General news

news news Mohammed Ali named Canberra Citizen of the Year

Mohammed Ali, founder and president of local charity HelpingACT, has been named Canberra Citizen of the Year for 2022.

At a ceremony at Albert Hall on Tuesday, Chief Minister Andrew Barr said Mr Ali was recognised for his dedication to supporting vulnerable members of the community through his roles with HelpingACT, the ACT Multicultural Advisory Board, the ACT Refugee Asylum Seeker and Humanitarian Coordination Committee, and Companion House.

“I feel overwhelmed, completely in disbelief, and very, very humbled,” Mr Ali said. “It is not me who is recognised. What is recognised is definitely my volunteers.”

Mr Ali, a Pakistani migrant, retired biochemist, and former Multicultural Volunteer of the Year, founded HelpingACT four years ago to provide food security to vulnerable Canberrans, particularly homeless people, refugees, and asylum seekers.

He also started Forum Australia, a thriceyearly panel on issues that concern Australians.

The honour showed “a great recognition for the inequalities and the plight of the people who are struggling at the moment”, Mr Ali said.

Canberra’s food need has tripled; every day, HelpingACT receives at least four or five requests for help. Salaries have not risen, and Centrelink payments are low, so some people are only eating half their bodily needs, he said.

“To think that this situation will ease in a few weeks’ time, I think, will be fooling ourselves,” Mr Ali said. “This post-COVID era has longer shadows, and we have to prepare. An underclass is developing in Canberra. They are the people with low incomes. And they are finding it hard because petrol prices have gone up, and grocery prices have almost doubled.”

HelpingACT delivers food directly to those people; to community organisations like Companion House, Havelock House, the Early Morning Centre, and Woden Community Service; and to street and church pantries. During the 2019/20 bushfires, HelpingACT partnered with Slabs for Heroes to donate goods to fire-

Canberra Citizen of the Year for 2022 is Mohammed Ali, founder and president of local charity HelpingACT.

affected areas, and prepared meals for families at evacuation centres.

It was a way Canberra’s diverse communities could help people in need, and make Canberra one of the best cities in the world.

“Not many cities are as affluent as Canberra,” Mr Ali said. “We take it as a duty to help these people to come out of this cycle. Our dream is that no one sleeps hungry in Canberra.”

Last year, the Governor-General himself commended the charity for their hard work, particularly during lockdown. Again, the public paid tribute to HelpingACT when they raised $30,000 – $10,000 more than Mr Ali had hoped – for a new delivery van and trailer.

Full story online. - Nick Fuller

Canberra’s rabbit invasion threatens native species

They may look “cute”, but Canberra’s widespread rabbit population is threatening native species and conservation efforts, and they’re popping up literally everywhere.

Rabbits are a common sight in many urban areas, like the City Hill roundabout, but they’ve recently hopped into precious conservation territory, including the Jerrabomberra Wetlands.

In 2017, the ACT Government implemented a Rabbit Control Program which aimed to reduce numbers by releasing a strain of calicivirus into two populations of pest rabbits.

The virus-infected populations were living in an area of Namadgi National Park and land adjacent to Mulligans Flat Nature Reserve. Although the program was initially successful, populations have since continued to increase.

ACT community organisation, Friends of Grasslands, have been fighting to conserve Canberra’s natural environment since 1994, and the volunteer-led group are “very concerned” over the increase in rabbit numbers.

President of Friends of Grasslands, Jamie Pittock, says rabbits are a major threat to the flora and fauna in local bushland.

“The first key concern is they eat particular plants to extinction, so we need to control the number of rabbits so key wildflower species can survive. The second concern is they support the high population of predator cats and foxes which then also prey on native wildlife,” says Mr Pittock.

“We appreciate the ACT Government does undertake rabbit control, and we understand it’s difficult to scale up the control during the wet season. But we’re concerned with the limited number of contractors undertaking these control efforts.”

