R.G.Menzies above

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Two of my ancestors were convicts so my family has been in Australia for a long time. As well as that, all four of my grandparents were born in the State where I was born and still live: Queensland. And I am even a member of the world's second-most condemned minority: WASPs (the most condemned is of course the Jews -- which may be why I tend to like Jews). So I think I am as Australian as you can get. I certainly feel that way. I like all things that are iconically Australian: meat pies, Vegemite, Henry Lawson etc. I particularly pride myself on my familiarity with the great Australian slanguage. I draw the line at Iced Vo-Vos and betting on the neddies, however. So if I cannot comment insightfully on Australian affairs, who could?

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12 February, 2012

SCHOOL CRACKDOWN: Dud teachers face axing in deal worth millions

Good if it actually happens. Government schools cannot afford to be too fussy, though. It's mainly the least talented of graduates who go into teaching these days. Trying to teach in an undisciplined school is only for the desperate -- aside from a few idealists

POORLY performing teachers will be sacked in a landmark education reform to be rolled out nationally.

In return for signing up to the Federal Government's teacher hiring policy, aimed at improving standards, state governments will be offered cash handouts worth millions.

The national reforms will need to be agreed to by each state and will be first rolled out in Queensland and New South Wales. The Queensland Government will be offered $7.5 million, and the NSW Government will be offered a handout of more than $12 million.

In a move that will break the longstanding deadlock about whether principals can hire and fire, school management will be given free rein to take over the recruitment and management of teachers and support staff.

School boards and councils will also take over the budget control and strategic planning, giving parents a greater role in oversight of their school operations. They will also be given the right to set salaries for teachers and contracts for school maintenance, such as cleaning.

"To get the best results we need principals to have the powers to get and keep the best teachers," Prime Minister Julia Gillard told The Daily Telegraph yesterday.

NSW government schools have the most centralised decision-making processes in Australia. All staff hiring is also centralised out of the state Department of Education, which has the say on hiring and firing of teachers.

The PM will announce the reforms ahead of the release of the Gonski review of school funding, due next week. It will be the first review of how schools receive funding since 1973 and is expected to call for major injections of funds into an education budget that tops $36 billion annually.

As federal education minister, Ms Gillard introduced the My School website and the Naplan tests, which brought in national standards for Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 in reading, writing and numeracy.

The Federal Government will withhold the additional funding if the State Governments do not sign up to the harder reforms, specifically around the hiring and firing of teachers by principals.

The onus is now on NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell to submit an implementation plan to the Federal Government to prove how he would lift education performance.

Inability to hire and fire staff has been one of the principals' greatest gripes. Principals will now become more accountable for their school's performance. A trial of the reforms will involve 325 schools in NSW over the next two years.

SOURCE




Good intentions but clean energy price too high

There are few things more dangerous than a bad policy built on good intentions. Communism springs to mind ("commune" is such a lovely word). The vast public housing estates built across the English speaking world in the 1960s and 1970s are another. The first famine in the Soviet Union, and the social dystopia in "the projects", should have quickly revealed that the policies were misconceived. Yet because the values behind the policies were ostensibly noble, they continued to operate on the original intention rather than the results. So it is with the government's Solar Flagships program.

"Renew" is also a gorgeous English word that carries with it a cache of that precious and elusive substance - hope. I don't want to disparage the search for diversified and sustainable energy security. I am concerned, as a taxpayer, that we get value for the $10 billion largesse we are pouring into renewables, as the price of Bob Brown's support for a minority government.

The policy was this week mugged by reality when both its Solar Flagship projects crashed. A $300 million grant to photovoltaic Moree Solar Farm must now be re-tendered because the proponents failed to attract matching private investment, in part because BP Solar, which was providing the technology, announced it was getting out of solar globally. (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the Czech Republic have all slashed solar subsidies and four of the biggest solar systems suppliers have filed for bankruptcy in the past 10 months). A solar thermal project at Chinchilla in Queensland (which has suffered a $300 million cost blowout since July 2011) has had to be granted a six-month stay of execution because it is yet to secure a customer.

The former Labor Leader Mark Latham now looks prophetic in his December 2011 statement: "The Government has put aside $10 billion for so-called 'industry development' … this is the biggest industry slush fund in the history of the nation. The technologies aren't ready, the businesses aren't established to absorb this money in any productive way."

Latham is an echo of growing unrest among the more hard-headed inside the ALP, including those committed to "urgent action on climate change". Kevin Rudd's former economics adviser, Dr Andrew Charlton, referred in his Quarterly Essay 44, to "the wide gap between rhetoric and reality when it comes to clean energy … Neither wind nor solar power can currently provide continuous base-load power … these sources deliver nothing to the grid when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining". Charlton's thesis supports public investment over time but warns: "Trying to roll out large-scale renewable energy with current technology would be a terrible waste of money. We would spend billions of dollars installing expensive and inefficient renewable power with technology that will soon be outdated".

The British Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron, this week faced a revolt of 101 MPs demanding a dramatic cut to a £400 million subsidy to the "inefficient" onshore wind turbine industry. They were not without a factual basis for their concerns after Verso Economics' March 2011 evaluation of The Economic Impact of Renewable Energy Policy found that: "Policy to promote the renewable electricity sector … is economically damaging. Government should not see this as an economic opportunity, therefore, but should focus debate instead on whether these costs, and the damage done to the environment, are worth the … climate change mitigation".

That finding is supported by Bjorn Lomborg's Copenhagen Consensus Centre, which commissioned five economists to review renewables policy. Their advice? "Cutting carbon is extremely expensive, especially in the short term, because the alternatives to fossil fuels are few and costly."

The only source of large-scale, storable, renewable energy is recharge-pumping hydro-electricity. But the Greens believe climate change has permanently reduced rainfall and were founded in Tasmania on a commitment to stop the construction of dams. In a Brown/Gillard government, the taxpayer can look forward to massive, well-intentioned but poorly targeted spending on immature technologies that will deliver little enduring benefit.

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Anti-obesity propaganda blamed for new eating disorder among children

DOCTORS have started treating a new type of eating disorder, warning aggressive anti-obesity campaigns are driving healthy children to starvation.

The phenomenon has been seen by Victoria's three leading paediatric services, with doctors hospitalising children who have lost up to a third of their body weight over a few months in an irrational desire to stay thin.

Royal Children's Hospital chair of adolescent health Susan Sawyer said this eating disorder, affecting children at the upper end of the healthy weight range, was only starting to be documented.

"When you're older and overweight it's a very simple message that weight loss is good for you," Prof Sawyer said. "The difficulty with young people is that even if they are moderately overweight, they are still growing height-wise and are at risk of over-interpreting public health messages of 'low fat is good' to suggest that 'no fat is better'.

"For all intents and purposes, these adolescents have anorexia nervosa in terms of how unwell they are, the distorted body image and the amount of weight loss, but they are at a normal weight. "This is very new."

Austin Hospital's medical director of mental health, Richard Newton, said he believed some of the nine and 10-year-olds being treated were becoming ill from "the panic" created by anti-obesity campaigns. "We need to be giving healthy weight messages that don't vilify fatness, but actually encourage health," Associate Prof Newton explained. "Some of the health messages we give create panic.

"We have to reassure young people that if they do have a weight problem, it doesn't mean that makes them a bad person. "We need to encourage people to not just consider physical health, but emotional wellbeing as well."

Monash Children's head of adolescent medicine Jacinta Coleman said children developing this type of eating disorder could become sick quickly. "The kids we're seeing are at the upper end of their healthy weight range, not necessarily obese but on the more overweight side, and there is so much pressure on kids to lose weight," Dr Coleman said.

"They need to understand that you can be healthy even at a heavier weight, as long as you're active, eating nutritious food. "I think that's where the message is getting misinterpreted."

SOURCE





‘Building a new economy’ – really, Prime Minister?

Robert Carling

Throughout economic history, people have fretted about where the jobs will come from to replace those lost in declining firms and industries. We never seem to learn the lesson that they have always come from somewhere, as long as the private economy was allowed to get on with doing what it does best.

At times, concerns about declining industries are heightened by the general economic climate or the high profile of the firms or industries in decline. Australia is going through one such episode of heightened public concern as a result of the pressure that the strong Australian dollar is putting on industries such as motor vehicle manufacturing.

At its peak in the 1960s, Australian manufacturing – sheltering behind a high tariff wall – employed upwards of 1.35 million people, or more than one in every four in the workforce.
If someone in authority had announced in 1970 that manufacturing was destined to shed 400,000 of those jobs over the next 40 years, there would have been panic. How could the labour market replace 400,000 jobs and absorb the normal growth of the labour force?

Yet that is exactly what happened. Since 1984, for example, manufacturing shed 150,000 jobs (and agriculture another 70,000), while ‘health care and social assistance’ generated 800,000 more jobs; ‘professional, scientific and technical’ 600,000; construction another 600,000; retail trade 500,000; education and training 400,000; and so on.

The structure of the economy is always changing. This reality makes nonsense of the recent discovery by politicians of a ‘multi-speed economy’ – as if it has ever been anything else – and of Julia Gillard’s speech last week about ‘building a new economy’ – as if the one we’ve got is in ruins. What we are witnessing is structural change around the edges, albeit at an accelerated pace due to the high exchange rate, the high terms of trade, and the mining boom. To describe it as ‘building a new economy’ is just self-serving hype from a government that wants to be seen as thinking big and firmly in charge.

If there ever really was a need to build a new economy, God help us if we had to rely on government to do it. The only contribution government should make is to apply consistent macroeconomic, trade, competition and regulatory policies that give the private sector the best shot at maintaining high employment at high levels of productivity and low levels of inflation. This framework has no room for policies that shelter declining industries. Resources must be allowed to move to their most productive uses, and failing firms must be allowed to fail. But those employed in declining industries should not just be thrown on the labour market scrapheap. There is a case for structural adjustment assistance so that a 50-year-old car industry worker, for example, can be retrained and work happily and productively for another 15 or 20 years rather than spend the rest of his life as a dependant of the state.

SOURCE





Amnesty on truth

Despite its pretensions, Amnesty has been a far-Leftist organization for a long time -- JR

Sara Hudson

I’m ashamed to admit I was a member of Amnesty International in high school. Back then I proudly wore an Amnesty badge on a black beret. Now I cringe at the memory of my naive self lapping up their hyperbole.

The Sydney Morning Herald recently reported that Amnesty International is urging a parliamentary human rights watchdog to investigate the federal government’s plan to crack down on school truancy by linking welfare payments to school attendance. The article claimed that a recent evaluation of SEAM (Improving School Enrolment and Attendance through Welfare Reform Measure) found that suspending welfare payments did not improve school attendance.

However, that is not what the evaluation actually found. According to the report, attendance rates improved in the two communities where SEAM was trialled – from 74.4% to 79.9% in the Northern Territory and from 84.7% to 88.7% in Queensland.

Where an enrolment notice was sent, 82% of families in the Northern Territory and 84% in Queensland provided enrolment details without the need for a welfare suspension. Of the 4,688 parents in the SEAM communities, only 85 had their welfare payments suspended under the enrolment component and seven under the attendance component.

When critics complain about government’s actions to improve remote Indigenous school attendance, what is it that they expect government to do? Let parents get away with not sending their children to school?

Quarantining people’s welfare because their kids don’t attend school may seem heavy handed, but the consequences of not enforcing school attendance are worse. Already there are tens of thousands of young people in remote communities who are unable to read and write. Do we want this cohort to grow exponentially, or do we want to nip it in the bud?

A recent ad campaign by the Australian Literacy and Numeracy Foundation (ALNF) asked the question: ‘If 80% of kids in Sydney couldn’t read would you lend a hand?’ The same question could be asked about school attendance.

Granted, low school attendance is not the only reason for educational failure in remote Indigenous schools. Education departments across the country, with their separate curricula for Indigenous children, are also to blame.

In one Homeland School, an activity book based on a children’s picture book by Mem Fox is used for all the children aged 5 to 18 (or whatever age children decide that school is boring and stop going altogether).

Instead of complaining about government’s efforts to improve Indigenous school attendance, Amnesty should be complaining about what Indigenous children are being taught when they are at school!

SOURCE



11 February, 2012

"Overcrowding" in Sydney State schools?

Class-size is a snark. All the evidence shows that it is teacher quality that matters, not class size.

A point not mentioned below is that the turning to State schools mostly seems to be happening in affluent suburbs, where the quality of the pupils keeps standards up

STUDENTS in government primary schools are struggling in classes of more than 30 children as wealthy families turn their backs on expensive private colleges to save thousands of dollars in fees.

Booming public school enrolments have stretched teachers in many popular and high performing primary schools to breaking point as class sizes have jumped to as high as 32 after Year 2.

Children in their first three years of school -- who are not required to sit national literacy and numeracy tests -- have government-mandated small classes with as few as 19 students.

But in senior primary school years children are often forced into large classes, exceeding the upper ceiling of 30 laid down by the NSW Department of Education and Communities.

Data showed enrolments in the best government primary schools has been rising rapidly in recent years, particularly since parents have been able to monitor school performance in the National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy (Naplan) tests.

Public school enrolments have increased by 8400 across the state since 2009, with northern Sydney a major hot spot.

Government schools in the city's north, up against heavily marketed independents, have recorded the greatest increase in students -- 5100 over the past three years.

At Caddies Creek in western Sydney enrolments have jumped from 220 when the school opened in 2003 to 925. Mona Vale Public on the northern beaches has increased from 799 three years ago to 900. Others have risen by more than 60 per cent in six years.

Relieving principal at Mona Vale Public Greg Jones said families who would have opted for a private education were saving $20,000 a year by choosing the local government school.

"It reflects the community having increasing confidence in public education . . . we are not losing them (new students) so there is very little leakage," he said.

But a rigid staffing formula administered by the Education Department, under which schools can lose a teacher if student numbers decline by just a few, has made it almost impossible to keep all primary classes at under 30.

The Federation of Parents and Citizens Associations said large class sizes in the upper years of primary school was an issue, particularly as students in Year 3 and Year 5 were required to sit the Naplan tests.

Allison King, from Wahroonga, has three children. Her eldest, six-year-old Malachi, is in Year 2 at Waitara Public School. She believes small class sizes are important: "They're still quite little in Year 3 and with all the literacy and numeracy tests they are doing they need so much attention. I wouldn't like Malachi to be in a big class."

In a bid to juggle a limited number of teachers and classrooms, schools are forming composite classes or using "team teaching" -- with 45 or 50 students in a room with two teachers.

Education Department data showed some schools now had up to 19 composites.

The carer of two primary school children in southwestern Sydney, who did not wish to be identified, said she had been told by a teacher that the quality of learning dropped when classes became larger than 25 students.

"I once complained to a teacher because they didn't mark my child's homework when she was in Year 3 -- the teacher said they didn't have enough time to get around to marking every child's work," the carer said.

"This year the principal wants classes to stay at 27 but I think it will increase. This is because some children haven't even come back from holidays yet and are yet to be placed in classes."

Chairwoman of the Public Schools Principals Forum Cheryl McBride said most of her classes at Canley Vale Public in Sydney's west had 29 or 30 students.

"We would love to have smaller sizes . . . if you are a quality teacher you can be even more effective with smaller numbers," she said.

"Disadvantaged schools also find (larger class sizes) more challenging than affluent areas.

"But it is about competing priorities and I rate the need for more counsellors, help for special needs kids and teachers' salaries ahead of reducing class sizes."

Ms McBride agreed public schools were attracting families who might otherwise have sent their children to private schools.

An Education Department spokesman said $710 million had been spent reducing class sizes in primary schools. They now averaged 24 across all grades.

Sydney regional director Dr Phil Lambert said improved academic performance, exciting programs and "connectedness" between the school and parents of students were reasons why government schools had become more attractive. [Dream on!]

SOURCE





Dam engineers accused of using report to cover up their negligence

The sleepy public servants who misused Brisbane's perfectly adequate flood-control dam and flooded Brisbane, killing several people

A SENIOR Seqwater executive has defended the writing of a critical March report by four dam engineers accused of mismanagement of the Wivenhoe Dam during last January's floods.

Seqwater general manager of water delivery Jim Pruss has taken the stand Saturday morning at the flood inquiry to explain his role in the preparation of the report released in early March 2011.

The report is at the core of serious accusations levelled against the four engineers alleged to have disobeyed the dam manual and used low release strategies during the critical January 8/9 weekend before the flood peak last January 13.

Counsel assisting Peter Callaghan has directly accused the engineers inside the inquiry of confecting the March report to cover their tracks.

