payments and crippling credit debts will pay absurd prices for the ingredients to make fresh, homemade salads when a fast food "dinner" will be substantially less?

Basically, if most of the catchment areas for the Murray-Darling Basin do not get virtually unprecedented rainfalls in the next two months, Australia's food bowl crop lands will get most of their water supplies cut off, to ensure urban areas get enough drinking water instead.

And "unprecedented rainfalls" mean months worth of rain, steady and continual. Nobody really believes that is going to happen, except the most optimistic of long-range weather forecasters.

Good thing the Howard government hasn't been ignoring its own chief scientists, and trying to silence them all, on the reality of the mega-drought and climate change for the past ten years, or Australians really might be in some serious trouble :

Zero water allocations in the Murray-Darling Basin would threaten crops such as citrus, stone fruit and grapes, some of which may take years to recover from a year without water.

New Zealand farmers said they were sympathetic to their Australian counterparts' plight and stood ready to help. But they said Australia must stop using its quarantine rules as a trade barrier.

A day after warning that all irrigation allocations could be suspended without heavy rains in the next two months, the Prime Minister said there might be a need to ship more food from overseas.

"Obviously it might be possible in some areas to import the foodstuffs that would otherwise come from Australian sources," Mr Howard said.

"Now we hope that doesn't happen, because we always like to see ourselves as being capable of meeting our own food needs and, in fact, providing for the food needs of others.

"But it's a question of rain and we must all hope and pray that over the next six to eight weeks it rains, it rains heavily, it rains in all the right areas, (and) there's plenty of run-off into the catchments."

Here's another example of how John Howard told Australians to get down on their knees, raise their hands to the heavens, and start praying for rain :

...he encouraged people to seek divine intervention.

"It's very serious, it's unprecedented in my lifetime and I really feel very deeply for the people affected,'' Mr Howard told ABC Television.

"So we should all, literally and without any irony, pray for rain over the next six to eight weeks.''

But Father Bob Maguire, an hilariously honest and straightforward priest from South Melbourne, who exemplifies everything a true Christian should be, said praying for rain was pointless, and a waste of time. He urged, instead, that some real, significant action be taken instead :

Bob Maguire says church leaders across Australia can pray for rain "until they go black in the face" but it won't solve the water crisis.

"Maybe our prayers need a creative spin, like 'O God, please turn this wine into water'," the Catholic priest said.

"Now I know a lot of people won't like it, particularly if people are making their prayers over a nice bottle of Grange, but this water problem is bigger than all of us boys and girls down here on ground level."

"Praying for rain is great and we will be doing it in our services, but we have to be prepared to work on finding solutions to the problem ourselves," he said.

The UK Independent devoted its front page and multiple pages inside a recent edition to spelling out the true scale of the disaster facing Australia, and it pushed the line (or lie) that the mega-drought was the first and most prominent example of a major country facing ruin due to the effects of severe climate change :

...its mighty rivers have shrivelled to sluggish brown streams. With paddocks reduced to dust bowls, graziers have been forced to sell off sheep and cows at rock-bottom prices or buy in feed at great expense. Some have already given up, abandoning pastoral properties that have been in their families for generations. The rural suicide rate has soared.

Mr Howard acknowledged that the measures are drastic. He said the prolonged dry spell was "unprecedentedly dangerous" for farmers, and for the economy as a whole. Releasing a new report on the state of the Murray and Darling, Mr Howard said: "It is a grim situation, and there is no point in pretending to Australia otherwise. We must all hope and pray there is rain."

But prayer may not suffice, and many people are asking why crippling water shortages in the world's driest inhabited continent are only now being addressed with any sense of urgency.

Until a few months ago, Mr Howard and his ministers pooh-poohed the climate-change doomsayers. The Prime Minister refused to meet Al Gore when he visited Australia to promote his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. He was lukewarm about the landmark report by the British economist Sir Nicholas Stern, which warned that large swaths of Australia's farming land would become unproductive if global temperatures rose by an average of four degrees.

