The earth ruined in the blink of an eye

Anyone who watched the ABC series, Australia: The Time Traveller's Guide, cannot but have been amazed by the incredible continent on which we live.

In the first episode, we saw this land billions of years ago when the ores, which we value so much today, were laid down with no help whatsoever from the human animal.

Man didn't in fact appear until the end of the last episode, about 50,000 years ago; a mere blink of an eye in geological terms.

One wonders therefore just who does own these ores?

Is it the state?

Is it the country?

What about all the people who have lived here and those yet to come?

That a person today can simply buy a prospector's licence and then say that he owns all that ore and simply dig it up and ship it out to another country, giving him-her undue influence in our society, hardly seems to be just.

The whole process puts a tremendous strain on our society.

There is pollution causing health problems; more and more land covered in asphalt or concrete, more coastal areas affected by jetties, social problems due to fragmented families, more extreme inequality in our society, quite apart from the fact that all that we are leaving for future generations is more and more enormous holes in the ground.

In addition, there are frightful environmental impacts, which spell doom for many of the other species which share this continent.

I therefore find it incredible that Australians can be so easily swayed by these miners, to accept that the mining tax is in any way unjust.

I believe that the original mining tax was the correct one.

Email, 19 Apr 2012

Margaret Lund, Woy Woy Bay