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30 June 2006

No place for New Age school syllabus

NSW Education Minister Carmel Tebbutt has slammed other states for designing their curriculums using an "outcomes-based" approach, saying school students should be protected from syllabuses adopting the latest educational fads. Ms Tebbutt warned that if those curriculums infused the new national syllabus and Australian Certificate of Education being promoted by the Howard Government, there was a risk NSW students could be penalised. "What's happened in some other states is that they've elevated one (outcomes) at the expense of another (content) and my view is you need both," she told The Australian.

The NSW school curriculum differs from other states in prescribing the content of what students should be taught as well as describing the outcomes of what students should be able to do, which Ms Tebbutt said shielded NSW students from the educational trends adopted in some other states, such as postmodern interpretation of literature. "I certainly don't subscribe to the view that there are no pieces of work that aren't more superior than other pieces of work," she said. "There are great pieces of literature, and they should be studied as such." In some states, literary works such as those by Shakespeare are treated as having equal merit with websites, film posters and CD covers.

Ms Tebbutt, who belongs to the Left faction of the ALP, expressed concern that NSW students would be forced into studying a narrower curriculum if the new national syllabus were restricted to the common elements from among the other states. "Any attempt to examine students right across Australia would end up ... pooling the common elements from each state and territory, and we'd only get a part of what we teach being tested," she said yesterday. "The danger is that your teaching program gets skewed to what's being tested, and that ... would narrow our curriculum."

The NSW school curriculum is widely regarded by educational experts as the benchmark, with the West Australian Government saying it would look to the NSW system in redesigning its controversial courses for Years 11 and 12. The Australian Certificate of Education and a national curriculum are expected to be discussed at the national education ministers' council next month.

Ms Tebbutt gave short shrift to many of the current educational trends that carry weight in other states. For instance, she questioned the ability of senior students to grasp complex philosophies, such as Marxism, and apply them to English texts. "I don't subscribe to the view that there are no universal truths ... we might as well all give up now if that's the case," she said. "I don't support that view because it then becomes completely unclear what students are supposed to be learning."

Ms Tebbutt said ensuring a content-rich syllabus was taught consistently throughout the state had enabled NSW to avoid its curriculum becoming dominated by one approach. "We've had a strong approach and we don't want fads in our system," she said. "We stick to an approach that's worked." While some teachers asked senior English students to analyse Shakespeare plays from a Marxist and feminist point of view, Ms Tebbutt questioned the capacity of students to interpret a work at that level. "You've got to remember it's Year 12 students," she said. "And sometimes we're expecting them to have a level of understanding about other philosophies that at that age they're not able to make."

Source



Wind farm claims 'hot air'

Wind farms don't live up to the hype that they're an environmental saviour, federal agriculture minister Peter McGauran says. Mr McGauran's first voiced his concerns in a speech to dairy farmers earlier this week, contrasting with federal Environment Minister Ian Campbell's position in support of wind energy. "Wind farms don't live up to the hype that they're the environmental saviour and a serious alternate energy source," Mr McGauran told ABC radio today.

However, Renewable Energy Generators of Australia chief Susan Jeans said Mr McGauran's comments were out of line. "I suspect it's best that we let the environment minister comment on matters relating to renewable energy," Ms Jeans told ABC radio.

Mr McGauran said the giant propellers devalued land. "The deleterious affect they can have on their neighbours is so serious it means that they should not be allowed to get away with the exaggerated claim," he said. "Their claims are fraudulent in regard to the environmental and energy terms." " ... these wind farms are not producing any electricity of any measurable amount and because they are having such an affect on rural communities they should only be permitted where the community is ... accepting of them."

Source



One Muslim thug finally caught

A vicious stabbing in the hours after the Cronulla riot was the most violent of the revenge attacks that swept through Sydney, police say. A 21-year-old Chester Hill man yesterday became the first person charged over a brutal attack outside the Woolooware Golf Club, in Sydney's south, on December 11, last year. He was one of four men who allegedly set upon a man, known only as "Dan", knocking him to the ground and kicking him about the face and body. The self-employed mechanic also was stabbed twice in the left thigh and three times in the back, the blade narrowly missing his spine. Police allege the men only stopped the attack when the knife handle snapped leaving the blade embedded in the 26-year-old's back.

Superintendent Arthur Katsogiannis, from Strike Force Enoggera, established in December 2005 following the Cronulla riot and retaliatory attacks, today said police had closed in on the perpetrators. "This is the most serious of all the reprisal attacks," he told reporters outside Bankstown Police Station. "(The arrest) was pleasing not only for us and investigators, but also the victim to see some type of end result."

Supt Katsogiannis said a beige car, tracked to a house in Chester Hill, was a key factor in the arrest. "That particular car was used in connection with the offence by the attacker and sometime after the offence was committed the number plate on the car was changed," he said. Supt Katsogiannis refused to say if the Chester Hill man was responsible for the stabbing. "There were at least four attackers," he said. The Chester Hill man, charged with maliciously inflicting grievous bodily harm with intent and affray, was refused bail to appear in Bankstown Local Court later today.

Source



This is crazy: Expensive paint thrown away

Lots of householders would be glad to have it. This firm NEEDS to be taken over



Wattyl has taken the concept of the end of year clearance to a new level. With only two days left in the financial year, the paint maker has left some staff at its main Blacktown warehouse stunned after it earmarked an estimated 100,000 tins of paint for the incinerator. "We're told it has to be dumped," one long-serving Wattyl worker told the Herald. He said the paint was valued at $3.2 million. "We can't work out the logic. Some of this paint, the value of it is just unbelievable," he said. The worker, who has been at Wattyl for more than 10 years, said it was by far the biggest consignment of paint dumped in his time there.

Wattyl, which is subject to a $321 million takeover bid from South African paint group Barloworld, said there was nothing untoward in the massive stock clearance. "There's nothing dramatic in it," said Wattyl managing director John Nolan. It was merely part of the company's ongoing program to scale back stock and its paint range. "That's just part of our SKU [stock keeping unit] reduction." Dr Nolan declined to say how much paint was destined for the incinerator or the value of it, despite playing down the $3.2 million figure provided by Wattyl staff. Dr Nolan would only say the massive write-off was included in a $3.7 million inventory write-down the company reported in February. "It's just a normal process," Dr Nolan said. However, the latest clearance adds weight to concerns that trading conditions across the paint industry have worsened in recent months due to the weak housing industry.

It is five months since the company said its "stock units and stock reduction" program aimed at cutting $1.4 million a year in costs was "substantially progressed". Dr Nolan admitted trading conditions had worsened since the start of 2006. "There's no question that the market has come off a bit," he said. Wattyl's end of financial year clearance raises questions about the forecasts provided by the company when it fended off the now defunct $275 million takeover bid from Allco Equity Partners. Wattyl had predicted it would attain $22 million in annual cost savings by the end of this fiscal year and double its pre-tax profits by the end of 2006-07. It predicted a turnaround in trading conditions from next month.

Source



29 June 2006

Power-mad union leader



Australia's top union official is under fire for saying it would be good if unions ran the country as they had done in the past. On the eve of a union rally that will shut down Melbourne today, ACTU secretary Greg Combet admitted making the remark to a group of South Australian unionists. "I recall we used to run the country and it would not be a bad thing if we did again," he said.

Prime Minister John Howard said the union chief had revealed the union movement's true motives. "It's not about the welfare of unionists, it's not about getting the unemployed back into work, it's not about boosting their real wages. It's about union power," he said. Mr Howard said the unions had bullied Labor into promising to axe Australian Workplace Agreements.

Mr Combet defended the comment, saying it was taken out of context. "The comments I made were a joke and a light-hearted aside to a large group of people," he said. He accused the Government of dredging up old claims about union power to justify its IR changes. But the lapse could not have come at a worse time for the unions, with disruptive rallies across the nation today over industrial relations changes. Trades Hall has vowed to gridlock Melbourne, with 100,000 unionists in the streets....

More here



PM predicts power deals

China's rapacious appetite for energy has prompted Prime Minister John Howard to hold out the prospect of record breaking new resource deals with the world's emerging super power. The Prime Minister arrived in the Chinese industrial port city Shenzhen last night for a lightning business visit to capitalise on what he called our "super-duper" export relationship with the Asian giant. Mr Howard will today oversee the arrival of a shipment of liquefied natural gas from Australia's northwest shelf. The shipment is part of a historic $25 billion deal for Australia to supply LNG to China -- our biggest export contract.

Mr Howard will also meet Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao. The two leaders will focus on economic relations and regional security, especially concerns over North Korea.

Mr Howard, who will discuss progress on Australia's free trade agreement with China, hailed the 25-year LNG deal as proof that Australian export efforts were succeeding. But Mr Howard said "what we should remember is that whether we sign a free trade agreement with China or not, we have one super-duper economic relationship with this country". "Quadrupling of exports over a period of 10 years is a pretty remarkable achievement and that's been done without a free trade agreement," he said.

Today's LNG delivery is the first to Shenzhen and has only been made possible by construction of a special terminal big enough to handle such a large scale shipment. "This particular shipment is the largest single trade agreement that Australia has ever signed," the Prime Minister said. "It can, in my view, be the beginning of a further stage of expansion."

But potential stumbling blocks to future deals include China's reluctance to pay prevailing prices for LNG. Indeed, the contract between China and the northwest shelf venture was struck at fixed prices four years ago that have since been dramatically overtaken. But Mr Howard said the Federal Government played no role in negotiating the prices.

Source



Walk-up start for Batam meeting



Prime Minister John Howard and the Indonesian President have met on the Indonesian island of Batam, but the dress code for the first leaders' meeting was a little unorthodox. Mr Howard sported shorts and a polo shirt and President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono looked like he was heading to a golf course - the two leaders were on their morning walks.

Mr Howard headed out on his walk in the vicinity of the Nongsa Point marina, where the President is staying and where this afternoon's meeting will take place. Mr Howard heard that Dr Yudhoyono was out and about while he was walking and doubled back to see him. The two men greeted each other and briefly talked about the Island of Batam's tourism prospects and Australian investment.

Both Indonesia and Australia have ruled out any new security pact being signed at the meeting, saying it was never intended to be completed by today. Mr Howard is also hoping for changes to Australia's asylum laws to be discussed. The Prime Minister has also called for the strict monitoring of radical Islamic cleric Abu Bakar Bashir.

Source



Now it's NSW Hospitals under fire

Too many patients are waiting too long to receive treatment in New South Wales public hospital emergency departments, the State Opposition said today. Opposition health spokeswoman Jillian Skinner today said Health Department statistics for April showed 1943, or 18 per cent, of patients with an imminent life-threatening medical condition were not seen within the recommended 10 minutes. An imminent life-threatening condition - such as a heart attack - requires treatment to commence within 10 minutes of the incident occurring.

Ms Skinner said 35 per cent, or 15,701, of patients with a potentially life-threatening condition were not seen within half an hour. These conditions include heavy bleeding, a major fracture, dehydration, and severe illness. Patients must receive treatment within 30 minutes of their accident or illness being diagnosed. Ms Skinner said 31 per cent, or 17,986 patients were not seen within the recommended hour.