Faced with criticism from even conservative sections of the media, Mr Howard realised that he had misread the public mood - grave faux pas in an election year. Last month's report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted more frequent and intense bushfires, tropical cyclones, and catastrophic damage to the Great Barrier Reef. The report also said there would be up to 20 per cent more droughts by 2030. And it said the annual flow in the Murray-Darling basin was likely to fall by 10-25 per cent by 2050. The basin, the size of France and Spain combined, provides 85 per cent of the water used nationally for irrigation.

Mr Howard has softened his rhetoric of late, and says that he now broadly accepts the science behind climate change. He has tried to regain the political initiative, announcing measures including a plan to take over regulatory control of the Murray-Darling river system from state governments.

British Media Hammer Howard For Refusing To Sign Kyoto, Blame Mega-Drought On Climate Change

The 'Mount Olympus' Of The Aboriginal Gods



Deep inside the Wollemi National Park, protected by natural barriers like steep cliffs and virtually impenetrable terrain and bush, lies one of the greatest collections of ancient Aboriginal rock carvings found to date.

Rock art expert, Professor Paul Tacon, likened the find to an Aboriginal Mount Olympus.

From the Melbourne Age :

Last spring archaeologists discovered an enormous slab of sandstone 100 metres long and 50 metres wide in the 500,000-hectare Wollemi National Park, which is north of Lithgow, in western NSW. The sandstone was covered in ancient art.

The discovery was an unprecedented collection of powerful ancestral beings from Aboriginal mythology.

For most of the day the engravings are almost invisible. At dawn and dusk, the images are briefly revealed.

Supreme being Baiame and his son Daramulan were both there. Near this father and son pairing is an evil and powerful club-footed being, infamous for eating children. Several ancestral emu women and perhaps the most visually powerful of the images, an eagle man in various incarnations, are also present.

"The site is the Aboriginal equivalent of the palace on Mount Olympus where the Olympians, the 12 immortals of ancient Greece, were believed to have lived," says Professor Tacon. "This is the most amazing rock engraving site in the whole of south-eastern Australia."

And yet the archaeologists have found hundreds of sites in the past five years. It seems almost certain that engravings are part of a much larger network of songlines and stories.

An aboriginal representative of the local tribe who joined the expedition to study and catalogue the rock art said :

"They reckon we didn't have written language...We didn't have A, B, C, D but we had a written language in these engravings. They would have been able to read from site to site to site."

Aboriginal rock engravings are widely regarded as the oldest art works in the world, some dating back more than 40,000 years.

Australian Aborigines have long been recognised as having the most ancient culture in the history of all mankind. Before Dutch and English explorers reached the continent, more than 500 distinct Aboriginal tribes existed, each with their own oral and dance storytelling traditions and unique languages.

A number of tribes are believed to have used the stars for navigation across the vast stretches of the outback for thousands of generations.

'Blood' Tide At Jervis Bay



It looks like a vision of hell, on one of the most beautiful beaches in Australia, but not to worry, "it's just one of those natural occurences" :

"If there was environmental or probable health issues we'd certainly let people know."

An expected wind change is likely to wash the bloom back out to sea tomorrow and Sunday.

....the algae is a vital part of the ocean ecosystem.

"It's an important source of food," Dr Fortescue said.

The exact species of algae is not known, but it is not like fresh water algae, which can be toxic.

It stinks like hell as it rots, but the algae is expected to wash away in the next few days.

Aussie Circa 2007 : Cynical, Lacking In Empathy, Obsessed With Money And Property

Is This Really Australia Today? Or Just Sydney?

As is traditional, an Australian author has scored an English release for his new novel, so it's time to piss all over the homeland for the amusement of the Brits, many of whom still don't like the idea that "the worst of the worst" of England's prison ships built something close to paradise over the past two centuries in this sun-drenched land so far away.

Well, if not paradise, then something far less grim than most of England on a wet, misty winter's day, when the sun sets at 4pm, and nothing else to do but fuck, dance and drink.

