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21 September, 2007

Australian Leftist commentators bubbling over with deluded hatred

LIKE those inexperienced footballers who attempt to dispose of the ball before they have it, Australia's standing army of Howard-haters has gone beyond predicting a Labor victory at the forthcoming federal election. They are now explaining, and claiming ownership of, that victory. Writing on this page last month, Phillip Adams put John Howard's looming defeat down to the fact the Prime Minister's "wedging, vote-buying and sundry pork-barrelling has confirmed the electorate's worst suspicions about his deviousness". Any evidence those suspicions are widespread outside the echo-chamber of Late Night Live, Phil?

Adams continued: "Honest John is now seen to be as tricky as Dicky. Our increasingly Nixonian PM is focusing on his worst attributes and sinking into deeper do-do and disrepute." Apparently, after years of ignoring the prophets of the cultural Left, the electorate has woken up to the truth of what they have been saying all along: that Howard is evil incarnate.

Reading Adams, I was reminded of a comment made to me recently by a Left-leaning friend who works in one of the arts industries: that Australians are about to ditch the Government because of its abandonment of the anti-Semitic terrorism-supporter David Hicks.

But if a kind of Rip Van Winkle theory of the electorate was merely hinted at by Adams, it was outlined in great detail last weekend by Hugh Mackay, the social researcher and Fairfax columnist whom Tim Blair recently dubbed "Australia's most boring human". The key point about the election, wrote Mackay, will be its "retrospective character". This will be an election "about the past - the Government's and ours - catching up with us".

The poll will demonstrate the electorate awakening from a "dreamy period" during which it has disgracefully prioritised material satisfactions over principled politics. And can you guess whose pet peeves will be legitimised in this catch-up? "Many Australians who have felt powerless will want to punish this Government for sins long past," Mackay says. "Those who once marched in support of Aboriginal reconciliation, for instance, will decide it was not good enough, after all, to simply push that idea off the agenda. "Those who were ashamed of our treatment of asylum-seekers, but let themselves become anaesthetised by propaganda, will decide it was wrong to capitulate. Those who took the easy path of prejudice against ethnic or religious groups will decide they are capable of nobler responses than that. "Those who were too dozy to react to their gut instinct that told them the anti-terrorism laws went too far will think again."

But why, Hugh? Why would voters who rejected the reasons put forward by the cultural Left to ditch Howard in 1998, 2001 and 2004 suddenly accept those as the best reasons to ditch him now?

Similar threads were apparent in an extraordinary opinion article by Catherine Deveny in The Age yesterday. "If I were John Howard, I'd be praying for a terrorist attack," wrote Deveny, revealing a level of bloody-mindedness I wouldn't have expected even from the worst of the Howard and Bush-haters. Deveny looks forward to an election-night party that will deliver her and her crowd their long-delayed revenge. "The angry and disillusioned (I take it she means the green and the Left) are hoping for a grudge match come election night," she writes. "It's not enough for the Howard administration to be voted out. People want to see blood. They want to see Howard cockily strutting into the election claiming smugly, 'We are the underdog' ... only for it to go horribly wrong as the votes come in. "It gives me goose bumps just thinking about it."

And I bet it gives Howard goose bumps just reading about it. Do Mackay and Deveny even realise what utter poison it is to Labor's cause if voters in outer-suburban seats get a sniff of the looming triumphalism of those who seek to turn politics into either a moral crusade ("nobler responses") or a blood sport?

Anyway, do we really need such abstruse and self-serving theories as these to explain the predicament of the Howard Government? Here's a simpler account, based on the universal logic of the use-by date. The electorate is considering a change of government for the same reason I just traded in my old Commodore: as any unit ages, it becomes less reliable. While voters have, in fact, been toying with a political upgrade for some time, Labor has previously failed to satisfy one of the basic criteria: sound leadership. Voters thought Mark Latham was too volatile, Kim Beazley too soft. But in Rudd they are prepared to embrace a leader every bit as conservative, temperamentally cautious and safe-handed as Howard.

A disclaimer: the above theory is not original. It was unrolled before me by Rudd himself, five months ago, in the bookshop at Sydney Airport, as we stood leafing through Anne Applebaum's superb new study of the Soviet gulag and pondering whether to buy it. (I did; he didn't.)

Let me say that, as a swinging voter, I don't invest anything like Deveny's emotional energy in the outcome of the election. Rather, I celebrate the convergence of the main parties, which testifies to the contemporary Australian settlement in favour of markets as the fairest mechanism for distributing scarce resources, and the US alliance as the foundation of our foreign relations.

That said, if the Government falls, will I be discomfited by the crowing of the Howard-haters, against whom I have spent most of the past 15 years at war? Well, OK, yes. But even as I cringe under that cacophonous onslaught, I will be anticipating a more familiar and comforting sound: their howls of disappointment, as Rudd reveals he is no more a victim of their prejudices than Howard.

Source




Sleepy New Zealand police good at excuses only

New Zealand police say they are relying on Interpol to coordinate the search in the United States for fugitive father Michael Xue. He is now the prime suspect in what is thought to be the murder of his estranged wife Annie Liu. Mr Xue fled to Los Angeles at the weekend, leaving his three-year-old daughter Qian Xun Xue at a Melbourne train station, yet US police claim not to have been contacted by detectives in Auckland.

The officer in charge of the homicide investigation, Senior Sergeant Simon Scott, says they are dealing with Interpol, rather than local law enforcement agencies. "We want to speak with [Mr Xue] in relation to what's gone on here and in Melbourne," he said.

A post-mortem examination today is expected to formally identify a body found in Auckland as the toddler's missing mother. The body of an Asian woman believed to be 27-year-old Annie Liu was discovered in the boot of her estranged husband's car almost 48 hours after police first went to the family's suburban Auckland home.

But Senior Sergeant Scott blamed the apparent delays on obtaining a search warrant and the need to follow procedures. "We haven't had the keys for the vehicle - it's just not a matter of breaking the windows and getting in," he said. "I'm satisfied my staff have done an excellent job. "We are hoping examination of that vehicle is going to reveal evidence as to how the person that is in that vehicle has met their death."

Meanwhile the toddler's grandmother Liu Xiaoping, 53, will travel to New Zealand and then on to Australia to try and gain custody of Qian Xun Xue. "What she is going through now has no doubt left scars on her heart," Ms Liu said. "The Australian Government and people have given her great caring and support, for which I feel very grateful, but it will take some time for her to recover and walk out of the shadow cast on her heart." Her grandmother says she is the only one left to care for the girl. "I'm her closest and most important family member - she's got nobody apart from me," she said. "Anan [mother Annie] was my only child and she's my only granddaughter. I will do my utmost to bring her up."