Ms Skinner said the Government needed to recruit more nurses so extra hospital beds could be opened. "No matter how creative the spin doctors, the plight of very sick and badly injured patients is at stake, and Premier (Morris) Iemma and his health minister (John Hatzistergos) stand condemned for denying the problem," she said in a statement.

Source



28 June 2006

Bizarre medical appointment

The new chief of the Health Quality and Complaints Commission was a senior Queensland Health boss whose failure to resolve formal complaints over unsafe hours at Bundaberg Hospital led to surgeons quitting and Jayant Patel being hired. Dr John Youngman, a deputy director-general of Queensland Health during the discredited leadership of former Health Minister Wendy Edmond, will lead the new commission and oversee complaints from consumers, hospital staff and whistleblowers. He will work two days a week for $100,000 a year to head a board of five assistant commissioners including a former Beattie Government director-general Marg O'Donnell, whose husband Justice Martin Moynihan shut down the health inquiry for "ostensible bias".

Senior clinicians told The Courier-Mail yesterday the elevation of Dr Youngman was extraordinary given his previous No. 2 role in Queensland Health, which was found to have had a "culture of concealment" in inquiries by Tony Morris, QC, and Geoff Davies, QC. The head of the Patients' Support Group, Beryl Crosby, also slammed the appointment and said the Bundaberg Hospital disaster would not have happened if Dr Youngman had been more responsive to the pleas from surgeons for help. "It is bizarre that they would put someone in as head of the complaints unit who did not listen to complaints in the first place. This will not inspire confidence," Ms Crosby said.

In unchallenged evidence at the inquiry it was revealed that pleas by Bundaberg Hospital's then director of surgery, Dr Charles Nankivell, for urgent help were not dealt with by Dr Youngman in his role at the time as general manager (health services). Dr Nankivell had been pleading in writing for top-level intervention because he had been working dangerously long hours and feared his chronic fatigue would harm patients and himself. He had written to the heads of the hospital and the heads of Queensland Health to raise the concerns before patients were unnecessarily maimed or killed.

Dr Youngman's written response, described in the Commission of Inquiry report as "trite", did not address the safety concerns. Dr Nankivell, who quit in disgust, told the inquiry that Dr Youngman's response was the straw "that broke the camel's back". Dr Nankivell was replaced by Dr Sam Baker, who also quit in disgust, resulting in the hiring of the incompetent Jayant Patel who had been banned from performing surgery in the US. .

Dr Youngman told The Courier-Mail yesterday he had no recollection of the complaints by Dr Nankivell and Dr Baker, nor was he aware of their unfavourable evidence. He said the Davies inquiry had made no findings adverse to him and that his track record in safety and quality underlined his commitment to better health care. Dr Youngman said he had worked hard with limited resources and that as a top administrator he had not personally been part of a "culture of concealment". "From my point of view I undertook a very transparent role. I'm sure there are many people who support me and some who would not support me," he said. Dr Youngman has been working since last year as a consultant to Health Minister Stephen Robertson.

Source



Drinking sewage unpopular

So it's an unlikely alternative to the dams that Greenies hate

The first Australian mayor to be dumped from office for backing recycled drinking water has warned Toowoomba Mayor Di Thorley she risks the same fate. Ten years ago Caboolture Shire residents ditched their mayor, John White, after he had served for 16 years on the council. He blamed his demise on a plan to recycle purified sewage from the local wastewater treatment plant. "I didn't see it as an election issue but very emotive terms were used and the topic was used to divide the public," he said. "One day I was the rooster, the next I was a feather duster."

Cr Thorley, who plans to contest the 2008 council election, is backing a similar plan for drought-stricken Toowoomba, where residents are facing a July 29 referendum on water recycling. Mr White warned she risked a similar fate and he called for a co-ordinated approach from the State Government instead of allowing individual councils to cop the flak. "If (her) opposition chooses to use this as an issue then she will become a feather duster as well," he said.

He admitted that if he had been able to foresee the deep divisions the debate caused he would have advocated recycling for uses other than drinking. Cr Thorley said that although she did not underestimate how concerned some residents were about the issue she would not back down. "I've acknowledged that people take this seriously but I have not seen that as a reason to make me lose courage," she said. "I think 1997 in Caboolture was a very different time. "They weren't faced with running out of water, no one thought Wivenhoe Dam could run dry and you didn't have climate change in the media day after day."

Mr White said he was pleased the debate had led Caboolture to spend millions of dollars to improve its water treatment facilities and to embrace recycling of water for parks, gardens and sporting fields. "It defies logic to treat millions of litres of water and then dump it into the ocean," he said. In 1999 Caboolture upgraded its sewage treatment works, treating the effluent to A-class standard rather than building an outfall pipeline to Moreton Bay. The recycled effluent is now used for new housing and industrial developments and major water users including school grounds, the town's showgrounds and sporting fields, parks and gardens, roadworks and building sites.

Source



Another RAAF plane faces delays

Have we EVER had a defence buy that was delivered on time and at the budgeted cost?



Project Wedgetail, the RAAF's $3.5 billion long-range surveillance aircraft, faces delays of at least 18 months after suffering testing problems with radar and sensor computer systems. The latest setback in one of the RAAF's most high-profile purchases came as a surprise to the Defence Department, which has touted Wedgetail as one of its best-managed projects. The new airborne early warning and control (AEW&C) planes, the first of which is due to enter service late next year, are claimed to provide state-of-the art air and maritime surveillance for the defence force over Australia's northern approaches.

The 2004 delivery schedule called for the first two aircraft to be fitted out in the US city of Seattle and the remaining four to be modified at RAAF Amberley, outside Ipswich in Queenlsand. The final plane was due to be handed over in early 2008.

Boeing, the prime contractor for the project, first hinted at problems with the highly complex software integration work earlier this year. The first of the six modified Boeing 737-700 aircraft has been undergoing tests in Seattle, and had been scheduled to be delivered to the RAAF by the end of the year. Each of the 737s contains 863 electronic boxes, 300km of extra wiring and four million lines of software code.

After initially deciding to buy four aircraft in 1999, the Howard Government increased the order to six in 2004, with the fleet to be based at Williamstown in NSW. The extra planes enhance the Government's options for participation in future military operations with the US and other allies, which was not possible with a four-aircraft fleet. The Wedgetail project has resulted in an estimated $400million worth of Australian industry involvement, including the investment by Boeing at Amberley.

Source



Australia helping the Chinese with cricket

Thanks largely to India, cricket is already by far the world's most widely-followed bat-and-ball game. If the Chinese take it up, its following will be immense



The first recorded game of cricket in China was played in 1858 in Shanghai. Nearly 150 years since those seeds were planted, a tiny sapling is only now beginning to sprout. If, however, the Chinese Cricket Association's (CCA) development plans are even half successful, it is only a matter of decades before the cricket world could be looking at the new giants of the game. The CCA, which formed in 2004, has spent the past year developing a core base of players, umpires and coaches, with help from the best cricket establishment in the world, Cricket Australia.

Ross Turner, Cricket Australia's general manager for global development, has had a close-up view of how the game is starting to take root in the world's most populous nation. "The greatest pleasure of my life in a professional context was visiting China for the first time and working with a group of dedicated officials in breaking incredibly new ground," said Turner at a recent Asian Cricket Council seminar on the future of Asian cricket. "The baby in some ways has not been born yet. But there is an opportunity in a global sense that we need to grasp. The CCA have drafted a long-term strategy and I recommend (the world) to look at this project, which will help bring a new face to cricket that we cannot fully comprehend at the moment."

The most famous cricketing event in China over the past few years has been the Beijing Cricket Sixes, involving mostly expatriate teams. CCA director Calvin Leong said that since September, China had produced 68 qualified coaches and umpires while the association had introduced the game to 19 primary schools, 20 secondary schools and 25 universities. "When the CCA was established in 2004, cricket was an expatriate game. Only a handful of Chinese had ever put their hands on a cricket ball," said Leong. "In the past, cricket was zero, nil and nothing in China. At the moment it is a young baby, or a tiny seed."

Leong said the CCA is choosing only the top schools and universities in which to introduce the game and are currently focusing their efforts on Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Liaoning. "Beijing and Shanghai are the two biggest cities in China and are more readily acceptable of new ideas and cultures. If we are successful here, it can influence other cities. "Guangzhou also has a strong economy while we chose Liaoning because many of China's top athletes come from this area."

The CCA said it is trying to have cricket included as a medal sport at the 2010 Asian Games in Guangzhou. "We are trying to convince the organisers to include cricket," said CCA vice chairman Cui Zhiqiang. "That's why development in Guangzhou area is important. If we can get youngsters there to play, it will help in obtaining Asian Games status." Leong added that the CCA is even trying to convince a baseball academy in Shandong to convert to a cricketing institution. "It doesn't sound that surprising when you consider that baseball does not have a good future in the Olympics and it has been dropped from the 2012 London Games," said Leong. "A Shandong cricket school stands a good chance and that is one of our targets in 2007." Leong said the CCA is hoping that by the end of 2007 China would have 30,000 players, 600 coaches and 600 umpires. Their target is for 150,000 players by 2020.

Source



27 June 2006

Australia's "Noble savages"

In their hatred of their own society, a persistent Leftist theme has been the myth of the "Noble savage" (Rousseau's term). Reality would have made "warlike" or "murderous" a better adjective than "noble" for most primitive people but Leftists are driven by their fantasies, not by reality.

Australia has a bunch of just the sort of folk Leftists idealize -- stone-age black people rudely wrenched into the wider world by the arrival of the British in 1788. And modern Australia has plenty of fantasy-driven Leftists too. So the fantasists concerned (notable among them being the late "Nugget" Coombes) managed some decades ago to reverse Australia's long-standing policy of assimilating the aborigines concerned into white society. The do-gooders managed to send about half of the blacks off to isolated and undeveloped places near their ancestral homelands where they could live in communal splendour according to their own ways and value systems. They were also of course given unconditional welfare so were not obliged to work. Big god Gubmint would look after them and supply all their needs. Nugget and all the other do-gooders went to bed every night after that basking in the warm glow of what a wonderfully kind and enlightened thing they had done.

But what did they expect the blacks to do? There was virtually nothing they could do in their isolated camps. They could certainly not get jobs there and with no need to hunt or plant they could not even gain the self-respect of supporting themselves and their families by their own efforts.

So they drank -- and any substance that could be abused they abused. They sank into a life not too different from some conceptions of hell. When they were not too stoned out of their brains for it, fistfights became a daily occurrence among them, black women were savagely beaten as a matter of routine and sexual abuse of children became so rife that you now have black toddlers with sexually transmitted diseases.

All that has now at long last gained the attention of the Australian media and there have been numerous articles about it in all the papers. And none of it was news to me or to the lady in my life. I grew up with a black's camp just down the other end of the street and the lady in my life has spent years working in isolated Aboriginal communities as a child-health nurse and general medical carer. On Sunday, however, I did put up three articles from the papers about the situation in the aboriginal communities and in response to that I received an interesting email which I reproduce below.

"I'm following your posts concerning Aboriginal sexual abuse with interest. We lived and worked in a number of Aboriginal communities for years. As an RN working in remote clinics I found it endlessly frustrating to be surrounded by evidence of abuse yet unable to do any more than treat the effects. There was enormous pressure to not "make waves" or become involved in any way and it was made very plain that any RN who did so would be promptly removed from the community.

