WORK on a $900 million Korean suburb on Hobart’s Eastern Shore will start within a year after winning final planning approval yesterday.

Billed as an “integrated lifestyle, education, and residential development”, ParanVille will be one of the biggest residential subdivisions developed in the state and promises to give the struggling building industry a massive boost.

It is expected to attract residents from Korea, China and Japan who are keen to escape harsh northern winters and the threat of nuclear accidents, its backers said yesterday.

The 158-hectare rural site between Howrah and Rokeby approved by the Tasmanian Planning Commission will become home to more than 2000 new residents and several hundred language students and will generate up to 1000 jobs during the 10-year construction period.

It will feature a language school and residence hall for students. The site was chosen because of Tasmania’s international image as a clean, green, safe and politically stable place to live and for its proximity to Hobart’s airport.  [The Mercury]

You can read a lot more at the link, but the development has been criticized for practicing cultural separatism.  The Korean man building the development, Paul Kim says that the development will be open to anyone to live in but is focusing on  attracting Korean students, retirees, and those who can afford a second home in Tasmania.  I think this development is going to be a hard sell because there are very few Koreans living in Hobart compared to Sydney and Melbourne that have large Korean communities.  Also as nice of a town as Hobart is once again it doesn’t carry the same amount of prestige as living in Sydney, Melbourne, or Brisbane.  If you are trying to attract rich people from Korea them bragging about their condo in Hobart is not the same as bragging about one in Sydney.  Then there is the climate; Hobart actually has some of the nicest weather on Tasmania, but it is not a warm weather location like Brisbane or Sydney that someone would traditionally want to retire to.

I think this all just combines to become a tough sell to get Koreans to buy property here.  The fact that the developer is trying to scare people by bringing up natural disasters and the Fukushima nuclear crisis as reason to move to Tasmania seems to smell of desperation to me.  Also the Greens in Tasmania are not making a stink about this development like they usually do with anything development wise, which leads me to believe they are taking a wait and see attitude as well on whether this development will actually happen.  The guy behind the project Paul Kim from what I found is a Pastor at the Korean Full Gospel Church in Hobart.  Pastor Kim was behind the redevelopment of the church which back in 2010 the Korean Ambassador to Australia attended its opening.  So the guy has political connections, but I am wondering how does a Pastor go from leading the redevelopment of a church to backing a near billion dollar residential development?

THE expanded American military presence in Australia – to be formally announced next week by the US President, Barack Obama – will result in vastly more US ships, planes and soldiers visiting and being stationed in the nation’s north, the government says.

As the government all but confirmed yesterday’s Herald report that US Marines and materiel would be shifted to Darwin, the Greens said the move would annoy Australia’s neighbours, including China, and make the nation a bigger military target.

The Greens leader, Bob Brown, said he would make his concerns known to Mr Obama next week in the unlikely event he was granted a meeting with him. Otherwise Senator Brown planned to ring the US embassy to complain.

The Foreign Minister, Kevin Rudd, attacked the Greens, whose platform opposes foreign military bases.

”The Green party does not direct Australia’s national security policy, the Green party does not direct Australia’s foreign policy,” Mr Rudd said from Hawaii, where he is attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit.

Mr Rudd played down concerns expressed by some defence analysts, such as Professor Hugh White, that the increased US presence might antagonise China. Mr Rudd said Australia had always been transparent about the importance of its alliance with the US.

With Australia’s vast coastline and small population, ”it has always made national security sense for Australia to have a strong strategic alliance with the United States”. This had long had the overwhelming support of the Australian people, he said.   [Sydney Morning Herald]

Considering the size of the existing military installation Robertson Barracks that they are putting Marines at in Darwin it could probably hold just a few hundred Marines, so it won’t be a very large troop presence.  However, this opens the door to future expansion of the base once the politics in Australia line up to support such a move.  This is a very good idea to reduce some of the pressure over the US Marine presence on Okinawa while at the same time strategically dispersing US forces across the Pacific.  On a side note, China would look ridiculous complaining about US Marines stationed thousands of miles away in an entirely different hemisphere, especially if it reduces the number of US forces in Okinawa that is sitting literally right off their shores unlike Australia.

EVERY student will be required to study a second language for at least 300 hours before year 7, with Chinese and Italian the first to be taught under the national curriculum.The draft shape of the national curriculum for languages, to be released today, says curriculums for 11 foreign languages will be developed to be taught in schools.

The curriculum has been criticised for failing to include classical languages, such as Latin, or the Australian sign language Auslan.

Advertisement: Story continues below The first national language curriculums to be developed will be Chinese and Italian – chosen because they cater for the greatest range of students – and a framework for teaching Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages.