Ms Liu wants to take her back to live in China's Hunan Province where she works as the deputy general manager of a large company. A Chinese politician in New Zealand says the three-year-old girl is best off being reunited with her extended family in China. Nationals MP Pansy Wong says the girl speaks Mandarin, and her grandmother has given assurances about family connections in China. "She's a very youthful grandmother, strong woman, they also have uncles," she said. "Qianxun also has grand-uncles and grand-aunties, so there's a lot of very caring extended family there."

Source




Police union attacks police bureaucracy

But the Leftist government loves the bureaucracy, of course

The Queensland Police Union (QPU) says the Commissioner needs to make police on the front-line his priority if he is going to be in the job for the next three years. The State Government has extended Bob Atkinson's contract to keep him on as Police Commissioner until 2010.

QPU vice-president Denis Fitzpatrick says the union yesterday opted against pushing for a vote of no-confidence in the Commissioner but that things need to change in the police force. "We disagree with the priorities of the Police Service - the way the service is operating at the moment, the way administration seems to become the main focus of the police service in Queensland, rather than preventing and solving crime," he said. "It's the union's firm view that operational police should be the priority of the Commissioner."

Queensland Police Minister Judy Spence says she has told the union to work with the Commissioner. "I had a meeting with the police union last night and told them of the Government's decision to renew the contract of Commissioner Atkinson," she said. "I'm disappointed with the fact that they've gone round with these motions of no-confidence. "They're not going to influence the Government's decisions and it's about time they agreed that they would work with the Commissioner."

Source




Rough West Australian cops betray their community

One would have thought that the wrongful conviction of Andrew Mallard would have shown them that their "anything for a conviction" mentality was wrong

There is a lot of soul searching going on inside the criminal justice system in Western Australia, after the guilty plea this week by a man named Dante Wyndham Arthurs to the shocking murder of an eight-year-old girl in a Perth shopping mall toilet last year.



It was a routine shopping trip that turned into a crime which shocked the nation. In June last year, the young girl, Sofia Rodriguez-Urrutia-Shu, was brutally murdered in a toilet at this shopping centre in Perth's southern suburbs. She was out of the sight of her brother and uncle for just 10 minutes, but the violence of the attack shocked even the most hardened police, including WA Commissioner Karl O'Callaghan. "The girl has got some shocking injuries, including broken bones and it's a very disturbing crime," he said. "As I said, it's one of the worst that I've ever seen."

Almost four years earlier, police had charged Arthurs with sexually assaulting another young girl, but the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) then dropped it because he ruled the police interview was too aggressive. In this week's murder case, the Supreme Court dismissed the police interview once again for exceeding acceptable boundaries.

Police acknowledge improvements need to be made and there are mounting calls for a major overhaul of law enforcement tactics.

On Monday, the man accused of the crime, a 22-year-old shopping centre worker, pleaded guilty to murder after the DPP dropped charges of wilful murder and sexual assault. "We have a conviction by a plea of guilty to murder and there will be a life sentence imposed. That's not a bad outcome," WA DPP director Robert Cock QC said.

Spokesman for the family of the murdered girl, Father Bryan Rosling, says they are relieved to be spared the trauma of a trial. "They are relieved in the sense that they don't have to be involved with the ordeal of a long trial and that their son Gabriel, who is only 15, will be spared having to be a witness," he said. "But they're very disappointed and saddened by the downgrading of the charges through the plea bargain."

The question now being asked of the DPP and the police is, could this murder have been avoided? In 2003, Dante Arthurs was charged with sexually interfering with an eight-year-old girl in a park near his home. Arthurs confessed to the attack, but as Mr O'Callaghan says, the matter went no further. "The DPP made the decision not to proceed with that case because they thought the detectives' questioning of Dante Arthurs was robust," he said. "We disagree with that, we disagreed with it at the time, we disagree with it now."

"It was just devastating to know that nothing was going to be done about it," Sophia's mother said. "It was just dropped and I was angry. I think it was inevitable that he was going to do it again."

But Mr Cock does not think the decision to deal with Arthurs led to the recent murder of Sophia. "I think it draws a very long bow to suggest that had he been dealt with for that offence, this offence may not have happened," he said.

The handling of the Arthurs murder case came close to failure last month. The defence had a win in the Supreme Court, when a videotaped police interview with Arthurs was ruled in admissible because of the aggressive interrogation yet again.

Mr Cock has criticised the interrogation of Arthurs by police. "The questioning by police went beyond the wind in this one, it wasn't just close to the wind," he said. "It exceeded the limits of a fair interrogation such to produce an interview which was not admissible in court. "So in that respect, it went too far."

"We have to understand that firstly there were no admissions made in that particular interview, so it wasn't necessarily as key as we think it might be," Mr O'Callaghan said.

Dante Arthurs pleaded guilty, therefore saving another potential embarrassment for police, but in recent years WA has seen a string of high-profile cases result in defeat and sometimes red faces for law enforcement.

In 2002, deaf mute Darryl Beamish was freed after serving 16 years in jail for murder and in 2004, the Mickelberg brothers conviction for a multi-million dollar gold swindle were overturned after more than 20 years. In 2005, Rory Christie's conviction of his wife's murder was overturned and in the same year, Andrew Mallard's 1995 conviction of Perth jeweller Pamela Lawrence was quashed, which is now the subject of a Corruption and Crime Commission inquiry. Earlier this year, three men were acquitted of the murder of Phillip Walsham in 1998.

But Mr O'Callaghan warns against drawing conclusions. "I think we have to be very careful in drawing conclusions that because a case is lost, the police have not done their job or the investigators have not done their job. That's not true," he said. "I don't want to sound overly defensive about policing, I think that we do have some improvements to make."

Mr Cock shares a similar view. "I think it's unfair to put in a bundle, about seven or eight high-profile cases that have been delivered recently - although depending on trials that have happened over the last 40 years - package all them up and say therefore you haven't learnt anything," he said.

Many in Perth's legal community, including barrister Tom Percy QC, believe there needs to be a radical overhaul of the law enforcement culture, even after a royal commission into police conduct which reported in 2004. Mr Percy has been practising criminal law in WA for three decades. "I haven't seen any major changes in the last 20 years, 30 years of any real significance at all," Mr Percy said. "It's time that the whole culture of the police and the DPP was examined and examined by someone who doesn't have a culture within the DPP or the police. "Someone from the outside [to] have a good look at it, because as long as the people who've been part of the system for many years are in charge, we're unlikely to see anything change."

WA Attorney-General Jim McGinty has announced the State Government will abolish the offence of wilful murder to bring it in line with other states. But regardless of any reforms, the family of Sofia will always be haunted by the question, what might have happened had Arthurs been convicted in 2003.

