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Barrier Reef $542M funding buys penthouses, Lamborghinis and overseas holidays
Katters Australian Party targets Save the ‘Great Barrier Reef’ industry
North Queensland readers would find it more than interesting the Cairns Post newspaper has ignored this story
KAP Candidate for Leichhardt, Daniel McCarthy has today called for a forensic audit to be carried out on all Barrier Reef government funding warning that the ‘rivers of gold’ crisis funding being allocated to save a reef that doesn’t need saving have flowed for far too long and it was time to reveal to tax payers just how their money was being spent.
A select few crisis-crying people have done exceedingly well from millions of dollars in tax payer funded grants whilst the rest of the marine tourism industry in Cairns and Port Douglas have suffered tremendously.
“We have the third largest territorial sea of any nation yet no politicians currently in Canberra have the slightest grasp on reality with our oceans, and it now seems government doesn’t know or has been turning a blind eye to where the reef funding money has been funnelled and a full and thorough forensic audit will determine what’s been going on with the $102 million been spent on Crown of Thorns alone,” said Mr McCarthy.
Dan McCarthy KAP calls for forensic audit of half a billion in Federal reef funding
The negative publicity in the world wide media is a result of outrageous false and misleading claims made by those milking the gravy train has destroyed the reputation of the Great Barrier Reef,” he said.
“The knock-on effect caused by the reef’s trashed reputation has flowed through the North.
“Cairns Port expansion plans are held to ransom by the Federal governments Reef 2050 plan along with the unnecessary State Government vegetation management laws and increased green-tape where virtually every farmer in North and Far North Qld has also been vilified along the way.
“It’s high time to restore integrity into science, policy and research funding for the Great Barrier Reef.”
The current media reports of the sacking of Prof Peter Ridd by James Cook University is currently before the courts and is deeply troubling.
“As far as I am aware Prof Ridd was simply offering a scientific view that the science in relation to reef funding should be quality controlled.”
The federal government handed over $102m to a group of researchers to implement control measures for the coral-eating crown of thorns starfish (above). Current research shows a one-off injection of a bovine enzyme easily kills the starfish.
Recently the Crown of Thorns starfish funding had been under scrutiny in wide spread revelations in the media.
“We all want to protect the GBR that’s for sure. However, I have been inundated with phone calls from people across the marine sector and the public who are absolutely ropable over the reef funding scandal that has come to light.”
McCarthy has a deep understanding of the threats and the reality of what’s actually happening on the reef, having worked on it for most the last 30 years and in every sector of the marine industry.
“I have long been concerned that the relationships and arrangements for reef funding were ‘a little cozy’ between a couple of individuals and their organisations and members of parliament, but what has been revealed in recent wide spread media of late it appears the situation stinks of jobs for the boys to say the least.”
Hard working Australian tax payers are having hundreds of millions of their dollars directed into the ‘save the Reef’ industry.
Now it appears some of this money may have been funnelled into saving for retirement, penthouses, expensive luxury cars, hobby farms on the Tablelands, overseas holidays and election campaign funding for a select few. It certainly does not pass the pub test.
Mr McCarthy is furious at many of the matters being raised particularly with what equates to ‘Donor Democracy.’
“If what is alleged in these media reports is true I think it disgraceful. Australian’s are fed up with seeing their money being swallowed up in deceptive, self-interested projects under the guise of saving things,” he said.
“I support Dr Peter Ridd’s proposal that at least one per cent of the funding that goes to the Great Barrier Reef is spent on checking the science, verifying the findings and providing quality assurance.”
There are many further questions to be asked as to why the Federal Government gave $440 million to a private company that never asked for the money nor has the capacity or idea as what they intend to do with it.
A healthy Great Barrier Reef spawns fictitious, costly scare campaigns
The never-ending battles of the Coral Sea
by Viv Forbes, science writer
For at least 50 years Australian taxpayers and other innocents have supported a parasitic industry in academia, bureaucracy, law, media and the tax-exempt Green Alarm “Charities”, all studying, regulating, inspecting and writing about yet another “imminent threat to Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef.”
The Queensland Labor Party Government is about to embark on another reef-runoff onslaught against coastal farmers that is intended to close down farming along the entire coastline, from Cooktown to Brisbane.
It has become the never-ending battle of the Coral Sea.
The threats change, but there is always a doomsday forecast – Crown-of-Thorns, oil drilling, fishing, cane farming, coastal shipping, global warming, ocean acidity, coral bleaching, port dredging, chemical and fertiliser runoff, coal transport, river sediments, loss of world heritage status etc. Every recycled scare, magnified by the media and parroted by politicians, generates more income for the alarm industry, usually at the expense of taxpayers, consumers or local industries.
The reality is that sea creatures would starve in pure water – all marine life needs nutrients, salts and minerals. These come from other life forms, from decomposing rocks and organic matter carried to the sea by rivers, from dissolving atmospheric gases, or from delta and shelf sediments stirred up by floods, cyclones, dredging or coastal shipping. No one supports over-use of toxic man-made chemicals, but well-run cane, cattle and coal companies can co-exist with corals.
Conservation bodies and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority conjure up doomsday scare campaigns for a healthy Barrier Reef to attract more funding from inept government
Corals first appeared 500 million years ago and have proven to be one of Earth’s great survivors. They outlasted the Carboniferous Forests, the Permian and Cretaceous extinctions, the dinosaurs, the mammoths, the Neanderthals and the Pleistocene cycles of ice age and warming. They thrive in warm tropical water, cluster around hot volcanic fumaroles and survive massive petroleum spills, natural oil seeps, tidal waves and volcanic dust. They have even recolonised the Montebello Island waters devastated by atomic bomb testing in the 1950’s.
The ENSO oscillation of blobs of warm Pacific water which caused recent coral bleaching can be identified in historical records for at least 400 years. Corals have survived El Nino warmings for thousands of years and they will probably outlast Homo Alarmism as Earth proceeds into the next glacial epoch.
See the Supercorals:
https://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/supercoral.png
Corals do not rely on computer models of global temperature to advise them – they read the sea level thermometer which falls and rises as the great ice sheets come and go.
In the warming phase like the one just ending, ice melts, sea levels rise and the reef that houses the corals may get drowned. Corals have two choices – build their reef higher or just float south/inshore and build a new reef (like the Great Barrier Reef) in shallower, cooler water. When islands sink beneath rising oceans, corals may build their own coral atolls as fast as the water rises.
Then when the cold era returns, ice sheets grow, sea levels fall, and the warm era coral reefs get stranded on the new beaches and coastal plains. Usually the process is slow enough to allow the coral polyps to float into deeper warmer water closer to the equator and build another reef.
This eminently sensible policy of “move when you have to” has proved a successful survival policy for the corals for 500 million years.
Humans should copy the corals – “forget the computer climate models but watch real data like actual sea levels and . . . move when you have to.
Cairns News 
