Duterte Admits He Is An Addict - As We Predicted

Back in October 2016 Inside Tasmania made the bold prediction that Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte is a drug addict.
Now Duterte has admitted to not only abusing the opioid fentanyl but also murdering people on the streets of Davao in order to encourage the police to shoot more people. 

"The 72-year-old former provincial mayor, whose crackdown on illegal drugs has left almost 6000 people dead, admitted over-using an addictive pain-killing drug to relieve pain. Mr Duterte told a business forum in the presidential palace that he started taking the opioid analgesic drug fentanyl, which is usually prescribed for cancer patients, despite never being diagnosed with cancer. "
Now we know Duterte was sexually abused by a priest, is a drug addict and has committed murder. So why was he elected president of the Philippines? The fact is any electorate is made up of a majority of people with only average intelligence and they will consistently elect poor leaders.
This controversial mathematical modelling is one of the most uncomfortable truths of our age. It has also put the human race on a trajectory to annihilation.

Inside Tasmania supports current vice president Leni Robredo (right) to replace Duterte as Philippines president. Robredo is a human rights lawyer and she always seems to be smiling. We are sure she would be much better for the Philippines than the mentally unstable murderer, drug addict and sexual abuse victim Rodrigo Duterte.
It's just a pity Duterte got this far.
As for Telstra and other Australian telcos using the Philippines for their call centres, we now don't care what they do. They are going to lose everybody's personal data anyway so the telcos can dig their own grave as Rodrigo would say.

Institute Of Foresters Australia And FSC Australia - Liars And Conmen

Behind all Australian state logging authorities and the rest of our logging industry is the quasi-academic 'Institute of Foresters'.
Through their 'professional' members in the 'economic chamber' of FSC, the Institute of Foresters has almost complete control of FSC Australia. The IFA has known for a long time that the big bucks they once made from clear-felling public native forests are no longer there. The IFA's own forest certification schemes are now forgotten and they desperately need the FSC tick of approval on their 'Brazilian waxed forests'. (A term we coined to describe clear-fell logging operations)

The IFA has even managed to get some enviros working for them. Groups like TWS and ACF have worked for the logging industry. They were convinced the IFA would save high conservation forests in return for their support. We predict it will not be long before the IFA dumps it's pro-genetically modified trees policy, bringing them inline with the weak FSC policy on modified trees. The fact is, FSC is certifying the functional equivalent of genetically modified trees. They don't flower, they are clonal and nobody really knows what else has been altered.

Have a look the IFA board of directors?  Most of this 'white shoe brigade' has either logged or is logging Tasmania in the role of running Forestry Tasmania. These university educated buffoons thought nobody would notice most of them have been on the payroll of the state logging authorities in Tasmania and Victoria. Where the big trees used to be.
That's not surprising because the university forestry course was set-up by the state logging authorities. They all went to either the ANU School of Forestry or The Creswick Chainsaw Sharpening Academy in Victoria. These people are not interested in forests, they are interested in their bank accounts.

Today the FSC is finalising an Australian national 'standard' that was paid for by the Gillard Government specifically to get Forestry Tasmania certified.

Although Tasmania was once blessed with beautiful forests like Vancouver Island, it is now an economic backwater. The island runs mostly on welfare and the Feds would rather bankroll rogue Indian coal miners like Adani. The Turnbull Liberal psychopaths just can't destroy the Great Barrier Reef fast enough can they?

But what a ridiculous system FSC is running? FSC calls a clonal tree plantation a 'forest', they call a pine oil plantation a 'forest' and they call a Brazilian waxed wasteland a 'forest'. And they churn-out thousands of pages doing it. FSC do not operate 'on the ground'. Data is taken by certification companies or 'auditors' at face value and rarely checked. FSC certification is mostly a desktop publishing project.

Reading through FSC's myriad 'standards' and 'normative' documents you can see that exclusions and trade-offs abound. It's pretty obvious that for FSC trees only exist to enrich humans. Just like the Institute of Foresters AU.