Source





20 September, 2007

Global warming attracts the dumb and the devious

IT'S a toss-up as to who's making a bigger fool of themselves over climate change: our politicians or our Miss Earth contestants, Andrew Bolt writes

At least the girls in the Miss Earth beauty pageant can afford to look stupid, since they aren't in charge of anything important, like the vanishing water supplies of our cities. They've just wanted to preach green messages in a bikini and tiara, as they fought last week for the titles of Miss Earth Australia, Best in Swimsuit and Best Environmental Speech. So, we could smile to read contestant Snezana declare that "Salinisation (sic) of land is one of the major environemtal (sic) crises facing Australia", and Kirra warn that "the biggest problem in our enviroment (sic) today is our lack of water". At worst we'd have wondered how badly we teach English as Angelique demanded help for an "environmnet" in danger, and Natalia wept for an "enviornment (sic) that sustains us".

How cute, these earnest bikini babes, so keen to save something they cannot even spell. But how scary, too, that many of these contestants want to save this thing they cannot spell from a threat they cannot understand. You see, someone - a few of the girls dobbed in Al Gore - has filled their pretty heads with such wild fears of global warming that poor Amanda now wails that "the human race will eventually become extinct".

Scared silly, like so many children now, by professional panic merchants, it seems there's nothing these girls won't now blame on global warming; even tsunamis caused by earthquakes. Christine, for instance, says she's been worried about global warming "from when the tsunami happened in Thailand back in December 2004". "Hey! Me too," squeals Georgina. "Aside from an increase in natural disasters such as the fateful tsunami of 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, smaller changes to weather patterns are slowly being recognised."

Of course, we mustn't blame the girls for believing something so stupid when even Great Guru Gore has falsely suggested global warming caused Hurricane Katrina, the melting snows of Kilimanjaro, the drying of Lake Chad, the immigration of Pacific islanders and whatever else he dreams up when flying here to tell us to cut the kind of emissions he just blew out the back of his jet.

And I ask again: Who really is making a bigger fool of themselves over global warming; these harmless beauty contestants or our politicians, now watching our dams drain dry? The girls may think global warming causes earthquakes, but our politicians just as stupidly claim it's causing our cities to run out of water. Here is New South Wales Premier Morris Iemma last Friday, explaining why Sydney is getting permanent water restrictions: "The changes brought by climate change are going to change the way we use water." Victoria's politicians have used the same line. Here is our since departed Minister for No Water, John Thwaites, excusing water restrictions that are killing our playing fields and gardens: "So all the evidence points to a significant involvement of global warming in the present drought."

How handy, that global warming bogyman. Blame global warming for Melbourne's dams now being 7 per cent lower now than they were even last year, when things got grim. Blame global warming for the Brumby Government having to reassure us last week that Melbourne won't run out of drinking water this year, at least. Gosh, don't blame the Government instead for having such a green phobia about a new dam that we may run out of water the year after. What deceitful men. Or stupid.

For a start, no scientist can tell if any drought yet has been caused by the slight global warming of 0.7 degrees thought to have occurred last century. Let's not forget we've had many droughts before in our "land of droughts and flooding rains". Indeed, the driest five years in NSW in the past century were from 1940 to 1944, and Victoria's past five years have been no drier than what we suffered then, too. Bureau of Meteorology figures suggest we may just be returning to the drier weather of the first 45 years of last century.

In NSW, the average annual rainfall back then was just 475mm. Then came years of plenty, averaging 567mm, but since 1996 the annual rainfall has fallen back to an average of 511mm - still well up on the usual rainfall of the post-war years. So what drought? Victoria's weather has followed much the same pattern: Dry years until 1945, followed by years of good rain until a decade ago, when the dry returned. Our average annual rainfall from 1996 has been 571mm, much less than the post-war average until then of 671mm, but not much less than the pre-war average of 603mm.

Droughts come and droughts go, and it's impossible to see the influence of any man-made global warming. So why should this make you furious with our politicians? Because the history of this continent's weather should have told them to prepare for dry years of the kind we've had so often before. Because it should have told them they were mad to waste dam water on environmental flows for rivers that had survived years far drier than these. And because by blaming global warming instead of themselves, they make sweet girls like Miss Earth's Krystle shake on their stilettos, sure that "the ultimate end of existence of Earth and man is global warming". Fear not, Krystle, stupidity will kill us more surely than global warming.

Source




Leftist racism on the march among the Australian Left

LIKE most of you, I'm indigenous. I was born here and have nowhere else to go, Andrew Bolt writes

This is my home, and where my heart is. If I'm not indigenous to Australia, I'm indigenous to nowhere. So you might think I'd cheer at Labor's promise last week to ratify - should it win government - the United Nations' new Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Except, of course, we know Labor is infected with the New Racism, and still plays off one tribe against another.

In the case of we indigenous Australians, Labor now wants to ratify a bizarre document that doesn't just stop at saying some indigenous people are more indigenous than others. It also says the most indigenous of us - people born here, like me, but with some Aboriginal ancestry - can be excused the laws and obligations that apply to the rest of us. And get extra rights all of their own.

Here's proof that Kevin Rudd's new Labor isn't so new, after all, exploiting the ethnic differences which divide us rather than celebrating what unites. Incidentally, for more proof, see star Labor candidate Maxine McKew, now fighting Prime Minister John Howard for his seat of Bennelong. She's just promised to recognise the "Armenian genocide", hoping to thrill Bennelong's 4000 ethnic Armenians. The nation's many Turks, however, will be enraged, rightly arguing that the death of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in the wars, famines and inter-ethnic slaughter of the Ottoman Empire's last years was a tragedy, but no state-ordered genocide. McKew's promise can bring only strife, but harvesting votes by preaching old divisions rather than a new unity is an old Labor ploy.

And so we see again with this UN Declaration on indigenous rights. The wretched thing is actually the work of the UN's discredited Human Rights Council, which includes representatives from such beacons of humans rights as Saudi Arabia, China, Cuba, Egypt, Pakistan and Russia. Already you'll have figured this is a document full of empty sentiments that even its authors don't believe or most certainly will never implement. That helps to explain why the four countries that refused to ratify it last week are ones that take their word more seriously: Australia, Canada, the United States and New Zealand, each of which objects that this declaration puts ethnic laws above national ones. But Labor's spokesman for indigenous affairs, Jenny Macklin, can't wait to sign, promising "a federal Labor Government would endorse Australia becoming a signatory".