This will be followed by Indonesian, Japanese and Korean, which are national priorities, French and German, which are among the most commonly taught languages in schools, and Spanish, a language of global importance.  [Sydney Morning Herald]

However, as Andrew Bolt points out prioritizing Korean and the other Asian languages does not make sense for students to learn:

The results are now in, thanks to a study from Melbourne University’s Asia Education Foundation. For many students, it seems those years of forced study have been largely wasted, and wasted most with Asian languages. …

So what does the AEF find about the teaching of the languages Rudd most wants to push: Indonesian, Mandarin, Korean and Japanese?

First, there is little chance Rudd’s plan can double the year 12 students learning these languages by 2020 without an “attitudinal change across the Australian community”.

Most parents just don’t see the sense in learning Asian languages. What chance is there really that their daughter will need her schoolgirl Indonesian to do business deals? What cultural payoff is there in learning Korean that a child in this essentially European country couldn’t get twice over from learning French?

The statistics in the report say it all. [Andrew Bolt]

Click the link to read the rest but I agree that it doesn’t make sense to push such difficult languages on students before the 7th grade.  Learning a language such as French, Spanish, or Italian is much easier to learn for a English speaker and good way to practice foreign language study before attempting to learn a difficult Asian language.

An Australian council is rueing a decision to send street cleaners into a Melbourne lane after they painted over a priceless stencil of a rat by the celebrated British graffiti artist Banksy.

Melbourne Deputy Lord Mayor Susan Riley last week sent a clean-up team into Hosier Lane, renowned internationally for its colorful street art, to clean up garbage in the graffiti-lined passage after local residents complained.

But the request went awry when the cleaners painted over a Banksy stencil of a rat hanging underneath a parachute and adorning the wall of an old council building. “Unfortunately the contractors were not made aware by us that that was an important piece. It is the nature of graffiti art. It’s very vulnerable to other people’s work,” Council chief executive Kathy Alexander told local radio.

The reclusive Banksy, who is regarded as one of the world’s top street artists, painted several stencils in Melbourne during a 2003 visit. His satirical and distinctive art is often directed at anti-war, cultural and anti-capitalist themes.-Reuters

Graffiti is never going to be permanent. That it lasted seven years without destruction sounds pretty good to me.

A RACE row has erupted at a Melbourne council with a former Greens candidate accused of telling a fellow councillor not to vote on “Asian matters” because he has a Korean wife.

Manningham Cr Ivan Reid accused Cr David Ellis of telling him to butt out of Asian issues that arise on the council.

The council’s first public meeting of the year was last week rocked by the allegation, which has been verified by Manningham Mayor Charles Pick, but angrily denied by Cr Ellis.

Cr Reid told the council meeting Cr Ellis had a “hidden cultural agenda” over the proposed expansion of an all-Chinese nursing home in Donvale.

“He stated that I should abstain from Asian issues because my wife is Asian,” Cr Reid told the meeting.  (…………..)

“He started saying that because my wife is a Korean I should declare a conflict of interest in any Asian matters and not get involved in any Asian matters,” he said. “I was shocked. I think there might be an ethnic angle he’s got and I think people can draw their own conclusions.”

Cr Pick said: “I can’t deny that it happened, but we’re committed to moving forward.  [Herald-Sun]

I guess people married to white women shouldn’t be involved with anything dealing with white people then to use this guys logic. What is also further interesting about this is that Councillor Reid who is married to the Korean wife is half Chinese himself.  Wouldn’t you think his family ties to the Chinese community had more to do with his promoting of a Chinese nursing home than being married to a Korean woman?

Talk about putting your foot into your mouth.

James Anthony Dean-Willcocks, of Illawong, was yesterday charged with the murder of Magno Alvarado, 67.

Residents of Elouera Rd, Cronulla, told police of being woken about 5.30am on Saturday by a male yelling: “F … off back to Japan”.

[...]

Police will allege Dean-Willcocks was heard yelling “Ya Jap”.

Another described seeing Mr Alvarado tackled, “body-slammed” and punched many times.

One witness told police he yelled at Dean-Willcocks to stop and asked what he was doing.

“Mate, he’s Japanese and he deserves it,” the accused allegedly answered.

It is understood Mr Alvarado was Filipino.  [Daily Telegraph]

James over at Japan Probe has netizen reaction from Japan that is as you would expect after an incident like this.

Australia is far from being a “racist country” because this guy is just one of a few bad apples that can cause Australia to look bad.  Nevertheless I would love to hear what motivated this guy to want to murder a “Jap” because Australia’s media coverage of Japanese whaling is usually quite sensationalized and over the top.