Evidence of STDs (or any other evidence of abuse) in young children was passed on to the Sexual Health Team (in the NT) and they were supposed to deal with it. To the best of my knowledge this information was never passed on the the police for follow-up action. I was never asked for further information but instead given repeated warnings not to become involved.

There's no discernible effort to bring the perpetrators of sexual abuse to justice, not at any level. The communities --through fear or complicity--maintain a wall of silence, the police have little or no information to enable them to act (even if they were prepared to, which I strongly doubt) and the Health Department had no effective program in place to identify at-risk kids and remove them from the community.

Interestingly, the lower the standard of accommodation for visiting health teams, the less likely we were to see them. The problem isn't fixable.

Sadly, I have to agree with the lady. I don't think the problem is fixable either. And I think most people who know the situation well would be inclined to agree. Paternalism would help alleviate the situation but the outraged screams of the Left at any such idea will probably make the political cost too high for the Australian government to do much in that direction. The "equality" mythology of the Left has effectively consigned the Aborigines to hell and that is where they will stay.

The latest news report on the situation is below



Abuse a 'national disgrace'

Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough says he wants just one outcome from today's summit on violence in indigenous communities - to put a stop to the abuse of women and children. Three years after a similar summit, Mr Brough will today chair a meeting with the states, which has been called in the wake of claims of child abuse and violence in isolated indigenous communities.

Mr Brough said the Federal Government was prepared to put up substantial resources provided the states and territories came on board. "I am just asking everyone to come with one approach in mind and that is how we are going to stop the abuse of children. it is not too much to ask," he said ABC radio. "It's got to be our number one priority as human beings to try and stop abuse of children and women. And if we can't do that, then we have got to really have a close look at why the heck we are governing. "We feel this is a national disgrace. It requires national attention. We will put substantial resources on the table as long as the states and territories acknowledge there is a problem and that they work with us to solve it."

The Federal Government is reportedly planning to contribute up to $100 million to pay for additional police stations in remote communities and additional drug and alcohol services. States and territories will have to find the extra police and pay their salaries. At today's summit, the Federal Government will discuss how to deal with escalating violence in indigenous communities, three years after being told of child abuse and domestic violence by indigenous women.

The states and territories have their own priorities. The Northern Territory wants the special Opal fuel made available across central Australia in a move to end petrol sniffing. Queensland police minister Judy Spence said housing was a priority, with some cases of up to 30 people sharing a three bedroom home. "While they are living in those sorts of situations you are going to get the problem of domestic violence and sexual assault and alcohol abuse," she told ABC radio. "It is very difficult for people to live in such close confines and not get that kind of behaviour."

Aboriginal leader Pat Dodson suggested what was needed was a commission including indigenous and business leaders to oversee community development. "Unless you have got an integrated system that deals with the leadership of the Aboriginal people, that are part of the solution making, I am afraid we are going to repeat mistakes that are already too clearly known and identified by various commissions and reports," he told ABC radio. "The goodwill and good intentions of another minister will disappear when he disappears from the scene."

South Australian Aboriginal affairs minister Jay Weatherill said Aboriginal people had asked him to defend Aboriginal culture. "We would be interested to see what minister Brough puts up but we won't be participating in anything that has a racist effect," he said. "We haven't got a proposition in front of us. Certainly though we believe that people accused of criminal offences and who essentially make up interpretations of Aboriginal law as some way to escape culpability, we are not interested in that. "We do know it exists. That is disturbing to Aboriginal people as it is to the broader community."

Source



Another comment on what appears to be a hopeless situation

My intention was to berate Lord Mayor Campbell Newman for folding on his promise to alleviate the daily traffic chaos that strangles the Toowong shopping precinct.... Then I heard the story of the severed head and my self-interest suddenly rang hollow. The severed head was that of a female petrol sniffer living on an Aboriginal community in South Australia. As revealed on the ABC's Lateline program, the 30-year-old had been living alone on the town's outskirts. She had been savaged by wild dogs, one of which is said to have dragged her head through the township.

In Adelaide, the restaurants would have hummed with activity, in the Barossa Valley the tourists would have been crowding into the vineyards' cellars, sniffing and tasting and passing over their credit cards. In the remote community of Fregon a dog was dragging a human head down the street. If a single image was needed to establish for all time that state and federal governments have absolutely failed to deal with Aboriginal health and welfare, then surely this was it. Mountains of money have been spent, and frequently misspent, in addressing the issues and tonnes of paper consumed by neatly worded press releases announcing the latest government initiative.

Nothing works. Alcohol, illiteracy, violence, unemployment and its attendant hand-out dependence ravage the communities and now an even more sinister element is emerging with claims by federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough that Aboriginal children are being systematically preyed upon by pedophiles because their vulnerability makes them easy targets. Newly released West Australian government figures show that since 2001, 708 children under the age of 14 were reported as infected with sexually transmitted diseases. Eighty per cent of these were Aboriginal. Of these, 19 were under the age of four.

A report on Aboriginal child abuse in NSW was handed to that state government three months ago but has yet to be made public. Media reports claim that it found that the rate of sexual assault among Aboriginal children was four times that of the general community. In Queensland last week, three men and two boys were charged with sexually abusing a 10-year-old girl in a Cape York community. The evidence of the statistics is irrefutable. There's no point in bothering to contest the fact that Aboriginal children are at a high risk of being sexually abused. The question is whether anybody really cares or do we just continue to do what we usually do and look the other way.

If you want to trigger an argument, then lob the hand grenade of Aboriginal care into the middle of the dinner table and duck. Everyone has a view and no one has a solution. I grew up in this city. When I was a teenager, South Brisbane was where Aborigines went to drink. It was a no-go zone for whites. I'd see them lying in the parks where South Bank now stands, accepted as part of the scenery, as I rode the tram home to Holland Park. They'd be arrested, spend the night in the watchhouse, and be out the next day. As kids we heard stories of Aborigines being given new homes which they quickly destroyed. They were seen by my white middle-class peers as being incapable of helping themselves.

The hundreds of millions of dollars which have been spent over the years on them, and the continuing inability of their own leaders to provide any accountability for large amounts of this money, has hardened public opinion against them. When a media outlet such as Lateline shines a light on this underside of Australian life, we shake our heads and say how awful it is. Politicians announce they will hold an inquiry and then gradually our concern and distress ebbs and the issue again submerges.

I remember an ABC Four Corners program which went to air a long, long time ago in the days of black and white television. It dealt vividly with the appalling conditions on Aboriginal communities. Australians were not accustomed to being confronted with such disturbing images and the program provoked widespread concern. Little has changed in the 40 or more years that have passed since the program went to air...

Source



Black leader loses sexual assault appeal



Prominent Perth Aboriginal elder Robert Bropho has lost a bid to appeal against his conviction for indecently assaulting a 13-year-old girl at the notorious Swan Valley Nyoongah camp. Bropho, 75, was convicted last December of two counts of indecent assault, following the May 2003 incident. The teenager, who cannot be named, had entered an office area at the Nyoongah community camp, in northeast suburban Lockridge, with a female friend, who was delivering a sum of money to Bropho. When the girl went to get a drink at a water fountain, Bropho came up behind her, reached around and touched her left breast with one hand and with the other, rubbed her genital area through her clothes. Bropho was running the camp at the time.

Bropho applied to appeal the verdicts, claiming trial judge Henry Wisbey had erred in law by failing to adequately identify and consider all relevant legal principles applicable to the case, and failing to give adequate reasons for his decision. He claimed Justice Wisbey's guilty verdicts were "unsafe and unsatisfactory" and had occasioned a miscarriage of justice. But three Supreme Court of Appeal judges today handed down their unanimous rejection of Mr Bropho's application to appeal. "In my opinion, none of the proposed grounds of appeal have any merit," Justice Christopher Pullin said in the court's written judgement. "I would therefore dismiss the application for an extension of time in which to appeal against sentence, the application for leave to appeal against sentence, and the application for leave to appeal against conviction." Mr Bropho was eligible for parole next month.

The Nyoongah camp came under attack during the 2000 Gordon inquiry into abuse in Western Australia Aboriginal communities, which found child sex abuse was rife. The camp was closed in June 2003, with then Premier Geoff Gallop saying he was not prepared to let another young person die there.

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Business helps preserve the natural environment



Recruitment king Geoff Morgan is one of growing number of millionaires who are helping to bankroll a fund that's at the forefront of an environmental putsch. But unlike past environmental battles where activists take on bulldozers and police, the Australian Bush Heritage Fund relies on suits and big business to quietly buy up large tracts of land and establish environmental reserves.

Donors such as Morgan, the managing director of Talent2 and co-founder of the recruitment company Morgan & Banks, have helped Bush Heritage become the most active and largest land conservancy group in Australia. It now owns 24 reserves tallying almost 700,000ha and worth $14million across Australia. Collectively, these acquisitions protect more than 158 species of threatened plants and animals and more than 63 threatened vegetation communities. Its latest acquisition is a 63,000ha reserve called Boolcoomatta, five hours from Adelaide and adjacent to the newly formed Bimbowrie National Park.

Bush Heritage chief executive Doug Humann won't divulge the names of his donors but the list includes some leading names in Australian business. Among the influential cohort are Carol Schwartz, a director of Highpoint Property Group and president of the Melbourne International Arts Festival board; Simon Mordant, joint chief executive of Caliburn Partnership; Graham Turner, founder and managing director of Flight Centre; Louise Sylvan, chief executive of the Australian Consumers' Association and deputy chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission; and Helen Lynch, deputy chairwoman of Pacific Brands, former chairwoman of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and a non-executive director of Southcorp and Westpac Bank.

Corporations that support Bush Heritage through payroll donations are Allens Arthur Robinson, BlueScope Steel, Goldman Sachs JBWere, Integral Energy, Perpetual Trustees, UBS and Westpac. Donations of $2 or more are tax-deductible, property gifts valued at more than $5000 are deductible. Humann says the fund relies on "a lot of people who give us smallish sums of money or regular sums". "We've got a few people, foundations and trusts who give us quite substantial one-off sums and there are others who have pledged over a number of years," he says. "Their pledge might be for hundreds of thousands of dollars a year."

Bush Heritage is also finalising a gift of $1million a year over the next three years. "That's the largest donation I've been associated with." Humann says. "It is the result of an individual who has established a private fund."

Morgan says his financial contribution to Bush Heritage has been substantial but adds "giving is not just a financial thing. I'd like to think that with Bush Heritage I've come up with ideas, as I know other people have, to help them be more successful." Morgan, together with business partner Andrew Banks, formed recruitment powerhouse Morgan & Banks in 1985 and pushed sales growth to more than $700 million a year. It became Australia's most successful recruitment firm before being sold, bought back, floated and then sold again, with the pair pocketing an estimated $1 billion.

Morgan says his five-year involvement with Bush Heritage is not about fertilising his own business opportunities but "helping this organisation become as good as they can be". "People give money and they think that's great," he says. "They wash their hands of it and then move on and, you know, start standing under the shower for 15 minutes. It is about who you want to be as a person. It is not how other people measure you. It is how you measure yourself when you look in the mirror every day. I'm not worried about what other people think of me, I'm worried about what I think of me."