So what is in this UN declaration, that Macklin later stressed was "non-binding", that Labor wants to sign us up to? Read closely, because it's actually a blueprint for an Aboriginal nation within Australia, with rights to its own schools, own government, own treaties and own laws, even if as barbaric as payback: "Indigenous peoples and individuals have the right to belong to an indigenous community or nation . . . "(States must give) due recognition to indigenous peoples' laws . . . "Indigenous peoples have the right to establish and control their education systems . . . "States shall consult and co-operate in good faith with the indigenous peoples concerned through their own representative institutions . . . "Indigenous peoples . . . have the right to maintain and develop contacts, relations and co-operation, including activities for spiritual, cultural, political, economic and social purposes with . . . other peoples across borders . . . "Indigenous peoples have the right to determine the responsibilities of individuals to their communities." That last one is oppressive. It says tribal strongmen can tell Aborigines who want to join the mainstream to stick with the tribe instead.

Macklin is now insisting she won't let tribal law overrule the general law. But why sign a protocol that implies the very opposite? That supports an Aboriginal nation within Australia? That supports separate rights and separate development for Aborigines, instead of urging them to seek a future with the rest of us? What divisive and racist foolishness. Already we can assume Labor in office will kill the federal intervention in the Northern Territory launched by this Government to save Aboriginal communities now drowning in booze, violence, truancy and unemployment.

It isn't right, a Macklin will say after the election, that "we" trample on Aborigines' rights to their own ways. And once again the weak will pay for this Noble Savage myth that Labor still worships: this insistence that Aborigines be a race apart. They'll be like the boy of this news story last week: "A magistrate seeking to preserve an Aboriginal toddler's cultural identity ignored warnings from child protection workers and put him into the care of his violent uncle, who four weeks later tortured and bashed the boy almost to death . . ." Preserve the tribe! Never mind the individual. And pit one race against another. Pit one group of indigenous people against the rest who were born here, and want brothers, not rivals.

Source




Australian education pattern different

Leftist State governments fail to teach the basics

AUSTRALIAN school students spend half the time learning reading, writing, maths and science that their counterparts in other industrialised nations do. Australian curriculums devote the least amount of time of the 30 leading industrialised nations to teaching core subjects for 9- to 11-year-olds and for 12- to 14-year-olds, says the OECD report on education released last night. Education at a Glance 2007 says Australia is the only member of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development to decrease public investment in tertiary education, by 4 per cent, compared with an average 49 per cent increase in the 29 other nations.

While public spending on education at all levels is below the OECD average, the level of private spending at the school and university level is among the highest.

The report also notes the lack of financial incentive for experienced teachers, with 31 per cent of wage rises in the past decade going to beginners and only 3per cent to those with more than 15 years on the job. Education Minister Julie Bishop and Opposition education spokesman Stephen Smith said the core subjects of reading, writing, maths and science were vital and the OECD results reflected why it was necessary to introduce a rigorous national curriculum in such subjects. Ms Bishop said the report echoed recent concerns made by the Australian Primary School Principals Association that the curriculum was too cluttered and that core skills were suffering as a result. Mr Smith said the core subjects were at the heart of a quality education and fundamental to other learning.

But association president Leonie Trimper disputed the figures, saying Australian primary schools spent about 30 per cent of the week on reading and writing and 20 per cent on maths. The OECD reports that the intended instruction time for the compulsory curriculum in Australia is 13 per cent in reading, writing and literature for primary school students compared with 23 per cent in the OECD, and 9 per cent for 12- to 14-year-olds, compared with 15 per cent. Maths accounts for 9 per cent of instruction time in primary schools compared with the OECD average of 16 per cent, and 9 per cent in high schools, compared with the average of 13 per cent. Primary school science accounts for 2 per cent and a foreign language 1 per cent of teaching time compared with the averages of 8 per cent and 7 per cent respectively.

The report notes that Australia has a much lower proportion, 41 per cent compared with the OECD average of 92 per cent, of compulsory core curriculum, or the minimum required time devoted to core subjects common to all students. The majority of the compulsory Australian curriculum is flexible, allowing schools or students to choose where to spend the rest of their time. "This indicator captures intended instruction time ... it does not show the actual number of hours of instruction received by students," the report says. "It nevertheless provides an indication of how much formal instruction time is considered necessary in order for students to achieve the desired educational goals."

In assessing education funding, the report says that based on 2005 figures, public funding of all levels of education in Australia is 4.3 per cent of GDP, compared with an OECD average of 5 per cent while private spending is 1.6 per cent of GDP, more than double the OECD average of 0.7 per cent, and the third-highest level behind the US and Korea.

Public funding of tertiary education institutions fell by 4 per cent compared with an average increase in the OECD of 49 per cent. Half of all tertiary spending is now from private funds.

Mr Smith said the investment Australia made in education compared with other countries was the crucial factor. "The report finds that there has been a significant decline in public investment across all levels of education in Australia under the Howard Government," he said.

Ms Bishop said the OECD's analysis was flawed, and was based on a different definition of tertiary institution than used in Australia. Ms Bishop also said it failed to include large public funding increases since 2004, including the $5 billion Higher Education Endowment Fund. However, she said the report provided further support for the Government's push to introduce performance-based pay for teachers. "The lack of incentive and career prospects is one reason why 40 per cent of teaching graduates do not go into teaching and 25 per cent of new teachers leave the profession within five years," she said"

Source




Leftists find racism under every bed

TODD Harper, the VicHealth boss, really does seem awfully keen to see racism where none exists, Andrew Bolt writes

Last week, I pointed out that VicHealth now claimed our Anglo culture made immigrants sick. As VicHealth Letter put it: "The dominance of an Anglo culture, and civic organisation based on a British system of law and governance, inadvertently leads to systemic racial discrimination, creating barriers to the economic resources necessary to maintain good health and well-being."

I tried, using facts and reason, to show Harper why he was wrong to so savagely criticise a culture that has actually produced a society remarkably happy, rich - and healthy. I wasted my time. You may have seen on these pages on Monday Harper's response, which began with the best anecdote he could find to show how bad our racism was: "An 11-year-old boy, Steve, is at the footy with his dad. The boy was born in Australia. His father was born in Greece. They are both proud Aussies. "They are watching Carlton champion Anthony Koutoufides playing St Kilda in what will turn out to be his last game. "As Kouta drops a mark, a St Kilda fan roars: 'Go back to your souvlaki shop.' The boy turns to his father with a scared and confused look . . ." This, Harper triumphantly concluded, is among the "evidence (which) shows that Victoria's large culturally diverse population deal(s) with fairly high levels of discrimination . . ."