The Australian author in question here is Richard Flanagan, who wrote a fairly interesting novel The Unknown Terrorist. It's one of the few novels to look at the effect of terrorism and the 'War On Terror' in Australia. But the true terror for Flanagan seems to be what he found on the streets and in the hearts of Sydneysiders when he decamped from his tree-crowded Tasmanian home to Sydney to write the novel.

Actually, Flanagan does make some valid, but troubling, points about what occupies the minds of many Sydneysiders today, and, as he explains in the quotes below, the new Australian exemplified by money-obsessed, property-focused Sydneyites, is the antithesis of the creature that once passed as the typical Aussie.

Blame John Howard? No, says Flanagan, we did it to ourselves :

"I wanted to make a mirror to what I felt Australia had become. I think it is a pretty bleak country at the moment. It was a land of such hope and possibility when I was younger, and in the past couple of years, like a lot of Australians, I've ended up feeling ashamed of what it had become. But we can't blame governments or parties or politicians; we have to accept in the end it was we as a people who happily went along with this.

"There was a loss of empathy. I don't know where that comes from. We're a migrant nation made up of people who've been torn out of other worlds, and you'd think we would have some compassion."

On laying blame :

"...in my country, they're blaming Howard, but that's such an absurd and easy option. There is a crisis that is not political - an epidemic of loneliness, of sadness - and we're completely unequal to dealing with it. We're obsessed these days with believing that the answer is always individual, that it lies in ourselves. This takes every form of madness from self-help manuals to step aerobics, and is always about improving yourself. But the reality is, it lies in other people and making connections with them, yet it is a world where it's ever harder to make those connections."

The limits of truth :

"In Australia....we have a whole spectrum of media commentators who consistently argue that things like national security demand that individual freedoms be truncated, and we're also constantly told there are needs and necessities of the nation that mean there are limits on the truth. But there can be no limits on the truth. If there are limits on the truth, you've opened up the road to tyranny."

On David Hicks :

"To train with al-Qaida prior to 2001 is a different thing than to go and train with them now. One can understand how people like him might end up there. You don't have to agree with them, and I don't. I have a friend who died in the Bali bombing. I don't support the murder of innocent people anywhere by anyone, but what really matters is truth and individual freedom, and when those things start coming under such heavy attack as they have in recent times, then people should be very disturbed....there is nothing higher than individual freedom."

On terrorism :

"Terrorism is simply murder. What is it we dislike? We dislike murder and the use of murder to try to impose a repressive regime. But it's murder, that's what it is. The word terrorism has been misused for so long that it clouds our understanding of what happens. After the Bali bombing, you can make a lot of criticisms of the Indonesian authorities, but they treated it as a crime and they tracked down those people. That's what it was - a crime. The Americans saw September 11 as an attack on their national honour, and it led them into a madness that the world is now paying for".

The Full Story Here is a worth a read. As is Flanagan's novel.

Philip Adams : Australia Has Become Another Country....Almost

Australia's Anzac Day Shame

The Forgotten Soldiers Of Our Forgotten War

Most Australians know little about this country's involvement in the Korean War in the 1950s, even though more than 6000 soldiers served there and hundreds died on the battlefields.

Considering some of the most acclaimed Australian soldiers of World War 1 and World War 2 volunteered to fight in Korea, for six long years, and 338 soldiers were killed there, it is an utter mystery as to why the war barely gets a mention in the mainstream media. The United States has a similar memory hole when it comes to Korea, and they lost thousands in the fighting.

In Australia, politicians rarely, if ever, mention the Korean War; historians write dozens of books about Gallipoli and Australia diggers in Europe and the Middle East during World War 2, but they won't touch Korea; you don't see lengthy TV documentaries, or docudramas, on the extremely deadly battles fought against more than a million Chinese and North Korean soldiers, and as for Anzac Day - Australia's national day of digger remembrance - you'd be hard pressed to find the kind of double page spreads afforded WW2, Gallipoli and Vietnam veterans focusing on what Australia's did more than 50 years ago to hold back Communist forces at the height of the Cold War.

