Dingo bites
Free trade means the stripping away of all protection for a nation's economy. Plunder is the name of the game and there'd damn well better not be any hindrances or barriers in the way of transnationals in their carnivorous pursuit of profits. This includes quarantine laws. So, when the Australian Banana Growers' Council hired an expert in banana diseases as part of a campaign to stop the import of Philippines bananas, the quarantine watchdog, Biosecurity Australia, began a counter-campaign to intimidate him. Professor David Jones is a senior scientist with Britain's Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs recruited by the Banana Council to examine the dangers of the imports. The Council says it has evidence that Biosecurity Australia colluded with Jones' bosses in Britain to force him to drop his examination. Apparently there are still some imports that are not acceptable.* * * The NSW Greens say that a financial crisis at Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens is forcing its management to cut down near- century old trees. The Botanic Garden Trust is under pressure to find alternate sources of income because of lack of funding from the Carr Government so the trees are being removed to make more space for crowd activities and also to reduce the cost of liability insurance. The Government is each year cutting the Trust's funding by the same amount as the funds raised by on-site events. The result is that the Domain, a public space, must increasingly make more money from events, a vicious cycle that has now resulted in environmental vandalism on publicly owned land.* * * The national broadcaster, the ABC, remains under the funding gun but out of the spotlight so that a death by a thousand cuts continues unnoticed but unabated. A report by Liz Jacka, Professor of Communications Studies at Sydney's University of Technology has revealed that arts programming on the ABC has been substantially downgraded and that management is increasingly turning to lightweight, populist programming driven by an eye for ratings. A glaring example of the effect of funding shortfalls and management's exploitation of them to take the ABC toward the ultimate goal -- commercialisation -- is the national broadcaster's involvement in a planned children's theme park. The park will be at Melbourne Showground and Flemington Race Course. The ABC's community champions, Friends of the ABC, put it this way: "FABC recognises that the ABC is struggling for funds. But joining in ventures, or selling its creations and trusted name to a commercial operation to make money out of children, is unethical and downright dangerous."* * * CAPITALIST HOG OF THE WEEK: is Foxtel. News Ltd's pay TV Foxtel Footy Show has mustered up all the principles and integrity we have come to expect from a Murdoch entity in dealing with the extreme sexism revealed to be rife in the various football codes. It has introduced a segment with a panel of wives, girlfriends and in one case the daughter, of AFL footballers to give their perspective on the issue.