Small problem, Todd. As it happens, Koutoufides really does own a souvlaki shop, called Souvlaki Hut, along with former teammate Ange Christou. In fact, he's since left football and indeed gone back to his souvlaki shop. So, what was that St Kilda fan supposed to shout instead: "Go back to your Chinese takeaway?" And was what he said truly racist, when the most passionate anti-racists saw nothing wrong with similarly advising One Nation's Pauline Hanson to go back to her fish and chip shop? Really, Harper should be much less eager to take offence. It's not healthy, and not that fair on us, either.

Source





19 September, 2007

A very cranky major Australian newspaper

The Age used to bill itself as one of the world's great newspapers, and there was a time when that was probably true. The paper no longer uses that slogan, and just as well. These days, the Canberra bureau apart, its standards fall far short of those set by the world's best newspapers. Things have become much worse since Andrew Jaspan, a left-wing Englishman, took over as editor in October 2004.

Jaspan, the former editor of the obscure The Sunday Herald in Scotland, has always been a puzzling choice for a self-confident Australian city such as Melbourne. His singular notoriety emerges from the astonishing story he commissioned after al-Qa'ida murdered 3000 Americans and others on September 11, 2001. Jaspan's reporter was given extensive space to make the following extraordinary claims:

"Who do you think they were? Palestinians? Saudis? Iraqis, even? Al-Qa'ida, surely? Wrong on all counts. They were Israelis; and at least two of them were Israeli intelligence agents, working for Mossad, the equivalent of MI6 or the CIA. Their discovery and arrest that morning is a matter of indisputable fact. "To those who have investigated just what the Israelis were up to that day, the case raises one dreadful possibility: that Israeli intelligence had been shadowing the al-Qa'ida hijackers as they moved from the Middle East through Europe and into America, where they trained as pilots and prepared to suicide-bomb the symbolic heart of the US. And the motive? To bind America in blood and mutual suffering to the Israeli cause." (The Sunday Herald, November 2, 2003)

In the 1960s, under Graham Perkin, The Age threw off its staid conservative image and became a crusading liberal newspaper in the true sense of the word. For instance, it campaigned against White Australia and the death penalty. Under Jaspan, however, The Age's liberalism has morphed into a peculiar sort of bitter and twisted extremism, borrowed from Britain's The Guardian.

Nowhere is the corruption of The Age clearer than in its coverage of foreign affairs, characterised by systematic anti-Americanism, symbolised by horrible Michael Leunig cartoons showing Americans and Israelis as Nazis. It is to The Age's eternal shame that Leunig was welcomed by the mad bigots in Iran for their competition denigrating the Holocaust.

I am no great fan of the Bush administration, but there is a difference between criticising a particular president and the reflexive hostility to everything American that now pulsates from the columns of The Age. Australians whom I know do not have that visceral hatred of all things American. These are alien views. These views are being shoved down the throats of Age readers, mainly interested to read Epicure and know what is happening in Melbourne.

Even worse is The Age's news coverage of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Since 2002 The Age's correspondent in Jerusalem has been O'Loughlin. Like many people, I have given up subscribing to The Age because of its primitive coverage of the Middle East. Getting angry over breakfast spoils my day. Fortunately, other people make it their business to monitor O'Loughlin's writing and expose his errors of fact and interpretation.

One of these is Tzvi Fleischer of the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, who writes the Media Watch column for the Jewish News. Fleischer has documented literally dozens of cases in which O'Loughlin has got basic facts wrong, or else placed his own anti-Israel spin on stories. As Fleischer says: "O'Loughlin's bent is clearest in his longer features, which have generally been simply attempts to make and sell the Palestinian case to his readers." According to O'Loughlin:

* Palestinian suicide bombers are militants whose murder of Israeli civilians is an understandable reaction to Israel's brutalisation of their families.

* Israel's security barrier, which has saved hundreds of Israeli (and Palestinian) lives, is a wall, imposing apartheid on innocent Palestinians.

* Israel's withdrawal from Gaza was all part of a cynical Israeli scheme to occupy the West Bank forever.

* Israel and Hamas are morally no different, since neither wants peace and both are dominated by rejectionists.

The Age and O'Loughlin are, of course, entitled to their opinions. If their anti-Israel polemics were confined to editorials and signed opinion articles, I could just ignore them. But anti-Israel bias seeps into The Age's news columns as well, and that is another matter. The Age was an influential paper, and its systematic anti-Israel bias has a real effect on public opinion.

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Teacher failures spell student trouble

Who will teach the teachers?

Young teenagers could be forgiven for misspelling words such as subterranean and miscellaneous, but what about the nation's primary school teachers? A spelling test of about 40 Victorian teachers, conducted in April this year, provides no grounds for confidence. Not one of the teachers could correctly spell all 11 words, ranging in difficulty from substitute to adolescence. The test was set at the level expected of 14-year-olds but the average score among the 39 teachers was just seven correctly spelled words.

Five teachers correctly spelled 10 words, putting their level at 13 years and nine months. One teacher was unable to spell any of the words while two teachers got only two of the words correct. Overall, 22 teachers misspelled subterranean, 17 couldn't manage embarrassing or miscellaneous and 16 had trouble with adolescence.

The test was held during a two-day course conducted by teacher Denyse Ritchie, who has run programs for the past 11 years giving primary school teachers the basic literacy skills to teach reading. Ms Ritchie, executive director and co-author of THRASS (Teaching Handwriting Reading And Spelling Skills), used by thousands of schools around the nation, said the spelling results were typical of the standard she saw.

She said teachers trained over the past few decades had been influenced by the "whole language" method of teaching reading, in which the letter-sound relationship underpinning written language is only one strategy used to teach reading, and not necessarily the first. "Rather than teaching children the 26 sounds of the alphabet, they need to learn the 44 letter-sound combinations that comprise the English language." Ms Ritchie said teaching children the letter 'c' only as the sound in cat made it impossible for them to work out how to read words like chair, chef and face. With the sound 'f', students are taught that the letter f makes the sound but not that the letters 'ph' make the same sound.

Ms Ritchie said the biggest problem was that teachers were not taught how to break words into their composite sounds and so could not explain it to children. "Teachers are ignorant of the 44 sounds in English and all the spelling choices that make up those sounds; they have a very limited understanding of it. "You can learn to read without knowing phenomics (the sounds that make up words), but when you spell, you have to have a good phenomic understanding to help spell words like said. "Unless you're taught that 'ai' as well as 'e' can make an 'eh' sound in words like said and again, you will spell said as 'sed'. "But many teachers don't have that inherent knowledge,"

The teachers' phenomic knowledge was also tested. When asked to break words into the constituent sounds or phenomes - such as how many sounds in 'cat' (c-a-t) - the average score was 4.1 out of a possible 10 correct answers. When asked to identify the third sound in a word like scrunch (r), the average score was 4.5 out of 10 and the average mark for breaking words into syllables was also 4.5 out of 10.

