Australian Constitution - Section 116

Australian Constitution - Section 116 - Commonwealth not to legislate in respect of religion

The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.

This is definitely not as strong as USA's state and church separation. But there are grounds to work with. There is an ongoing high court challenge for a federally funded state program across Queensland where federally funded school chaplains may conduct Christian prayers on all-school assembly; at significant school ceremonies; hold lunchtime prayer/Bible study sessions and engage with students in the classroom, playground, school excursions, school camps and sport. Chaplains oversee and conduct Religious Instruction classes and on-campus church-designed and run programs including Hillsong 'Shine' which connect children with evangelistic off-campus clubs, programs and camps.

Donation towards this high court challenge is available at http://www.highcourtchallenge.com/

Worrying times

It is a no brainer. Fossil fuels are stored carbon that lived up to 300 million years ago. Burning almost half^* of these fuel in the last 50 years (releasing 21.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere each year) released all these stored carbon in a very short period (50 years is nothing compared with 300 million years) obviously will have a tremendous effect on the environment. You don't need a PhD in Climatology to figure out how bad it would be.

Unfortunately, very unfortunate indeed, one of the independent senator, Steve Fielding, was still "unconvinced* after a 2-hour meeting with our Australia's Chief Scientist that human activity is the main cause of climate change. [source]

I echo strongly with Orion77 the concern of such attitude from our politician. Here is a little background of Senator Steve Fielding (from his own website): He has 15 siblings, an engineering degree from RMIT and has worked mostly in management. Here is the interview from Lateline:
Part 1:

Part 2:


It sounds GOOD for him to say that he was trying to listen to both sides of the argument - including the skeptics. However, as a politician, he should not be so naive to ignore efforts of vested interests to discharge a large volume of mis-information and pseudo-science.

^*Everyone has a different opinion on how much of the stored fossil fuel has been burnt. The last major oil field discovered is in 2006 which would supply 2 year worth of consumption for USA alone. I may be over optimistic already!

cross posted to Sustaining Future