•    Science is already underfunded in Australia.

We must not undermine any chance to enthuse Primary and Secondary students with the new scientific experiences at Discovery.

Having worked in Secondary Education for 30 years, I know full well how hard it is to attract passionate, effective science teachers to the service.

Keeping them is even harder.

•    Students while at the Centre are obviously excited and engaged while they are there.  

•    As entry costs rise, the Centre provides Science Kits to send out to rural schools whose travelling times and costs are problematic.

Many students in remote schools would be on the road for 7 or 8 hours or more to get to and from Melbourne, compared to half that time for a Bendigo visit.  

•    After visiting Discovery, the extra interactions between students, teachers, and parents generate even more learning and enthusiasm for Science.

•    Discovery also adds a Tourist attraction to Bendigo.

•    Finally, and importantly, if this Science outlet closes, we will lose valuable expertise from the whole region.

Not only that, it will further reduce the impact on young minds, which can lead to Science careers later.

When will they leave our native forests alone to get on with the job of being some of the world's best carbon sinks and oxygen producers?  

Now Tony Abbott and Barnaby Joyce want to burn native forests for power generation and call it 'renewable energy'.  Who are they kidding?  

It is quite clear that the Renewable Energy Targets should not include native forests burnt for electricity production because it makes no sense at all to destroy mature and functioning and free carbon sinks i.e. our native forests, for private industry credits (read 'profits).  

This is not renewable energy development.  I leave you to devise a name for it.

For people obsessed with austerity the government, strangely, does not want to use free sources of power - sun and wind.  But then Messrs Hockey and Abbott have such hypersensitive aesthetic vision they are upset by the sight of a wind turbine.  

Apparently a bulldozed and scorched logging coup is a pleasant sight.

The industry has assured us that they will only use 'native forest waste' to create thousands of new jobs in this small new venture if the RET legislation gets through unamended.  

Previously 'forest waste' has in reality been whole logs shipped from Portland, or whole logs wood chipped to be shipped from Eden - a facility that was designed for whole logs, not sticks and sawdust.

 I don't trust their definitions.  Industrial scale forestry does not create jobs; jobs in that industry have been dwindling for years.  

The real jobs are in the labour intensive, genuinely renewable energy industry.  

We have abundant plantations in Australia.  

We have smart and innovative people working with wood.  

We should not squander our rich native forest resource on either co-generation or bolstering the bank balances of energy producers too lazy and greedy to do the hard yards and develop a genuinely renewable industry.

Watch the Senate this week to see whether the Greens and the ALP can defeat this hairbrained scheme, and save our native forests for another generation.  

Or phone the PM direct to ask him to remove native forests from the RET.