Ms Ritchie said teachers commonly answered that the word scrunch comprised two sounds (scr-unch) when it actually has six sounds (s-cr-u-n-ch). "Teachers and students need to know that letters don't have a sound," she said. "They need to know that letters are only symbols that are used continually in different combinations to represent sounds."

In Britain, the Government has stipulated that from the beginning of this school year, reading will be taught using "first and fast" synthetic phonics, which teaches students the letter-sounds and how they are blended to form words. But the British teachers association persists in arguing that teaching reading using an intensive phonics approach is inferior to an "inclusive reading program" that has children predict words based on the context of the sentence or the type of word it is.

In a position paper on reading and phonics released by the English Teachers Association of NSW in July, it suggests a child reading the sentence "The car drove along the s..... at high speed" could guess it says street because the word starts with s. If the child said road, the paper says, the teacher will "have to weigh up whether to take the student back to the word" to read it correctly. "They may NOT because they recognise that meaning is most important, that we ALL make such mistakes EVERY time we read, and that this mistake shows that the child understands what they are reading," the paper says.

Source




Another new Premier to reform Freedom from Information laws

What a laugh! Believe it when you see it

New Queensland Premier Anna Bligh yesterday set the stage for a more open government than that of her predecessor Peter Beattie, announcing an overhaul of the state's outdated freedom of information laws. Speaking after chairing her first cabinet meeting as Premier, Ms Bligh also announced an independent audit of the state's troubled ambulance system and said she had placed her ministers on a "campaign footing" even though she did not expect to calla state election for another two years.

Ms Bligh said an independent overhaul of the 1992 Freedom of Information Act would be conducted by a three-member panel chaired by David Solomon, a barrister, journalist and former chairman of Queensland's Electoral and Administrative Review Committee. The committee paved the way for the abolition in the early years of the Goss government of the state's notorious gerrymander.

Ms Bligh said she wanted to provide the public with greater accessibility to information and greater transparency. "It is now 15 years since Queensland saw its first freedom of information laws," Ms Bligh said. "Freedom of information was introduced in Queensland at a time when the worldwide web didn't exist, when emails were a completely unknown phenomenon and when text messages were not part of our lives."

Mr Bligh follows in the path of another newly appointed state leader, Victoria's John Brumby, who also announced freedom of information reform as one of his first acts as Premier. The Beattie Government was notorious for its secretiveness and obstruction of freedom of information, though Ms Bligh denied that wheeling documents into cabinet to make them exempt from FoI inquiries was a common practice. Ms Bligh said the aim of the overhaul was to ensure the state Government achieved the right balance between the public's right to information about themselves and the workings of government, and "the privacy of individuals and the need for government at times to conduct its policy-making processes on a confidential basis".

Ms Bligh said she had told herministers that they faced a tough challenge to win the support of Queenslanders at the next election. "I've effectively said to them that ... we are now on a campaign footing for the next two years," she said. "I want them to be working alongside me to earn the respect and the votes of every Queenslander."

FoI expert Rick Snell said last month the planned Victorian reforms should be adopted across the nation. The University of Tasmania law lecturer told The Australian that all of the nation's FoI laws were out of date and needed an overhaul. Mr Snell said restrictions on what information could be made available were particularly severe in Queensland, where FoI requests were viewed with suspicion by public servants.

The report on the so-called "Dr Death" inquiry into Queensland's hospitals by respected lawyer Geoff Davies QC in 2005 found that the Queensland cabinet had a "culture of concealment" in which hospital waiting lists and other material were hidden.

Ms Bligh's other announcement from her first cabinet meeting as Premier was an audit conducted by Treasury officers of Queensland's ambulance system. The state of the ambulance system has become a major political problem over the past few months as it has been plagued by complaints of slow responses and high levels of staff on sick leave and stress leave.

Source




Money for blacks ends up the usual way

A TINY Queensland town which says it must beg for government funding is furious after learning taxpayers' money was handed to a privately owned pub which went bust in seven months. Isisford, 100km south of Longreach, has a population of 100 and two pubs. One of the pubs, Clancy's Overflow Hotel, was financed by the now defunct Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, which spent more than $400,000 helping a former bankrupt without proven Aboriginal heritage. The loan was handed out six years ago but has only now come to light, angering locals who had struggled to convince federal and state governments to fund community projects.

Former Gold Coast Council candidate Philip Horne has told The Courier-Mail that ATSIC loaned him $220,000 after he told them "one of my ancestors had helped Aborigines". Mr Horne put up $100,000 alongside the ATSIC money to buy the hotel but he says he was given incorrect financial records and the pub was placed in receivership seven months later. It earned only $1000 a month in revenue, far below the $10,000 a month estimated to ATSIC, he said. Mr Horne says ATSIC spent at least another $200,000 to keep the property in receivership for a year and to sue him before he declared bankruptcy again. He now wants to sue Isisford Shire Council and the Federal Government to recover his $100,000.

Isisford Shire Council CEO Robert Bauer said he was amazed to learn of the loan when contacted by The Courier-Mail yesterday. "It annoys me that they gave him $5," Mr Bauer said. "There's a lot of things we could have done with that kind of money to upgrade facilities and improve the lives of our people and their children."

ATSIC was disbanded in 2003 with former indigenous affairs minister Phillip Ruddock attacking its handling of commercial loans and grants.

Mr Horne said the hotel was a "retirement dream" ruined after he was ostracised by town residents when he evicted patrons using drugs in the pub. "What I should have done was kept my mouth shut and turned a blind eye to everything that was going on and I'd still be there," he said. He blamed ATSIC for not properly checking his loan application, although he admitted he hadn't properly investigated the hotel's business potential. "I'm half to blame for it. I didn't ask for the bank statements. I should have looked at the business traffic. Hindsight's a wonderful thing," he said.

But Mr Bauer said Mr Horne paid a "ridiculous price" for the pub, which was later auctioned for a third of the cost. "Isisford is just a friendly bush town," Mr Bauer said. "Ninety-nine per cent of people didn't like him. It had nothing to do with drugs."

Police reports show Mr Horne was bashed with a club outside the pub in 2002, suffering head and chest injuries. A female friend who also worked in the pub also said she was thrown to the ground by the same man, who was sentenced to community service for the attack on Mr Horne.

Mr Bauer said it was "probably the only assault in the town in the last eight years I've been here". "The beating didn't cause his problems. It could have been worse," he said.

A spokesman for Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough said the bad loan was "a common story during the ATSIC era". Indigenous Business Australia had taken over many of ATSIC's loan functions, with tougher accountability and governance, he said.