Morgan says he is not like his former neighbour, HIH boss Ray Williams, who "used all of the public company money to make himself look good. For Andrew (Banks) and I, every dollar we give is our own money, not anybody else's. "I think the Australian approach is about getting on and doing it. It is not a personal marketing campaign. That's making you out to be bigger than the cause. I don't like that sort of philosophy. "I think you need to have a mentality where you have a gift bank in your mind. And I like to make sure that I'm in credit all the time on the giving side."

Morgan says he agrees with Bush Heritage's pragmatic approach. "The more private enterprise leads the way rather than just relying on government departments, the better off we'd be, particularly in environmental terms. "It's a negative and small view that we have to worry about the economy. If the environment is stuffed we won't worry about the economy. I'm scared about the lack of action in this country. We lead the world in many areas, why don't we lead the world in the environment? More people need to get angry about it."

Morgan's entree into Bush Heritage came via Schwartz who donates both time and money. "Our support is financial and I guess my support is in the context of introducing Doug Humann to people like myself who have an awareness of what the issues are," Morgan says. "I wouldn't say that it (her financial commitment) is major in the context of the sorts of donations that Bush Heritage receives but from my point of view it was substantial. I always give according to what my means are and what my priorities are and there are lots of competing priorities. "For me it is a lot harder to give hours as opposed to writing a cheque. I can write a cheque for $500 easier than giving an afternoon of my time. What I have done is facilitated many meetings and introductions. That, I think, is more valuable than my financial contribution."

Schwartz riles at the suggestion she is helping to establish an influential business network that will enhance personal business opportunities via the environment. "I hate the word networking," Schwartz says. "I prefer the word facilitation because networking has connotations that people want something out of the relationship. All I'm doing is facilitating an introduction for them to be able to develop that interest that I think is waiting there just to be ignited."

Schwartz, like Morgan, says the people she introduces to Bush Heritage are not "looking for an opportunity other than having a real interest in the Australian environment and in creating a sustainable Australian environment. They really want to know how they can do that. "I actually don't think that with an organisation like Bush Heritage and the sort of people one introduces to that organisation, that those alternative motives are there. It is just too easy to go along to a pure business lunch and have that sort of opportunity."

Schwartz describes her first visit to a reserve in western Queensland called Carnarvon Station as "remarkable". "I have never been in that part of Queensland before. As you drive to Carnarvon Station you actually go through this area where forests have been felled for grazing. I've never seen that before. I thought I was driving through a nuclear wasteland. It was just horrible. It is really scary stuff. Then we get to Carnarvon Station which is actually like an oasis in the middle of this nuclear desert." Schwartz says she will remain committed to Bush Heritage because "they are involved in an issue that is really important for my children and grandchildren, and that they are effective and will be able to deliver outcomes".

In the past 15 years landcare groups have grown from an estimated 200 community-based groups to more than 4000, involving about 120,000 volunteers across Australia. There are now more than 20 million hectares in conservation reserves. Increasingly, these reserves are private holdings. Green senator Bob Brown started the trend by establishing Bush Heritage in 1990 with the purchase of two small parcels of land, Liffey River and Drys Bluff, adjacent to the Tasmanian World Heritage area. Brown modelled Bush Heritage on the US's The Nature Conservancy, one of the world's biggest environmental organisations. The Nature Conservancy is the richest conservation group in the world, with total revenue in 2000 of more than $US784 million ($1.070million) and assets of about $US2.8billion. Then as now, Bush Heritage relied on a network of influential people to raise funds for its first two purchases. Brown called on friends including Judy Henderson, John Williamson, Phillip Adams, Jenny Kee, Jo Vallentine and Roger Woodward. More often than not, Bush Heritage donors never see the reserves. Morgan says he trusts the fund to manage and preserve its reserves and hopes to visit in the future.

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26 June 2006

Good idea: Neighbours' court

A neighbours' court could be introduced in Queensland to crack down on residents who make other people's lives a misery. Attorney-General Linda Lavarch has revealed she is considering the extreme measure as disputes between neighbours spiral out of control. The concept would be based on the so-called liveability court in the United States which can punish offending neighbours with fines and even jail for anti-social behaviour including excessive noise, animal control and harassment. A neighbours court will be considered as part of a wide-ranging State Government review of how authorities deal with suburban disputes.

This follows an exclusive Sunday Mail survey last week that revealed one in five Queenslanders had been forced to move house to escape "neighbours from hell". The survey prompted a massive mailbag from readers, many of whom felt they had nowhere to turn when plagued by bad neighbours. The Attorney-General said she was shocked by the survey findings. "I can imagine it must be heartbreaking for people whose only option is to move to get away from bad neighbours, and we need to look at how we can do things better," she said. "The liveabilty court is worth looking at to see if it could work in Queensland."

Ms Lavarch said she would speak to authorities in the US, where the liveability court was already sitting. "I am interested in the concept of having something in place to specifically deal with this sort of problem. It would be a central point for people to go to," she said. Ms Lavarch will also look at the possibility of introducing neighbourhood justice centres - a concept already planned for Victoria, which focuses on local crime and safety and incorporates a magistrates court. If a dispute cannot be resolved through mediation, a magistrate attached to the justice centre will rule on the case. The magistrate will also spend time with the local community to help keep the peace.

In the US, cases dealt with by the liveability court include unkept yards, unpleasant smells, noisemakers and parking violators. One bus driver was fined $200 and sentenced to 30 days in jail for annoying residents by illegally stopping his bus in their street.

The British Government has adopted Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, which are slapped on individuals who cause harassment, alarm or distress to others. If a person fails to comply, they could be charged with breaching the order and face jail.

Tens of thousands of complaints involving neighbours are made each year to councils, police and the Environmental Protection Agency. At Brisbane City Council alone, complaints involving neighbours increased from 16,000 in 2004/05 to 19,729 in 2005/06. At the State Government's Dispute Resolution Centre, which helps resolve issues out of court, 21 per cent of cases relate to neighbourhood quarrels. "A lot of issues fall between the council and the police, so people find themselves really frustrated about where they can go for help," Ms Lavarch said. "By putting the work in now, we can ensure that Queensland's great lifestyle is protected and enhanced."

Police confirm they are unable to take action involving disputes between neighbours unless a criminal offence has been committed. "If it is a noise complaint, we can investigate and request that music is turned down, but generally neighbours have to work disputes out between themselves unless there is a criminal matter," a spokeswoman said. Ms Lavarch urges people with bad neighbours to write to her at: Floor 18, State Law Building, 50 Ann St, Brisbane, Qld. 4000.

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Rage at dental wait

More than 50,000 Queenslanders have given up trying to see a public dentist because of waiting times of up to five years, new figures reveal. Opposition health spokesman Bruce Flegg said the dental service was on the verge of collapse despite State Government claims of record funding. Dr Flegg said the waiting periods had resulted in general dental clinic treatments falling almost 20 per cent from 296,000 patients in 2004-05 to 240,000 in 2005-06. School dental clinic treatments had also fallen, from 670,000 to 630,000, over the same period. "Queenslanders are not getting value for the huge injection of taxpayer funds," Dr Flegg said.

The Australian Dental Association said in December that waiting times for Queensland public dental services were up to five years for a basic check-up. The Government's inability to attract staff meant the situation was unlikely to get better, it said.

The Opposition said it was not surprising that with fewer patients accessing treatment, dental emergencies at public hospitals had jumped 10 per cent. "These figures just blew me away . . . it reveals the extent of government mismanagement," Dr Flegg said.

Gold Coast pensioner Wayne Webb said he gave up waiting after three years - using his life savings of $5000 to get new teeth. Mr Webb, 52, told The Sunday Mail he first went for treatment at a clinic attached to the Gold Coast Hospital in 2003 and was told he was on an emergency waiting list. "They said to just wait. But I was in so much pain, I could not eat, I had to do something," Mr Webb said. "Stuff Mr Beattie. He promises all this money in the Budget to fix health, but what has he done for me? Nothing."

Health Minister Stephen Robertson said the Government would spend $137 million in 2006-07 to provide free public dental services - up $5.3 million on 2005-06. His office provided figures for the number of dental treatments in 2005-06 but no comparisons with the previous year. He said Queenslanders enjoyed Australia's "most comprehensive" public dental service and the Government would continue to push for the federal scheme to be reinstated.

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Black welfare 'link to school'

The Federal Government is considering tying welfare payments to school attendance and nourishment at home as part of its response to the social crisis in Aboriginal communities. The idea has been endorsed by Treasurer Peter Costello ahead of tomorrow's summit of state and federal indigenous affairs ministers, called to find ways of combating violence and child sexual assault blighting many remote settlements. The summit is also expected to consider garnishing welfare payments for parents who are substance abusers. Under the proposal, part of their payments would be held by the Government and directed towards their children's welfare.

Mr Costello said there had been "no shortage of money spent on Aboriginal affairs". "Like any other people, they get family tax benefits and CDEP (Community Development Employment Projects). In addition to that, they get much higher per-capita spending on health and education, yet they're still suffering from great hardships. "What we've proven is that simply shovelling money at these problems is not necessarily the answer. "One option is to tie that money to health and education outcomes much more carefully. For example, making family benefits payments payable only if the parents' kids are going to school. "You could also make family benefits payments conditional on the kids being properly nourished. It's no good if the money is being spent on grog and gambling."

Mr Costello said he'd been convinced to try the scheme by Cape York Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson. He said the Government had set aside money for pilot schemes tying welfare to health and education in the Cape. But in the wake of a controversial call by Health Minister Tony Abbott for a "new paternalism" in Aboriginal affairs, Mr Costello said his plan would apply to all welfare recipients. He said it would probably work better in Aboriginal communities, where leaders were able to identify families in need.

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Mary shows off her 'little kingaroo'

A probable future King of Denmark -- with his Australian mother



He's Crown Princess Mary's bouncing baby boy. With rosy chubby cheeks and cute potbelly, the robust eight-month-old proved a crowd-pleaser when shown off by his proud parents from the decks of the royal yacht. Rugged up in a sky-blue knitted jumper, Prince Christian seemed to almost swamp svelte Princess Mary when she held him up for the crowd.

It was one of the young heir's rare public appearances, made after the royal family arrived in the Danish port city of Ronne last week. The family travelled by boat to the Baltic Sea island of Bornholm for a short visit, where they toured attractions and greeted residents. Wearing a wide-brimmed ochre felt hat and a smart tailored suit, Tasmanian-born Princess Mary was accompanied by husband Crown Prince Frederik, who was dressed in full naval regalia. No date for an Australian visit by the royal family has yet been confirmed but some suggest it may take place later this year.

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25 June 2006

Tax, welfare changes kick in

Average workers will get a $10 tax cut from next week and new mums will be better off thanks to a rise in the baby bonus. But fine defaulters will face tough new sanctions, and those on parenting payments will have new obligations to look for work.

The baby bonus for new mums rises from $3000 to $4000 from July 1, and families will start to receive the latest round of federal income tax cuts. Workers earning $60,000 will be $9.80 better off a week, but those on $20,000 a year will get almost $20 a week more. At the higher end of the scale, those on $150,000 will get almost $120 off their tax each week.

Single mums signing up for parenting payments will have to start looking for work when their child turns 6 under new Welfare to Work changes coming into effect in the new financial year. New recipients of disability pensions will also have work obligations.

