Emergency Services scanner feeds now online. Is there anything the interwebz can't find you??

Expensive gear now superfluous...

Following the tragic news of yet another mass shooting in America, there was an online message about the radioreference.com  live feed of the local police radio chatter - with the obvious warning that much of the feed at that time was quite disturbing.

The service also links to emergency service radio feeds for many Australian services (but not ACT or Northern Territory). There is scattered availability in the other states, with Inner Sydney an interesting omission...

Amazing that this sort of eavesdropping used to require expensive hardware of questionable legality. And now there it is, given the interwebz treatment for anyone to listen in on.

In just an hour of listening in on the Sunshine Coast feed, they nabbed a guy who lifted a $400 pair of sunglasses from a shop in Noosa (didn't arrest the shop owner for charging that much though!), a female wanted pseudo-ephedrine runner, a wanted parole defaulter and a male with suicidal tendancies after a knife-wielding house invasion in Coes Creek. Not a bad work rate guys!

Regarding the shooting in Aurora Colorado, in Australia we can be truly thankful that John Howard - strongly supported by Tim Fisher - showed true leadership following the Port Arthur shooting and (at great personal political cost) pushed through sweeping gun law changes that make such an horrific crime so much less likely here.

Perspectives on the Tent Embassy Anniversary fracas

A lot has been written about the events of Australia Day 2012 in Canberra. A lot of it misinformed, a lot blown out of any semblance of proportion. But very little written with any regard for the unnecessary and completely avoidable damage done to the cause for reconciliation.

Apart from Laurie Oakes' piece questioning the role both before and during of the Australian Federal Police, and this piece by Sunshine Coast Daily oped writer Bill Hoffman:

The tent embassy on the lawns of old parliament house is 40 years old.

It has sat there as an ugly reminder of the ugly reality of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' disadvantage for all that time.

Vale Coast musician Tony Connor

Just learnt that renowned Sunshine Coast musician Tony Connor has died, at just 49 from a brain tumour.

Tony was a customer at my Nambour computer business.

Gaylene and I went to his first ever live concert at the Nambour Civic Centre on maybe 1993.
We wondered how ambient music would be live but it was a magical night.

A great life cut short.

And now for the desal campaign...

Now Queensland's Premier Anna Bligh is trying to hit back spitefully at the Sunshine Coast after the rejection of her pet dam project, by trying to fast-track a desalination plant at Marcoola.

Talk about digging yourself a hole and then jumping right in. Go right ahead Anna Bligh.
The Marcoola site is in the midst of endangered wallum heathlands. This area was once national park that was degazetted by David Low to get the road that bears his name built in return for development rights over the coastal strip.

This Crown land was then designated by DNR as "Industrial" and "Investigation" for many years. After about two years of negotiations with DNR staff, personal discussions with then Ministers Jim Elder and Rod Welford, and a unanimous resolution of Maroochy Council supporting my push, the State Government agreed in 1999 (?) to change the designation to "Conservation". It was a great personal win, and was written up in SCEC's Eco Echo magazine at the time. Perhaps no-one has mentioned this conservation status of the land to Bligh, or mentioned that this is one of the few wildflower areas remaining on the Coast?

Traveston dam is a travesty - and unnecessary

Anna Bligh's grand plan of a dam on the Mary River at Traveston Crossing near Gympie is now in the lap of Peter Garrett. This is a dumb dam plan in a dumb location that would produce a massively wide yet shallow dam with extraordinary evaporation losses. It will also emperil the already endangered prehistoric lungfish that live in those reaches of the river.

The fact is that there are viable alternatives to building more dams. And the Queensland Government knows it.

In 1999, the Department of Natural Resources advised the Caloundra-Maroochy Water and Wastewater Steering Committee (on which as a Councillor I was the Maroochy Council's delegate) that their research had shown that, despite facing runaway population growth, use of wastewater recycling would allow Queensland to cope with all the projected population growth without needing to build any more dams.

That's right - no more dams at all.