Source





18 September, 2007

Moderate Australian Muslims attack $1m Saudi gift to university

Up to $1 million will be pumped by Saudi Arabia into an Australian university, sparking fears the money will skew its research and create sympathy for an extremist Muslim ideology espoused by al-Qai'da. Muslim leaders and academics have attacked Queensland's Griffith University for accepting an initial $100,000 grant from the Saudi embassy, which they accused of having given cash in the past to educational institutions to improve the perception of Wahhabism - a hardline interpretation of Islam. The Australian understands the Griffith Islamic Research Unit will in coming years receive up to $1 million from Saudi Arabia, which has injected more than $120 million into Australia's Islamic community since the 1970s for mosques, schools, scholarships and clerical salaries.

A former member of John Howard's Muslim reference board, Mustapha Kara-Ali, accused the Saudis of using their financial power to transform the landscape of Australia's Islamic community and silence criticism of Wahhabism. "They want to silence criticism of the Wahhabi establishment and its link to global terrorism and national security issues," he said.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade does not keep tabs on money from Saudi Arabia to Australian universities, despite having mechanisms in place to monitor official funding from the kingdom to local mosques.

James Cook University's Mervyn Bendle, a senior lecturer in the history of communication and terrorism, said Saudi Arabia would not provide funds to any Islamic initiative without wanting to propagate its own agenda and version of Islam. "Historically, Saudi funding around the world has been used to promote Wahhabism," he said. "It would be naive to just accept on the surface that this is not the case as far as this money is concerned."

Griffith Islamic Research Unit will also receive a "collection of Islamic books and other materials", according to the university's website. But the director of Griffith's key Centre for Ethics, Law, Justice and Governance, Ross Homel, defended the Saudi grant the university received on August 23, saying it came with "no strings" attached. He said the grant - which was not solicited by Griffith but followed "negotiations" between the university and the embassy - would help fund research scholarships at the Islamic centre, promote moderate Islam and supplement the salary of the body's director, Mohamad Abdalla.

Professor Homel said some of the research being conducted at the Islamic centre focused on domestic violence within the Islamic community and "the way Muslims are demonised". He said the Islamic books promised by the embassy were classic texts. "Saudis have indicated that they are prepared to provide substantially more (money)," said Professor Homel, whose department is responsible for the Islamic centre. "They are not controlling the money, the money is very much controlled by us through the university, so they have really no influence over the way we spend our money. "In fact, we wouldn't accept the money if it was for ... hardline (purposes) ... well, I'd like to believe we wouldn't."

Source




Open-door "prison" for dangerous nuts

MENTAL health patients charged with crimes are walking out of Princess Alexandra Hospital due to a lack of secure beds, an ex-psychiatric nurse claims. The registered nurse said the hospital had recently opened 30 of its 36 secure beds, despite the concerns of doctors and staff. "About six months ago, management decided to open the ward on the basis it had been closed for too long," he said. "As a result, there have been fewer aggressive incidents. . . but that's because they're just letting themselves out when no one's looking," he said.

The nurse said those in the now open ward - known as the "west wing" - included forensic and classified patients in trouble with the law. The hospital's mental health division director of nursing, Janice Crawford, confirmed the ward - which houses both voluntary and involuntary psychiatric patients - was opened on March 19 after previously being "intermittently closed". "The open ward policy reflects the Queensland Mental Health Act's philosophy of least restrictive practice," she said in a written statement.

The nurse felt compelled to speak out after reading a report in The Courier-Mail about the problems facing police as a result of what they called a "revolving door" policy for mental health patients. Police complained that patients being arrested and taken to hospital were often back on the streets creating further disturbances the same day. "People are being put at risk but doctors and consultant psychiatrists are not having their concerns listened to," the nurse said.

Health Minister Stephen Robertson said the Government had initiated the Mental Health Intervention Project to train police and ambulance officers to deal with mentally ill people. He said 3500 police had a training session but police yesterday said people with mental illness were also suffering as a result of the shortage of long-term care. A senior officer said a patient who had attempted suicide several times was taken to the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital psychiatric unit, only to be released shortly after. "A few days after being released, he threw himself in front of a train in Fortitude Valley," the officer said.

The Queensland Mental Health Alliance said such incidents highlighted the need for non-government community services for the mentally ill. "Currently patients are going from having everything done for them in hospital, to having to fend for themselves when they're released," spokesman Jeff Cheverton said. "If you're not sick enough to be in hospital, you get nothing," he said. He said less than 2 per cent of Queensland's mental health budget was going to non-government organisations that provided community-based mental health services. "We're not suggesting you need to reduce investment in hospitals, but there is a need to grow investment in community-based services," Mr Cheverton said.

Source




Blitz on coastal dole pay

A fresh round of welfare reform will be unveiled by the Howard Government in an effort to break high levels of unemployment in coastal areas. As John Howard puts the promise of full employment at the centre of his re-election campaign, the Government is considering tightening welfare rules and forcing people to work for the dole earlier. The policy is part of the Government's attempt to construct a policy vision focused on the future after senior ministers acknowledged it had been concentrating on past achievements.

Workplace Relations Minister Joe Hockey said yesterday there were areas near beaches with "stubbornly high levels" of unemployment, and welfare rules had to be toughened to force people into jobs. "There's the capacity for targeted initiatives in high unemployment areas," Mr Hockey told The Australian. "There are pockets of unemployment. There is an unfortunate tendency for unemployment to be higher in warm coastal seats - it is still stubbornly high in southern areas of NSW, the south coast of NSW and around Wollongong."

Mr Hockey said he was appalled to find that in coastal areas, business owners were desperate to find workers while unemployment stood at staggeringly high levels. "I got very frustrated going to Lismore recently where small businesses were complaining they couldn't get workers. And the unemployment rate is still reasonably high there," he said. "I'm talking about where unemployment remains stubbornly high - I think there's more that can be done there."

The Prime Minister yesterday ramped up his full-employment campaign, arguing that it took more than good intentions to get unemployment down. "You can't just wave a magic wand or give off a few nice-sounding grabs for the cameras and wait for it to happen," he said, attacking Kevin Rudd. "Unemployment is 4.3 per cent. A few years ago, some would have classed this as full employment. People have been weaned off welfare and into work ... These are not accidental outcomes."

Mr Howard said in his weekly column that "we are not resting" and would embrace further policies that created even lower rates of unemployment. "We believe that we can forge a full-employment society. We don't just mean a job for everyone, we don't only mean a job that people can do, but a job that people will want to do," he said.