Forestry Tasmania Chair de Fegely accuses fellow IFA members of mismanaging Forestry Tasmania

Rob de Fegely is president of the Institute of Foresters AU and now the ex-Liberal candidate for Eden Monaro he is also Chair of Forestry Tasmania.
In an extraordinary letter to Tasmanian Ministers Gutwein and Barnett pleading for more money, de Fegely lays blame at past managing directors of Forestry Tasmania for writing sweetheart contracts giving away trees at less than commercial rates. The kicker here is those past directors of Forestry Tasmania are also members of de Fegely's own organisation the IFA. One of them is on the IFA board and another is a life member. There was also stand-in chairman of FT Bob Annells who did not write any long-term contracts as far as we know.
We will not name the two notorious FT directors here because one of them is addicted to buying silence by legal action. 

Tasmanian Forestry - The State of Play

part of a story by Sally Glaetzer Mercury

The lift is slightly rickety as it ascends the three floors to John Gay’s modest office suite in the heart of Launceston’s central business district. Here, the former woodchip king once considered the most powerful man in Tasmania runs his family’s veneer business. Specialty Veneers and its offshoot Corinna Timbers supply timber and decorative veneers, mostly for kitchen makeovers and shop fit-outs locally and interstate.

Forico chipmill

Gay is pale and clearly fatigued late on this Friday afternoon when we meet as planned in the company’s tiny, bare-walled conference room. Gone is the bolshie businessman I spoke with earlier in the week by phone when he told me – with good humour – he had no desire to participate in a profile article for TasWeekend.

“If you lose a grand final, that’s it,” Gay had said. “You can’t go back and play it again.”

This is Gay’s admission that the other side has won, referring to what he calls “the extreme green groups” who undermined his plans for a pulp mill and – he says – manoeuvred behind the scenes to have him ousted from Gunns, the once-mighty timber giant he ran for nearly four decades. He similarly blames outside forces for his criminal conviction for insider trading in 2013.

Despite not wanting to be interviewed for a personal profile piece as such, Gay is happy to meet for a “general chat” about the timber industry in Tasmania. He makes it clear he has no interest in defending his legacy. Gay is comfortable in his own skin and content in the knowledge that those who in his mind matter still hold him in high esteem.

The 74-year-old, who was worth $50 million on paper at Gunns’ peak, is still in the industry he loves – albeit on a much smaller scale. Specialty Veneers was once a subsidiary of Gunns and was shut for four years after the company’s collapse, until Gay started it up again. In court, he was granted special leave to run the business, which has a small factory at Somerset and employs 35 people, including Gay’s daughter. He has another two years to go before he can serve as a company director on a larger company.

Gay admits that by the end of a working week he is exhausted. In 2007, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. At the time, his doctor warned him that if radiation therapy did not work, he would have six months to live. The radiation bought him time but now Gay has secondary bone cancer.

The Hobart office of the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions confirms Gay has paid the $500,000 pecuniary penalty he was slapped with under proceeds of crime laws late last year. “The lawyers have cost me more,” he says.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission pursued the penalty after there was widespread criticism of the relatively minor $50,000 fine Gay copped in court after pleading guilty to insider trading. The criminality related to Gay selling $3 million of Gunns shares in 2009 while privy to price-sensitive information.

Gay reveals he is writing a book about Gunns, but not covering his court case or the period after his forced resignation from the company in 2010. In September 2010, Gunns’ replacement chief Greg L’Estrange declared the company would quit old-growth logging and transition to a plantation-only business in an unsuccessful attempt to shore up pulp mill investors. Two years later, the company went into receivership.

“I’m sure if I had stayed on and been left to carry on, the business would still be there,” Gay says. “It might have been smaller and with no pulp mill, but I’m sure the business would have survived.”

It has been a turbulent time for Tasmania’s timber sector since Gay’s ignominious downfall and the post-GFC collapse of the woodchip market. Many industry watchers, including conservationists and those who want to see an end to constant taxpayer prop-ups, had hoped the native forestry sector would be allowed to contract naturally. With the state-owned Forestry Tasmania posting a $67 million loss last year Resources Minister Guy Barnett says he has a plan to end subsidies without shrinking the industry.

Barnett’s solution to the woes of FT, which is losing money on more than a quarter of the trees it harvests, is to bring forward the felling of forests previously earmarked for future reserves, but leave it to the private sector to log the contentious areas. He is giving FT the optimistic new name of Sustainable Timber Tasmania, alleviating some of its non-commercial responsibilities such as firefighting and road maintenance, and lifting prices of sawlogs “to offset costly coupes”.