But perhaps most shamefully of all, there are sixteen Australian veterans who died in Korea who don't even get a mention on the war memorial in Canberra.

Why?

Bureaucratic bullshit, mostly. And a fear of giving too much attention to what lies hidden beneath the conspiracy of silence shrouding the truth about the Korean War.

Officially, the Korean War ended on July 27, 1953, with the signing of a "truce" between the US-led coalition and North Korea. But the fighting raged on until April, 1956. The last three years of the war are not officially recognised as "war-fighting", even though there were many deadly conflicts fought in that time.

Eighteen Australian servicemen were killed during the "non-war". Two of them have their names listed on the war memorial. The other sixteen? Australian military history doesn't recognise them.

From 'The Australian' :

With Anzac Day less than a week away, a group of Korea veterans has renewed efforts to get official recognition for those forgotten 16 servicemen.

Bob Morris, who served two tours of duty in Korea with the navy, yesterday called on the federal Government to end the discrimination against those killed in the second stage of the war and to recognise all his comrades.

"We started this five years ago and we have been through five defence ministers and all but given up trying to get a hearing from the Prime Minister," Mr Morris, 75, said as he planned Anzac Day celebrations with some other Korea veterans in Nowra, on the NSW south coast.

"When you get a minister who is only 40 years old and who is surrounded by bureaucrats who have no idea about what happened more than 50 years ago, it is bloody hard."

Mr Morris said Defence bureaucrats had argued against his committee because in 1998 it was decided that deaths in Korea would be ruled "warlike or non-warlike".

"These men were all ... war-caused deaths - one was squashed between a tank and a truck, an army captain died of heat stroke and one army private froze to death in his tent.

"Others were killed by mines or by guerilla action - but everything was hushed up by the UN because there was supposed to be a truce."

Mr Morris said that after successive failures to get any response from John Howard's office, he had approached the Prime Minister when he was visiting Nowra last year.

"I got face to face with him and said I wanted to speak to him about this matter - but I got short-sheeted pretty quickly and palmed off to his principal private secretary."

Disgusting. Isn't the Korean War popular enough with middle-class Australia to warrant the prime minister's attention? These unrecognised Australian soldiers fought and died in a war committed to by Howard's hero, prime minister Robert Menzies. Bob Morris hopes that a Liberal government, then, "would fix things up."

They might get a better run from the Rudd Opposition.

"ALP MP Robert McClelland moved a motion in the house (of Representatives) last year to get us recognition but it failed," Mr Morris said. "But since then Kevin Rudd has come on board and promised to address the matter if he wins the next election."

Morris is worried that time is ticking away, and although he manages to get a bit of attention for his cause each year when ANZAC Day comes around, the years are getting on, as are his fellow Korea veterans. They're not asking for much. Just recognition for the mates they lost in the war.

"If something isn't done soon, we'll all be gone and our grandchildren won't know what we went through."

"Bizarre Refugee Swap"

Australia's Latest Export To United States : Sri Lankan Asylum Seekers

This is surely one of the most bizarre government policy announcements in years. Few on the Left or the Right can seem to comprehend WTF it's all about.

Here's the short version : The Howard government and the Bush administration have reached a deal which will see dozens of Sri Lankan asylum seekers, currently held on Nauru Island off the coast of Australia, packed off to the United States, where, presumably, they will eventually be given green cards and allowed to settle.

In exchange, the Bush administration gets to free up some space in Guantanamo Bay by sending hundreds of asylum seekers from Haiti and Cuba to Australian shores.

Here's Australian immigration minister, Kevin Andrews :

"This arrangement will ensure the integrity of the international system of protection and the integrity of Australia's borders is maintained, by providing protection to those who need it. It also sends a strong deterrence message to people smugglers."

It does? How? By allowing people smugglers to raise their prices because they can now say, "Hey, we'll get you near Australia, then you get to go to America!"