In Victoria, new rules will allow fine defaulters' car wheels to be clamped, and their driver licences revoked. Vehicle registrations could also be cancelled and wages deducted to recoup unpaid money. Other changes from July 1 will require those who work with children to undergo police checks.

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Why I Love Australia

By Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON -- In the Australian House of Representatives last month, opposition member Julia Gillard interrupted a speech by the minister of health thusly: "I move that that sniveling grub over there be not further heard.'' For that, the good woman was ordered removed from the House, if only for a day. She might have escaped that little time-out if she had responded to the speaker's demand for an apology with something other than "If I have offended grubs, I withdraw unconditionally.''

God, I love Australia. Where else do you have a shadow health minister with such, er, starch? Of course I'm prejudiced, having married an Australian, but how not to like a country, in this age of sniveling grubs worldwide, whose treasurer suggests to any person who "wants to live under sharia law'' to try Saudi Arabia and Iran, "but not Australia.'' He was elaborating on an earlier suggestion that "people who ... don't want to live by Australian values and understand them, well then they can basically clear off.'' Contrast this with Canada, historically and culturally Australia's commonwealth twin, where last year Ontario actually gave serious consideration to allowing its Muslims to live under sharia law.

Such things don't happen in Australia. This is a place where, when the remains of a fallen soldier are accidentally switched with those of a Bosnian, the enraged widow picks up the phone late at night, calls the prime minister at home in bed and delivers a furious unedited rant -- which he publicly and graciously accepts as fully deserved. Where Americans today sue, Australians slash and skewer.

For Americans, Australia engenders nostalgia for our own past, which we gauzily remember as infused with John Wayne plain-spokenness and vigor. Australia evokes an echo of our own frontier, which is why Australia is the only place you can unironically still shoot a Western.

It is surely the only place where you hear officials speaking plainly in defense of action. What other foreign minister but Australia's would see through "multilateralism,'' the fetish of every sniveling foreign policy grub from the Quai d'Orsay to Foggy Bottom, calling it correctly "a synonym for an ineffective and unfocused policy involving internationalism of the lowest common denominator''?

And with action comes bravery, from the transcendent courage of the doomed at Gallipoli to the playful insanity of Australian-rules football. How can you not like a country whose trademark sport has Attila-the-Hun rules, short pants and no padding -- a national passion that makes American football look positively pastoral?

That bravery breeds affection in America for another reason as well. Australia is the only country that has fought with the United States in every one of its major conflicts since 1914, the good and the bad, the winning and the losing.

Why? Because Australia's geographic and historical isolation has bred a wisdom about the structure of peace -- a wisdom that eludes most other countries. Australia has no illusions about the "international community'' and its feckless institutions. An island of tranquility in a roiling region, Australia understands that peace and prosperity do not come with the air we breathe, but are maintained by power -- once the power of the British Empire, now the power of the United States.

Australia joined the faraway wars of early-20th-century Europe not out of imperial nostalgia, but out of a deep understanding that its fate and the fate of liberty were intimately bound with that of the British Empire as principal underwriter of the international system. Today the underwriter is America, and Australia understands that an American retreat or defeat -- a chastening consummation devoutly, if secretly, wished by many a Western ally -- would be catastrophic for Australia and for the world.

When Australian ambassadors in Washington express support for the U.S., it is heartfelt and unalloyed, never the "yes, but'' of the other allies, perfunctory support followed by a list of complaints, slights and sage finger-wagging. Australia understands America's role and is sympathetic to its predicament as reluctant hegemon. That understanding has led it to share foxholes with Americans from Korea to Kabul. They fought with us at Tet and now in Baghdad. Not every engagement has ended well. But every one was strenuous, and many quite friendless. Which is why America has such affection for a country whose prime minister said after 9/11, "This is no time to be an 80 percent ally,'' and actually meant it.



AUSTRALIA'S "NOBLE SAVAGES" AT WORK

Three reports below:

Rape of ten year old kept quiet for three weeks by child safety authorities

Just blacks being blacks, you know (!)

The Queensland Government is investigating allegations that child safety authorities failed to alert police that a 10-year-old girl was repeatedly raped in a Cape York community. Child Safety Minister Mike Reynolds has ordered his department's ethical standards unit to investigate the allegations that the matter was known about for three weeks before police were notified.

Acting Premier Anna Bligh said today the Government was "very concerned" by the allegations and would take every step to get to the bottom of the incident. "Any allegations (about) possible harm to children should be reported to the appropriate authorities, including where appropriate police, as soon as that comes to their attention," Ms Bligh said. "Clearly children need government departments to be acting co-operatively, whether it is Child Safety, Queensland Health, Queensland Police or any other agencies that this matter might come to their attention." Ms Bligh said the matter would be referred to the Crime and Misconduct Commission if the investigation recommended as such.

But Opposition leader Lawrence Springborg said an internal investigation would not suffice. "There needs to be a proper independent investigation of this and the information in the report should be made publicly available," Mr Springborg said. He said only two and a half years ago Premier Peter Beattie had called a state election in order to protect the kids. "If children under the supervision, or with the knowledge of the Department of Child Safety, had been repeatedly raped for three weeks ... I can just say that in Queensland things have got decidedly worse."

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Inquiry into black sex abuse

The Northern Territory Government has launched an inquiry into child sex abuse in indigenous communities after allegations of pedophilia and sex slavery. The ABC's Lateline program last night broadcast allegations that indigenous men in central Australia were keeping girls as young as five as sex slaves. An unnamed former youth worker at Mutitjulu, near Uluru, said some men were were offering young girls petrol to sniff in exchange for sex. The worker said he had been intimidated by the alleged abusers into withdrawing his complaints to police. "It's true that there are predatory men in the central deserts who are systematically abusing young children," he said. The NT Government yesterday announced an inquiry into child sex abuse across the territory's Aboriginal communities, while police vowed to investigate the allegations involving Mutitjulu, where petrol sniffing is rife. "It's time to break through the fear, silence and shame about what's happening in the bush," NT Chief Minister Clare Martin said. "Too many families are being destroyed by child abuse. We must draw a line in the sand and get all the facts and act on them."

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STDs rife in indigenous children

Sexually transmitted diseases are spreading rapidly through Australia's indigenous toddlers and children as the hidden tragedy of child abuse becomes a broader health crisis for the nation. With federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough standing by his claim that pedophile rings are operating in central Australia, Northern Territory Chief Minister Clare Martin yesterday ordered an inquiry into the abuse of children in Australia's most disadvantaged communities. But new figures reveal child abuse and poor indigenous health is not confined to the Territory, with the number of Aboriginal children in Western Australia infected with STDs doubling in the past five years.

According to West Australian Health Department statistics, 708 children under 14 had been infected with the diseases since 2001. And almost 80 per cent of the victims were Aboriginal. Of those, 19 were toddlers and preschoolers under the age of four. In the Kimberley region in the state's far northwest, four children aged under four had been infected with chlamydia or gonorrhoea last year. STD rates are also high in other states, as the culture of silence over sexual abuse, coupled with a lack of support services and indigenous disadvantage, continues to blight the next generation of Aboriginal men and women.

While The Australian and other media outlets have been casting light on the issue for years, doubts remain over the official response to the crisis, with the NSW Government under fire yesterday for sitting on a damning report on Aboriginal child abuse and the Queensland Government investigating claims its child safety department was too slow to respond to complaints a 10-year-old girl had been raped on Cape York.

Ms Martin is today expected to name the head of the NT inquiry she hopes will "break through the fear and the shame and the silence we see about child sex abuse in our communities". "We have failed to prosecute child sex abuse," Ms Martin said yesterday. "We have failed because we couldn't get people to come forward as witnesses. Police have done work in those communities and we can't get the evidence, we can't get people to step forward - and that's what this inquiry is about."

Mr Brough, who has called a summit on indigenous disadvantage for Monday, last night declared the victims could not wait for another inquiry to report. "You would hope that anything that is going to shine the light on what is a desperate situation is positive but what we need right now is action and that's what I hope to achieve in co-operation with the states and territories on Monday," Mr Brough said.

Melva Kennedy, a member of the Aboriginal Child Sexual Assault Task Force in NSW, said it was a misconception that systematic sexual abuse within indigenous communities was confined to remote areas. "It happens all over the place, all over Australia, not just the outback" said Ms Kennedy, who has worked in the field of child protection for the past 20 years. "I know of incidents of sexual abuse in communities in the cities, in country towns, and in the outback."

The NT inquiry was called amid a heated row between Mr Brough and territory authorities over allegations of child abuse at Mutitjulu, an Aboriginal community in the shadow of Uluru that the Chief Minister describes as one of the most dysfunctional in the Northern Territory. Mr Brough claimed his department had sent a "full report" to NT police about the Mutitjulu allegations raised on Wednesday night on the ABC's Lateline.

But Deputy Police Commissioner Bruce Wernham said yesterday that Alice Springs police had only received an anonymous fax in February that contained "general intelligence", was unsigned and written on a plain piece of paper. Mr Wernham said police had been aware of some of the allegations but could not gather enough evidence to act. He said just four cases of sexual abuse had been reported at Mutitjulu since 2002, including one involving children. "An allegation is one thing, but following that up and getting hard evidence is totally another," he said. "That's where we really rely on the goodwill of individuals." Mr Brough last night defended his actions and maintained that police were able to use information he passed on as intelligence. Police have formed a taskforce to investigate the claims at Mutitjulu.

In NSW, Attorney-General Bob Debus is still sitting on a report, delivered to the Government three months ago, on Aboriginal child sexual abuse in NSW. The report is understood to find that child sexual assault has reached "epidemic proportions" in Aboriginal communities in NSW, and is four times more prevalent than in the general community. It says the assaults have led to high levels of mental illness in communities, but that victims rarely come forward due to fear of retribution. Ms Kennedy, a member of the taskforce that produced the report, said she was frustrated at the lack of action.

Despite publicity over the Cape York case in Queensland, and claims violence has gone unchecked in the state's indigenous communities, Queensland Premier Peter Beattie yesterday said his Government had already held an inquiry into the abuse of Aboriginal children and would not convene a second one. Mr Beattie said the inquiry by Tony Fitzgerald led to alcohol management plans and that a forum and a follow-up inquiry had also fostered a new child protection system.

Source



24 June 2006

Police must hire someone with a criminal record?

Those good old "human rights" again. Criminals have a "right" to a police job?

A Federal civil rights watchdog has found the Victoria Police and the Emergency Services Telecommunications Authority discriminated against a woman by refusing to employ her because she had a criminal record. In a report tabled in Parliament, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission found it was discriminatory to refuse to hire someone to answer phones because she had been convicted of drink-driving.

Tracy Gordon applied for the job of communications officer with the ESTA in August 2003. After a typing assessment she filled in an application form, which asked if she had a criminal record. She alleges a staff member then told her she was ineligible to go any further with the assessment because she had been convicted of drink-driving. Ms Gordon claims when she contacted Victoria Police about the issue she was told the authority had a rule that anyone with a criminal conviction could not be hired.