A self-styled sheik has been arrested in Australia over letters sent to widows of soldiers killed in Afghanistan, accusing their partners of murder, as Canberra mulls an early withdrawal from the troubled country.

The Iranian-born Muslim spiritual leader, who calls himself Mufti Sheik Haron, was charged with sending hate mail to families of seven Australian soldiers killed fighting Taliban and al Qaeda militants in Afghanistan over a two-year period.

“I feel bad that you have lost your son but I don’t feel bad that a murderer of innocent civilians has lost his life,” Haron allegedly wrote to the family of one Australian commando killed in January, the Daily Telegraph newspaper said on Thursday.

Haron denied the charges after his arrest. But New South Wales state Premier Nathan Rees said on Thursday that if proven true, the letters were an “evil act of cowardice.”

Australia, a close U.S. ally, has 1,550 troops in Afghanistan, including special forces, and is the largest non-NATO troop contributor. Ten Australian soldiers have died fighting alongside Dutch forces in southern Oruzgan province.- Reuters

While I find what Heron wrote to be despicable, I have always strongly felt that speech shouldn’t be a crime. I’ve defended people from Ann Coulter to Cindy Sheehan in their right to express themselves. That hasn’t stopped me from criticizing them also.

Letting the government regulate or criminalize speech is a quick way to put a free society in jeopardy.

Two Dutch tourists heading to Sydney for a dream Australian holiday mistakenly ended up in a Canadian town of the same name.

Joannes Rutten and his grandson Nick, from Amsterdam, booked their flights through a travel agent.

They only realised an error had been made as they landed in Nova Scotia, on Canada’s southeastern coast, on Saturday, the Cape Breton reports.

The hapless holidaymakers are the third set of tourists in as many years to wind up in the town accidentally.

The Ruttens aren’t alone. A few years ago a Littlerock Washington man who wanted to go to Taiwan and ended up in Taiyuan instead and had to fight his way out of a brothel.

Sydney, Nova Scotia, is 17,000km away from its Australian namesake and has a quieter pace with about 30,000 residents.

Temperatures in the town were a reasonable 16C yesterday, but if the tourists arrived in the heart of winter they could have faced snow storms and -17C.

The Dutch pair’s airline, Air Canada, organised free hotel rooms until they could arrange a flight home.

“We had 24 hours with no sleep … It’s not good, not good,” Mr Rutten Snr told the Cape Breton Post.

Mr. Rutten probably dropped a few notches in the eyes of his grandson. When Nick returns to school he is more than likely to be teased by his classmates because of what happened to him and his grandfather. Then the boy is fifteen years old and maybe he should have noticed something was wrong with his travel arrangements.

THE Chinese Government has threatened to end Melbourne’s 29-year sister-city relationship with the city of Tianjin if Lord Mayor Robert Doyle does not intervene to stop the screening of a film about Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer at the Town Hall today.

Mr Doyle has rejected the Chinese demands – as well as intense pressure from his own councillors to stop the screening of the controversial film.  [Andrew Bolt]

It will be interesting to see if the city eventually gives into Chinese demands.

What is even more interesting is that the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd speaks fluent Mandarin and the Chinese have soured on him because he uses his Chinese language ability to speak directly to Chinese citizens instead of being filtered by Beijing translators.

Hackers posted a Chinese flag on the Web site of an Australian film festival in an escalation of protests against the planned appearance by an exiled Uighur activist whom Beijing blames for deadly ethnic riots in China’s west, an official said Sunday.

The cyberattack on the Melbourne International Film Festival — which also received a flurry of critical e-mails — came after four Chinese films pulled out of the event and a Chinese diplomat protested the screening of a documentary about activist Rebiya Kadeer, whom Beijing says incited the violence this month between Muslim Uighurs and Han Chinese that left nearly 200 dead.

China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang criticized the screening and Kadeer’s planned appearance earlier this month, saying: “Everyone knows the kind of person that Rebiya is. We are firmly opposed to any foreign country providing her with a stage for her anti-China separatist activities.”

Kadeer, who lives in exile in the United States and will attend the festival in Australia‘s second largest city Aug. 8, denies any role in the ethnic violence — the worst China has seen in decades.

If Chinese society had the rule of law, these hackers would be prosecuted.  Just like those who destroyed a Malignant Melanoma website in 2001  called ‘Mark’s Melanoma Hot List’.  That took place after the Hainan Island incident and made even less sense than the attack on the film website. Destroying a website that provides resources to cancer patients and their loved ones in a fit of nationalism is stupid beyond belief.

Personal note- I’m a malignant melanoma survivor. My personal story was on Mark’s page before it got hacked. The website was never restored.