Tens Of Thousands Rally To End Najib Razak Kleptocracy

From SMH
Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets of the Malaysian capital on Saturday, defying a police ban and crackdown on pro-democracy activists, to demand the resignation of scandal-hit Prime Minister Najib Razak.

Ninety-one-year-old former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, one of Mr Najib's fiercest critics, told a sea of protesters clad in yellow that it is time to topple the government.
"We are no longer a democracy, we are known as a kleptocracy – a nation run by thieves," he said.

The on-line portal Malaysiakini estimated that more than 40,000 protesters marched in the rally organised by Bersih, a coalition of almost 100 groups campaigning for electoral reform and against corruption amid allegations that a state fund embezzled billions of dollars in the country's biggest financial scandal.

Mr Najib set-up 1Malaysia Development Berhad, known as 1MDB, and oversaw the fund through chairmanship of an advisory committee.

Maria Chin Abdullah, the leader of Bersih, told Fairfax Media before being arrested on Friday she feared a counter pro-government "red shirt" group would disrupt the protest.
"We have security but it's insufficient when faced against gangsters," she said.

But Jamal Yunos, a red-shirt leader, was also arrested hours before the protest after earlier warning "anything can happen, including violence."
He has also made bizarre claims against Bersih, including that the coalition had been infiltrated by Islamic State terrorists.
The rival groups heckled each other but there were no serious clashes. Malaysiakini estimated the number at red-shirts who also took to the streets at around 4,000.

Ms Chin and 10 opposition figures and student leaders were arrested after Mr Najib uploaded a speech on his website declaring the Bersih protesters "a tool of the opposition".
Police banned Bersih supporters from taking to the streets despite Ms Chin declaring they would comply with rules of the Peaceful Assembly Act.
As investigations continue in at least five countries into 1MDB Mr Najib's government has become increasingly authoritarian. A Malaysian court last week sentenced an outspoken member of Malaysia's parliament to 18 months in prison for publicly disclosing information relating to the scandal.

The conviction of Rafizi Ramli was slammed by human rights groups who said Malaysians have a right to know about corruption.
"These arrests are the latest in a series of crude and heavy-handed attempts to intimidate Malaysian civil society activists and other human rights defenders," said Amnesty International's Josef Benedict.

Mr Najib, 62, has been under fire since July last year when the Wall Street Journal published documents showing that almost US$700 million turned up in his private bank accounts. He denies any wrongdoing.

The US Justice Department has said it is investigating US$1 billion of assets purchased in the US with funds that were allegedly embezzled from 1MDB. The department said a figure it called "Malaysian official 1" knowingly received huge sums from 1MDB.
A Malaysian cabinet official has since confirmed that official was Mr Najib.

However as Malaysia's biggest financial scandal unfolded Mr Najib has shut down his country's investigations into the fund, removed critics from government, closed several media outlets and enacted tough security laws in a sweeping crackdown that analysts say has endangered an already fragile democracy.
Mr Najib, who has had close ties to successive Australian governments, has in the meantime shored up support in his party, the long-ruling United Malays National Organisation, where officials have for decades benefited from money politics.

How The Emirates Melbourne Cup Legalises Rape

G'day Aussies. Ever notice the 'Emirates Melbourne Cup' is never promoted by the Emirates rulers even though they own the airline and sponsor the race? The reason is they don't want dumb-as-a-brick Aussies to know this is another Moslem-Totalitarian-Sharia Law incursion into Australian culture. The Emirates usually hire a Brit front man to do the media. Fact is the Emirates is a Sharia Law dictatorship controlled by just one family.

 UK woman charged in Dubai after reporting her own rape

by Lin Taylor
London: The family of a British woman arrested in Dubai for reporting her own rape has launched an online appeal, urging the public and the UK government to help negotiate her release.
The British woman was charged for having extramarital sex after she reported her own rape to police, according to UK-based legal advocacy group Detained in Dubai.
The case has revealed a persistent and deep-rooted prejudice against women in the Gulf state, rights groups say.

"The authorities continue to fail survivors of such violence by treating women who have been raped as criminals, instead of investigating and prosecuting suspected perpetrators," Drewery Dyke, from Amnesty International, said on Friday.