But commission president John von Doussa found Ms Gordon was discriminated against because she did not need to reach the same standard of character and integrity as a police officer in order to answer phones. "I am of the view that if a person is convicted of an offence for driving whilst under the influence of alcohol, it does not mean that they fail to meet this lower level requirement," he said. ESTA and the police said they were considering the recommendations.

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Namby pamby prison officer

The sight of blood made him sick so the taxpayer pays

A prison officer who has depression after having to take photographs of a dead inmate has won a civil action against the State Government. Alan Edward Pearson, 60, was awarded weekly compensation payments, backdated to August 2005, as well as payment of his medical expenses. A medical panel found Mr Pearson had a major depressive disorder.

In a judgment handed down in the County Court on Wednesday, Judge Michael Higgins said Mr Pearson was placed in stressful situations while working at the old Beechworth Prison, now closed, and had become totally incapacitated by his depression. Mr Pearson was not involved with security at the prison, but in a mostly administrative role.

Judge Higgins found a direct link between the work stress and his illness. Mr Pearson claimed there were three incidents that led to illness. One related to the stabbing of a prisoner in 1995. Mr Pearson did not see the stabbing but saw the aftermath, including the blood, blood-stained clothes and bedding. Another time he had to stay with a prisoner who had been stabbed until an officer was found to open the prison gate. Another incident occurred in 2001 when Mr Pearson had to take photos of a dead prisoner.

Mr Pearson was responsible for teaching other workers how to use a digital camera. He claimed that when custodial officers had trouble with the camera, he was called in from home to take the photos. "He said there was a lot of violence in the prison and a lot of violent people and that he could not come to terms with it, nor could he understand it," Judge Higgins said.

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"Bloody hell" campaign winner of web hits



If Tourism Australia's controversial "So Where the Bloody Hell Are You?" campaign is measured in website hits, it's already a runaway success. The campaign has had its detractors, with British advertising regulators initially banning the catchphrase on television, while there also was some concern in Australia that it might present the wrong image. But Tourism Australia's managing director, Scott Morrison, says average weekly visitations to its website, Australia.com, and to the ad campaign's own site, have jumped by 71 per cent since the campaign was launched in late February. "They are seeing it and they are responding to it and are doing so in every single country where we are running it," Mr Morrison told journalists at the Australian Tourism Exchange on Sunday.

Website visitations in Britain are up 40 per cent, in New Zealand they have risen by 50 per cent and in the United States they have jumped 41 per cent. And in the 10 days since the campaign was launched in South Korea and China, visits to Australia.com have jumped 16-fold and almost five-fold respectively. Mr Morrison said while website hits were a good initial indication, the real evidence for the campaign's success would come in 12 to 18 months. "The first thing you look for when you launch a campaign like this is a form of response that you can see, and we are clearly seeing that," he said. "But this campaign builds over time. "This is at least a two-year commitment of rolling this out and reinforcing the message around the world."

Mr Morrison said while it was well known that "the world loves Australia" not everybody was intending to visit. The challenge is to go from a 'must visit someday' destination to a 'must visit today' destination," he said. "If we can lift the intention to travel to Australia then we know the trade can covert that intention into some serious business in Australia."

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Dishonest Leftist radiation hysteria

Deputy Opposition Leader Jenny Macklin's workout with the dog whistle on nuclear issues would put a bull elephant to shame. Macklin has found a pliant media open to her bellowing and willing to run the sort of nuclear scare campaign which could have brought the Cold War to boiling point. Mischievously, she has made a series of accusations about incidents at the Lucas Heights nuclear facility which bear little relation to the scope or magnitude and, too frequently, the press has not checked the facts before publishing her overblown claims.

In the past week, headlines have ranged from "Safety scare for nuclear workforce" to "Radioactive gas leak -- Lucas Heights worker contaminated in pipe rupture" but, before donning safety suits, it is worth looking at the facts and determining who actually poses the greater threat to public safety, Lucas Heights or Macklin. With her insinuations and accusations, she is not dissimilar to the menace who dangerously encourages panic by calling "fire" in a crowded cinema. Her exaggerated concern about the few incidents at Lucas Heights is ludicrous as not one has been of the level necessary to be reported to the regulator, the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Authority (ARPANSA). Not one.

The terms of the Act and the licences issued by ARPANSA require details of any significance -- the exposure of a worker beyond regulatory limits -- to be provided in 24 hours. Other less significant events are reported to ARPANSA during routine quarterly reporting. There were three incidents in the past week in addition to a pipe rupture the previous week, which released very low levels of radioactive gas (common in radiopharmaceutical production), which again were not reportable to ARPANSA. Each was of a minor nature and there are no continuing concerns for the health of the workers. Not one of the incidents occurred in the reactor but in places well removed from its vicinity.

According to ANSTO, in the first of the three incidents on June 14, a worker received a low radiation dose of iodine-123, used in the diagnosis of thyroid cancer, while packaging the product for patient use. He received 4 per cent of the annual limit for radiation workers and significantly less than a patient would in a nuclear medicine scan. He did not need any treatment and continued to work.

In the next incident, a worker's trousers and shoes were contaminated on June 15 when he dropped a vial with a small amount of technetium-99m. His skin was not contaminated and his clothing was cleaned. He did not receive radiation above that associated with normal work.

The day after, a worker at the National Medical Cyclotron in Camperdown was cleaning up waste in a thallium-201 production area when a pack of radioactive material burst. A small splash found its way beneath his safety glasses and into his eye. He had his eye washed at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital next door. He received less than 1 per cent of the annual radiation dose for an eye, but as chemicals were involved, he was also seen by an eye specialist.

For all Macklin's blustering, such incidents would not normally be reported outside ANSTO because the dose levels were significantly less than the reportable amount and there were no releases of radioactivity outside the laboratories. But she is blowing the dog whistle for all she is worth because of the need for Labor to corral the green, anti-nuclear, anti-development vote.

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23 June 2006

Escaping unwanted calls



Australians will soon be able to escape one billion unwanted telemarketing calls after laws passed the Senate today. People will be able to put their phone numbers on a Do Not Call Register that telemarketers must respect or face fines. It is estimated there are an estimated one billion telemarketing calls a year - or 53 per person - in Australia. Both sides of politics queued to support the measure, with Labor claiming the government had backflipped and adopted its initiative.

Communications Minister Helen Coonan told the Senate that Australians would embrace the register as they generally found telemarketing intrusive. "We will give peace and mind to those who don't like, and indeed resent, the intrusion and disruption caused by unsolicited telemarketing calls," she told the Senate. "The government has consulted widely ... to ensure that there is an appropriate balance between the rights of an individual to privacy, and the need for business to promote their products and services."

Registration would be available for fixed line and mobile phone numbers and would be free. The call ban would apply to Australian telemarketers and overseas callers working for Australian companies. But households won't be protected from all those unwanted calls that always seem to come as the kids are running riot and dinner's boiling over.

Charities, government, religious and education organisations - and politicians - will still be able to call. Amendments proposed by the Democrats seeking to remove this exemption from the new laws were voted down by government and Labor senators. The new laws are roundly supported by the telemarketing industry, which is keen to operate under a centralised regulatory framework.

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Donuts winning so far



Up to 50 Victorian schools have signed up with Krispy Kreme doughnuts to raise funds, leaving health experts and parents' groups furious. The American doughnut chain -- which opens its first Victorian store in Narre Warren today -- will provide kids with cut-price doughnuts to sell to raise cash for their schools. Nutritionists are horrified the international chain is encouraging children to eat fat-laden doughnuts while the nation is in the grip of an obesity crisis.

Almost 400 NSW schools ran Krispy Kreme fundraisers within months of the first Australian store opening in 2003. A glazed Krispy Kreme doughnut has about 836 kilojoules (200 calories), with half coming from fat. A fundraising box of a dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts costs $8. Schools on-sell them for $13, netting a $5 profit per box. There is a minimum purchase of 50 boxes.

A company spokesman yesterday said about 50 not-for-profit Victorian organisations had registered to raise funds through Krispy Kreme, but would not disclose how many were schools. The company will launch the details of its Victorian fundraising policy in the next two weeks.

Statistics show about 10,000 Victorian children become obese or overweight every year. Kelly Neville, from Nutrition Australia's Healthy Eating Schools program, said the Krispy Kreme fundraising was appalling. "It is horrifying. Krispy Kremes are very high in saturated fat and are larger than other doughnuts," the dietitian said. She said the fundraising program would encourage children to eat more doughnuts and contribute to the obesity problem.

Nutrition Australia recently released a Fundraising Ideas for Healthy Kids manual which lists a number of alternatives. "We have seen some schools take the risk and drop hugely successful junk-food drives in favour of staging a fun run," Ms Neville said. Obesity expert Professor Boyd Swinburn said Krispy Kreme was undoing the programs to reduce childhood obesity. "They are undermining all the hard work that the State Government, schools and parents are doing," he said. "All junk food should absolutely be banned from school fundraising."

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Is this a new record for government idiocy?

The Queensland government will pay you $1,000 if you install a rainwater tank. But it then forbids you to use the water for the one thing that you would want a tank for!



Water-saving rebate schemes offered by the State Government and local councils are set to be reviewed following complaints they are too complex and tied up in bureaucratic red tape. Premier Peter Beattie yesterday revealed he would ask the newly created Water Commission to clarify all the rules covering the use of water tanks and other water-saving devices before generous new rebates take effect from July 1. The move came after the Opposition said residents wanting to apply for State Government rebates had to comply with more than 50 terms and conditions.

Mr Beattie rejected suggestions the Government had not properly thought out the plan before it was announced 10 days ago. He blamed existing council rules which forced some residents, including those living in Brisbane, to abide by the water restrictions, including a ban on hosing, even if they had water tanks. "I'll be talking to the Water Commission about this, if you put in a tank then you should be able to use the water as you see fit," he said. "A lot of these were old rules put in by the councils."

Residents have also complained that to receive a rebate of up to $1000 from the Government for installing a water tank, they have to connect it to their toilet, laundry and pool. But because of hygiene issues with toilets, the tanks also need to be connected to the mains water supply which means water in the tanks cannot be used for other purposes such as watering the garden. Mr Beattie said this issue would also be investigated.

Opposition Natural Resources spokesman Jeff Seeney said the water tank rebates were a bureaucratic farce and should be rewritten. "This bureaucratic approach will serve as a powerful disincentive for people to buy water tanks. It's just not worth it," he said. "The rebates won't result in significant savings of water simply because the Government hasn't put the effort into administering them properly." Controversy over the rebate scheme coincided with patchy rain in Brisbane yesterday but SEQWater operations manager Rob Drury said the rainfall had no impact on dwindling dam levels.

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Imams' secret talks for future



The nation's seven most powerful Islamic clerics have held unprecedented secret talks to set up guidelines to condemn extremist literature, protect national security and push for new laws to criminalise the mockery of religious prophets. The spiritual leader of Australia's 300,000 Muslims, Sheik Taj Din el-Hilali, headed Tuesday's meeting at Lakemba Mosque in Sydney's west, where the clerics also thrashed out the issue of calling for a Palestinian state to be set up. Sheik Hilali said yesterday the special meeting was attended by moderate Muslim leaders from NSW, Victoria, Queensland and Perth - the states with the largest Islamic communities - and was backed by the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs.

