Where’s the rest?
In the recent State budget, the NSW Liberal-National Government promised $100 million to create a regional arts fund, but on July 17, arts bureaucrats revealed that the fund is not what it is cracked up to be.
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The fine print of the Regional Cultural Fund shows a mere $25 million will be now rationed across all of NSW’s rural and regional communities in 2017-18.
This is pitiful when the fund is compared to what is being spent in Sydney’s CBD.
In the June budget, the NSW Deputy Premier John Barilaro and NSW Arts Minister Don Harwin boasted that they were providing $100 million in funding for regional and rural art galleries, museums and community halls. We now discover that this is just a cruel hoax.
But the most insulting aspect is that the fund cannot go to hire staff, urgent repairs, ongoing maintenance or operational costs.
How will small communities compete with the larger better resourced regional centres?
The Nationals must explain why all of the funding goes to Sydney.
Hon Walt Secord
Shadow Minister for the Arts, Deputy Opposition leader in the NSW Legislative Council
Animals feel it too
Global warming doesn’t just affect us humans. Ian Fraser has published online an article called “Nature in a Warming World”. This is a very brief summary.
- Mr Fraser points out that while bird ranges can vary from time to time it is clear that climate change is pushing warmer climate birds further south – as happens in reverse in the Northern Hemisphere.
- Tawny Grassbirds, whose normal range ends just south of Sydney, now appear as far south as Melbourne.
- The Pacific Koel - which normally winters in Indonesia and New Guinea and breeds in northern and eastern Australia - over the last 20 years has become common in Canberra.
- The Channel-billed Cuckoo, with a similar normal range to the Koel, is also getting commoner in Canberra and likely to be breeding in the region in years to come.
- White-headed Pigeons have extended their range from the mid-south coast of New South Wales well into Victoria in the past decade or so.
- A 2010 CSIRO study showed that at least 45 species of south-east Australian marine fish have exhibited “major distributional shifts” which were almost certainly climate-related.
- Warmer water fish from both further north and west have moved into formerly cooler Tasmanian waters, inevitably displacing local species.
- A 2003 study in the Peruvian Andes showed that 85% of the 1,000 tree species studied were moving higher at a rate of 2.5 to 3.5 metres per year – significant but, according to the report authors, only half as fast as they need to move to keep pace with the observed warming.
- Another study in the French Alps showed that of the 175 plant species studied, 118 of them – nearly 70% – had moved at least 18.5 metres per decade up the slope over the twentieth century.
- Spring is arriving earlier which upsets breeding and migration patterns.
- A 2003 study in the journal Nature reported that spring was arriving earlier at the rate of 2.3 days per decade.
- In 2007 the IPCC reported that the arrival of spring had been advanced by up to 5.2 days per decade over the past 30 years
- In 2013 an Australian review of published studies showed that the mean rate of advance across all plant responses (leaf set, fruiting, flowering etc) was 11.3 days per decade.
- The same review showed that the spring migration departure of birds moved forward by 2.2 days per decade.
This is a dramatically shortened summary of the article, which refers to other sources for more detail.