Mr Callaghan has also questioned why the engineers created a "retrospective" report by going over old data instead of recalling exactly what occurred.

Mr Pruss told the inquiry he had played a supportive role in the creation of the report and acted in "a governance role".

During the report's preparation the dam engineers would meet and decide on a process to meet the deadline which only allowed one month's preparation, he said. "We were really kicking this around in interactive sessions."

Mr Callaghan said there were concerns the report was compiled with reference to data without any attempt to capture any personal recollections of the dam engineers.

Mr Callaghan asked whether Mr Pruss agreed there was the danger of a "displacement" effect in the retrospective manner in which the report was prepared. "The record... might displace unrecorded memories of the engineers," he said. "I agree that is possible," Mr Pruss said.

SOURCE







Paramedics detail Queensland Ambulance Service staff shortages

Your government will look after you -- NOT

SERIOUS staffing shortfalls in the Queensland Ambulance Service have been revealed in a secret file that has been compiled by frontline paramedics.

The covert audit of crew shortages and station closures, obtained by The Courier-Mail, shows communities in some of the state's busiest areas are regularly being left exposed.

Despite fears of career damage or job loss, paramedics logged almost 150 examples of understaffing in recent months. The campaign, not driven by their union, includes details of shifts not being filled, 24-hour stations unattended - often at night - and officers working alone or cobbled together with staff from other areas.

Officers say the "roster holes" are caused by a "cost-sensitive management" and there simply are not enough people to cope with a rising workload, or to cover leave.

The QAS has denied the service is undermanned and says the recent Report on Government Services 2012 showed it had the highest ratio of officers per 100,000 people in the country. It said it had increased numbers by 29 per cent since 2006-2007 and there were now 2596 officers.

However, the on-road figures are considerably less, with an average 450 frontline staff on annual or accrued leave (time off in lieu) each week. Illness also takes a toll, with paramedics each averaging 79 hours of sick leave a year.

The most regular cases of understaffing logged by officers were on the Gold and Sunshine coasts. Staff shortages were also recorded at Redland Bay, Kenmore, Beenleigh, Logan West, Rockhampton and nearby Yeppoon. December was the worst month, with 83 shifts not filled at the Gold Coast, Beenleigh area and Ipswich.

On January 21, the Gold Coast was two crews down when surf lifesavers called for help after a mass rescue of six tourists at Coolangatta. First on the scene was a single officer. QAS confirmed the first unit assigned, at 2pm, was a single responder who arrived within 10 minutes, followed five minutes later by a back-up crew. Six officers attended.

A QAS spokesman said the single officer had been left short after her partner went home sick.

The Gold Coast was 15 paramedics down that day, 12 were replaced by relief or overtime provisions, but then a further two had gone home ill, leaving the region five short.

A paramedic logged that, on September 28 last year, the night shift at Coolum was moved to Nambour and a heart attack in Coolum led to a 17-minute response time. QAS confirmed the incident but it denied that Coolum had been closed.

Boxing Day brought the high-profile case where celebrity chef Matt Golinski waited 29 minutes for a paramedic at a Tewantin fire tragedy while nearby crews attended other jobs. A lone officer came from Maroochydore and a police officer had to drive the ambulance to hospital.

Paramedics told The Courier-Mail their unprecedented "snapshot of the real state of resourcing" had been a last resort. They said the log told a story of increasing pressure and mounting potential for disaster. "All we want is our shifts to be filled so we can serve the community effectively," an officer said. "The system is running too lean and the pressure on us is enormous.

"There are holes everywhere and busy areas like the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast are seriously short, especially over the holiday period where they run the same rosters as the rest of the year. This is madness given the population can double during these times."

Paramedics say the QAS would rather see a station close for the night than pay overtime or source casuals: "We only have bare-bones staffing and are worried about what would happen if we have a major incident, such as a bus crash."

Another officer said he believed management was doing the best it could, given the funding available. The QAS gets $575.8 million a year as part of the Department of Community Safety's $1.8 billion allocation.

QAS said it had a three-step plan for filling vacancies caused by sickness or leave. First, it can draw on excess staff from a 13-week relief ratio. If this is not possible, casual staff can be employed and, if neither of these options are possible, overtime can then be utilised.

The service's January data shows that even with this strategy, 26 shifts could not be filled on the Gold Coast and seven on the Sunshine Coast.

"Shifts may not be able to be filled for a variety of reasons, including sick leave, parental leave, maternity leave, military leave as well as WorkCover absence and resignations," a QAS spokesman said.

SOURCE





Carbon tax to hit car jobs

CAR parts and plastics manufacturers warn their industries could be the next to shed jobs because the carbon tax will hit them hard.

And the future of Alcoa's Geelong smelter and 600 workers' jobs was no clearer after high-level meetings yesterday involving the company's bosses, Premier Ted Baillieu and federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott. Regional Cities Minister Denis Napthine revealed only that discussions had been "frank" and Alcoa had made no specific demands.

Mr Abbott called for the carbon tax to be dropped to save the jobs, saying: "With the carbon tax, the aluminium industry is essentially dead in this country."

The Federal Government, which is giving the aluminium industry $3.5 billion in compensation, said the big problem for Alcoa was the soaring dollar, not the tax.

Despite previously flagging that the carbon tax would be a significant cost to the company, Alcoa said yesterday it was not a factor in its decision this week to launch a review of its loss-making smelter at Point Henry in Geelong.

But car parts manufacturers, who employ about 43,000 Victorians, took the opportunity to warn a carbon tax could be a decisive impost on a fragile industry.

Federation of Automotive Products Manufacturers chief executive Richard Reilly said continuing government help would be needed. "We are going to be impacted by a carbon tax, and our competitors (overseas) won't," he said. "If we want to have a car industry, we need continued co-investment."

Vinyl Council of Australia chief executive Sophi MacMillan warned the combination of a high Australian dollar, imported products and the impending carbon tax would "weed out" many exposed businesses. "It is difficult for the manufacturing sector in Australia at the moment across the board whether you are in plastics or other materials," she said.

SOURCE




Another triumph of airport security



A STUN gun found on an aircraft departing Melbourne has sparked a federal police investigation, amid concerns about airport security. The stun gun was discovered by cabin crew during final checks of the aircraft before the take-off of Virgin Australia flight DJ229 from Melbourne's Tullamarine airport to Adelaide yesterday.

Virgin Australia spokeswoman Emma Copeman said the stun gun appeared to have dropped out of a passenger's bag as a member of the cabin crew rearranged items in the overhead locker.

The Australian Federal Police (AFP) were called and confiscated the weapon. Police questioned passengers sitting nearby before clearing the aircraft for take-off, Ms Copeman said. No one was removed from the flight, she said.

Ms Copeman said the airline thoroughly checked flights upon arrival, and the stun gun was not detected when the aircraft arrived arrived earlier at Melbourne Airport.

"They check the flights completely after they arrive and depart and there was no reports of anything on the flight beforehand," she said. "I believe (the stun gun) fell out of a bag that was on the aircraft."

The AFP said investigations into the incident were continuing, adding that there had been no danger to travellers on the aircraft, they said.

Melbourne Airport spokeswoman Anna Gillett said the flight, scheduled to depart for Adelaide at 2.40pm (AEDT), was delayed only a little by the incident.

She said although the airport would work with the AFP investigators, it would not be conducting its own inquiries into how the stun gun could have evaded airport security.

SOURCE




Australian whisky catching up?

Australian wine has certainly caught up with the best in the world

A NEW multi-million-dollar whisky distillery run by renowned maker Lark will be developed at heritage Redlands Estate in the Derwent Valley [Tasmania]. The distillery and tourism project in Plenty will convert the 150-year-old estate, built by convicts, into a unique, world-class attraction.

Project developer and Redlands property owner Peter Hope said the development would include a distillery for premium, single-malt whisky. There would be cellar door sales at a visitor centre, a gift shop and tasting room housed in the old coach house.

Mr Hope said it would also include tourist accommodation in the restored building, restoration of one of Tasmania's earliest bakeries and a carriageway through Redlands Estate to the adjacent Salmon Ponds.

Bill Lark, internationally known for his award-winning Tasmanian whisky, said it would be one of only a few distilleries in the world which grew its own barley and made malt on site using a traditional process.

Mr Lark said the proposed distillery would produce 60 barrels a year initially, or about 10,000 bottles of whisky. "We'll be the only distillery in Tasmania and one of only a few in the world with a paddock-to-bottle process," he said. "We will be growing the barley, malting, distilling and bottling on site."

Mr Hope said tourists would be able to see the barley grown on the estate, irrigated by Australia's first convict-built irrigation canal system, which links with the Salmon Ponds.

The Hope family bought Redlands Estate, formerly a well-known hop farm, about four years ago. They are restoring many of the hidden features of the unique property. These include its heritage-listed buildings and gardens, which boast specimens of some of Australia's oldest European trees.

SOURCE



10 February, 2012

Federal government hits private health insurance

Private health insurance is an expensive item and this rise could well push some people out of the system -- particularly if they have large families. Pushing yet more people into the already overworked public system will hit the poor most of all

ABOUT 2.4 million wealthy Australians will pay up to $1000 a year more for health cover from July after Labor rescued its private health rebate reform, which delivers half of its projected budget surplus next year.

The government's means test on the 30 per cent private health insurance rebate is expected to receive parliamentary approval next week. Greens MP Adam Bandt backs it, Tasmanian independent MP Andrew Wilkie is "inclined to support it" and regional crossbencher Rob Oakeshott is understood to be supporting the measure.

The policy change will raise $746.3m in 2012-13, and is crucial to the government's bid to achieve its $1.5 billion surplus.

Passage of the measure through parliament three years after it was first proposed - and after it was twice rejected - will mark a significant victory for the government.

The private health rebate means test is a key plank in Labor's drive to clamp down on middle-class welfare that has also disqualified families earning $150,000 or more from the Baby Bonus and Family Tax Benefit Part B and frozen the indexation of family welfare payments until 2014.

Victorian Health Minister David Davis and health funds yesterday warned that the measure would force tens of thousands of people to drop their health cover and many more to reduce their cover, increasing the pressure on the public hospital system. And the opposition warned that it could force some doctors to withdraw their services from rural communities.

The means test would push up the price of health insurance for families earning more than $166,000 and singles on more than $83,000 a year by between $315 and $935 a year.

Families earning more than $258,000 a year and individuals more than $129,000 a year would lose the rebate entirely.

The government is still battling to win Greens support for an element of the legislation that will increase the tax penalty that applies to wealthy people who do not have private health cover.

Greens leader Bob Brown yesterday said his party would "concede" and support a rise in the Medicare levy surcharge if the government put the $80m a year it raised directly into a public dental scheme.

However, Health Minister Tanya Plibersek said she would not be "reading the newspapers one day and making a policy announcement about dental the next just because the Greens ask it".

Senator Brown confirmed his party would support the means test yesterday; Mr Oakeshott declined to comment; and Mr Wilkie said: "I can say that I am inclined to support it."

The government says three out of four, or 7.7 million, health fund members will be unaffected by the change and it predicts that only 27,000 will drop their health cover when their subsidy is reduced or abolished.

"It's important to remember that most people will not lose the subsidy entirely; as their incomes increase, the subsidy will decrease," Ms Plibersek said.

Health insurers have predicted 1.6 million health fund members would quit their health cover over the next five years if the means test goes ahead.

Mr Davis told state parliament yesterday if tens of thousands of Victorians dropped or reduced their cover because of the means test, "there would be a significant impact on the public health system".

"That would necessarily put greater pressure on the public health system, emergency departments, elective surgery lists and so forth," Mr Davis said.

Australian Medical Association chief Steve Hambleton said if the means test increased the pressure on public hospitals, the federal government should have to top up public hospital funding.

Opposition health spokesman Peter Dutton said many Australians would face higher premiums as a result of the means test and younger and healthier people might quit their cover, pushing up premiums for everyone else. "Half the nation has private health insurance and if you drive people out of private health insurance on to the public system that's already overstretched, we'll just get bad health outcomes."

Private Healthcare Australia chief Michael Armitage said he would not stop lobbying MPs to stop the means test until a vote was taken.

"My experience is until the vote is counted, no one can count on any vote," he said.

SOURCE





Demand for public hospital emergency care on the rise countrywide

DEMAND for emergency department care in Australia rose by almost 40 per cent in the past decade. A new study shows the growth in demand exceeded population growth.

Prof Gerry FitzGerald, of the Queensland University of Technology, said the ageing population might partly explain the rise. "The growth in demand for ED services is a partial contributor to the crowding in EDs," he said.

Researchers found that there was no evidence increased demand was because of patients turning up inappropriately.

The results were published by the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine.

SOURCE





Feds support new brown coal power station

Brown coal has been a great resource for Victoria because it is so cheap but Greenies hate it because it does give off some real pollution. The new plant aims to reduce pollution

Resources Minister Martin Ferguson will this morning throw a lifeline to a contentious coal-fired power plant project in Victoria's Latrobe Valley that is subject to a legal tussle with state environmental authorities.

Mr Ferguson will also pledge $100 million of Commonwealth funds for CarbonNet — a carbon capture and storage project in the Latrobe.

The Greens are strongly opposed to the controversial HRL power plant project at Morwell. In granting the project a six-month extension, Mr Ferguson will make it clear that this is the last lifeline for a project that began under the Howard government.

Following this morning's announcement, green groups will likely accuse Mr Ferguson of a double standard after he pulled the pin this week on a dawdling solar project, the Moree Solar Farm, which was in line for $306 million in government help.

Mr Ferguson re-opened the bidding on the solar money, allowing three other shortlisted projects to have another shot.

The six-month extension to the controversial HRL Dual Gas project near Morwell will allow the project to meet the terms of a contract first established by the Howard government.

The Resources Minister says this will be the final extension given to the project, which has been under way since 2009, and is the subject of a legal challenge by Environment Victoria.

Mr Ferguson has firmly rebuffed the green opposition, and argued the project, which aims to optimise brown coal and lower its emissions, should have the opportunity to proceed.

"Despite political pressure from the Greens and others, the Australian government has treated the HRL grant with the same measure of good faith that we've shown to other challenging clean energy technologies – including the Low Emissions Technology Demonstration Fund grant to Solar Systems," Mr Ferguson says.

"The government is absolutely committed to a technology neutral approach and proper administration of grant programs in accordance with due process."

In Morwell this morning, Mr Ferguson will argue the $1-billion-plus CarbonNet project will provide job opportunities in the Latrobe — and preserve the value of brown coal as Australia moves to lower carbon dioxide emissions.

"I hope today's announcement takes us one step further to not only shoring up the value of Victoria's brown coal resource, but perhaps more importantly helping to secure the economic future of the Latrobe Valley," Mr Ferguson will say this morning at a function in the regional city of Morwell.

SOURCE





Negligent education bureaucrats in NSW hit disabled children

AN investigation into the debacle that left hundreds of disabled students without school transport has blamed senior bureaucrats at the NSW Department of Education, but cleared Education Minister Adrian Piccoli.

Former director-general of education Ken Boston today handed his report into the bungle to Premier Barry O'Farrell, who said it demonstrated a "systemic breakdown" within the department.

On the first day of the school year, 740 disabled students were left without transport, after operators pulled out of some runs at the last minute because of complaints over a new payment system.

Mr Boston's report is scathing of the department's handling of the operators' complaints. He says the department repeatedly failed to tell Mr Piccoli that some students could be left without transport, even though it had known since October there was a risk that would happen.

"The prevailing culture seems to have been one of telling senior officers, and even the director-general and the minister, what it was thought they wanted to hear, not what they needed to know," the report says.

"I criticise the Deputy Director-General, Finance and Infrastructure and the Director of Finance Shared Services for failing to deliver this $80 million program of vital importance to the most vulnerable children in NSW, and their parents.

"They have damaged the reputation of the Department of Education and Communities in the opinion of the transport operators, the community and the NSW Government." Mr Boston recommended disciplinary action be taken against both senior education officials.

Mr O'Farrell, who received the report at 11am (AEDT), said he was angered by the report's findings. "What the report details is a systemic breakdown in the Department of Education and Communities in relation to this transport scheme for children with disabilities," he said in Sydney.

"As I read the report I got increasingly angry at what was clearly a lack of focus by the department on the needs of those children and their families. "I have asked the Director-General of Education and Communities to implement the recommendations and advise me what action will be taken against the two senior staff members about which Dr Boston made specific recommendations of disciplinary action."