Have the senior ranks of the Howard government been sitting around licking cane toads?

Some sanity :

...refugee advocates have called the Mutual Assistance Arrangement, signed in Washington last week, a "bizarre refugee swap" and questioned the motives of the US Government.

And perspective :

The agreement will hose down fears in the lead-up to the election that asylum seekers could be cast into indefinite exile on Nauru. These include the 82 Sri Lankans who were intercepted by the Australian navy near Christmas Island earlier this year.

"It points to the human rights credit of Australia that the only country that will assist us is a country with whom we are in the coalition of the willing," said Pamela Curr of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre. "It's shocking. My other concern is what does America expect of Australia in return for taking our refugees? The Yanks don't do anything for nothing."

The whole thing is like a a pitch for some new demented reality TV show : "We follow desperate asylum seekers from South East Asia all the way to Australia. But here's the twist. They won't get into Australia. Instead, they will be stuffed onto a plane for a mystery flight, all the way to the USA! Wait till you see the looks on their faces!"

Naturally, there's a political angle for John Howard, who's never been afraid to use the poorest and most desperate of people as bargaining chips and publicity footballs. Problem is, nobody seems to be quite sure just what that political angle will be.

The most likely angle is Howard needs to get get the Sri Lankans out of the way, and put the hose on a few Nauru Island spot fires of dissent.

Nauru Island has told Australia the Sri Lankan asylum seekers currently housed there have to be gone within six months. Howard doesn't want the status of the Sri Lankans left unresolved as he moves into election mode, and he sure as hell won't let them come to our precious shores.

Nauru is playing tough with Howard now because they no doubt fear a repeat of the situation where legitimate asylum seekers, from countries like Iraq, were detained, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars to the Australian taxpayer, for as long as six years.

Not surprisingly, Nauru is developing something of a complex about being treated like a human dumping ground by the Australian government.

Wait until Howard asks them if they'd mind storing some of the nuclear waste winging back our way from international uranium sales.

Refugees Are 'Not Washing Machines'

Howard's Last Days

Prime Minister Faces Devastating Defeat At Coming Federal Election

The stunning downward spiral that is the Australian prime minister's political career is only matched for drama by the remarkable rise of the man who is now set to become the nation's newest leader, Kevin Rudd.

The right-wing media keeps beating up non-events in an effort to disable Rudd's rise, but nothing sticks. Clearly the Australian public have greater concerns than those the right-wing media tell them they must be concerned about.

After 11 years of John Howard, and a long series of shocking scandals - including the detention of dozens of legitimate refugee children in concentration camp-like detention centres in the heat of the Australian outback; the flat-out lies, distortions and corruption surrounding Australia's involvement in the Iraq War, and the federal government's blind-eye to the $300 million bribing of Saddam Hussein by the Australian Wheat Board - Australian voters have clearly had enough.

For more than 10 months, the Australian prime minister's popularity has been plunging, and continues to savagely decline, in poll after poll.

Australians hate the Iraq War, they're disgusted by the industrial relations reforms Howard forced onto them, they 're stunned that interest rates continue to climb after the prime minister guaranteed they would stay low at the last federal election, and they are sick to death of the constant bitching and whining and pathetic attacks launched by Howard's snarling dog pack of smirking federal ministers and back bench low lifes.

Howard and his crew still don't get it. Australians aren't concerned about whether or not Kevin Rudd (allegedly) distorted the childhood story of how his family were evicted from a farm after his father's death. Nor are they worried that Rudd's staffers have been caught up in a low-boil controversy about staging an early dawn service for Anzac Day.

The political belly button fluff that Howard & Co obsess over mean little to most Australians. They've told the Howard government, in poll after poll, that they are far more concerned about rising interest rates, the horrific failure of the Iraq War, the fact that their children will have less employee-related entitlements when they join the workforce and severe climate change, including droughts and water shortages. These are the issues that occupy their minds and keep them up late at night.

But Howard & Co aren't listening, and so they are continually punished for being so ignorant in virtually every new poll published.