He urged authorities to do more to eliminate violence against women across the United Arab Emirates (UAE), including among tourists and migrant workers.

The news has made the front pages and raised questions about the judicial system in the Gulf state, which lures large numbers of expatriates and tourists with a Western lifestyle.
Radha Stirling, founder and director of Detained in Dubai, said the treatment of rape victims in the UAE "tremendously disturbing".
"The UAE has a long history of penalising rape victims," she said.

"Victims go to (the police) expecting justice, and end up being prosecuted. They not only invalidate their victimisation, they actually punish them for it."
"It is still not safe for victims to report these crimes to the police without the risk of suffering a double punishment."

The woman's passport has been confiscated, Ms Stirling said, and she may face trial where punishments can include imprisonment and flogging.
The woman's family said she was on holiday at the time and had been planning to travel on to Australia when she was reportedly raped by two British men in Dubai, one of the seven emirates that make up the UAE.

"Please help my daughter, she is being held in a prison cell in a foreign country for up to one year if we can't bail her out," the family wrote on a fundraising website.
The family said they were targeting £25,000 ($41,600) to cover the woman's legal costs. As of Friday, they had raised more than £13,700 ($28,800).

The Britain's Foreign Office confirmed the incident and said they were "supporting a British woman in relation to this case and will remain in contact with her family."
Ms Stirling said the alleged attackers have since returned to the UK without any charges.

The victim's father said the two men accused of the rape filmed the incident – which took place in a hotel room – on a mobile phone.
In 2008, Australian woman Alicia Gali was charged after reporting her own rape. She served eight months of a one-year prison sentence. 

Thomson Reuters Foundation, PA, Fairfax Media

Pilger Interviews Assange - Saudis, Qatar Funding IS

Great to see an Aussie interviewing an Aussie. Seems the Islamic State funding secret has been revealed. Qatar and the Saudis both fund IS because they all share the same brainwash. The Clintons got donations as well because they enabled the largest arms deals in the history of the planet with Saudi Arabia.
Christians to vote for Trump because he said a woman was not attractive enough for him to sexually assault WTF?
From RT
 In the second excerpt from the John Pilger Special, to be exclusively broadcast by RT on Saturday, courtesy of Dartmouth Films, Julian Assange accuses Hillary Clinton of misleading Americans about the true scope of Islamic State’s support from Washington’s Middle East allies.

In a 2014 email made public by Assange’s WikiLeaks last month, Hillary Clinton, who had served as secretary of state until the year before, urges John Podesta, then an advisor to Barack Obama, to “bring pressure” on Qatar and Saudi Arabia, “which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL [Islamic State, IS, ISIS] and other radical Sunni groups.”
“I think this is the most significant email in the whole collection,” Assange, whose whistleblowing site released three tranches of Clinton-related emails over the past year, told Pilger in an exclusive interview, courtesy of Dartmouth Films.

“All serious analysts know, and even the US government has agreed, that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIS and funding ISIS, but the dodge has always been that it is some “rogue” princes using their oil money to do whatever they like, but actually the government disapproves. But that email says that it is the government of Saudi Arabia, and the government of Qatar that have been funding ISIS.”

Assange and Pilger, who sat down for their 25-minute interview at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where the whistleblower has been a refugee since 2012, then talk about the conflict of interest between Clinton’s official post, which held throughout Obama’s first term, her husband’s nonprofit, and the Middle East officials, whose stated desire to fight terrorism may not have been sincere.

John Pilger: The Saudis, the Qataris, the Moroccans, the Bahrainis, particularly the first two, are giving all this money to the Clinton Foundation, while Hillary Clinton is secretary of state, and the State Department is approving massive arms sales, particularly Saudi Arabia.

Julian Assange: Under Hillary Clinton – and the Clinton emails reveal a significant discussion of it – the biggest-ever arms deal in the world was made with Saudi Arabia: more than $80 billion. During her tenure, the total arms exports from the US doubled in dollar value.

JP: Of course, the consequence of that is that this notorious jihadist group, called ISIL or ISIS, is created largely with money from people who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation?

JA: Yes.

Pilger also questioned Assange over increasingly frequent accusations from the Clinton camp, and Western media, that WikiLeaks is looking to swing next week’s US presidential election in favor of Donald Trump – perhaps at Russia’s behest.