The State Opposition has demanded the sacking of Mr Piccoli, saying he should have acted when he was told there were problems with the contract last year. However, Mr O'Farrell defended his minister, saying his department had failed to advise him about the potential debacle despite repeated requests for information.

"Mr Piccoli and his staff have at all times sought to handle this as is appropriate," he said.

Mr Piccoli said he was angry that he didn't get the sort of advice that he should have been getting from the department. "I asked all of the questions I should have asked," he said. "I should have been given better advice and more accurate advice so that this problem could have been averted. "The advice that was given to me was insufficient, wrong.

"The Boston report clearly says that the department have let me down and the Government down, but have most importantly let those parents down of those students who were affected on the first day of school."

SOURCE






Telstra forces BigPond customers to use Hotmail

This sounds very pesky. I store a lot of photos in a "blog" facility associated with my Bigpond A/c. Will they have to be moved to a new address? Altering addresses would create a huge workload

TELSTRA is set to ditch its BigPond email service and force its 4.2 million Australian customers onto Hotmail and Windows Live accounts.

BigPond users' addresses won't change, but their emails, photos and data will now be stored online in a cloud-based server operated by Microsoft.

The change will apply to all users with a Telstra BigPond Webmail or Myinbox account from April.

Telstra media head JB Rousselot said account holders would be given help to make the switch.

"To assist customers we have set up a dedicated self-help website including 'how to' videos, Q&As and updates on progress of the changeover," he said.

"Our social media channels and 13 POND are ready to help our customers if they need help with moving photos, blogs and other applications."

But the Herald Sun believes those who choose not to transfer their material may risk losing it entirely.

More than 500,000 Victorian accounts will be affected in what is an extension of the alliance Telstra formed with Microsoft in 2008.

Kevin Grobler from Microsoft Australia said the new system would expand existing services and more readily enable sharing.

"The value for BigPond customers is that Hotmail offers a fast, secure and reliable email service," he said. The new system offered "enhanced security features, and virtually unlimited storage of photos and documents in the cloud with SkyDrive".

A spokesperson for Telstra indicated the account migration would most likely begin in April or May.

SOURCE



9 February, 2012

Who stole the "stolen generation"?

There was in fact no such thing, just social workers doing a job that they are now too afraid to do. Rather than taking black kids away from abusive families, they now just let the black kids die: Another malign effect of Leftist lies

But there WAS authoritarian treatment of blacks in earlier times. And who was it doing that? The following is a brief excerpt from a biography of Ned Hanlon, a LABOR party Premier of Qld. and still a revered figure in the ALP. Labor Premier Peter Beattie named a hospital after him a few years back

How odd that the left yammer on about the stolen generation but glide over REAL discrimination against Aborigines

As the minister largely responsible for the development and implementation of the A.L.P.'s welfare policies, Hanlon held assumptions and attitudes that had important consequences for the character of Queensland society. Under his administration Aborigines continued to be subjected to 'enforced population transfers, confinement to particular areas under relatively arbitrary and quite authoritarian regimes, excessive moral scrutiny, interference in intimate human relationships, supervised breeding, imposed placement and calculatedly inferior educational training for their children, control over their labour conditions, wages and personal property, and even suppression of their ''injurious" or menacing ''customs" or practices'. In these ways, Aborigines who, in their 'natural' state—according to Hanlon—were 'about 1,000,000 years behind the white race', were 'protected' by the state.






$1bn to keep "asylum-seekers" in detention

THE Federal Government has been handed a $1 billion bill for the running of Australia's detention centres.

Foreign-owned global security company Serco secretly renegotiated its contract with the Department of Immigration just before Christmas.

The new four-year contract to manage immigration detention centres - including Maribyrnong in Melbourne - has quadrupled from the original figure of $280 million.

The Opposition labelled the blowout a failed "stimulus program" for asylum seekers. The number of detention centres has increased from 12 to 20 under Labor.

While the centres accommodate visa overstayers and illegal workers, the Government admits they make up a small number compared with asylum seekers.

"When Labor came to office there were just four people in detention who had arrived illegally by boat," Opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison said. "After four years of policy failures on our borders, this grew to more than 5600."

The variation to the contract with Serco - from 2009 to 2014 - was made on December 2 last year. It had been revalued in July last year to $712 million, meaning the cost blowout in the past nine months is almost $400 million.

"The original contract did not cover the number of sites we have now expanded to," Immigration Department spokesman Sandi Logan said. "It has been driven by a simple reason - the expansion in the number of centres in the network."

Immigration Minister Chris Bowen said the new contract would not affect the Budget.

Greens senator Sarah Hansen-Young said boat people should be immediately released from detention into the community.

SOURCE






Medical tourism hits Australia too

It's common in Britain

FOREIGNERS are taking up hospital beds, many without paying, and leaving hospitals with millions in unpaid bills. Angry doctors say the burden effectively pushes Australians down waiting lists.

More than 30,000 foreign citizens were treated in Victoria's hospitals in 2010-11, leaving the state's healthcare system with $6 million in unpaid bills. Many did not pay, sparking calls for travel insurance to be made a visa requirement.

While most international patients were treated after falling ill or being injured while here, thousands made the most of the state's world-class medical amenities for non-urgent treatments.

Less than half of the 11,372 international patients given a hospital bed were facing medical emergencies, with more than one in five having elective surgery and even more filling maternity wards, Health Department data released to the Herald Sun reveals.

The number of foreigners admitted to hospital has almost tripled in six years. Emergency departments are seeing twice as many foreigners as six years ago, treating 19,429 in 2010-11.

The most common reasons visitors use our hospitals are births, maternity services, kidney failure, cancer, colds, flu, injuries and infections.

Foreigners using our hospitals most commonly come from India, China, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Vietnam, Fiji, the US, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. None of these countries are among the 11 with whom Australia has reciprocal healthcare agreements.

But their citizens accounted for more than half the foreigners admitted to our hospitals and treated in emergency departments.

Monash Hospital was the most popular, treating almost 4300 foreign patients, followed by Royal Women's with 3103.

Stephen Parnis, Australian Medical Association state vice-president, said making insurance a visa requirement for foreigners should be considered.

All doctors would be concerned by foreigners coming to Victoria to have a baby or seek elective care and "effectively pushing Australian citizens further down the waiting list". "If people have the means to come to Australia on an international holiday they should have the means to make allowance for their own healthcare," he said.

SOURCE






Ned Hanlon's "Free" hospitals are not so free anyore

Ned Hanlon's "free" Qld. hospitals pre-dated Britain's NHS by 5 years -- 1944 vs. 1949 -- but the trajectory has been downward for both

PARENTS of children with ear, nose and throat problems are being told to consider paying for private treatment, despite living in one of the most disadvantaged areas of southeast Queensland.

Doctors in Logan, south of Brisbane, are at a loss to know where to refer children who have ear, nose and throat conditions for public treatment.

The Mater Children's Hospital is accepting only some ENT referrals and, despite Queensland Health's promises of a pediatric ENT service at the Logan Hospital, it is yet to receive funding.

A recent letter, signed by Logan ENT surgeon Bernie Whitfield, suggests general practitioners should consider referring the patient to a private practitioner.

"Due to high demand the Mater Children's Hospital is unable to accept routine ENT referrals and is returning them to Logan," the letter says. "Unfortunately, Logan Hospital is currently not funded to provide pediatric ENT services and we are unable to review your patient."

ENT director at the Princess Alexandra and Logan hospitals, Ben Panizza, said Logan received a minimum 30 pediatric ENT referrals a week but was not equipped to deal with them.

"That's led to approximately 1000 kids waiting to be seen," Dr Panizza said. "That's probably a figure which is on the conservative side. "There's a huge unmet need for pediatric ENT services in the Logan area.

"We've got the manpower to do it, we need the capital requirements from Queensland Health for outpatient facilities and theatres to allow us to do this."

Australian Medical Association state president Richard Kidd called on Queenslanders to lobby MPs and Health Minister Geoff Wilson to take urgent action.

He said children who needed ENT procedures, such as having grommets inserted, would be condemned to potentially years of partial deafness if they failed to receive the surgery. "That's a major impediment in their social and educational development," said Dr Kidd, a general practitioner.

Logan Hospital Medical Services director Jennifer King said funding had been marked to create a dedicated pediatric outpatient area.

Mater Children's Health Services executive director Mark Waters said if patients could not be seen within 12 months, they were notified the appointment could not be accepted so alternative arrangements could be made.

SOURCE



8 February, 2012

Opposition to coal seam gas based on worst-case scenarios

Scot MacDonald

IN THE United States, the emergence of the shale gas industry is creating thousands of jobs and breathing economic life into depressed regions.

Australia, and in particular regional Australia, has a similar opportunity with coal seam gas.

As a member of the NSW legislative council inquiry into coal seam gas, I’ve listened to hours of hearings, read countless submissions and spoken to dozens of stakeholders.

Most of the witnesses were very negative towards the nascent industry and, other than industry spokesmen or government officials, few were openly supportive.

Of those who opposed coal seam gas, I can’t recall a single piece of evidence or data to support their case. They were based on NIMBYsm, supposition, emotion and worst-case scenarios.

I’ve lived and worked in regional NSW or Queensland for more than 30 years.

In all that time, the mantra has been more regional jobs, more regional businesses, better infrastructure, reversing population decline, building export businesses, keeping our children in local jobs and so on. Now we have the prospect of an industry in coal seam gas that can deliver on those aspirations.

While no one can argue with the need for environmental caution and appropriate safeguards, the unwillingness to see the positives in the industry has been confronting.

What has disappointed me the most has been the failure of leadership and vision in our regional communities.

With the exception of the mayors of Gunnedah, Narrabri and Tamworth, local government representatives have been happy to be silent or run with the crowd.

For me this is an intergenerational issue. While those with assets are eager to “lock the gate” and maintain the status quo, the cost of turning our backs on coal seam gas will be borne mainly by future generations.

North West NSW can become the source of cheap, accessible, reliable energy.

In a world where all these features will be scarce, our region has the opportunity to transform itself from an agriculturally dependent, low-employment, low-growth, low-income demographic to a dynamic, developing, mixed-economic region with a key comparative advantage of affordable energy. Right now, international investors are looking for these features to build energy reliant industries.

For example, North West NSW is a heavy importer of nitrogen fertilisers for agricultural production. Perhaps we could follow the US trend to build fertiliser factories close to the source of its major raw material, which is gas.

Right now, these opportunities are being seized in places like the USA and Canada.

I would like to challenge the army of economic development officers, chambers of commerce, regional development boards and local governments from Tamworth to the Queensland border to take up the challenge for their communities of seizing this once-in-a-century game changer.

SOURCE





Rupert Murdoch's MOTHER is still alive



At that rate Rupert will be around for a while yet

DAME Elisabeth Murdoch is celebrating her 103rd birthday today.

The philanthropist and mother of media titan Rupert Murdoch will celebrate with friends and family, including grandson Lachlan Murdoch, at a concert in her honour at the Melbourne Recital Centre.

Born on February 8, 1909, Dame Elisabeth was 18 when she met and married newspaper journalist Keith Murdoch. They had four children - Helen, Rupert, Anne and Janet.

Known for her work in child health and welfare and the arts, Dame Elisabeth reportedly supports more than 100 charities annually.

She is also an avid gardener and regularly opens up her immaculate gardens at Cruden Farm, near Melbourne, to the public.

SOURCE




1500 hospital beds closed in Victoria

A SECRET nurse bed toll reveals more than 1500 Victorian hospital beds were closed in a month. Fed-up nurses have recorded bed closures for the first time, saying it is occurring on an unprecedented scale.

Australian Nursing Federation state secretary Lisa Fitzpatrick blamed the closures on the State Government's failure to provide hospitals with adequate funding. "The diagnosis is grim. Our hospitals are very sick and failing Victorians," Ms Fitzpatrick said.

The beds, which included paediatric, surgical and intensive care, were closed for varying periods between December 23, 2011, and January 25, 2012.

The Australian Medical Association and the Government said beds were closed in holiday periods because medical staff took leave and fewer operations were performed.

"The numbers of beds that were being closed over that period was about par for the course," AMA Victoria vice-president Dr Stephen Parnis said.

Ms Fitzpatrick said they accepted that surgeons took holidays, but only 40 per cent of the 1516 beds were surgical.

"There aren't fewer people attending emergency departments," Ms Fitzpatrick said.

"People don't stop having strokes in January ... they still have medical conditions that require hospital treatment."

A hospital source told the Herald Sun nurses were frustrated by emergency department queues and surgery cancellations.

"Waiting lists are so long, we should be operating and clearing the backlog, there shouldn't be closed beds," he said.

Ms Fitzpatrick said empty beds were unacceptable, particularly after the Government stated the nurses' industrial action, which closed almost 1000 beds, had "threatened patient safety and welfare".

The union, which is in dispute with the Government over pay, nurse-to-patient ratios and health assistants, will publish the bed toll on its website.

Department of Health figures show in the past four years there were between 834 and 1026 bed closures in December.

A spokeswoman for Health Minister David Davis said up to 20 per cent of staff from major health services might be on leave during December and January.

She said the Government had promised 100 new beds in its first year and had increased health financing.

SOURCE




Greens press case for billion-dollar dental scheme

As usual, the Greens are to the Left of the ALP

The Greens are insisting the Federal Government allocate at least $1 billion in this year's budget to meet a commitment on taxpayer-funded dental care.

The Greens have proposed introducing a Medicare-style dental scheme, which could cost about $5.5 billion, and a report on the feasibility of the plan is due from the National Advisory Council on Dental Health this week.

The Opposition thinks the Government is gearing up to scrap the dental deal with the Greens, after Prime Minister Julia Gillard said honouring the commitment needed to be weighed up in the budget process.

Greens health spokesman Richard Di Natale says he is optimistic, but wants significant start-up funds.

"There are existing schemes that can be used, but we think that unless you're talking about a scale of investment in the order of $1 billion or more that you're not going to make the necessary inroads in this year's budget that we need to make," he said.

"We do have an agreement with the Government that there needs to be significant investment.

"I'm optimistic that they will follow through with the recommendations of that report which I'm sure will recommend a significant investment in dental health over the coming years."

Greens MP Adam Bandt asked Ms Gillard whether she would honour her commitment to the Greens. In answering, the Prime Minister detailed spending commitments the Government had made to date, and then added: "But as we weigh what we can do in the budget process, we will of course make the appropriate fiscal decisions for the nation."

SOURCE



7 February, 2012

Parents camp out for exclusive enrolment

Shades of Britain! Ascot is of course a high socioeconomic area. It's the smarter and better behaved kids that make the school

PARENTS are sleeping on the footpath outside a popular state school in order to gain an enrolment spot for their children. Dedicated mums and one dad camped on the footpath in tents and chairs outside Brisbane's Ascot State School on Sunday night, in an effort to secure their child a coveted place.

While students who reside within the school's catchment area are guaranteed enrolment, others must vie for the remaining spots.

Education Queensland's Chris Rider said applications for students not living within the catchment zone were accepted annually from 9am on the first Monday in February.

Parents started arriving from 4pm on Sunday for yesterday's sign-up day. One woman whose child graduated from Year 7 last year, was lining up to secure a place for her second child. "We only want the best for our kids," mother-of-two Kerry Douglas said.

New Farm resident Georgie Robson said she had left her children with her husband while she camped at the school. "One of the girls did a drive by. We'd planned to get here about 10 but someone rang us and said 'get your skates on there are already four people here'," she said. "We dropped everything and left our husbands with our kids. I've got four kids under four and just went 'sorry got to go'."

The women said the publication by The Courier-Mail of the school's audit results, which showed the high calibre of Ascot State School, had reinforced the desire to enrol their children there. Ascot State School received top marks in the audit data for the highest performing school. Ascot, along with Eagle Junction and Wilston, are Queensland's most sought after state primary schools.

The mothers said they had been planning the camp-out for a year.

Holly Westaway said she had calculated property choices in order to improve her children's chances of getting into the school. "We moved from the Gold Coast and rented in the area just so we could get our children into the school," Mrs Westaway said. "Then we bought a street away."

Mr Rider said schools, such as Ascot State School, had developed enrolment management plans in consultation with the P and C, parents and the school community. "When developing an enrolment management plan, schools allow for in-catchment growth during the school year and ensure an even spread of students across all year levels," he said.

The audits, set up as part of the State Government's school improvement agenda, were carried out at all 1257 state schools and education centres in 2010, with 460 schools reaudited in 2011.