Latest poll numbers show the Opposition government led by the team of Rudd, political fireball Julia Gillard and former Midnight Oil frontman Peter Garrett, would win a federal election today by a margin of almost 20%.

And there is nothing, not a single solitary thing, on the horizon that is likely to change
Australians concrete view that the Howard government's time in office is now well and truly over.

Kevin Rudd would have to be caught on camera drowning kittens in a vat of burning petrol, while laughing maniacally and gnawing on a koala's face to drop as low in the polls as John Howard.

With a preferred leadership rating of a mere 36%, John Howard is stumbling into the unpopular leader territory that President George W. Bush knows so well. Howard's clearly lost the hearts and minds of the great majority of Australians. And that's without an Iraq War, or 'War on Terror' related, bodycount of Australian servicepeople adding to the misery.

With interest rates all but guaranteed to rise in the coming months; with the prime minister unable to shake the locked-on visage of being a cynical denier of the realities of global warming and severe climate change; with the Iraq War plunging into a carnage-soaked abyss of incomprehensible horror; and with workplaces around Australia filling with the voices of workers yelling, "What the fuck do you mean I don't get the weekend off anymore?" John Howard is a doomed politician.

The coming federal election is expected to held in October-November this year.

That is, if John Howard remains leader of the Liberal Party.

And there is no guarantee today that John Howard will still be leader when Australia goes to the polls. So bad are his numbers now, so awesomely has his popularity and credibility peeled away in the past six months to reveal little but a hollow shell of his former glory, that rumours are bubbling away that he may bow out as leader before the election, which could still be held as late as March, 2008.

If Howard does leave before the election, expect a health care scare for the prime minister, or a member of his family, to be the reason he cites for having to pack it all in.

If he can hang on long enough to host the APEC summit of world leaders in Sydney in September, the love-in with Bush And Blair will be his swansong. Who knows? He's probably already planned it to be.

But Howard's ego is so vast, yet fragile, he could not conceivably take an election defeat that sees him lose the most powerful office in the land, particularly by a shame-slapped margin.

And he certainly won't stick around long enough to get rolled by the rest of his party, despite his mantra that he would "remain leader of the party as long as the party wants me to remain leader."

The clearest glimpse so far that Howard knows what is coming was last month when he was read the then latest polls (not as bad as today's) during an interview on the 7.30 Report,

Howard said "it's long time to the next election." Halfway through that sentence, a terrible reality appeared to dawn in his mind, and the words "the" "next" "election" were punctuated by pauses and a barrage of blinking.

The End is a rampaging road train storming down the highway straight at Howard. He is unlikely to stand there and let it run right over him. He will step out of the road, and out of the way, so he can slink off and claim for the rest of his days, to whoever will give a shit, that he was leader of Australia for 11 years, that he won four elections and that he was never beaten as prime minister.

It will mean a lot to him, no doubt, but the rest of Australia will have to cope with the reality of what he has done, or not done, over the past decade, as the resources boom skyrocketed the Australian economy, all off the back of the tough economic choices made by Labor during the 1980s and early 1990s.

Howard, meanwhile, will wheel away to one of the most privileged lifestyles in the land. Or he will whip himself off to the United States. There's a lot of opportunities waiting for Howard in the US, particularly while President Bush remains in power.

In the United States, John Howard can look forward to a few seats on some of the boards of the defence companies he's helped to enrich through the Iraq War. He can expect huge paydays on the Republican-rich dinner-talk circuit, and he and soak up the praise from the increasingly irrelevant American right wing media and Fox News lap dogs who view Howard as some down under messiah-warrior during The Crusades II.


Here's the Newspoll numbers :

Labor leads the Coalition by 59% to 41%. A stunning eighteen point lead. And that's two points up for Labor from the last poll, and two points down for the Coalition.

Rudd remains the preferred prime minister at a steady 48%, while Howard's numbers have slumped once again, this time down to only 36%.