But Assange dismissed the prospect of Trump, who is behind in the polls, winning as unlikely – and not necessarily due to his standing with the electorate.

“My analysis is that Trump would not be permitted to win. Why do I say that? Because he has had every establishment off his side. Trump does not have one establishment, maybe with the exception of the Evangelicals, if you can call them an establishment,” said Assange. “Banks, intelligence, arms companies, foreign money, etc. are all united behind Hillary Clinton. And the media as well. Media owners, and the journalists themselves.”

Andrew Robb Goes Maoist

Comment. Does ex-trade minister Andrew Robb really think Landbridge is not a front for the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China?
Wakey-wakey Robb, you have been bought by the Communists which proves you were a compromised trade minister all along. Now you are just a commie asset which makes you worse than Sam Dastyari.

from SMH

Former trade minister Andrew Robb has accepted a job with the Chinese company that has a 99-year lease of the Darwin Port.
Mr Robb was appointed to the role – described as a "high-level economic consultant" – in a ceremony in September.

However, his job only came to light on Sunday when the ABC commissioned a translation of a September 2 statement by the Landbridge Group.
According to the ABC, the translated statement reads: "The process of internationalisation of the Landbridge Group and the results achieved had greatly impressed him [Mr Robb]."

Chairman Ye Cheng is quoted as saying that, for Landbridge to achieve its goals, "it will be necessary to draw on experts such as Mr Andrew Robb who have global vision and global influence."

A ceremony celebrating Mr Robb's appointment was described as "auspicious" and included a floor-to-ceiling banner reading: "Appointment ceremony of Senior Economic Adviser Mr Andrew Robb of Landbridge Group".

Landbridge Group paid $506m for the 99-year Darwin Port lease, which began in November 2015. The deal was seen as an attempt to expand trade between Australia and China.

At the time, Mr Robb welcomed the deal, lauding it as a "wonderful outcome for the Northern Territory, and for Australia as a whole."
In his time as trade minister, Mr Robb negotiated four trade agreements, including the Free Trade Agreement between Australia and China.

When the 65-year-old announced his resignation in February, he said he wanted to have one more career before he turned 68. His career move has already been criticised.

Peter Jennings, the executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, told The Australian Mr Robb needed to explain his "cosy" appointment.
"It is appropriate that we get an explanation about when he was approached by the company to take on this role," Mr Jennings said.

"He has to be very careful to make sure he can explain if there is a conflict of interest or why there isn't a conflict of interest in this appointment, based on his obvious involvement in the free trade agreement arrangements when he was the minister for trade."
On Sunday night, shortly after the announcement was made, Mr Robb's Wikipedia page was changed anonymously to read that his appointment continued "a proud tradition in Australian conservative politics of plunging their snouts firmly in the trough for the purposes of personal enrichment at the expense of the Australian voter".

The altered text remained online for several hours.
Under the Statement of Ministerial Standards, ministers are not allowed to lobby the Australian government for 18 months from the date they resign their ministry.

Duterte Imitates Addict While Visiting Crystal Meth Supplier

Duterte imitating a drug addict

Tasmania is far enough away from Rodrigo Duterte to see him as he really is. The problem for Australia is we have a democratically-elected nut-job in the region. After once being in a sexual relationship with a priest, Duterte slaughtered 3,800 people in his first 3 months in office because they may have had a drug problem.
And this could just be the beginning of Duterte's bloodbath. He claims there are 3 million more addicts for him to kill.

Is Duterte a drug user himself? At right we see Duterte imitating an addict while on his China trip. How does Duterte know what addicts look like and why does he need to personally demonstrate this to China while on a diplomatic mission? It's not unusual for people who have been sexually abused by priests to later develop serious drug and alcohol problems. Is it time Duterte turned the gun on himself? China is the world's largest supplier of crystal methamphetamine or 'ice'. China is also a communist dictatorship so the ruling regime must be involved in trafficking ice somewhere along the supply chain. Is Rodrigo Duterte a crystal meth addict?

Tasmanian Liberals Go Wild Over Burning Wood

The Tasmanian Liberals are going gaga over New Forests plan to build a $145 million wood pellet plant in Tasmania. The Lib government thought it was such a great idea they funded another 13 ventures to do similar things with pellets.