SOURCE






Queensland Health charade

Job ads give only the appearance of action on a bloated bureaucracy

MARK Twain, responding to his obituary in a New York newspaper, announced: "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." So, too, is Premier Anna Bligh's claim that "Queensland Health as we know it is over".

Over the past two Saturdays, QH has advertised locally, interstate, and nationally, offering 19 senior positions - all top-level bureaucrats, presumably with generous salaries, but no clinical qualifications whatsoever - comprising 17 "chief executive officers", one "chief operations officer" and one "executive director".

What Bligh calls QH's "sick administrative performance" certainly calls for a thorough cleansing of the Augean stables. The Jayant Patel tragedies, the payroll fiasco, the incomprehensible decision to build a new children's hospital in Bligh's electorate, the apparent theft of an estimated $16.6 million of taxpayers' funds, are all symptoms of a bureaucracy which is terminally incompetent. But is the employment of 19 additional high-end health bureaucrats the solution?

Out of every taxpayer dollar paid to QH, as little as 25c, perhaps only 20c, gets through to clinical service delivery. Actual clinicians represent less than three-eighths, perhaps as few as a third, of QH's 70,000-plus workforce.

Compare the British Colonial Office in 1935, when a mere 173 civil servants sufficed to administer an empire encompassing a quarter of the world's population and a similar proportion of its land mass. But then, empire-building within QH expands at a far quicker pace than the British Empire ever did.

The recent advertisements are obviously intended not to attract serious applicants. The closing dates - ranging between February 13 and 27 - are extraordinarily short. And there is no mention of pay scales or other benefits; not even a non-specific reference to an "attractive salary package". Their manifest object is to give the appearance of a recruiting effort, when the positions are already earmarked for internal promotions.

Under caretaker conventions, as summarised in the Bligh Government's own Cabinet Handbook, "a caretaker government should avoid, wherever possible, making appointments of significance in the caretaker period". The Government will be in caretaker mode from not later than February 19, when Parliament is dissolved. The published closing dates make it practically impossible for any external appointments to be considered before then.

Indeed, if external applications were being seriously sought, finalising such appointments before the election would be difficult. And what would be the point of advertising positions which an incoming government may not - most probably, will not - wish to fill; which an incoming government may - most probably, will - make redundant?

What, moreover, would be the merit in making external appointments to positions which are unlikely to exist under a new government? Why would anyone - let alone a person qualified for such a job - bother applying for a post which may never be filled; or accept such a position, before March 24, knowing that it is likely to be abolished?

Yet, eight weeks after Bligh announced that "Queensland Health as we know it is over", that organisation is not only alive, but still expanding, with the publication of advertisements for 19 bureaucratic positions at the highest echelon.

The position descriptions require the successful applicants to adhere to "Queensland Health policy"; provide "regular performance reports to ... Queensland Health"; and "Ensure ... engagement with ... Queensland Health".

The "Key skill requirements/competencies" include "personal qualities consistent with the Queensland Health values ... and leadership framework". The Director-General of Queensland Health is listed as a "key stakeholder" with whom successful applicants "will be required to engage, liaise or negotiate".

In the same media statement on December 12, Bligh gave her personal assurance that the bureaucrats responsible for "the sick administrative performance" of QH "have nothing to fear"; that "their jobs are safe" - promises which no incoming government would be silly enough to repeat. Does it make sense that QH would be advertising nationwide to recruit another 19 top-drawer bureaucrats, rather than redeploying some of the tens of thousands whom Bligh has personally promised never to sack?

So, are these advertisements just another monumental stuff-up by QH and the Bligh Government, or something more sinister? Is it, as it appears to be, a last-ditch effort to fill some cushy positions with another 19 "Labor mates"?

Are QH and the Bligh Government attempting to lock in a future government to their own road map of how "the sick administrative performance of this mammoth organisation" should be perpetuated? Or merely to saddle taxpayers with the cost of 19 redundancy packages for those who are most to blame for the "sick administrative performance"?

SOURCE





Typical bureaucracy: Locked gate traps residents during bushfire

In a bureaucracy no-one is responsible and no-one gives a damn


Black Saturday survivors David and Justine Boscaglia at the locked gate near their Kinglake West home on Coombs Rd.

A COUPLE who lost their home on Black Saturday say residents were trapped in their own street during a total fire ban on Sunday because of council bungling.

David and Justine Boscaglia, of Kinglake West, said Whittlesea City Council installed a gate at a fire access track in Coombs Rd more than a year ago to prevent it becoming a hoon playground and had not unlocked it.

Mrs Boscaglia said the couple rang the CFA - which has a key - on Sunday and crews arrived only to discover the padlock appeared to have been swapped. "Basically residents of Coombs Rd are entrapped on a day of total fire ban. It's crazy," she said. The mercury reached 27C in the Kinglake area on Sunday.

Mr Boscaglia said the gate to the track, owned by Melbourne Water, had been locked for two weeks.

Whittlesea Council CEO David Turnbull said an investigation had been launched into why the gates had not been unlocked.

SOURCE







2011, and the Unlucky Country finally gets a carbon dioxide tax

Australian voters entered 2011 with the pre-election commitment of Prime Minister Julia Gillard still sounding in their ears: "There will be no carbon [dioxide] tax under a government that I lead".

Nonetheless, cognitive dissonance had already arrived on the Canberra political scene, in the shape of the Multi-Party Committee on Climate Change (MPCCC) that was established in late 2010 in order to plan for the introduction of just such a tax.

Thereafter, the political year yielded a spectacular display of chicanery, scientific malfeasance, media bias and economic and social irresponsibility, all underpinned by a confusion of both purpose and morality and accompanied by an uncertainty of outcomes: and that’s just the global warming picture.

The way that science works

Climate change is self-evidently a natural process. Warmings, coolings, cyclones, floods, droughts and bushfires have been coming and going since long before human industrial processes started adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere; and, indeed, since before there were humans at all.

The appropriate question is therefore not whether climate change is “real”, but the more specific one of whether human-related greenhouse emissions are causing dangerous global warming.

Scientists assess such speculative ideas against a norm called the null hypothesis, which, following long historical practice, is fashioned to be the simplest interpretation of any given set of material facts.

The null hypothesis for today’s observed climate changes is therefore that they are of natural causation, unless and until specific evidence accrues otherwise.

Contrary to prevailing political belief, and to the alarmist messages that come from the UN’s discredited Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), much amplified by environmental organisations and a compliant media, scientists have searched for this accrual in vain.

Instead, tens of thousands of scientific papers published in reputable journals delineate changes in climate and the environment, and ecological responses, that are entirely consistent with the null hypothesis of natural causation. In contrast, not a single paper exists that demonstrates an evidential cause-effect link between change in an environmental variable (be that more or less storms, floods, droughts, cyclones, honeyeaters or even polar bears) and warming caused by human-related carbon dioxide emissions.

Given the astonishing amounts of money that are now poured into climate change research, it is no surprise that 2011 saw the publication of several thousand more scientific papers that contain data relevant to this problem. But it may perhaps be to some readers’ surprise that these papers simply added yet more evidence in favour of the validity of the null hypothesis.

2011 in review: the two universes of climate change

The 33 selected discoveries and events discussed in the main review represent but a small part of the recent evidence that challenges the belief that dangerous global warming is being caused by human-related carbon dioxide emissions. Contradictions of nearly every shibboleth of the AGW faith are present on the list, and every argument that has been advanced in favour of the speculative dangerous warming hypothesis is now feeling the breeze of contradictory fact. Many additional articles that contradict the prevailing wisdom can be found in the more comprehensive reviews of the Non-governmental International Committee on Climate Change (NIPCC).

The 2011 climate year, then, as judged from both media coverage and new scientific literature, has confirmed the existence of two entirely parallel universes of climate thought.

In the first universe, independent scientific and public opinion are moving inexorably towards the rejection of climate alarmism and the costly measures that are perpetrated in its cause. An important manifestation of this opinion was the recent publication of a reasoned statement of disagreement with warming alarmism in the Wall Street Journal, signed by 16 independent scientists. Their conclusion is that global warming is not a serious problem, and that even if it were the solutions being offered wouldn’t fix it anyway.

In contrast, the IPCC and its supporters, who include the Australian government as one of the most faithful acolytes, continue to project unrelenting alarmism. Towards which end they encourage the implementation of expensive, unnecessary and ineffectual measures that they claim will mitigate dangerous warming, such as carbon dioxide taxation and the massive subsidisation of feel good eco-bling like solar farms and windfarms.

Yet the IPCC is a discredited organisation that remains under heavy attack, and its forthcoming 5th Assessment Report is facing a barrage of fundamental criticism even before its publication. For the distinguished Dutch chemical engineer and philosopher of science, Professor Arthur Rörsch, has issued a critique of the draft version of this report, entitled “Post-modern science and the scientific legitimacy of the IPCC’s WGI AR5 draft report”. Noting that the IPCC is a political organization that applies post-modern “logic” to the science that it summarizes, Rörsch calls for thorough independent investigations to be instituted into climate change policy in Europe, thereby mirroring conclusions drawn, and similar calls made, by independent scientists in Australia, Canada and other countries over the last five years.

The political costs of irrational climate policy

The huge social, environmental, economic and (so far limited, but increasing) political costs of pursuing irrational climate policies have to date simply been swatted aside, both in Australia and overseas.

But now that major discrepancies have emerged between genuine scientific knowledge and IPCC advice, sensible policy reappraisals are occurring in many countries. In these circumstances, the compulsive Australian self-harm of continuing to demonize carbon dioxide emissions has become politically enigmatic – not to mention the ultimate ironic twist that the emissions are actually environmentally beneficial, and additionally so at a time of likely global cooling.

When the accumulating new research knowledge, and the reassurance that it provides, are compared with the statements and actions of the Australian government during 2011, an enormous disconnect becomes apparent. And when measure is taken also of the present state of Australian public opinion, and of the rapidly shifting, worldwide political movement away from climate alarmism, and away from punitive measures against carbon dioxide, that disconnect morphs into full blown cognitive dissonance.

In which state of mind, the Labor-Independent-Green government in Australia last year passed what must be the worst legislative package ever approved by a federal parliament. “Worst” because it marks a direct attack on the cheap power prices that formerly underpinned the Australian economy, thereby being a direct attack also on the living standards of all citizens – and especially the less well-off.

Those with the most to lose include not only individual citizens, but also the very lobby groups that have so assiduously fomented the dangerous warming scare.

Including, in particular, environmentalists (because anti-carbon dioxide measures, and the destruction of wealth and landscape desecration that go with them, harm the environment), scientists (because piping a called tune is the very antithesis of science), business interests (because shareholder value is never going to be enhanced by encouraging large and irrational increases in the cost of power) and politicians (because their atavistic need to be elected will not be facilitated by sharply attacking the living standards of their constituency).

The way forward will be determined by an election

The Australian government and its climate-alarmist supporters are now trapped deep inside a blind alley with walls that are labelled “scientific consensus” and “public consensus”. These have always been political siren calls, but the first is a nonsense by definition, and, in that fickle fashion that public opinion often exhibits, the public consensus dramatically reversed its direction during 2009-2010, partly because of the Climategate affair and the attendant loss of IPCC’s virginity.

Former British PM Margaret Thatcher well understood that it is the nature of consensus policy-making to spawn legislative stupidities such as Australia’s carbon dioxide legislation. As she said so well:

"Consensus is the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot [otherwise] get agreement on the way ahead."

Well, people did object but a carbon dioxide tax has still become law, and as they pass from 2011 into 2012 Australian voters are probably less interested in pondering causes, consensual or otherwise, and more interested in action towards rectifying what they see as an economically damaging, expensive, regressive, ineffectual and unnecessary new tax.

They are therefore likely to be contemplating closely the carefully chosen words of Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott:

"We have a Prime Minister who is the great betrayer of the Australian people. She was absolutely crystal-clear before the last election – 'There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead'. We [the Coalition] can repeal the tax, we will repeal the tax, we must repeal the tax. I am giving you the most definite commitment any politician can give that this tax will go. This is a pledge in blood. This tax will go."

Barring unforeseen and extraordinary circumstances, and terminally bored though we all are with the debate already, the next Australian federal election will therefore be won or lost on the global warming/carbon dioxide tax issue.

By pulling out of the Kyoto protocol, and scheduling formal Senate hearings on global warming from independent scientists, as they did in December, Canada has blazed a new trail.

The question is whether Australia’s Coalition partners will now muster the courage to honour Mr Abbott’s pledge, and to administer the bureaucratic restructuring and legislative repeal that is needed to restore sanity to our national climate policy.

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6 February, 2012

Leftist hatred of Qantas

Unionists don't care if they destroy their own jobs. They just want a win

QANTAS CEO Alan Joyce has said he has "grave fears" for the future of the airline if laws are changed to increase wages for international staff and to keep heavy maintenance in Australia.

Mr Joyce also told a Senate Inquiry the Qantas Group may have to sell its budget offshoot Jetstar and withdraw from services connecting Darwin and Cairns to Asia and Europe if the amendments go ahead.

Mr Joyce and Jetstar CEO Bruce Buchanan are facing a grilling at the inquiry in Canberra today.

Among the issues the inquiry will address is the possibility that Jetstar has broken Australian immigration laws by bringing in foreign flight attendants at lower wages on long daily rosters to work domestic flights.

The committee met twice last November to consider two bills - one concerning flight crew arrangements and the other the enforcement of the intent of the original Qantas Sale Act of 1992.

Mr Joyce said he had "grave fears for the future of Qantas" if the legislative proposals come into effect.

Amendments to the Qantas Sale Act, which was introduced to ensure Qantas remained a majority Australian-owned flag carrier while also answering to shareholders, would strangle its capacity to run its business, he said.

Senator Nick Xenophon's proposed amendments include requiring that a Qantas Group airline such as Jetstar conduct the majority of its heavy maintenance in Australia. "Jetstar would then be confronting competitors who enjoy a lower cost base by doing virtually none of their heavy maintenance in Australia," Mr Joyce said.

"Those of us running Qantas would have to face a choice: allow Jetstar to fail within the confines of the Qantas Sale Act, or sell it to allow it to succeed outside it."

Mr Joyce also said amendments to the Cabin Crew Bill would destroy jobs, especially in regional Australia. "Whenever Qantas Group airlines use foreign crew and Australian crew on the same flights, Australian crew operate under Australian wages and conditions and foreign-based crews on the terms and conditions of their domicile country where they are employed and where they live," he said. "This is standard practice adopted by airlines all over the world."

Mr Joyce said this occurred on a limited number of flights within Australia involving a domestic sector of an international flight, enabling it to service regional destinations such as Cairns and Darwin.

"If the amendments are passed, and international crews are treated as Australian in terms of wages and conditions on domestic legs of international flights, we will no longer be able to viably operate those international services," he said.

"The proposed amendments would quite simply force the Qantas Group to withdraw from services connecting Darwin and Cairns to the tourism and trade markets of Asia and Europe."

Mr Joyce said Qantas must adapt or die.

SOURCE




Call for overhaul of emergency ward wait times

REDUCING the time patients spend in hospital emergency departments to under four hours saves lives, a new study suggests.

Researchers studied six Perth hospital emergency departments before and after the introduction of a "four-hour rule" which aimed to discharge or admit 90 per cent of patients within that time.

They reported a 13 per cent reduction in the number of deaths in the three largest hospitals. That equated to about 80 lives in 2010/11.

"The introduction of the four-hour rule encouraged hospitals as a whole to share the responsibility for, and help solve the problem of overcrowding in EDs," the researchers wrote in the latest Medical Journal of Australia.

"This whole-of-hospital approach appears to have led to better communication between the EDs and the wards, with an increased appreciation of each other's problems and challenges.

"While these findings apply to the West Australian health system, there is no reason to suspect that other Australian health systems should fare differently if their hospitals similarly commit to whole-of-hospital reform."

The latest Queensland Health figures show only 69 per cent of patients requiring a hospital bed in December were admitted to one within eight hours of arrival at an ED.

Commenting on the research, Canberra-based emergency specialist Drew Richardson said new national emergency access targets, to be rolled out in 2012, would progressively require a higher proportion of ED patients to be treated within a four-hour time frame.

Professor Richardson, of the Australian National University Medical School, said although he supported the four-hour targets, he called for more research.

"This study suggests very firmly that there was a reduction of death rates in association with the reduction in time spent in the ED, but it doesn't prove it," he told The Courier-Mail.

"We require more data. One of the things the study did not look at was people who died outside of hospital. You've got to be absolutely sure people aren't going home from hospital and dying. I don't think they are but that is something you've got to be sure of. "A more definitive study is required."