The Islamic leaders, considered the most influential among the nation's 150 Muslim clerics, proposed to develop a national board of imams with representation in each state within the next three months, to set standards for spiritual leaders and their preaching. "Questions were also raised about how to resolve the issues of young Muslims, how to address the issues of women, how to deal with the government in the future and what role imams need to play in achieving this," Sheik Hilali said in an interview in Arabic.

Prominent Melbourne cleric Fehmi Naji el-Imam, a member of John Howard's Muslim Community Reference Group, who helped organise the meeting, said the set-up guidelines would be reviewed by the clerics over the next month. He said the leaders, including Sheik Shadi Suleiman and Yahya Safi from Lakemba Mosque, would then determine the final guidelines to be unveiled during a national conference for imams, which will be funded by the Government and is expected to take place soon. Clerics at the conference must then agree to them or risk being condemned and deplored for deviating.

The Weekend Australian understands that proposed guidelines, which were written in Arabic, include a call to support Palestinians "to regain their full rights" and call for a push to introduce new legislation to "criminalise" the defamation and mockery of "the messengers of god". It is also believed that guidelines will call on imams to pledge their allegiance to Australia and do what is in their power to protect the "safety and security and stability" of Australia.

Andrew Robb, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Multicultural Affairs, said yesterday it was important for imams to take responsibility for Islamic community issues. "It's very important for the Muslim communities, and especially imams, to take responsibility and leadership of the issues that face the Muslim communities in Australia," he said.

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22 June 2006

Cockatoo may pulp proposal for mill

A $650 million pulp mill in South Australia is under threat from the red-tail black cockatoo, despite the bird never being seen on the planned site. The Environment Department in Canberra insists the project needs federal approval because of the potential dangers it poses to the rare cockatoo, for which the closest feeding spot is 4km away. The developer of the Penola Pulp Mill, due to begin production by 2009, warned yesterday that the intervention could threaten the project, which is expected to generate more than 600 jobs during construction and permanently employ 120 people. It would produce 350,000 tonnes of pulp a year.

The mill's project manager, John Roche, told The Australian he was alarmed by the Environment Department's move, given that federal Environment Minister Ian Campbell had blocked a Victorian wind farm because of a perceived threat to the orange-bellied parrot. Senator Campbell's decision to bar the Bald Hill wind farm sparked a state rights brawl between Canberra and Victoria, with the Bracks Government launching a Federal Court challenge in an attempt to overturn the decision. The wind farm battle also exposed a number of other projects around the country that were investigated after being identified by Senator Campbell's department as potential threats to native wildlife.

Under the pulp mill plan, Penola intended to remove seven 200-year-old river red gums that contained hollows potentially suitable for nesting by the cockatoos, which number about 1000 and are listed as nationally threatened species.

Mr Roche said he was concerned by the decision, given the Bald Hills wind farm block. "It plays on our mind because that was a project that was fully approved and then turned over," he said. A spokesman for Senator Campbell said last night the minister could not comment while the department was conducting the approval process. The department will investigate whether removing the trees would harm the cockatoo. If the tree removal were found to threaten the future of the cockatoo, Senator Campbell could veto the project.

In a submission to the department, Penola acknowledged the seven river red gums contained large hollows suitable for nesting by the cockatoo. It said that while 95 per cent of cockatoo nesting activities were within 2km of known foraging sites, the planned pulp mill was 4km to 5km from the nearest foraging site. Anecdotal evidence from landowners indicated no cockatoos had been seen nesting in the trees.

As a compromise, Penola plans to set aside a 200ha conservation area with hundreds of mature trees, including river red gums. Birds South-East president Bryan Haywood welcomed the compromise last night and said birdwatchers did not want the project stopped. However, he said they were opposed to unnecessary clearing of potential nesting habitat as it took more than 100 years for a hollow to develop in a tree.

Mr Roche said the mill was now subject to environmental and planning assessments at a local, state and federal level. The project would be considered for approval by the local council over the next three months. "There has probably been tens of thousands of these trees cut down in the past 10 years for plantations," he said. The project could be at risk if the approval process was not completed quickly, he said. "The cockatoos are the most significant environmental hurdle we face. All of the other work is done. Air, noise, water. There is no impact."

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Who's afraid of happy clappers?

Andrew Denton's new documentary is being promoted as portraying evangelical Christians as 'downright scary', writes Caroline Overington

There are a lot of religious nutters in the world right now and some of them are extremely dangerous. They pose a threat to the security of Australia. At least 100 Australians - 88 tourists in Bali and 12 Australians who were in New York on September 11, 2001 - have been slaughtered either by them, or at their behest. None of these nutters, however, is featured in Andrew Denton's new documentary, God on My Side. Denton's short film, now showing as part of the Sydney Film Festival, is described in its own advertising as a "downright scary" look at religious fundamentalism; however, it concentrates not on Islamic fundamentalism but on evangelical Christians in the US, the so-called "happy clappers" who devote their lives to Jesus.

Denton filmed a group of them who gathered in Texas earlier this year not to plot a murderous rampage, but for the National Religious Broadcasters Convention, a four-day meeting to workshop new ways of broadcasting the Christian message (via podcasts, for example, or by selling lollipops with a Jesus theme). Denton zeroes in on some wacky characters, including a man who says Denton's skin is sparkling because God is spreading a kind of silver dust around the place. Another of them claims God once sent a helicopter to a cave where he had gone to drink himself silly, so he could come out and spread the word of Jesus. A third man says he turned to Christ after some corpses started calling out to him. "Did you think you were hallucinating?" asks Denton, incredulous. "Oh, no," the man replies.

Watching the film, it's difficult to escape the conclusion that Denton went to Texas to find and interview a bunch of nutters - in particular, nutters who support President George W. Bush - and ridicule them or, worse, compare them with the seriously religious nutters in the Middle East, who aren't so amusing. Denton insists it isn't so. "I didn't set out to mock them," he says. "Most of the people you see in the film, we didn't find them and set them up. They are simply the people we found when we got there, or else they came and found us." Denton says he chose to use his platform as an ABC star with a national audience and an enviable budget to examine evangelical Christians and their influence on Bush "not because I wanted to attack anybody, or because I thought anybody was worse than anybody else, but because there is so much focus on Islamic fundamentalism and so I thought, why don't we look at our side?"

Denton says he approached the task not as a journalist and "definitely not" as a comedian, but as a documentary maker, with the aim of even-handedness and serious analysis of the issues. "I tried to approach it as neutrally as possible and I didn't want to do a Michael Moore. Definitely not. I wanted it to be neutral, and I've avoided taking cheap shots," he says. He can't explain why the publicity for his movie describes the Christian broadcasting workshop as "downright scary" but he says "there's no doubt some people will find it a bit scary, and I believe that any kind of fundamentalism, any kind of absolutism, is dangerous".

Denton also says people shouldn't criticise the film for "not being about something". "It's completely unfair to say it should be about Islamic fundamentalism and not about Christian fundamentalism," he says. "I didn't set out to make a film saying this religion is bad or that one is worse. It isn't about whether it's worse than Islam or better than Islam, or who is bigger or badder or bolder. It's about looking at our culture (and) shining a light on it. "The point I'm making is that any form of absolutism is extremely dangerous, be it Christian or Muslim. Anyone who is a zealot, anyone who says there is only one word, only one law, scares me. "Why? Because terrible acts, historically and to this day, have been done by people who believe these things, all kinds of wars have been fought in the name of religion."

The Christians in Denton's movie certainly don't hide the fact that they've committed their lives to Jesus and they definitely do want to convert other people to Christianity. None, however, preaches the total destruction of other cultures by murderous means or says they want all Jews pushed into the sea. The film makes much of the fact that Bush is a born-again Christian but does not mention that Bill Clinton was also a committed Christian, or, indeed, that there has never been a US president (including John F. Kennedy, who was Catholic) who didn't have Christian faith.

Denton says evangelical Christians have a "particular relationship with President Bush. He addressed the conference three times, but Clinton was denied an invitation to address them. They have given an endorsement to Bush. They are political." He insists the link between religion and Bush "doesn't trouble me, but it's instructive to know it".

Having now made a documentary about evangelical Christians, does he plan to travel to, say, Iran, to tackle religious fundamentalism of the Islamic stripe? "It would be a lot harder to do that because it's not my language and it's not my culture, and it's harder to do in a foreign language," he says. "And this is a documentary about my culture, and so perhaps it's up to somebody from those cultures to do that kind of documentary."

A Dutch film-maker, Theo van Gogh, tried to do that in 2004, but when he released a film about violence in Islamic culture, he was stabbed and shot to death by a Muslim fanatic. Newspaper editors in Europe were this year warned not to print cartoons mocking Islam, for fear of violent reprisal. In 2002, riots by Muslims that led to dozens of deaths compelled Miss World organisers to scrap plans to stage the pageant in Nigeria.

Denton agrees that his life probably isn't at risk from Jesus-lovin' happy clappers angered by his film. "But I didn't go in there to construct a case against Christianity," he says, "and I'd be very angry and astonished, really, if people thought I was trying to justify Islamic fundamentalism or compare Christian fundamentalism to it. I absolutely reject that." However, he adds: "They (evangelical Christians) support a state (and a President) which is acting militarily all around the globe, and the greatest threat to mankind is religious war."

More contentiously, Denton also believes it "takes two to start a war" and that it's "very rare" to find a case where one side is "entirely in the right". "It's often very complex," he adds. "And history is written by winners, of course." "You say, 'What about Islamic fundamentalism?' and on the surface maybe it looks madder and more aggressive, but I think in the end any form of absolute belief, or any religious believers willing to advocate the use of force, are dangerous. "You look at Iran's President (Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad. He's a scary guy and you think: What is the matter with these people, why are they so aggressive? "But then, look back 50 years (when Britain and its allies invaded Iran during World War II, and later interfered in Iranian politics) and you think: Well, hang on, if that was my country, wouldn't I be angry? Reducing things to who is right and who is wrong, it's too simplistic."

Denton has no religious faith and does not believe in God, but he respects people who do. "It's a difficult journey for anyone and it would be wrong of me (to) - and I would never - mock anybody who has found faith," he says. "It's where the faith takes you that is scary, if you allow faith to get mixed up with politics."

In the documentary, Denton describes many of the people he meets in Texas as "positive, committed and eloquent". Some admit it is "kind of goofy" to make lollipops with images from the Bible but say the people who sell such things "are trying to reach out to the world, and you can't knock them for that". One person explains that Christianity is a "big tent" and although some people are clearly focused on the supernatural or on prophecies of doom - or else use puppets to preach to children - others simply want their lives to be filled with a meaning and purpose beyond their own satisfaction. Denton also goes around asking people about Bush, saying: "Do you believe he's doing a good job?" and even the puppet in Denton's film nods yes. It's a bit silly. But scary? No. There is a threat out there, but this isn't it.

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Catholic school parents want grades

The overwhelming majority of Catholic school parents support the introduction of the new A-to-E report cards, particularly the move to rank students against their peers. The support opens up a potential split with parents groups in government schools after their national body, the Australian Council of State School Organisations, foreshadowed at the weekend a campaign to inform parents of their right to refuse the new plain-English reports.