Unfortunately for Tas Forestry Minister (and lawyer) Guy Barnett, burning wood pellets produce almost the same emissions as burning coal. That is not surprising - coal is just a geologically buried forest so what is the difference?

Coal Mining Is Subterranean Forestry.
Quoting Wikipedia 'in the geologic past, the Earth had dense forests in low-lying wetland areas. Due to natural processes such as flooding, these forests were buried underneath soil'. That means mining coal is actually 'harvesting' an ancient forest. That is never mentioned by FSC or the Institute of Foresters Australia. In fact, coal mining is so close to forestry that the Institute of Foresters and FSC could call it 'Earth-managed subterranean forestry'.

The big FSC lie 
The main assumption buried under mountains of FSC verbiage is 'the best managed forests were not managed at all'. Without forests that evolved by natural evolutionary forces over a billion years, there would be no forests to be managed by humans or FSC.
FSC needs to declare this fact. They also need baseline data as a starting point to measure their progress at saving the Earths forests. The primordial forests that once covered the Earth were managed by nature not humans, and these are the same forests FSC attempts to certify today. Those ancient forests must have been managed very well without human managers, and if you accept that fact then coal must be a downstream 'chain of custody' product of ancient forests.

The economics.
If wood pellet manufacturing is financially viable then why can't the economic rationalist Liberals allow us to have an auto industry as well? Why can't we manufacture electric cars or thousands of other consumer products right here in Australia? Why do the Liberals want us to buy products only produced by low paid workers mostly from Communist China?

Turnbull Helping Najib Launder Million$

From Sarawak Report
Read about the Swiss proceedings against Falcon Bank and the laundering of stolen funds from 1 Malaysia Development Bank or 1MDB. It leads all the way to ANZ subsidiary AmBank. And guess who is intently looking the other way? Our own tax haven user, ex-merchant banker and Solomon Islands logger Malcolm Turnbull. Earlier this year Razak cracked-down on people depicting him as a clown. That convinced us that he really is a corrupt clown.

Swiss Start Criminal Proceedings Against Falcon Bank

On Wednesday the Swiss financial regulator FINMA announced that it had recommended prosecutions against at least two senior former executive officials of Falcon Bank as part of the actions taken over 1MDB.
Yesterday, the Attorney General’s Office went a considerable step further than that and declared that it is opening criminal proceedings against the entire Abu Dhabi-owned bank!
The implication of the shocking announcement is that the Swiss law enforcers suspect that the entire operation of the private bank was flawed from top to bottom, making it effectively a criminal enterprise.

“The OAG [Office of the Attorney General] suspects deficiencies in the internal organisation of the Falcon Private Bank Ltd. It is believed that due to these deficiencies, the bank was unable to prevent the commission of the offences currently under investigation in the criminal proceedings relating to 1MDB.
Swiss law .. allows the prosecution of a legal entity that is suspected of not taking all the reasonable organisational measures that are required to prevent natural persons from committing offences, in particular money laundering or corruption offences.”

The Attorney General’s Office points out that this is the second Swiss private bank against whom such radical measures have been taken, all relating to money laundering of money at 1MDB.  The first, of course, was BSI closed in May.
Falcon transferred no less than $3.8 billion related to 1MDB’s sovereign wealth transactions, highly unusual for a small private bank. However, the regulators focused on one blatant transaction of 21st March 2013, where Falcon acted as an intermediary for $681 million dollars from 1MDB, passed into Prime Minister Najib Razak’s AmBank account in KL.
In the course of just that one day the money was passed from BSI Bank in Lugano, filtered through three private ‘investment funds’, passed to an account at Falcon Singapore named Tanore Finance Corporation and then on to Najib’s personal account.  FINMA described the Tanore account owner, Eric Tan, as a young Malaysian businessman with known political connections.

Father of Permaculture Bill Mollison Dies At 88

By Matt Dunwell at the Guardian
Bill Mollison, who has died aged 88, was one of the co-creators of permaculture, an agricultural system that works with, rather than against, nature, on the basis that the natural world holds the key to stable and productive systems. Having developed the concept, he then travelled from his native Tasmania for 30 years to embed his approach worldwide. His ideas have spread widely – permaculture is practised in more than 140 countries and by more than 3 million people – even though in the 1970s the idea was considered, in Mollison’s words, “the highest form of sedition”.