In a separate Medical Journal Australia article, Judy Lowthian, of Melbourne's Centre of Research Excellence in Patient Safety, and colleagues, suggested a significant redesign of the emergency health care system would be needed to achieve four-hour targets.

"Current models of emergency and primary care are failing to meet community needs at times of acute illness," they wrote.

"Given these trends, the proposed four-hour targets in 2012 may be unachievable unless there is significant redesign of the whole system."

SOURCE




Muslim privacy comes at a cost to ratepayers

Why can't the local mosque cough up?

RATEPAYERS will pay for a $21,000 blowout in the cost of special curtains to protect Muslim women's privacy during female-only exercise classes at a suburban pool. Monash Council has approved the extra cash, bringing the cost of the curtains to more than $66,000.

Last year, it won an exemption from anti-discrimination laws to run the women-only sessions at its Clayton pool, but failed to get a Victorian Multicultural Commission grant to pay for the curtains.

Monash councillor Denise McGill yesterday questioned the amount. "We could have bought 600 (Islamic) swimsuits for the price we are paying for the curtains," she said. Cr McGill said she did not oppose the sessions, but believed the money could be better spent.

Islamic Council of Victoria spokesman Nazeem Hussain said: "The purchase of these curtains, and whether they are too expensive, is a decision for the councillors to make, and if the constituents aren't happy ... they are able to object."

Monash Mayor Stefanie Perri said it was wrong to say the sessions were only for Muslims or other minorities. "This ... will allow women from all backgrounds the opportunity to enjoy a girls' night out in Clayton and will include a series of dry exercise programs, including Zumba and yoga classes," Cr Perri said.

As reported in the Herald Sun last year, the push for the sessions came from a group of mainly African Muslim women. Council accepted a screen was needed for "cultural reasons". Women will pay a fee for the classes.

The extra money needed for the curtains will be drawn from Monash pool funds.

SOURCE







John Roskam and the IPA -- a conservative crusade

John Roskam’s political sensibilities were kindled at age 14, when he read George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” in one night. Combined with his parents’ small-business, anti-Communist leanings, the book inspired a passion for free market liberalism that continues 30 years later.

“You could not be anything other than in favour of the individual and individual choice after reading “Animal Farm”, says Roskam, 44, the executive director of the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA). “It highlights the dangers of unrestrained collective action.”

Just don’t label Roskam – or the IPA – as “right-wing”. “If journalists describe the IPA as right wing, I email or ring them and ask them how is the IPA right wing?” he says. “Right wing is Pauline Hanson.”

Roskam prefers to describe the IPA, which he has led since 2005, as a free market think tank. Over the past four years, its member numbers have soared from 300 to 1500, taking its budget to $2.4 million, and broadening its funding base from big corporates to individuals.

“The Gillard government is bad for Australia but good for the IPA – we’re expanding,” says Roskam, but adds that all so-called “independent” think tanks need to diversify away from corporate funding.

His CV is a classic think tank mix of law, commerce, academia and politics, plus a stint at global mining company Rio Tinto. Indeed, it was a fellow law student at Melbourne University, John Daley - who now leads the Grattan Institute - who suggested that Roskam apply for his first job at the Liberal Party, as a junior research assistant for Victorian MP Don Hayward.

Roskam worked with Hayward for two years from 1990, when Hayward was shadow education minister, then for a heady year after Premier Jeff Kennett came to power in 1992 and shut hundreds of schools.

He continued his education focus with two years in David Kemp’s Canberra office, when Kemp was education minister for the Howard Government. As a senior adviser, then chief of staff, he says politics taught him the importance of working closely with people, especially in the public service.

“Successful reform, whether in the corporate sphere or the public sector, requires commitment and buy in and participation from all the people involved,” he says.

After two years working in corporate affairs for Rio Tinto in Melbourne and London, Roskam returned to Australia to begin a PhD on Robert Menzies, which he hopes to one day finish. “I have 80,000 words of a PhD and 200,000 words of notes.”

It was not long before he was back in politics, however, spending a year as executive director of Liberal Party think tank The Menzies Research Centre in Canberra, before moving to Melbourne to join the IPA.

As for the biggest issue facing Australia in 2012, Roskam says the country must take advantage of its economic strength to lift educational standards.

“Even with the GFC, Australians have become accustomed to living in a boom, but we are not taking advantage of it,” he says. “Our productivity is declining, our education standards are still low – I spent eight or nine years in education policy – and we still have a very high proportion of underachieving students, including year 10 students who can’t read.”

SOURCE



5 February, 2012

Leftist fear and loathing of a mining magnate

By Ian Hanke (Ian Hanke is director of communications and strategy for the H. R. Nicholls Society)

LIKE many people who write about her, I don't know Gina Rinehart. But I think I would like to. A person who can stir so much passion and debate would, I think, be stimulating company.

The mining magnate, Australia's richest person, appears to be someone whose mere name spreads alarm throughout the left. Among the cadres of sometimes complacent and compliant journalists, she is deemed to be a right-wing ogre.

It seems that by taking a substantial shareholding in Fairfax Media (which owns this newspaper as well as The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian Financial Review), this one person is going to tear down society - and the media will be a tool, putty in her hands, to do just that.

The left try to tarnish her because her views are not in accord with their own.

Rinehart's views, according to people who don't know her, are on the "far right of the political spectrum", as academic and former Greens candidate Clive Hamilton told readers of this page yesterday. Rinehart has been vilified because she appears not to share the left's concerns about climate change and because she is advocating turning the north of Australia into a special economic zone with tax breaks.

Nothing new in that; it has been advocated for years.

Apparently she knows the businessman Hugh Morgan, who was instrumental in setting up the H. R. Nicholls Society, which advocates workplace relations reform. And Morgan, we are told, is also close to the - shock, horror - Institute of Public Affairs, which supports liberalism and a free market.

It is clear Rinehart must be a fiend, albeit via association.

And some sections of the media are quick to snap up this "conspiracy". According to some reports, Rinehart has "extreme views" on Australia's economic direction and her raid on the Fairfax share register is about "wielding influence and gaining political access in the corridors of Canberra", rather than being the action of an investor.

Yet this is a dubious proposition. With a reported worth of $20 billion, Rinehart already has access and influence.

And she has been dabbling in the media for the past couple of years. In 2010 she bought a substantial stake in Channel Ten. It is alleged, without much evidence, she was responsible for The Bolt Report, the show hosted by controversial columnist Andrew Bolt - and, of course, Bolt is anathema to the left because he refuses to bow to their orthodoxy.

Yet let us just say, for the sake of argument, that Rinehart was indeed responsible for the commissioning of The Bolt Report. That program, with its "unorthodox view", consistently out-rates Ten's more traditional Meet the Press. People seem to like watching The Bolt Report, where alternative views are given an airing. Can't have that, can we?

And now, by increasing her stake in Fairfax, Rinehart has again rattled the cages of the self-appointed cognoscenti, those guardians of the left who believe they, and only they, have correct policy settings for Australia - and that you should be damned if you disagree.

Certainly, it would seem Rinehart does not share the left's values, and good luck to her for that. We do, after all, live in a pluralistic society in which we should foster alternative views.

Yet some on the left seem to believe her views should preclude Rinehart from sitting on the Fairfax board if she gets the required shareholding.

What is wrong with a person with an alternative view of the world to that of the self-appointed guardians of the media sitting on the board of a media company? Nothing, I say. In fact, I say this could be damn good for Australia.

Fairfax is a company that has been ailing for some time. Its share price has collapsed. Five years ago it was selling at about $5 a share. It had fallen to as low as 54¢ recently and is now about 80¢ after Rinehart's foray. For shareholders in Fairfax, the value of their holdings has gone up by about 15 per cent since her move. Surely that is good news.

Instead of reading this foray as some dreadful attack, it should be embraced as a sign that one of Australia's most successful business operatives has endorsed not only an ailing business empire but also the media sector more broadly, which has also been languishing. To me, the investment, alongside her 10 per cent stake in Ten, signals there is still value in traditional media, even as the world moves to new platforms.

If Rinehart does take up a board position at Fairfax, it is to be hoped she brings the dynamism to the task that has made her what she is.

Fairfax needs an injection of new ideas. We have already seen some: the appointment of Greg Hywood as CEO and new editors at the AFR. But the company has long been in need of a radical shake-up and Rinehart, with her acumen and alternative view of the world, may well help provide it.

So I say, good luck to her. If she acts as some kind of lightning rod for change at Fairfax, that will surely be a good thing - except for those who feel only those in accord with their own view of the world should sit on a media company's board.

And, who knows, maybe her appointment will act as a catalyst for views other than the left's orthodoxy to be seen and read across the broadsheet mainstream of the Fairfax empire.

SOURCE






They do: Qld sets same-sex union date

Queensland's first same-sex civil unions are set to occur in a month's time, a move Deputy Premier Andrew Fraser is heralding as the sign of a “modern, progressive state”.

The enactment of the civil partnerships law will come three months after it was passed with support from most Labor MPs and one independent but opposed by the Liberal National Party and other crossbenchers.

The state government will today announce the law formally commences on February 23, meaning the first civil unions could occur on March 5, following the 10-day waiting period required after paperwork lodgement.

That timeframe should mean the scheme will remain in place if the opposing LNP wins office as expected on March 24, because its leader, Campbell Newman, has indicated the law would only be scrapped if no couples had entered into such arrangements at the time of a change of government.

Mr Fraser, who championed the civil unions push in a move dismissed by the LNP as a “stunt”, said the enactment of the law would be a “landmark and historic occasion” for the state.

“I know that for many people this day has been a long time coming,” he said in a statement.

“While it isn't marriage, it is the next best thing and as far as a state government can go in promoting relationship equality.”

The legislation allows any couple, regardless of their sex or sexual orientation, to formally register their relationship as a civil union and have a ceremony if they wish to.

Attorney General Paul Lucas said couples would be able to lodge the paperwork with Queensland's Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages from February 23, and then have their civil unions formalised from Monday, March 5.

Mr Lucas said ceremonies would be able to be held at the registry or at various magistrates' courts from the start date, while “notaries” to preside over ceremonies in other settings would be appointed from April.

“This legislation removes the artificial and arbitrary barriers to same-sex couples having their relationship formally and legally recognised,” he said.

“I expect many couples to use the progressive laws to see their relationship recognised either through registration or a formal ceremony and I congratulate them in advance.”

The civil unions bill was passed in State Parliament on November 30 during the final sitting week of the year, with the support of most Labor MPs along with independent MP Peter Wellington.

Four Labor MPs, the entire LNP parliamentary team and most cross-benchers voted against the laws, with some opponents arguing the civil unions scheme mimicked marriage, which they believed should remain between a man and a woman.

Mr Newman, who does not yet sit in Parliament but announced LNP MPs would vote as a bloc against Mr Fraser's private member's bill, has previously vowed to repeal the law “if it can be”.

During an interview with brisbanetimes.com.au in December, Mr Newman indicated he would not push ahead with scrapping the law if civil unions had already occurred at the time of a change of government, because of the impact on couples who had entered into such partnerships.

“If that had occurred that would obviously be an unacceptable and intolerable situation for them, so in that scenario we wouldn't be doing anything,” he said.

Mr Fraser today took another swipe at the LNP for not letting its MPs put forward their own personal views during the parliamentary debate, and called on Mr Newman to stand by his pledge if he won the election and civil unions had already occurred.

“There are thousands of Queenslanders to whom these laws mean so much. The whole state will hold Mr Newman to account and see if he stands by his word,” Mr Fraser said.

Mr Newman, who has revealed his personal support for allowing same-sex marriage, has previously dismissed Mr Fraser's civil unions push as a “stunt” and “distraction” and argued any change should be done at a federal level so there was consistency from state to state.

SOURCE





Protectionism hurts us all

It is no coincidence that each week brings news of another manufacturer forced to lay off staff, reduce their hours or shut up shop completely. Confronting a high Aussie dollar and an army of cheap labour overseas, it was the turn of Holden and the manufacturers of Mortein, Reckitt Benckiser, to announce job losses this week. Such events are invariably accompanied by calls for more industry assistance.

What you might not hear so much about is that the government already pours many billions of taxpayers' dollars each year into assisting industries to survive. The two most common forms of assistance are tariffs - duties imposed on imported goods to give local producers a leg up - and direct budgetary assistance, comprising direct subsidies and tax concessions.

"Hey, didn't they abolish all the tariffs already?" I hear you thinking. Well, no, tariff rates have been dramatically reduced since the 1980s, but remain in place on many manufactured goods like cars, clothing and food. Did you know that Australia still imposes tariffs on grapes and softwood conifers?

The Productivity Commission's latest annual review of industry assistance shows the gross value of these tariffs to Australian import-competing industry was $9.4 billion in 2009-10.

However, such tariffs also impose a penalty on other businesses which rely on imported goods to do business, such as construction firms and retailers. This input penalty is estimated to cost about $8 billion a year, bringing the net value of tariff assistance to the entire Australian economy down to just $1.4 billion.

But while tariffs have fallen out of fashion, and rightly so given the costs they impose on consumers and other businesses, industry continues to clamour for direct government subsidies and tax concessions. Australian industry received some $7.9 billion from such assistance in 2009-10. About half came in the form of direct payments and half in tax concessions.

To put that into perspective, the cost of budgetary assistance to Australian industry is approaching half of the federal government annual spending on defence ($21 billion) and a third of what it spends each year on education ($30 billion). These are no small bickies.

So where does it all go?

Across all industries, about one-third goes to research and development. A quarter is spent on industry-specific assistance, followed by small business grants and tax offsets (18 per cent) and 8 per cent on export assistance.

Manufacturing continues to enjoy the most privileged position of government protection due to tariffs. But its share of budgetary assistance has shrunk recently, from 36 per cent of assistance in 2003-04 to 23 per cent in 2009-10. Services industries, which employ around two-thirds of workers, have enjoyed an increasing share of assistance, up from 28 per cent to 46 per cent.

Peering closer, property and business services enjoy the highest level of budgetary assistance, $799 million a year, of all the 34 industries tracked by the commission. Coming in second place is finance and insurance ($794 million), thanks to tax concessions designed to transform Australia into a "finance hub". Vehicles and parts comes in third, with $721 million, thanks largely to the Automotive Competitiveness and Investment Scheme. Car industry assistance, then, accounts for a little under 10¢ in every government dollar spent on industry assistance.

Next time you hear an industry calling for more assistance, remember it all adds up. The hidden cost for tax taxpayers is either higher taxes or less spending on health, education and other services - sometimes both.

SOURCE






A land of tough talk and thin skins

If there is anything to be learned from this year's jingoistic festival of self-congratulation, it's that we're not as tough and laidback as the cultural mythologists say.

Dr Charlie Teo's Australia Day speech acknowledged our "hidden and sometimes overt racism". He told of a visiting Indian neuroscientist being spat on and his daughter told to "go home" because she looks Chinese.

Most interesting were the sort of public responses posted on the Daily Telegraph blog, which suggested "It's we white Australians that cop it". This was no rare sentiment. One commenter claimed the "Australian Labor government was racist against it's [sic] own people". There was no example provided, but this recurrent fear of government favouritism towards foreigners has been in the backwater of Australian politics for some time.

Commonly, it manifests on talkback radio in shrieking complaints about welfare, asylum seekers and immigration. There is latent anger among those who feel taxpayer dollars are unjustly spent on these programs instead of propping up "real Australians", a term impossible to deploy without ingrained racism.

The Challenging Racism Project at the University of Western Sydney found 84.4 per cent of Australians polled believe there is racial prejudice in this country. It is not for nothing that a well known satirical world map, which depicts the US as "freedom and Jesus" and Russia as "mail order brides", brands Australia with a single word, "racists". But tell Australians this and they get very defensive, very sensitive. We don't take criticism well.

Consider a second story, its protagonist the benign blogger Jennifer Wilson, who had the audacity to call commentator Melinda Tankard Reist a closet Baptist. Tankard Reist took such umbrage that she threatened Wilson with a defamation suit if the offending posts were not removed and an apology issued.

As Wilson has pointed out, as a commentator, Tankard Reist has ample public space to defend herself against any accusation. Hypersensitivity, again, appears to have provoked an extreme response. Equally, the huge support for Wilson on Twitter - not a medium predisposed to backing someone like Tankard Reist - has an air of extremity to it, like an over-zealous witch-hunt to shouts of "There she is - get her!"

