Melbourne Film Festival screens Uighur film despite cyber attack
Updated
IT security experts are warning that cyber attacks will become more and more common as internet access grows around the world - and after the attack on the website of the Melbourne Film Festival it's thought the hackers are going political. Hackers attacked the festival's website, posting an image of the Chinese flag, a jingle, and left slogans criticising an exiled Uighur activist and leader, Rebiya Kadeer, who is featured in a documentary film. But the website has been fixed and the film has been screened.
Presenter: Stephanie March
Speakers: Richard Moore, director, Melbourne International Film Festival; Asha Rao, senior lecturer, information security, RMIT University, Melbourne; Peter Black, lecturer in internet law, Queensland Institute of Technology
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RIMON: Lord God we thank you for your gift of life. We thank you for our atoll islands ...
MOTTRAM: At a climate change conference in Canberra last December, Bertarim Rimon, from the Kiribati government's climate change adaptation program, delivered up this prayer.
RIMON: ... but now Lord God we realise the real danger is approaching us. We begin to question your love and plan for us as your children.
MOTTRAM: The prayer is traditional but in recent years has been adapted to underline the sense of crisis many in Kiribati feel as climate change effects become more and more real.
And though Australia's Labor government promises to help its Pacific neighbours as those effects unfold a new report from The Australia Institute and Oxfam Australia is critical. Pointing to Labor's promises when in opposition, the Australia Institute's Richard Denniss says the government has done little including with $150 million its allocated for climate change in the Pacific.
DENNISS: It's being spread increasingly thinly, it's being spent on research rather than adaptation in some instances and it's being spent outside of the Pacific region and at the same time the government has gone completely silent on the need to discuss migration from what they referred to in opposition as our drowning neighbours.
MOTTRAM: A lot of Pacific states are already feeling the very direct effects of sea level rise and other climate change effects, but they do largely, don't they, want to stay in their own countries if they can. Why do you think immigration should be an issue?
DENNISS: Look, of course, they want to stay there and of course we should help them to stay there. But that said some areas, some low lying atolls, are already becoming impossible to inhabit and we do need to assist these people. We do need to discuss the very real possibility of some of these people having to move.
MOTTRAM: The groups are calling on Australia to at least double its commitment for Pacific climate change work. Andrew Hewett from Oxfam Australia says the money should be used to build on some of the work that's already happening in the region.
HEWETT: Climate change is becoming the central development issue. It's affecting every aspect of people's lives and it's only going to be more so in the coming years. It's got to be accorded that sort of priority at the Pacific Islands Forum meeting in Cairns.
MOTTRAM: Australia's parliamentary secretary for the Pacific, Duncan Kerr, rejects criticism of Australia's role.
KERR: I think it's pretty unfair to characterise where we stand to date as inadequate because we've worked very hard to change a position we inherited when we came to government, we've signed to Kyoto, we're going forward with commitment to make significant undertakings internationally to be part of an international consensus to bring down CO2 emissions globally, and in our region we've committed to very significant programmes for adaption, recognising that even with best will in the world the international community will still be faced with a reality that existing CO2 emissions in the atmosphere will almost certainly bring about some levels of climate change which will have very dramatic effects on our region.
MOTTRAM: Mr Kerr says Australia's efforts in the Pacific are aimed at practical adaptation measures. And he's warned against what he says is a worrying trend to creating despair about the future, with talk of moving communities rather than strengthening them in response to climate change. But he acknowledges that after his most recent of many trips to various Pacific states, regional leaders will be looking to Australia at the Cairns meeting to do more.