Interesting that the media have dropped the term "honeymoon" now when trying to explain why Rudd's numbers are so astoundingly good.

The honeymoon, then, may well be over for the Australian public when it comes to Kevin Rudd, but in the best possible way. Meanwhile, the protracted, messy, painful and dangerous divorce from John Howard has begun.


The Proof The Howard Government Tried To Hide : Most Australian Workers Lose Workplace Benefits Under New Industrial Relations Laws

Howard Admits His Age May Be An Issue With Voters - Calls Getting Older "A Remorseless Reality"

400 Special Forces Troops Now Head To Afghanistan

Howard Claims Australians Will Go After Taliban "Leadership"

Australia Digs In Years To Come In Afghanistan As Troop Numbers Expected To Climb To 2000 In 2008

Prime Minister John Howard, foreign minister Alexander Downer and defence minister Brendan Nelson went on a media blitz last week for the announcement that Australia will double its troop commitment to Afghanistan.

They didn't mention, however, that Australia's commitment could double again, to more than 2000, in 2008, as troops dig in for another four or more years of war fighting in the region.

Howard, Downer and Nelson boasted that Australia's special forces won't be targeting "goat herders" on their return to Afghanistan, but will be taking on the upper ranks of the Taliban, and its leadership. At the same time, they repeatedly stated that Australians "must prepare " for casualties.

If Australia's special forces are truly going in hard against the Taliban, and are aiming to decapitate the Taliban leadership, casualties are all but guaranteed.

What hasn't been addressed yet is whether the special forces will be entering the border regions between Afghanistan and Pakistan where most of the Taliban leadership is believed to be holed up, or whether they will enter Pakistan itself.

Pakistan's president Musharraf insists that Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters are not coming from his country, but are border-region Afghan refugees. The United States, meanwhile, claims that Pakistan is sheltering Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders.

With the announcement today that John Howard has told Pakistan president Musharraf that he "has to do more" to deal with the Al Qaeda and Taliban groups and support bases inside his country, it certainly sounds like the prime minister is laying the ground for Austrailan forces to work close to, or inside, Pakistan's border.

An exceptionally good summary of what Australia's special forces will be facing in Afghanistan from Patrick Walters writing in 'The Australian' :

Australia is being slowly yet inexorably being drawn into a novel 21st-century version of the "great game" in Afghanistan as our military prepares for its most sustained fighting since Vietnam.

The upgraded Afghanistan mission promises to be long and hazardous, and Australia's defence chiefs know there is no guarantee of victory. Our overall troop commitment is much likelier to rise than fall in the next two years as the battle intensifies to stabilise Afghanistan.

But, unlike Australia's two most recent wars, in Vietnam and Iraq, the war in Afghanistan is a full bipartisan commitment from the Government and the ALP. When Australian special forces return to the mountain-locked Oruzgan province next month they will face a far more confident Taliban insurgency. A dysfunctional NATO command in Kabul is manifestly failing to subdue the insurgency now gripping south-eastern Afghanistan.

"It is a fundamental test for NATO and NATO will fail it. It (NATO's counter-insurgency strategy) isn't working and it isn't going to work. But there will be some local successes," says one senior Australian government source. "The only people actually doing anything hard are the US, Brits, Canadians and Aussies."

Australia's military is preparing for the possibility of a four-year assignment task in Oruzgan. But planners know successfully stabilising the south in partnership with Afghan security forces will take a decade of sustained effort.

Since the SAS and commandos returned home from Afghanistan in September 2006 things have gone backwards in Oruzgan. Less than 30 per cent of the province, one of Afghanistan's poorest with a population of about 400,000 people, is under the control of the central government.

Areas subdued by the Australians in 2005-06 such as the Chora Valley, just 15km north of their base at Tarin Kowt, have now effectively fallen back under the control of the Taliban.

Nearly six years after the overthrow of the Taliban government in Kabul, Oruzgan remains a Taliban heartland. Its inaccessible mountain valleys are a safe haven for an estimated 300-400 hardened fighters who roam freely across the mountains from neighbouring Helmand and Kandahar.