Finally, a continuing tale that dates from November, when a News Ltd writer called Alison Stephenson penned an editorialised "news" story with her despairing view of A Night With The Stars, a one-off TV special hosted by Kyle Sandilands and Jackie "O" Henderson. No master of understatement, Sandilands's reaction was to call her a "fat bitter thing" and "a piece of shit".

The response from much of the community was to condemn Sandilands and call for his sacking from Southern Cross Austereo. This did not happen, but such was the uproar that more than 15 sponsors pulled their support.

This was not enough for those hellbent on Sandilands's demise, who then organised movements with the sole purpose of seeing him off. Last week, a blog called "Sack Vile Kyle", also campaigning on Facebook and Twitter, successfully petitioned Jenny Craig to withdraw its sponsorship of the show. This was hailed as a major victory and press releases flew across the land. Two ad executives have also been made redundant, portrayed as scapegoats to the cause.

There has long been an elitist witch-hunt against Sandilands, which has taken on a competitive nature among those vying to be the final scalp-taker. But what were the actual crimes? Sandilands needn't have been so incensed or so rude about the opinion of a crusading journalist earning a hundredth of his wage. It was silly that he responded in a crass way, yet his detractors have painted it as the crime of the century.

Emotion, it seems to me, rules the roost more than ever in Australia, while sober argument is relegated to an afterthought. Perhaps that's inevitable. But what we can avoid is this tendency to slice down anyone who breaches our little bubble of sensitivity. It is a censorious instinct that seeks to silence such people, not conducive at all to the flourishing of free speech or our supposed culture of larrikinism.

Those who cry foul do so because these "offensive" attacks cut to deep insecurities, which are often based in truth.

SOURCE



4 February, 2012

Hardly fair to vulnerable children

Dr Jeremy Sammut comments on how deserved is the "community worker" pay hike

For the last three years, I have been arguing that Australia’s failing child protection system is being run in the interests of social service providers and not ‘at risk’ children.

In the name of ‘family preservation,’ state community service departments are leaving children for far too long with highly dysfunctional families and only remove them as a last resort when they have been damaged, often permanently, by parental neglect and abuse.

While the childhoods and life opportunities of children ebb away into intergenerational disadvantage, social workers employed in the public sector and non-government ‘charitable’ organisations receive taxpayer funding to provide an array of support services that try and fail to do the impossible – fix broken families with serious drug and alcohol, domestic violence, and mental health problems that can’t be fixed.

The Fair Work Australia decision on Wednesday to award ‘equal pay’ to more than 150,000 community sector workers at a cost of $2 billion to taxpayers is indecent in its illustration of the political problems in the child protection system.

Forget that the decision is based on dodgy comparisons – why should someone with a three-year social work degree have income parity with a trained economist or scientist? Sadly, the federal government was not only willing to support the claim but also provided the $2 billion additional funding to foot the higher wage bill at a time of looming economic woes.

Many commentators are justifying the pay rise by saying those who choose to work with the poor are saints. The real question is why is failure being rewarded? Public choice, dear reader. I just wish vulnerable children had a public sector union to advocate on their behalf, replete with tame factional serfs in the Labor caucus.

That feathering their own nests has been the priority at a time when the child protection system is crumbling all around us and stumbling from one crisis to another means that social workers have surrendered any pretensions to their ‘professional’ status.

This sorry episode has reinforced my belief that the answer to the perpetual crisis engulfing child protection is to restore citizen-control over the system by re-establishing decentralised, community-governed child protection agencies.

SOURCE





Another sinking renews 'stop the boats' call

OPPOSITION immigration spokesman Scott Morrison says efforts in the Malaysia boat disaster are focused on "recovery and rescue". At least eight asylum seekers were found dead early yesterday after their boat capsized off southern Malaysia while en route to Australia. Grave fears are held for about six others who are missing. Thirteen people made it to shore.

"The effort at the moment always has to focus on recovery and rescue," Mr Morrison said in Sydney today.

He said the Coalition remained committed to its policy of reopening the detention centre on Nauru, the reintroduction of temporary protection visas (TPVs) and the towing of boats back to Indonesia. "That is the policy that's proven, that is the policy that's strong and that's the policy that should be restored to stop the boats," he said.

Mr Morrison said there would be no more talks with the Government about resurrecting the offshore processing of asylum seekers. "There is no further talks because the Government has refused to change the legislation," he said.

"The Government clearly has been seeking to do nothing other than trash the Nauru option with their ridiculous costings, which have been lampooned around the country. "They have no serious intention of destroying temporary protection visas, we know they won't turn the boats back."

This week's boat accident comes two months after more than 200 asylum seekers drowned when their vessel sank after leaving for Australia from East Java in Indonesia.

SOURCE






Shortage of State school places in Victoria

Rapid population growth fuelled by out of control immigration must bear much of the blame

Exclusive figures from the Education Department reveal for the first time the increasing struggle many parents face to get their children into popular government schools.

The records show 224 primary and secondary schools now have enrolment restrictions. They are either capping the number of students or using map boundaries. Some use both.

Families missing the cut are forced to move closer to their first choice - boosting real estate prices around the most popular schools - or settle for other options.

Both the State Government and Opposition say there are enough schools to cater for demand overall.

But some parent groups, principals and community advocates argue there are not enough schools where families need them most, and that "unpopular" public schools need more resources.

Parents Victoria executive officer Gail McHardy said while increasing numbers of parents were opting for public education, they could not be blamed for picking some schools over others. "It's laughable that governments advocate parental choice when they're not comparing apples with apples," she said.

Victorian Association of State Secondary Principals president Frank Sal was surprised by the number of schools with restrictions, but said state and federal funding of public education was too low. "We must provide the support needed to all government schools that enables them to attract and retain teachers, as well as instil confidence in their local community," he said.

Education Minister Martin Dixon said the Government was closely monitoring the changing needs of communities.

There were many reasons schools got to the point of needing caps and boundaries, including reputation, areas of specialisation and population growth.

"Some parents choose a school on a drive-by, so if there's a brand-new building out the front, that's often an attraction," Mr Dixon said. "It's so important for parents not just to listen to their neighbours, but to go into the school ... and make an informed decision."

Pitsa Binnion, principal of McKinnon Secondary College, a successful zoned school in Melbourne's east, believes boundaries create some misconceptions.

"We have to de-mystify the boundary issue," she said. "Many parents ... need to understand that wonderful things are happening in government schools (across the board)."

Opposition teaching profession spokesman Steve Herbert said the Government had undermined schools' ability to provide for their communities by "slashing capital works funding".

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Officialdom closes ranks over dam coverup

There is even an implied threat to freedom of the press

FLOOD Inquiry commissioner Justice Cate Holmes has defended her deputy, dam expert Phillip Cummins, against conflict of interest allegations as the flood inquiry resumed this morning.

The Courier Mail today revealed Mr Cummins was working as a consultant for a company on the payroll of Wivenhoe Dam operator SEQwater. "There has been no conflict," Ms Holmes said when the inquiry convened.

But Ms Holmes also said she only became aware yesterday that Mr Cummins was a staff member with a consultancy hired by SEQWater to oversee the revision of the dam manual.

Ms Holmes opened the hearing on Saturday by addressing The Courier Mail's front page headline and report. "All of that has the appearance of a calculated attempt to undermine the Commission and its work but I will not draw any conclusion about intent until I have given the editor and the journalist involved the opportunity to explain themselves," she said. "Whatever its intent the potential for its effect on public confidence in the Commission is obvious."

News Queensland editor-in-chief David Fagan and The Courier-Mail editor Michael Crutcher released a statement in response to Justice Holmes' words.

"The Courier-Mail stands by today's front-page story and by the journalists who wrote it," Fagan and Crutcher said in the statement. "Our obligation is to present the facts to our readers. The facts of this story are not in question. "The inquiry has substantial work ahead. This includes explaining to Queenslanders how it missed pointers to crucial evidence that forced the inquiry's resumption. If not for the work of newspaper journalists, that evidence may not have been uncovered."

The inquiry reconvened last week only after reports by The Australian and The Courier-Mail newspapers forced the commission to question its earlier findings.

Meanwhile, Deputy Premier Andrew Fraser sprang to the defence of the flood inquiry on Saturday. He says claims of a a cover-up by the government were "baseless". "Commissioner (Cate) Holmes has set out all of the relevant details and set out why there is no conflict of interest here. There is no benefit to the commissioner concerned," he said in his Mount Coot-tha electorate.

Asked if inquiry member Phillip Cummins should stand down, Mr Fraser said: "This government continues to have confidence in Justice Holmes who is fiercely independent and fiercely capable ... there is no conflict here.

"This is a commission which is holding extra hearings because it wants to get to the truth. Any suggestion that this is anything other than a truth-hunting exercise and one which is being carried out with fierce independence I think it false and is not reflected in the facts."

Mr Fraser said it was a mistake to suggest Mr Cummins had done anything wrong. "What he has done is agreed to work for a company into the future on other projects after the end of the inquiry."

Mr Fraser also disputed claims that further documents had been withheld from the inquiry. "All documents that the government had available were provided to the commission of inquiry. No document is being withheld. All relevant evidence and all people are available to provide both statements and to appear before the inquiry.

"This government wants to get to the truth as much of the people of Queensland. We have provided absolutely everything ... there is to be no stone left unturned."

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Hostile b*itch found wanting again

It would seem that it is only her Aboriginality has kept her in her job as long as it has

THE career of the magistrate Pat O'Shane has been delivered another blow, with the NSW Supreme Court finding she was biased and prejudged matters before her in court when she dismissed a traffic infringement case last year.

Already referred to the NSW Judicial Commission over her decision to dismiss the charges against a man accused of assaulting a paramedic, Ms O'Shane, 70, was yesterday lambasted by a Supreme Court judge who found her conduct in the traffic case "fell short of the required standard of a trial judge".

Justice Peter Garling overturned the magistrate's decision last August to dismiss the police case against Ali Elskaf, who was fined for turning left against a red arrow. The NSW Director of Public Prosecutions had appealed against the decision.

Justice Garling ordered the matter be returned to the local court to be "dealt with by a magistrate other than O'Shane". "In light of … the failures identified in this case I can have no confidence that Magistrate O'Shane would, if this matter was returned to her to complete, undertake the further hearing of it in accordance with the law," he said.

Justice Garling found Ms O'Shane threw the matter out of court before the police prosecutor had a chance to make his case, refusing to allow him to present two of his four police witnesses and accusing the two who did give evidence of delivering "claptrap" and a "bag of lies".

Ms O'Shane told the prosecutor that he could call only two police to give evidence because it was only they who allegedly saw Mr Elskaf run the red light while driving his black Ferrari in Macleay Street, Kings Cross. "I can indicate to you immediately, sergeant, that it won't assist you in the least," Ms O'Shane told the prosecutor when he tried to call the other two police.

Ms O'Shane then told the prosecutor she did not believe the evidence of the first two police and, on this basis, he did not have a case. "The court doesn't just accept a bag of lies and say that's enough to establish a prima facie case. In this case that's exactly what I've received," she said.

When the prosecutor objected to the officers being described as liars, Ms O'Shane responded: "Sergeant, I don't want to have to really dot every 'i' and cross every 't' for your benefit."

Justice Garling found that, in forming her opinion of the witnesses, Ms O'Shane had ignored the fact that much of their evidence had gone unchallenged during cross-examination.

To accuse the officers of lying in these circumstances was "a clear error of law and a denial of procedural fairness". The magistrate had been "biased" and had already made her mind up about the case.

She had treated the prosecutor like "an errant school student", taking over the conduct of his case, and had been unwilling to listen to his submissions about the strength of the evidence. "In that respect, her honour's conduct of this matter fell short of the required standard of a trial judge acting properly," Justice Garling said.

The judgment is a further blow to Ms O'Shane, whose career is already in doubt after the Premier, Barry O'Farrell, ordered that her behaviour be examined by the Judicial Commission following her decision in a case where she had suggested that a paramedic, Christopher Martin, didn't like "blacks".

Justice Garling said it was difficult to understand how she had made such errors, given it was not the first time the "proper procedure has been … pointed out".

Last night, the Attorney-General, Greg Smith, said he would be asking the Judicial Commission to consider this latest case in its inquiry into the conduct of Ms O'Shane. She could not be contacted by the Herald for comment.

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3 February, 2012

Wivenhoe Dam report 'a fiction' as engineer grilled

The plain fact is that if the flood compartment had been kept empty as long as possible, as it should have been, Brisbane would not have had a flood. Once the State Labor government decided to use it to store drinking water, very careful management of the dam became needed. And bureaucrats are not careful

WIVENHOE Dam engineers have been accused of concocting a fictitious and self-interested report of their conduct in the lead-up to last year's flooding of Brisbane, as it emerged that the document was written with the assistance of a top public relations firm.

In a series of heated exchanges at Queensland's recalled floods inquiry yesterday, SEQWater's principal engineer of dam safety, John Tibaldi, was grilled over a report he penned in the weeks following the January floods, which accounted for the actions he and his fellow engineers took.

At one point, Mr Tibaldi choked up in tears under the questioning.

Commissioner Cate Holmes, a Supreme Court judge, reconvened the inquiry after The Australian revealed evidence that appeared to show the dam was employing less severe flood mitigation strategies than those detailed in Mr Tibaldi's report.

As well as SEQWater officials and engineers being called to testify, Premier Anna Bligh has been asked to submit a written statement to the inquiry. Ms Bligh said she would provide a comprehensive statement by Monday and would submit a copy of her diary and relevant documents relating to the meetings and briefings she attended at the time of the floods.

Mr Tibaldi told the inquiry the report used raw data collected during the flood -- including lake levels and outflows -- and he then matched the data to the release strategies prescribed in the dam manual, known as W1, W2, W3 and W4. He said he had no recollection of asking the three other dam engineers which strategies they were using at various times during the disaster, but prepared the report based on the raw data and subsequently sought their approval.

"I tried to match the strategy transitions against the data that was available to me (and) just made conclusions based on that data as to when strategy transitions had occurred," he said.

Counsel assisting the inquiry, Peter Callaghan SC, suggested the manual was therefore used to analyse and justify the decisions taken by the four engineers -- Mr Tibaldi, Robert Ayre, Terry Malone and John Ruffini -- rather than dictating the decisions they took at the time.

"But (the report) is a fiction," Mr Callaghan said. "It is something that you created at the end of January. It doesn't represent a single thing that actually happened during the event, does it? "I suggest to you that you and the others have shown a disregard for the manual in this event, and in the preparation of the report, you have simply shown a disregard for the truth."

Mr Tibaldi rejected both suggestions, saying the engineers did not decide which flood-mitigation strategy they employed. Rather, he argued, it was automatically dictated by the data received at the time.

Justice Holmes then asked: "In other words, you seem to be saying that once you hit 68.5 (metres height in Lake Wivenhoe), it's black and white, you're in W3, there's nothing transitional in that?" Mr Tibaldi replied: "No."

Under strategy W3, the primary concern is to release a larger volume of water immediately to protect Brisbane from flooding. The Australian last month uncovered evidence in logs and other documents -- some of which had not been publicised -- that indicated that while the lake reached 68.5m at 8am on Saturday, January 8, the dam operators remained in strategy W1 and did not employ strategy W3 until late on Sunday or early on Monday.

Under strategy W1, the primary consideration is rural communities and infrastructure such as bridges.

Mr Tibaldi told the inquiry the report was written with the assistance of a firm called Rowland, which "helped me with the grammar". He said he was unaware of the company's status as a leading public relations firm.

Mr Tibaldi maintained he and the other three Wivenhoe engineers used appropriate strategies during the flood and he was "not particularly concerned" about technical breaches of the manual because the actions they took "unquestionably" reduced the flood peak.

He agreed with a statement put to him from Mr Ayre's new statement to the inquiry in which he said "strategy labels were generally only attributed after the event as part of the reporting process".

Mr Ayre's statement noted there was an aversion to using the W-terminology, since documents were being circulated to those outside the dam operations.

Yesterday's evidence has boosted the hopes of southeast Queensland communities intent on seeking compensation from the government, if it is demonstrated the flood was exacerbated by poor management at Wivenhoe Dam. SEQWater confirmed it was privately insured.

In a statement to the inquiry, dated yesterday, Mr Ayre denied misleading the inquiry: "At no time have I been imposed upon to create any false or misleading aspect of the Flood Event Report."

SOURCE





New Leftist labour laws turn firms off hiring workers: survey

LABOR'S federal workplace laws have led to increased labour costs, a rise in employee absenteeism and declining or flatlining productivity, according to a national survey of senior managers charged with implementing the new rules in their workplaces.