Much of what he espoused was based on his great respect for the wisdom of subsistence farmers around the world, who have long used sustainable methods to grow their crops. In agricultural terms, this means planting diverse sets of crops, using perennial species to form productive stable systems, and ensuring the conditions for soils to be regenerated.

Other characteristics that he observed in the Tasmanian wilderness informed permaculture, for instance that the interfaces between different habitats are the most productive and that elements such as plants and animals need to be placed together so they are mutually beneficial – as once when he pointed out: “You don’t have a slug problem, you have a duck deficiency!”

Mollison pointed to further beneficial ecological consequences: “The only safe energy systems are those derived from biological systems. A New Guinea gardener can walk through the gates of his garden taking one unit of energy and hand out 70. A modern farmer who drives a tractor through the gate takes 1,000 units of energy in and gives one back. Who is the most sophisticated agriculturalist?” He held that “although the problems of the world are increasingly complex, the solutions remain embarrassingly simple”. Ecological systems would enable people to meet their own needs, take back control of their lives and reinforce nature rather than deplete it.

Born in the fishing village of Stanley, on the north-west coast of Tasmania, Bill (whose given name was actually Bruce), was the son of Roland Mollison and his wife, Amy (nee Harmon). His parents ran a butter factory, and later built the village bakehouse that Bill took over at the age of 14 when his father died, delivering bread with a horse called Topsy.

In his 20s, he worked as a fisherman, forester and trapper. He understood and celebrated the self-reliance of rural life in the 1930s and 40s, and his love of the natural world led him to join the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in 1954, working in agricultural research for 10 years before leaving to study biogeography, the study of the distribution of plants and animals, at Hobart University.

He was appointed a lecturer at Hobart in 1968, and some years later developed a new discipline, environmental psychology. At this stage he could have settled into a comfortable academic life. However, he felt increasingly trapped by traditional academia and sought instead to marry his studies in psychology with the natural world, seeking an elusive operating system that would inspire people through a systematic design process to build abundant and resilient lifestyles.
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At the age of 50, after his university peers had roundly rejected his plea for a cross-disciplinary holistic approach to their work, he turned his back on formal education. Joined by an environmental design student, David Holmgren, Mollison started to sketch out the origins of what we now know as permaculture. Nobody had put together the architecture for a regenerative design approach that drew on knowledge of traditional cultures while adapting to the opportunities of new technologies and systems thinking. It simply did not exist.

Into this framework they introduced concepts from other ecological pioneers, indigenous cultures and peasant farmers, combining them with a keen observation of the natural world. In 1978 Mollison and Holmgren published Permaculture One, the precursor of Mollison’s more detailed Permaculture – A Designers’ Manual (1988). This was to become the “permaculture bible”, and is still used as a reference text for teachers. It expands the concepts at the heart of agroecology, agroforestry, carbon farming, regenerative agriculture, sustainable architecture and local money systems, providing the intellectual framework that supports the continuing evolution of his ideas.

Thereafter Mollison wanted to spread his ideas, and decided to teach an informal two-week course in permaculture, operating from what he dubbed “The People’s Republic of Strickland Avenue”, the street in Hobart where he and Holmgren lived. He devised a curriculum and shared it with anyone who might turn up – a move so audacious that it was laughable. As his students grew in confidence they taught similar 72-hour courses, and after 10 years of continuous touring and teaching, Mollison – with the help of his network of loosely affiliated teachers – had spread his ideas across five continents. In 1981 he received the Right Livelihood award.
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Although his original principles remain in place, the courses have evolved to expand beyond agriculture and into areas such as design, engineering, construction and architecture, all based on an ecological approach, and his ideas have been taken up by the international Transition Town movement.

Mollison had a brilliant mind. He observed, he catalogued, and his systematic approach helped him to weave seemingly disparate ideas into the most detailed tapestry. In this sense he was a true visionary. He was also challenging, angry, driven by a deep sense of injustice, and merciless if crossed. He used to say: “First feel fear, then get angry. Then go with your life into the fight.”

He is survived by his fifth wife, Lisa, four daughters and two sons.

• Bill (Bruce Charles) Mollison, ecologist, born 4 May 1928; died 24 September 2016