There are few roads, even fewer government services, and the opium crops are flourishing. Taliban fighters are steadily encroaching on the provincial capital, Tarin Kowt, which lies in a broad valley. They continue to threaten the main road and main supply line south to Kandahar, 120km away.

The Australians know the terrain and know the enemy but, as one senior military source acknowledges, "we will have to start from scratch again and recover lost ground".

Taking responsibility for the province would involve more than doubling the planned 1000-strong commitment, and would include the provision of combat air power and more ground forces.

NATO estimate the number of Taliban fighters in the southern provinces at about 10,000. Many of these are mercenaries and opportunists who will switch sides if they sense the momentum is slipping away from them.

With the Taliban leadership holed up in Quetta, Pakistan, and newly trained fighters crossing freely into Afghanistan, NATO is facing a far more resilient enemy fully prepared to test the resolve of the US and its allies.

In Oruzgan, Australia's SAS, ably supported by commandos, will aim to quickly regain the tactical initiative, limiting the insurgents and freedom of movement and cutting off their support bases and disrupting supply lines.

The aim will be to create fear and uncertainty in the minds of the Taliban and al-Qa'ida fighters, mounting clandestine patrols, all the while trying to gain the confidence of local Afghan elders and villagers.

This time the special forces will stay for at least two years and have the opportunity to really make a difference. But the Australians will need more help to do the job effectively, particularly helicopter support in combat operations. The army's refurbished Chinooks won't return to Oruzgan until early next year, leaving Australian forces totally reliant on NATO aircraft during the next nine months.

Australia's well-meaning efforts in Oruzgan may prove to be only a transitory success in a long painful march out of Afghanistan.

More details and background on the announcement of more troops to Afghanistan here :

Australia's defence deployment to Afghanistan will be doubled, with special forces charged to aggressively hunt down Taliban leadership and disrupt its resurgent terrorist network.

The existing 400 personal working with the Dutch in a Reconstruction Task Force in the Oruzgan province in the troublesome south, will be joined by a Special Operations taskforce made up of Special Air Service soldiers, Commandoes and a "solid intelligence capability", as well as an additional RAAF air surveillance radar group at Kandahar airport.

The present deployment of 120 special protection soldiers, rotated every six months, will be extended for another 18 months.

Two Chinouks helicopters will be returned and joined by an Hercules C-130J aircraft operating broadly across the Middle East.

The announcement means that Australia will have more than 900 personnel deployed by the middle of the year, peaking at over 1000 by the middle of 2008.

Mr Howard indicated he was conscious of the political difficulties Pakistan had in containing the Taliban but was keen for it to do more.

"We would like the Pakistanis to be as active, intense, as committed as zealous as possible in containing it," he said.

"I understand some of the political realities under which (Pakistani President) General (Pervez) Musharraf operates."

Mr Howard said he had made personnel representations to General Musharraf about the matter, as had British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US Vice President Dick Cheney.

"We do all understand some of the history and there is a balancing act," he said.

"There's no doubt that overall the Pakistanis have been good allies in the fight against terrorism," he said.

"I guess in relation to Afghanistan we would like them to be even better allies."

This is exactly the kind of talk which is now infuriating Musharraf, who claims :

"We have suffered the maximum and we have contributed the maximum. Therefore, we will not accept that Pakistan is not doing enough in the war against terror...It pains me when people say that Pakistan is not doing enough."

Why Howard continues to pour on the pressure when Musharraf is threatening to "quit" fighting the 'War on Terror' may be more about laying the media ground work for later revelations that Australian forces are operating on, or in, Pakistan's borders.

Though, according to Musharraf, they might end up doing such operations with his permission.


Howard Claims If Terrorists Gain A Foothold, Again, In Afghanistan, There Will Be "Direct Consequences To This Country"

Howard Asks Pakistan To Curb Taliban

Stop The Criticism Or I Will Quit Fight Against Terror, Warns Musharraf