The annual survey of the nation's human resource managers found that 47 per cent believed operating under the Fair Work Act would decrease the willingness of their organisation to employ people over the next three years. Only 6 per cent said it made them more willing to hire people.

An estimated 690 human resource professionals participated in the Australian Human Resources Institute survey, with 30 per cent of those surveyed engaged by companies employing more than 1000 workers and one-third engaging between 100 and 499 workers.

The institute previously surveyed members about the legislation in 2010 and the latest results show managers are increasingly negative about the impact of the laws.

Peter Wilson, the institute's national president, said while many managers had expressed optimism and goodwill about the Fair Work Act in 2010, the "prevailing impression a year later is that the legislation needs fixing".

The Gillard government is undertaking a review of the act, with many employers pushing for substantial changes.

"The findings demonstrate that the people in the workforce with responsibility for implementing its provisions are experiencing difficulties that are costly, and negatively affect the capacity of businesses to operate productively for the benefit of all stakeholders," Mr Wilson said.

"At a time when the global outlook is very uncertain and international competition is extremely tough, the current act is not serving the Australian workplaces very well at all."

Professionals participating in the survey were asked whether their organisations had experienced an increase or decrease in a series of outcomes that they believed were directly due to the introduction of the legislation.

An estimated 58 per cent said their labour costs had increased, while 26 per cent said the level of absenteeism had risen, compared with 13 per cent who expressed that concern in 2010.

Just 5.6 per cent believed productivity had increased as a result of the laws, compared with 29.3 per cent who said it had decreased and 61 per cent who said there had been no change.

Forty-one per cent said union visits to work sites had increased compared with 29 per cent in 2010, while more than one-third complained that Labor's unfair dismissal laws made it harder to make employees redundant.

Almost two-thirds of those surveyed provided commentary with their responses, with much of the negative comments focused on increases in vexatious unfair dismissal claims and how the laws had reduced employer flexibility to hire casuals, vary hours, negotiate contracts and manage underperforming employees.

There were also complaints about the time required to be spent on workplace bargaining and the increased need for legal advice and record keeping.

"The unions have become bullish . . . Bully-boy tactics abound," one respondent said. Another said: "You can't terminate underperforming employees and they know it. "Management and other employees look at it and say, 'HR does not have the balls to do anything.' However, we are unable to."

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Century of ocean warming good for corals, research shows

Another nasty one for Hoagy and all the other Warmists. Hoagy has been very quiet in recent years

A GOVERNMENT-run research body has found that the past 110 years of ocean warming has been good for the growth of corals spanning more than 1000km of Australia's coastline.

The findings undermine predictions that global warming will devastate coral reefs, and add to a growing body of evidence showing corals are more resilient than previously thought - up to a certain point.

The study by the Australian Institute of Marine Science, peer-reviewed findings of which were published today in the leading journal Science, examined 27 samples from six locations from the West Australian coast off Geraldton to offshore from Darwin.

At each site, scientists took cores from massive porites corals - similar to a biopsy in humans - and counted back to record their age in much the same way tree rings are counted.

Although some cores extended to the 18th century, they focused on the period from 1900 to 2010.

The researchers found that, contrary to their expectations, warmer waters had not negatively affected coral growth. In fact, for their southern samples, where ocean temperatures are the coolest but have warmed the most, coral growth increased most significantly over the past 110 years. For their northern samples, where waters are the warmest and have changed the least, coral growth still increased, but not by as much.

"Those reefs have actually been able to take advantage of the warmer conditions," said Janice Lough, a senior AIMS research scientist and one of the study's authors.

The key question is how warm the water can get before the positive effects are reversed. [Why should they be reversed? That is just ideology speaking. Warmth is generally good for all life] Lab studies have typically measured the effect of short-term, rapid changes in temperature and water chemistry; these mimic, for example, coral-bleaching events that are known to be devastating.

Much harder to measure are the long-term effects of gradual warming, such as those caused by climate change.

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Debate rages after call for smacking children to be made illegal

READERS have overwhelmingly rejected a call for an outright ban on parents smacking their own children. At 1.15pm, more than 91% of 6500 votes cast said the practice should not be outlawed as debate raged among commenters.

The debate was sparked by this morning's Herald Sun report of comments by Dr Gervase Chaney, the head of Australia's peak paediatric body, who called for mums and dads to be banned from disciplining their children with physical force. He said it was no longer OK for parents to argue "it never did us any harm" - and called on colleagues to stand up for children's rights.

Speaking today, World Vision Australia head Tim Costello admitted smacking his own children but backed calls for an outright ban. Rev Costello admits he smacked his own children and sympathises with parents who have, but said it is not the right way to discipline. “I think smacking should not be allowed, it should be banned to prevent abuse,” he said.

He has been echoed by Dr Joe Tucci, CEO of the Australian Childhood Foundation, who said his organisation had been campaigning for a ban for the past 15 years. "We think children should be afforded the same level of protection under law as an adult," he said.

"I don't believe parents necessarily set out to hit their kids, but if they are frustrated, angry or upset with the child it can inadvertently lead to them hitting too hard or in places where it does leave an injury and I don't think parents want that."

Ban 'too interventionist'

But former Australian of the Year and CEO of Child Wise Bernadette McMenamin rejected calls for a ban and said it would leave parents thinking they lived in a nanny state.

Ms McMenamin, whose brother was the victim of abuse as a child, said smacking needed to be stopped – but through education, not the law. "I think it would make parents feel like the Government is going too far, taking over the parental role,” she said. "Setting a law for no smacking, I know where the professor is coming from, but parents would find that far too interventionist and a nanny state."

Ms McMenamin has a child of her own whom she has never smacked and said parents who do smack their children did so for the wrong reasons – and risked escalating smacking into child abuse. "I do not believe that smacking is a useful disciplinary tool, it's about the parent taking out their frustration on a child,” Ms McMenamin said. "If you smack a child, how can you tell what is a smack and what is a punch? "It may start with an odd smack, but it can escalate.”

Political reaction

A spokesperson for Premier Ted Baillieu said this morning there were "no plans to change the law as it relates to the smacking of children".

Opposition Leader Daniel Andrews also said he did not support a change in the law. "A parent's first duty is to care and protect their child, and Victoria already has strong child protection laws in place," he said. "Parenting is hard and it's not made any easier by unenforceable and intrusive proposals like this."

Federal political figures have also opposed a ban on smacking kids, saying criminal law should not be applied to parents. Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey told Sunrise that parents had the responsibility to protect their children. “There are some things that the criminal law shouldn't be involved with,” he said. “In raising children, parents have a responsibility.”

His thoughts were echoed by Minister for Population and Communities, Tony Burke, who also appeared on the program. “These experts, there are helpful ideas they come up with, the naughty corner and these different ideas for raising kids,” he said. “I’ve found a lot of that really helpful with my own kids, but to start saying the criminal law and legal penalties is the way to deal with this - parents do it tough enough already."

Australia 'lagging behind'

Dr Chaney says Australia is lagging behind other countries in outlawing smacking, describing some cases as tantamount to child abuse. He is pushing for the Royal Australasian College of Physicians paediatric and child health division to officially support a ban as the body reviews its policy on smacking.

His comments come after The Royal College of Paediatrics in Britain this week called for a ban on smacking, saying too often "today's smack becomes tomorrow's punch".

In Victoria, parents can smack their children as long as the punishment is not "unreasonable" or "excessive".

The issue has polarised opinion in Australia - the Presbyterian Church last year backed the right of parents to smack their child within existing common-law parameters. The church's submission to a state government inquiry said there was "a significant body of research confirming its utility in raising children well".

Victorian Child Safety Commissioner Bernie Geary said he did not support smacking, but he was worried a ban could be misused and unfairly punish some parents. "The way children are disciplined should be thoughtful and respectful," he said.

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Flag maker gets lots of free publicity

A DEFIANT flag-maker says Nazi flags flying outside his home will not be removed.

Angry members of the Jewish community have demanded the swastika and SS flags flying outside the Carrum property be removed, according to Mordialloc Chelsea Leader.

Flag-maker Rob Boot said he would not remove the flags from his front yard along the Nepean Highway because of the complaints. "I’m just a flag salesman and it's just merchandise to me," Mr Boot said. "I’m at liberty to display what I want on my own property. "There’s no political message behind it at all."

Mr Boot said he did not believe the flags were offensive. "It would only be in really poor taste if I flew them with the Israeli flag," he said.

Earlier today, Chaiyim Ben Ariel spotted the swastika, which is flying with another flag bearing the SS logo, while driving along Nepean Highway. "Everyone in Australia and all over the world knows what this represents," he said. "It is so in your face. According to the law he is allowed to sell this crap."

Mr Ben Ariel and his friend, Yeshayah Halevi, have decided to demonstrate outside the home business in protest against the Nazi symbols.

They are not the only people to take offfence at the flags. Chelsea RSL president John Morris told Leader he thought flying the flags was "very unpleasant." "It’s in very poor and it offends the memory of our fallen soldiers and I feel for the Jewish community too," he said.

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2 February, 2012

Wages tribunal attacks community services in the name of "equality"

Why not pay everyone exactly the same wage? That's where the logic (or illogic) leads.

The Federal government has promised funding to help pay the bigger wages bill but that will get mired in the bureaucracy. There is no doubt some organizations will have to put off staff to make ends meet

ALMOST 150,000 community sector workers, mostly women, have been awarded a pay rise by the industrial umpire in a landmark test case. Fair Work Australia granted an equal remuneration order sought by several unions, including the Australian Services Union, which was supported by the Federal Government.

The industrial workplace relations tribunal said the pay increases should be phased in over eight years rather than six. The pay boosts will range from 19 to 41 per cent, equating to wage rises of between $6324 and $24,346.

Australia Services Union (ASU) Sally McManus welcomed the decision as a huge win, not just for the community sector, but for equal pay in Australia. “We’re happy, in fact we’re ecstatic,” she said. “We’re hoping this decision will go towards putting a dent in the 18 per cent pay gap between men and women in Australia.”

The ASU said they were disappointed the pay increase will be phased in over eight years rather than the six years originally sought.

The Fair Work decision comes after the Federal Government appealed to the industrial tribunal in November for pay rises in the community sector which would be backed by a $2 billion funding commitment.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard said at the time community sector workers, who are mostly women, were underpaid and it was time they got equal pay for their work.

About 120,000 of the sector’s 150,000 workers are women and employees mostly work in social services, welfare and the caring professions.

Big employers in the area include Mission Australia, Amnesty International, Oxfam, The Catholic Church and Greenpeace.

Ms McManus said they will now be calling on the state governments to join in and support the pay rises.

The majority of the full bench of Fair Work Australia said they decided any equal remuneration order made should be based on the wages in the modern award. "The proposals in the joint submission are consistent with that requirement," FWA said.

"Importantly, the percentage additions to the modern award wages, as varied from time to time in annual wage reviews, will provide an ongoing remedy for the part gender has played in inhibiting wages growth in the SACS (social, community and disability services) industry."

The increases at each wage level and the further four per cent loading will be introduced in nine instalments annually on December 1 between 2012 and 2020.

FWA vice president Graeme Watson disagreed with his colleagues, saying the wage claim did not stand up to scrutiny.

During the hearing, the Victorian Government made a submission warning of potential cuts to jobs and services if the wage rise cost more than $200 million over four years.

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New drug gives hope to hepatitis C sufferers

A DRUG set to cure thousands of Australians with hepatitis has been hailed as the most exciting development in the field in years.

Victrelis has been approved by medicines watchdog the Therapeutic Goods Administration and is awaiting listing on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.

Hepatitis Victoria chief executive Helen McNeill said the drug would boost the cure rate for the most common strain of hepatitis C from 50 to 80 per cent.

"Fifty-five per cent of people have the genotype 1 strain, and it often responds very poorly to treatment," Ms McNeill said. "The chance of increasing the opportunity of a cure using this new drug is very exciting. It is the biggest breakthrough in years."

More than 55,000 Victorians have hepatitis C, the leading cause of liver transplants.

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Hospital system a 'dog's breakfast'

A Hobart GP has told a parliamentary inquiry health budget cuts are decimating the system. Dr Graeme Alexander has told a Legislative Council committee that Tasmania is a dog's breakfast. The committee is examining the impact of the health system's $100 million budget cut this financial year.

The Claremont GP says Tasmania was already winning the wooden spoon in all areas of health care before the cuts and GPs are now in a precarious position.

Dr Alexander says he has patients with gallstones who he knows will probably never receive surgery. "Equally I have patients with hernias who will probably never be operated on." "The only way they will, is if they get a serious complication."

Dr Alexander says the only lifeboat for a sinking system is a federal takeover of health.

The inquiry heard yesterday that patients were going back to Emergency Departments because they are being discharged too early.

Neroli Ellis from the Nursing Federation said bed shortages are already impacting on patients, with many being re-admitted to the Emergency Department because they are discharged too early. "Anecdotally, nurses tell us people are coming back on rebounds."

"So they're coming back into Emergency that should not have been discharged as early as they were, or they may not have been able to cope at home etc, that they are coming back in."

Ms Ellis says elective surgery patients are also presenting to the emergency department at the Launceston General Hospital. "They're now seeing 35 to 40 per cent of their theatre lists on emergencies which truly has increased quite dramatically."

"So they're not true emergencies, however, because they're waiting so long on the elective list now they're becoming emergencies."

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No vote at all is better than a win for the No

It is always a good time to remove racially discriminatory provisions from the constitution. Except when such a sensible act might be defeated at a referendum for failing to obtain an overall majority and a majority of votes in a majority of states and there are unintended consequences.

Mark Leibler, co-chair of the expert panel whose report Recognising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in the Constitution was handed to the Prime Minister last week, clearly understands this. According to a report in The Weekend Australian Leibler has acknowledged that the suitable time to put a referendum proposal is when there are "the best prospects of success".

I was a keen supporter of the constitutional proposal on Aborigines, which was put to the electorate on May 27, 1967. It enjoyed the support of Harold Holt's Coalition government along with the Labor opposition led by Gough Whitlam, the Democratic Labor Party and independents.

The question was clear. Australians were asked if they agreed the provisions that barred Aborigines from being counted in the census and prevented the Commonwealth from making laws with respect to Aborigines should be deleted from the constitution. The total "for" vote was a record 91 per cent.

In May 1967 Holt presided over a popular government, having achieved a huge victory the previous year. Even so, the additional proposal put to the people in May 1967 was comprehensively defeated. Australians were also asked whether they supported breaking the "nexus" between the House of Representatives and the Senate, which would have made it possible to increase the number of MPs in the lower house without adding to the number of senators.

Only 40 per cent of electors supported the idea. There were two problems. The proposal was complex - many voters did not know what "nexus" meant. And it could easily be represented as giving more powers to politicians.

All the members of the House of Representatives supported the proposal to break the nexus. Opposition was led by 10 senators - most notably the DLP's Vince Gair and Frank McManus along with disaffected Tasmanian Liberal Reg Wright. The "no" case had scant money. However, as George Williams and David Hume point out in People Power, "the No campaign was vigorous and astonishingly effective".

Today it is common to say that no referendum proposal has a chance of succeeding unless it enjoys bipartisan support. The lesson from 1967 is that the backing of the Coalition and Labor will not necessarily deliver a "yes" outcome.

The next, and last, time the Australian electorate agreed to amend the constitution occurred in May 1977 when Malcolm Fraser's government, with Labor's backing, obtained support for three out of its four proposals. In 1977 Fraser too was a popular prime minister - almost midway between his record victories in January 1975 and January 1977.

Labor's sole postwar referendum success took place in September 1946 and gave the Commonwealth power to make laws with respect to social security benefits. Bob Hawke was the ALP's most successful prime minister. Yet, in the 1980s, he lost all six referendum proposals.

Leibler's cause is a noble one. He believes the time has come to remove the remaining race-based provisions in the constitution - namely, Section 25 and Section 51 (xxvi). However, he respects the founding fathers and recognises Australia is "one of the most peaceful and democratic nations in the world".

The problem is one of timing and complexity. At the moment, opinion polls are consistently reporting that the Coalition is leading Labor about 55 per cent to 45 per cent. In such a political climate, it is highly unlikely any government could initiate a successful referendum amendment. The expert panel with Leibler and Patrick Dodson as co-chairs is a representative group, on which the Liberal Party is represented. It is not clear how the Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, and his colleagues will respond when they consider the report.

