Earlier this week, Thom Mitchell broke an important story on the New Matilda website, related to the massive expansion of a $130 million port on Tiwi Islands, which was done without any environmental oversight.
FOI documents revealed the massive expansion of the port on Tiwi Islands – home to 38 endangered species – was missed by the Abbott Government because staff were “overworked” and investigators may have been lied to.
At the same time, the Chief Minister of Darwin, Adam Giles was issuing press releases (in March) and speaking to media about the project, which apparently came as a complete surprise to the Abbott Government a few months later.
Apart from ABC Darwin, the story has been completely ignored by mainstream media. Quelle surprise.
It’s an important yarn because it goes to the heart of the ability of the Abbott Government to manage environmental law, and to ensure that our kids and grandkids inherit a healthy and vibrant Australian landscape.
That’s what he have environmental law for, but when the Abbott Government stuffs it up, they blame ‘greenies’. Don’t let them.
We need your help to ‘make the story go viral’. We’ve started a crowd sourcing campaign with the good folks at Pozible (a wholly Australian-owned not-for-profit service) and we’re aiming to raise $5,000 in five days.
Half of that money $2,500 will be spent on pushing the story into the newsfeeds of more than one million Australians. It’s a targeted campaign, via Facebook and Twitter.
The other half will be spent continuing to pursue the story – we’ve got more FOIs to go in, and if we raise over our target we hope to be able to afford to send Thom to Darwin, to really ‘get amongst it’.
We really need the New Matilda community to step up.
You can donate to our campaign on Pozible here.
As little as $10 will help us reach our goal – indeed, if just 0.1 percent of the people who read New Matilda in the course of a single month donated $10, we’d exceed the target.
You can read more about Thom Mitchell’s FOI scoop here, and this afternoon, Thom filed another ‘explainer’ on the story, which you can read here.
New Matilda fans might remember that in March, we embarked on a similar campaign – we raised money directly through New Matilda, to push Max Chalmers’ exclusive story about the leaked Moss review transcripts into the news feeds of more than a million Australians (you can read that here).
You can still contribute directly via the NM site as well, if you prefer – donations of any amount can be made here.
Subscribing obviously helps us enormously, but so does sharing this story on social media, and encouraging family and friends to join the fight.
Thanks for reading… and for your support. Together, we can keep the bastards a little more honest.
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