Mr Pittock says he would like to see the ACT Government put more effort into training and accrediting more contractors who can assist in rabbit population control efforts.

The Manager for Invasive Species and Overabundant Wildlife at the Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate (EPSDD) for the ACT Government, Mark Sweaney, said rabbits are the most significant environmental pest in the Territory.

“Controlling the rabbits is one of our top priorities. It’s always more challenging in seasons like this with the combination of really good food available to them, together with a probable decline in the effectiveness of bio controls,” he says.

Mr Sweaney says although the rabbit population is one of the EPSDD’s main priorities, many of the rabbit groups don’t reach the threshold level to implement stronger control methods.

“If the rabbit population gets above a certain density, then they can have an impact on the environment. We have a threshold so we can control rabbits before they have those impacts but few reserves at the moment have too many rabbits,” he says.

He explains the EPSDD focus their efforts on controlling rabbits in certain areas across Canberra where they’ll have the best advantage in reducing the population.

“If there’s a lot of rabbits but they’re not causing a huge amount of damage, we don’t put resources there.”

According to Mr Sweaney, the control methods currently being used are continuing to have “really good” success in reducing the feral rabbit population.

news news ACT first jurisdiction to divest big fossil fuel shares

After years of effort by climate activists and Greens MLAs, the ACT Government no longer has any shares in any of the world’s 200 biggest fossil fuel companies – becoming the first jurisdiction to divest its shares in the industry.

“That means Canberra’s no longer putting our investor money into fossil fuels,” said Jo Clay MLA.

Divesting the ACT’s portfolio has been a tripartisan achievement spanning more than 20 years. Greens MLAs Kerrie Tucker (1999), Meredith Hunter (2010), and Caroline Le Couteur all advocated for ethical investment.

“Governments take a long time to do things,” Ms Le Couteur said. “It is exciting to actually find something you’re involved in actually comes to fruition.”

In 2014, 350 Australia, the branch of an environmental organisation that aims to end the use of fossil fuels and transition to renewable energy, identified fossil fuel divestment as a community campaign. It used the Carbon Underground 200, a list of the top coal, gas and oil companies listed by potential carbon emissions, as an indicator of the level of the ACT Government’s investment in fossil fuels, said Canberra coordinator Warwick Cathro.

After 350.org and the Conservation Council presented evidence to a 2015 estimates committee, its chair, then-Canberra Liberals MLA Brendan Smyth, recommended the ACT responsibly divest 85 per cent of its holdings in fossil fuels.

Ms Clay pursued the divestment of the remaining 15 per cent when she was elected in 2020.

As recently as September last year, the ACT Government still had holdings in fossil fuel and mining companies, including Rio Tinto and Woodside Petroleum. Only one per cent of the portfolio were fossil fuels, the government told Ms Clay and fellow Greens MLA Andrew Braddock.

By the end of that calendar year, a spokesperson said in November, the government would have no holdings in fuel companies, and could exclude investments with direct exposure to proven fossil fuel reserves.

The divestment is part of the ACT Government’s nation-leading climate change policy, including 100 per cent renewable electricity, and starting to electrify their transport, Ms Clay said.

“But if we’re putting money into fossil fuel industries and still wrecking the climate, the rest of that good work is getting undermined.”

Severe weather events of the last two years have shown why stopping investment in fossil fuels is vital, the Greens believe. Tim Hollo, Greens candidate for Canberra, pointed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report last month that burning fossil fuels causes the atmosphere to overheat, leading to extreme weather events – such as more frequent and severe floods and fires, of the sort deluging northern NSW and Queensland.

“Our task right now is to make the continued burning of fossil fuels simply untenable at any level – politically untenable, economically untenable, and socially shameful,” Greens leader Shane Rattenbury said.

Ms Clay hopes other jurisdictions will follow the ACT’s example. She intends to write to her Federal and state and territory counterparts to suggest divestment is “another smart, easy step to get off fossil fuels”.

- Nick Fuller