The potential problems turn not on what is proposed to be deleted from the constitution but what might be added. The panel proposes that the constitution should contain provisions aimed at securing the advancement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. At any referendum, this could raise the complex question of who is an indigenous person entitled to such advancement.

In his decision in Eatock v Bolt last year, Federal Court Justice Mordy Bromberg felt the need to address Aboriginal identity when discussing a group he referred to as "fair-skinned Aboriginal people". Justice Bromberg accepted that the term Aboriginal Australian applied to "a person of mixed heritage but with some Aboriginal descent, who identifies as an Aboriginal person and has communal recognition as such". However, he did not rule out the possibility "that a person with less than the three attributes of the three-part test should not be recognised as an Aboriginal person". This is the kind of debate that Australia does not need right now.

Already some Aborigines, whose priorities do not focus on constitutional change, are being criticised for not going along with the panel's proposals. For example, on the ABC TV program The Drum last Thursday, leftist activist Antony Loewenstein attacked Warren Mundine as a "Murdoch pet who hates everything about mainstream society". This is mere abuse posing as analysis.

This sort of line of attack against critics, or any allegations labelling Australians as racist if the proposal is rejected for being too complex, would be counter-productive. The 1967 referendum on Aborigines worked because the political timing was correct, the proposal was straightforward and the extremes of left and right were relatively silent.

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1 February, 2012

Robust response to Aboriginal flag burners in NT

A LABOR politician last night last night slammed her colleague for calling a group of children who burned the Australian flag "little pricks".

Marion Scrymgour hit back at Rob Knight after he made the remark during a radio interview on Monday. "His comments are not helpful at all, and I don't think Rob's little army should carry on this emotional debate," she said on Facebook. Ms Scrymgour was responding to a post from one of Mr Knight's supporters, congratulating him for his stance.

Mr Knight last night said he stood by his comments. "I absolutely condemn the burning of our flag," he said. "I don't believe any cause has ever been served well by burning any flag."

The minister was inundated with public support yesterday with scores of Territorians flooding the NT News website and social networking sites to back the politician over his controversial remarks.

But his boss, Chief Minister Paul Henderson, was less convincing in his support. "Rob's got to answer for his own comments, but I think he's expressed sentiment," Mr Henderson said in a press conference yesterday. "Now whether I would have expressed it in those terms is another matter, but what we have here is a different discussion taking place in the Northern Territory."

The CLP again attacked Mr Knight over the remarks yesterday. Opposition leader Terry Mills said the flag burning was a deeply offensive act, but that Mr Knight had responded in a crass way.

"Trashing the flag is an offence. It offends the sensibilities of this nation, particularly for our defence forces," he said. "But for a community leader to respond in such a low level and crass way I think diminishes the high office that he holds."

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Queenslanders want school performance made public

ALMOST two-thirds of Queenslanders believe teaching and learning audit results of state schools should be publicly released.

A poll on couriermail.com.au found 62 per cent of 2120 respondents wanted to know how schools performed, while 38 per cent did not think the results should be released.

The Courier-Mail's publication of the audit results on Saturday caused a furore among teachers and principals, with the Queensland Teachers' Union directing members to suspend participation in the process.

Political leaders are divided over the issue with Premier Anna Bligh backing the release, saying parents had a right to know, while LNP leader Campbell Newman dodged questions on whether he would continue the audits if his party won government.

"There's this obsession that's being created about doing the measurement, the testing and the measurement and the reporting, rather than helping the kids," he said.

Opposition education spokesman Bruce Flegg said he supported parents having the right to information about their schools but wanted to know more about the cost and benefits before deciding about publication or whether they should still be run in Queensland.

Teachers are now pursuing a way of keeping future teaching and learning audit results from being published, despite the State Government saying it believes parents have a right to the statewide information.

The QTU opposed a Right to Information application by The Courier-Mail late last year for the results, endorsing last November to suspend participation if the outcomes were ever published. That suspension was put in place on Monday.

The union argues it had secured an agreement the statewide results would not be published and any publication of them was misleading.

Every state-run school and education centre was audited in 2010, with 460 re-audited last year against world-class benchmarks in eight teaching and learning practices.

Queensland Teachers' Union president Kevin Bates said they were now considering discussing the future of the audit as part of their impending Enterprise Bargaining Agreement (EBA), including a possible guarantee of confidentiality as part of the EBA.

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Interference claim: MP investigation needs investigating, says union chief

The stink of corruption: Craig Thomson's conviction would lead to the downfall of the Gillard government so it must not be allowed to happen

The national secretary of the Health Services Union has called for an immediate inquiry into Fair Work Australia over its investigation into the alleged misconduct of the embattled Labor MP, Craig Thomson, and other senior union officials.

Ms Jackson, the national secretary of the HSU, says the investigation - first flagged in 2009 - was taking far too long and raised the explosive possibility of government interference into the process.

"There needs to be a competent, external inquiry into the goings-on at Fair Work Australia," Ms Jackson said. "Why has it taken so long? Why are we still waiting for answers? And why are we in this position? We need this to end."

Fair Work Australia is investigating allegations of misuse of a union credit card by the Member for Dobell, Mr Thomson, when he was national secretary of the HSU. Fair Work Australia first looked at the case in April 2009 but it did not begin a formal investigation until March 2010.

Ms Jackson said she could not rule out government interference into the inquiry but would not provide details or evidence to support her claim. "Anything is possible, but what I've seen in the last six months has been nothing but appalling," she said.

"The conduct of officials at the HSU, the conduct of certain government ministers about what they have been saying and not been saying privately to people, it all gets back to me."

Workplace Relations Minister Bill Shorten denied any knowledge of anyone in federal government interfering in the Fair Work Australia investigation.

Cabinet secretary Mark Dreyfus said Ms Jackson herself had said she had no evidence for her allegations. "People should lay off independent public servants that are going about their job," he told Sky News this morning. "This is an independent statutory agency and when it's finished its investigation and made its report public, that's the time for comment on it."

The Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, repeated his call for the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, to release details of all communication she has had over the Thomson affair. "The prime minister has got to come clean," he said.

"She has to detail every involvement between her, her office, the ministers and their offices and Fair Work Australia over this, because the only way Julia Gillard survives as prime minister right now is because she has the tainted vote of Craig Thomson in the parliament."

Mr Abbott said yesterday he will not move a no-confidence motion in the government over Ms Gillard's former staffer's involvement in the Australia Day protest when Parliament returns next week but was likely to do so if and when Fair Work Australia made adverse findings against Mr Thomson.

The Liberal Party backbencher, Jamie Briggs, defended Ms Jackson's actions saying the union secretary was just "truth-telling". "It's some pretty hard questions for the prime minister to answer today," he said.

Ms Jackson said she was not gunning for the fall of the Gillard government but that it was the fault of Labor if they lost their majority in the House of Representatives in the event Mr Thomson was forced out of Parliament.

"That would be a catastrophic outcome, but this is not of my making. It's not of the making of our union," she said. "The government should have taken more care in preselecting their candidates. This was not a surprise to them."

She also accused sections of the HSU membership of withholding crucial information from the investigation. "There's critical information that the union is withholding from the membership," she said. "But the leadership in NSW is trying to gag debate within this union and I think they hope that it all goes away and it's not going away."

Ms Jackson pledged to release more information to Fair Work Australia by Friday and has launched the website today called Clean UP HSUeast! which will detail more allegations against the senior membership.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy told ABC Melbourne Radio this morning that he didn't respond to "conspiracy theories" when asked about Ms Jackson's comments and that he didn't even have the phone number of Fair Work Australia.

Ms Jackson responded that she was "totally offended" at Conroy's implication that she was "a conspiracy theorist".

Ms Jackson has been banned by the HSU from speaking publicly about the allegations and said she was speaking out as a union member.
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Claims for job losses jump under new Leftist regulations

UNFAIR dismissal claims continue to rise under the Fair Work Act and have increased by more than 10 per cent a year since the laws took effect in mid 2009.

The number of claims is now running at about twice the level of the final year of Work Choices.

Nearly 8000 dismissal claims were lodged in the first six months of 2011-12 with Fair Work Australia, a rise of 11 per cent from the same time a year earlier.

The opposition workplace relations spokesman, Eric Abetz, said more employers were paying "go away" money to get rid of claims and the Coalition would seek to cut the number of claims. "One would want to see a reduction in the number of claims to ensure people aren't using this simply as an opportunity to milk some more money out of an employer, just on the basis they can," he said.

Senator Abetz would not say how the Coalition's policy would reduce claims but said it would watch closely submissions to the Fair Work Act review.

The Workplace Relations Minister, Bill Shorten, told the Herald that millions of extra workers now had rights after the Fair Work laws took effect, while there was only a "small increase in the number of claims".

"The Liberals' industrial relations policy must be in a witness protection program, because no one can find it," he said. Mr Shorten said while the Coalition complains about the current system it "won't tell us what rights it will take away from people".

Industrial relations is a fraught area for the Coalition after its Work Choices policy contributed to its 2007 election defeat. That policy exempted all businesses with 100 or fewer staff from unfair dismissal laws.

Labor restored dismissal rights for millions of workers although in businesses with fewer than 15 staff they have more limited protections.

The new data, released by Fair Work Australia, shows claims have nearly doubled since 2008-09, the last year of the Work Choices system.

The data also includes strong growth in general protections claims which relate to discrimination and freedom of association.

Senator Abetz said he suspected the actual claims would be higher still, with anecdotal evidence that employers are prepared to pay off sacked workers before a claim is lodged.

The secretary of the ACTU, Jeff Lawrence, said while the number of workers covered by federal laws have tripled the number of claims have only doubled.

He said nearly all claims were settled, usually for less than a month's pay. "There is no evidence that this is 'go away money', rather than the employer making a genuine payment of compensation in recognition of their wrongdoing and/or paying out entitlements," he said.

The National Retailers Association executive director, Gary Black, said dismissal claims should be limited to discrimination claims and unfair dismissals laws should be abolished.

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In politics as in life, fruit doesn't fall far from the ministerial tree

Peter Costello

Leave aside who told who what. The fact is the Prime Minister's office thought it was legitimate politics to organise an Aboriginal protest against her political rival.

As a taxpayer-funded "media adviser", Tony Hodges sent a tip-off to the Aboriginal tent embassy that Tony Abbott was nearby so they could do what? So they could go and protest against him.

And this is the key point. As far as Hodges was concerned the Aboriginal activists were legitimate assets to be used for partisan benefit. The only thing he had to do was to give them the message without leaving fingerprints. But Hodges wasn't up to that. So he had to fall on his sword to protect his boss.

Next time you hear the sound of handwringing coming from the Gillard government about how much they care for indigenous people, remember: they don't care nearly as much about them as they care about Tony Abbott. If they can use them to get at him, they will.

When I saw this my mind went back to the day Kevin Rudd made his apology in Parliament to the "stolen generation". A large overflow crowd gathered outside to watch the event on a big screen - indigenous and non-indigenous. Rudd's speech was received well with much applause and many tears. Then the Opposition Leader rose to speak in support. It was a difficult speech for Brendan Nelson. It involved repudiating the stubborn refusal of John Howard to use the word "sorry".

Howard loyalists were not happy about Nelson's turnaround and Nelson went out on a limb. If he had not given it bipartisan support that day, it would not have been the triumph that it was for Rudd. Rudd owed him a lot for that.

But the crowd did not warm to Nelson's speech. Some even stood up and turned their backs to the screen as his speech was broadcast. It was assumed that he had antagonised indigenous Australians. Later it was discovered that prominent among those turning their backs and demonstrating against Nelson were Lachlan Harris and Tim Gleason from the Prime Minister's staff.

Isn't that a coincidence? Different prime minister, different staff, but both engaging in attempts to fan indigenous protest against a Liberal leader.

We spend a lot of time thinking about how to successfully address indigenous disadvantage. But one thing that does not do it is political staff trying to manipulate indigenous issues for partisan advantage.

These are only two examples where staff have been caught in the act. I suspect there are many more but they have involved much more sophisticated political staff.

Before we get too hard on the staff, it is worth remembering the tone of an office is set by the minister. I always found a courteous minister had a courteous office, a trustworthy minister had trustworthy staff. People employ those who reflect their own values and beliefs. Was Richard Nixon unlucky to have those Watergate types - such as Ehrlichman, Haldeman, Colson - or did it say something about Nixon himself? Where did Hodges get the idea it was his job to spark indigenous protests against Abbott?

Which brings me to the hilarious performance by Anthony Albanese who went to the National Press Club to deliver an oh-so-serious attack on Abbott the day before the Australia Day riot. It turned out that his chief attack line was against the political rival of a fictional president played by the actor Michael Douglas in the movie The American President. Albanese says we shouldn't blame him for the blunder because he only read out a speech given to him by a staffer.

It makes you wonder what those Labor staffers are up to. Perhaps when they went to work in government they thought their lives would imitate art. In Hollywood, people organise demonstrations against opponents, do dirty tricks and get Oscars for doing so.

In the real world, actions have consequences. You learn that when you grow up.

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Postings from Brisbane, Australia by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.) -- former member of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society, former anarcho-capitalist and former member of the British Conservative party.


Most academics are lockstep Leftists so readers do sometimes doubt that I have the qualifications mentioned above. Photocopies of my academic and military certificates are however all viewable here


For overseas readers: The "ALP" is the Australian Labor Party -- Australia's major Leftist party. The "Liberal" party is Australia's major conservative political party.


Again for overseas readers: Like the USA, Germany and India, Australia has State governments as well as the Federal government. So it may be useful to know the usual abbreviations for the Australian States: QLD (Queensland), NSW (New South Wales), WA (Western Australia), VIC (Victoria), TAS (Tasmania), SA (South Australia).


For American readers: A "pensioner" is a retired person living on Social Security


Two of my ancestors were convicts so my family has been in Australia for a long time. As well as that, all four of my grandparents were born in the State where I was born and still live: Queensland. And I am even a member of the world's second-most condemned minority: WASPs (the most condemned is of course the Jews -- which may be why I tend to like Jews). So I think I am as Australian as you can get. I certainly feel that way. I like all things that are iconically Australian: meat pies, Vegemite, Henry Lawson etc. I particularly pride myself on my familiarity with the great Australian slanguage. I draw the line at Iced Vo-Vos and betting on the neddies, however. So if I cannot comment insightfully on Australian affairs, who could?


On all my blogs, I express my view of what is important primarily by the readings that I select for posting. I do however on occasions add personal comments in italicized form at the beginning of an article.


I am rather pleased to report that I am a lifelong conservative. Out of intellectual curiosity, I did in my youth join organizations from right across the political spectrum so I am certainly not closed-minded and am very familiar with the full spectrum of political thinking. Nonetheless, I did not have to undergo the lurch from Left to Right that so many people undergo. At age 13 I used my pocket-money to subscribe to the "Reader's Digest" -- the main conservative organ available in small town Australia of the 1950s. I have learnt much since but am pleased and amused to note that history has since confirmed most of what I thought at that early age.

I imagine that the the RD is still sending mailouts to my 1950s address!


I am an army man. Although my service in the Australian army was chiefly noted for its un-notability, I DID join voluntarily in the Vietnam era, I DID reach the rank of Sergeant, and I DID volunteer for a posting in Vietnam. So I think I may be forgiven for saying something that most army men think but which most don't say because they think it is too obvious: The profession of arms is the noblest profession of all because it is the only profession where you offer to lay down your life in performing your duties. Our men fought so that people could say and think what they like but I myself always treat military men with great respect -- respect which in my view is simply their due.


The kneejerk response of the Green/Left to people who challenge them is to say that the challenger is in the pay of "Big Oil", "Big Business", "Big Pharma", "Exxon-Mobil", "The Pioneer Fund" or some other entity that they see, in their childish way, as a boogeyman. So I think it might be useful for me to point out that I have NEVER received one cent from anybody by way of support for what I write. As a retired person, I live entirely on my own investments. I do not work for anybody and I am not beholden to anybody. And I have NO investments in oil companies, mining companies or "Big Pharma"


UPDATE: Despite my (statistical) aversion to mining stocks, I have recently bought a few shares in BHP -- the world's biggest miner, I gather. I run the grave risk of becoming a speaker of famous last words for saying this but I suspect that BHP is now so big as to be largely immune from the risks that plague most mining companies. I also know of no issue affecting BHP where my writings would have any relevance. The Left seem to have a visceral hatred of miners. I have never quite figured out why.


Although I have been an atheist for all my adult life, I have no hesitation in saying that the single book which has influenced me most is the New Testament. And my Scripture blog will show that I know whereof I speak.


A delightful story about a great Australian conservative