ACSSO president Jenny Branch wants state parents and citizens branches to ensure parents are aware they can choose to exclude their child from the new system, designed in response to complaints existing assessment models are vague and confusing. Challenging the push towards simpler A-to-E gradings on report cards, she told The Weekend Australian on Saturday the "traditional end-of-the-year report card is a celebration of achievement of a child throughout the year".

But a survey by the Federation of Parents and Friends Associations and the Catholic Education Office in Sydney shows almost three in four Catholic school parents support the introduction of the plain-English reports and just 8per cent are opposed. Reporting the results in the parents newsletter, About Catholic Schools, federation executive officer Franceyn O'Connor said parents were "largely enthusiastic" about the five-level grading system. "Many parents have indicated in several discussions and meetings held throughout the year that they welcome the opportunity to compare their child's progress against statewide standards using a common grading scale," Ms O'Connor said. "They appreciate how difficult it may be for teachers to convey bad news but they still want a fair and honest assessment of their child's abilities to determine their rate of progress."

The federal Government introduced a requirement for all schools in the government, Catholic and independent sectors to provide plain-English report cards as a condition of funding. All the states and territories are introducing the reports, which must grade students in five levels, such as A to E, and also provide information on the students rankings according to their peers.

Ms O'Connor said the decision by governments to only grade and rank students from Year 1 was crucial for parents' support, with the survey showing more than one in five were concerned that grading children when they started school could harm their self-esteem. ACSSO, representing parents in government schools, maintains opposition to the grading and ranking of students, raising questions of how representative their views are.

The federal Education Department has received many letters of support for the reforms to school reports and federal Education Minister Julie Bishop said the parents she had spoken to welcomed the changes. "The vast majority of parents I talk to want to know in plain English how their children are performing, and how they're performing in relation to other students," she said.

One parent quoted in the Catholic newsletter, Veronica Molloy, who has two children in high school and one at primary, welcomed the chance to gauge how her children were performing against statewide standards. Ms Molloy's only concern was about preconceived ideas that attached a stigma to any grade lower than an A. "There are a lot of negative perceptions in society about a C grade, for example," she said. "Children themselves might perceive any grade other than an A as a failure ... it's up to the Government to address these misconceptions."

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21 June 2006

Bravery no longer a secret

Martin "Jock" Wallace grew up in Winton, west of Tamworth in NSW, and his childhood was entirely normal. He rode a pushbike, then a trail bike; when he broke an arm on the trampoline, all his classmates signed the cast. His family had a working farm and he had an old beagle called Queenie. The young Martin liked to read, especially Treasure Island, but he also liked to play the fool, capering about in the back of the class when he was supposed to be studying.

When Russia invaded Afghanistan in 1979, he barely noticed. He was only 10 and, according to his mother, still as "wild as a March hare". Then, at 17, Wallace decided to enlist. Wallace did basic training at Kapooka in southern NSW and ultimately became a signaller, attached to the elite Australian Special Air Service. Ten weeks after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, he was sent to Afghanistan to take part in Operation Anaconda.

The US military believed that 150 al-Qa'ida fighters were hiding in the pretty villages that dotted Afghanistan's Shahi Kot Valley, and it wanted to flush them out. But the military was wrong. There were at least 1000 enemy fighters dug into the high ground around the valley. Wallace was among the first into the valley and he was quickly pinned down by enemy fire. Forces inspired by Osama bin Laden were all around, armed with machineguns and mortars. For a while, it looked as if Wallace might not make it out. But, surrounded as he was by frightened young Americans, some of whom were barely old enough to shave, he helped launch a tremendous counterattack, and came home alive.

Wallace would later receive the Medal for Gallantry, the first member of the Royal Australian Corps of Signals to be so honoured since Vietnam. The Australian Defence Force said it was for courage under fire and because he "maintained composure under sustained heavy attack from enemy forces", as well as for "providing leadership to those around him".

Now, had this been a normal situation, Wallace's story would have slipped from history, the details forever hidden in a file in Canberra marked top secret. As US commander Tommy Franks told reporters after the fight: "I'm not sure it will ever be fully declassified, but it literally brings tears to my eyes. The Aussies brought bravery to a whole new level." In the great tradition of those who serve, Wallace would never have told anyone, not even his loving mum.

Now enter Sandra Lee, an Australian journalist whose father, Kevin "Dixie" Lee, is retired from the Royal Australian Navy and whose brother, Gavin "General" Lee, served for 16 years with the army. Wallace told her about the battle and Lee became determined to get his story into print. "The military always gets the short end of the stick," she says. "Every time a Black Hawk comes down, we hear about it. We never hear about the victories. There are a lot of Australians who have no idea what our soldiers are doing in Afghanistan and Iraq."

The problem for journalists such as Lee is that soldiers generally aren't allowed to tell their stories. Australia does not have an official secrets act as such, but personnel are forbidden to talk publicly about warfare and the ADF rarely opens its military secrets file. So, when Lee went to the army to seek permission to tell Wallace's story, the answer was a flat no. "And look, I can understand that," she says. "For security reasons and for tactical reasons, some things have to be kept secret. But there was this great story of bravery and the public didn't know about it."

So Lee went to former defence minister (now UN ambassador) Robert Hill, who agreed to support the project. In the end, however, it was the head of Special Operations Command, Mike Hindmarsh, who had to give SAS troops clearance to discuss the operation. "It took time and there was a great deal of gentle diplomacy involved," Lee says. "But we got there." Her 18 Hours: The True Story of an SAS War Hero is the first book from an Australian perspective about Australia's role in a key battle against the enemy of our times, al-Qa'ida.

The book was launched last week by Peter Cosgrove at the Park Hyatt in Sydney. It was an amusing affair: on one side of the room, there were the fragrant women from the world of publishing, dressed in kitten heels and sipping champagne. On the other, there were the hard men of the SAS, some of them tattooed to the elbow, straining out of their suits. Cosgrove told the audience that he kept thinking, as he worked his way through the text, "there's going to be a clanger somewhere. She's a woman and she's never been in combat, so she'll get something wrong." She didn't. Cosgrove said Lee had perfectly captured the fear and confusion of men in battle, and the bravery of soldiers involved in Operation Anaconda. She got the language right, too. Read aloud, the book would turn the air blue.

Cosgrove agrees that the publication of the book - the process of reluctantly letting go of some military secrets, letting caution slip so that Australians can learn a little more about what their troops are doing in the faraway war on terror - was an important exercise for the Australian military. "It's important that Australians understand that we have soldiers fighting in foreign lands," he said. "It's dangerous and it's frightening, and they perform with honour."

Lee starts the book with a famous quote, often attributed to George Orwell: "We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence upon those who would harm us." It's a sentiment we would soon forget if stories such as this one weren't told.

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Communication breakdown

By Keith Windschuttle, the ABC board's latest appointment, who says media studies reject everything that journalism stands for



University degrees in communications and media studies in recent times have had the highest entry level requirements of any courses in the humanities and social sciences in Australia. In some institutions, it is as difficult to get into a media course as it is to get into medicine or law. This popularity has been important in ensuring that many of the new universities created since 1988 have been able to attract a high-calibre enrolment and have not been seen to house a second-rate student body.

Not surprisingly, this development has been a source of pride to many of the new university administrators. Indeed, these courses are changing the idea of what it means to study for an arts degree. Every year, more of the older universities, faced with declining entry aggregates in the humanities, are reappraising their traditional liberal arts degrees to accommodate media and communications studies, thus shoring up their student demand.

Within media studies, journalism is one of the options between which students choose. Journalism is offered as a major or a subject stream by more than 20 universities in Australia. In a typical bachelor of arts degree, the journalism stream occupies one-third to one-half of the total hours a student spends as an undergraduate. The rest of the program normally contains a small number of liberal arts subjects, with the remaining one-third to one half of the total degree devoted to media theory. There are a number of variations on this model, including some programs devoted almost entirely to media and communications theory, but it remains fairly typical.

There are three characteristics of journalism that most teaching in the field upholds. First, journalism is committed to reporting the truth about what occurs in the world. Second, the principal ethical obligations of journalists are to their readers, their listeners and their viewers. Third, journalists should be committed to good writing. This means their meaning should be clear and their grammar precise. However, in most of the media theory that is taught within Australian communications and media degrees, none of these principles is upheld. Indeed, they are specifically denied, either by argument or by example, by the dominant intellectual field that has reigned in media theory for at least 15 years. The methodologies and values of journalism are undermined, contradicted and frequently regarded as naive by the proponents of media theory.

In those institutions that teach journalism and media theory within the one degree, the result is a form of intellectual schizophrenia among students and staff alike. But even in those journalism schools fortunate enough to avoid this material, it remains completely unsatisfactory that the practice of professional education is overshadowed and denigrated by the dominant theory.

When journalism was taken up as a subject by a number of colleges of advanced education in Australia in the mid-1970s, prevailing academic opinion held that vocational education on its own was insufficient to constitute a bachelor's degree. So to get their courses through the higher education boards that most state governments had set up to accredit the new college degrees, journalism educators had to add something else to their subject matter. In most cases, the additional material comprised some liberal arts subjects plus communications studies or media studies.

At the time, however, the field of communications was dominated by American management theory and hence was largely inappropriate, while academic discussion about the media was then focused on the relatively narrow issues of the organisation of work, the ownership of the press and the selection of news. So there was a big gap in the market for a more all-encompassing field of study. This gap was quickly filled by British cultural studies, a movement that came to define the nature and methodology of media theory and which, despite several twists and turns, has held sway ever since. In Australia, cultural studies came to be taught in media degrees that contained vocational majors such as journalism, film production and the like, which were confined to the then colleges of advanced education, as well as in a number of new courses in communications theory offered by English and sociology departments in the established universities.

While journalism educators are trying to teach students to use active voice, short sentences, concrete nouns and verbs, precise grammar and clear meaning, they are faced with cultural studies courses that reward students who ape the passive voice, arcane abstractions, long and turgid expressions and grammatical howlers that characterise the latter.

Perversely, one of the reasons the cultural studies movement has been so successful is because it has adopted verbiage. Few people outside the field can understand what is being said, so wider opposition is thereby minimised. Obscure expression is a clever tactic to adopt in academic circles, where there is always an expectation that things are never simple and that anyone who writes clearly is thereby being shallow. Instead of signalling a communication theorist's inability to communicate properly, obscurantism such as the above is assumed to equal profundity.

But if media theory is as degenerate, how could media courses be so attractive to students? It is important to understand that the popularity of media courses owes nothing to cultural studies. Indeed, if my experience is any guide, large numbers of students will freely admit to sympathetic lecturers that they loathe everything cultural studies stands for. Once they have experienced it, most students come to regard media theory as a largely incomprehensible and odious gauntlet they must run in order to be allowed to do what they really came to the institution for: to study media practice. Students who take media courses want to learn skills that will gain them employment in what they perceive to be attractive and interesting careers. Before they enrol, very few of them realise how much of the course is consumed by media theory, nor do they appreciate what media theory actually is. They assume it is something that complements media practice, not its antithesis.

The great irony in the conduct of media courses lies in the relative status of those who teach theory and those who teach practice. Most media practitioners who join academic departments do so after at least 10 years', and more commonly 20 years', employment in the industry. However, most only have BA pass degrees and find that although their industry experience will get them a job, it will not get them a promotion. To be promoted from lecturer to senior lecturer, they are required to complete a PhD or a mas