Mr Hockey said there was room to have more targeted individualised welfare and he wanted an increased emphasis on "mutual obligation". He said options included forcing people to full-time work-for-the-dole sooner. "It breaks the cultural barrier to job readiness," he said. Under the Howard Government, he said, long-term unemployment had been slashed by 66.3 per cent. It was now at 66,700, close to a 21-year low. This was 79.8 per cent lower than the peak of 329,800 recorded in May 1993, when Labor was in office, he said.

Significantly, female long-term unemployment declined by 5600 (or 15.3 per cent) in August to stand at 31,200, the lowest level since the inception of the series in April 1986.

The Government yesterday promised no further industrial relations upheaval if it won the coming election, admitting employees had a poor understanding of its sweeping workplace reforms. Mr Hockey ruled out any major changes to the laws, which took unfair-dismissal protection away from millions of workers and allowed employees to bargain away penalty rates and other award conditions in return for more pay or flexible hours. "We are committed absolutely to the fundamentals of our workplace relations laws," he told the Ten Network. "We're not going to change them. Obviously, it has been a challenge, in the face of the fear campaign, to bed them down. "I have no desire to undertake further structural reform to the workplace relations system for the next three years."

Peter Costello said the Government had the balance right between fairness to workers and what was good for business. He warned that Australia would spiral into another recession if Labor were elected. "I think with the fairness test, we've got the balance right for employees and they're entitled to fairness," the Treasurer told the Nine Network

Source




Oz beats the Poms -- again

The Brits invented most of the world's most popular sports so it is rather a puzzle that they are so bad at all of them. Some understanding of the mysteries of cricket may be required to comprehend fully the report below. I will not try to elucidate them here. The report below -- from "The Times" of London -- is notably good humoured and cricket is in general more good humoured than most major sports -- though you must NEVER mention to a New Zealander the words "underarm bowling"



There have doubtless been stranger cricket matches – but not many. It took place in 43C (110F) heat in the desert of southern Iraq, within sight of the ancient Ziggurat of Ur and birthplace of Abraham, beneath a fluttering Stars and Stripes. The pitch was a strip of concrete in the scorching sand. The visiting team flew in by helicopter, but arrived an hour late because of a rocket attack. Nobody was too worried: the game had already been postponed for a week by lack of beer.

The “Ashes in the Desert” pitted the British Army’s 1 Mechanised Brigade against the Overwatch Battlegroup West 3 from Darwin, Australia. The venue was the US Air Force base at Tallil. And it was played with the same intense rivalry that characterises any sporting encounter between teams of Poms and Aussies – and with the same inevitable result.

The British team flew up from Basra brimming with confidence. They arrived wearing an England one-day cricket strip donated by the English Cricket Board, but with a feature seldom seen at Lord’s – SA80 rifles slung over their shoulders. They had new bats and pads and the same cheery optimism that invariably precedes an English rout. “We’re up for this, and expect to tonk you boys back into the Stone Age,” Lieutenant Tim Moore, the match organiser, rashly informed the hosts. The Australians were entirely unfazed. They had secured the support of a large and vociferous crowd by giving most of their 550-strong contingent the afternoon off and relaxing the rules to allow them two tinnies [cans of beer] each.

England won the toss. Their captain, Major Giles Malec, was bowled first ball and after that it was downhill all the way. There was nobody standing on top of the ziggurat. But if there had been they would have heard constant cries of “Howzat” followed by raucous cheers echoing off its 4,000-year-old walls.

As England’s wickets tumbled Captain Elizabeth McGovney, 26, from Houston, Texas, watched bemused. “We’re trying to figure it out,” she said. “Six pitches make an over and out, is that what it’s called?” The appearance of two streakers delayed another England collapse, but only briefly. The visitors were skittled for 93 runs in 15 overs, and there was no chance of them being saved by rain.

As England’s fielders turned crimson beneath the blazing sun Australia rattled off the runs for the loss of just two wickets. “An Australian battlegroup has smashed a British brigade,” Lieutenant-Colonel Jake Ellwood, the Australian commander, crowed at the prize-giving ceremony. “The cricket today was clearly a disaster,” Brigadier-General James Bashall, the British commander, ruefully conceded. But actually everyone was a winner. The game raised $14,000 for wounded soldiers, and generated a commodity all too rare in today’s Iraq: fun.

Source





17 September, 2007

Taxpayer money spent funding breast enhancements



If they are mental cases, they shouldn't be in the armed forces

THE Royal Australian Navy is paying for women sailors to have breast enlargements for purely cosmetic reasons, at a cost to taxpayers of $10,000 an operation. Defence officials claim the surgery is justified because some servicewomen need bigger breasts to address "psychological issues".

Darling Point plastic surgeon Kourosh Tavakoli told The Sunday Telegraph the navy had paid for two officers, aged 25 and 32, to have breast-augmentation surgery at his private clinic. Dr Tavakoli said the women had not been injured but claimed to suffer "psychological" problems. "I've had two female officers who have got the navy to pay for breast augmentation for psychological reasons," he said. "I know for a fact two patients claimed it back on the navy. They (the navy) knew it was breast augmentation and paid for it. "I don't know why they pay for it. There's no breast augmentation, that I know of, for medical purposes. You've got to be fair to yourself."

A Defence spokesman admitted cosmetic surgery occurred at "public expense" when there were "compelling psychological/psychiatric reasons", but refused to say how many such cases were taxpayer-funded. Cosmetic surgery was also provided for servicemen or women who were disfigured by work-related injuries, he said. "Cosmetic procedures undertaken solely for the purpose of preserving or improving a person's subjective appearance will be considered only if the underlying (psychological) problem is causing difficulties that adversely impact on the member's ability to do their job. "Operations purely for cosmetic reasons are not allowed."

The Sunday Telegraph asked Defence Minister Brendan Nelson, formerly a GP, how many members of the armed forces had received taxpayer-funded cosmetic surgery. A spokesman said figures would not be available until next week.

Australian Defence Association spokesman Neil James defended the practice of taxpayers funding medical procedures such as breast enhancement surgery for psychological reasons. He said young men and women were attracted to defence careers because they offered free medical care. This, in turn, improved the efficiency of the force. "Just as there are in civilian life, there are some females who feel their breasts are too small and if their breasts were bigger, they might be more of a 'normal' woman," Mr James said. "If they were lacking in self-confidence, this might provide the measure of self-confidence that would help them tackle their wider job. "There are privacy issues here for people. It's not as if they keep a record of who has had a nose job in the Defence Force over the past 100 years."

Dr Tavakoli, a member of the Australian Society of Plastic Surgeons, said the navy officers had visited him in 2005 and 2006. Each had had $10,000 worth of surgery, which required a recovery period of at least two weeks. Boosting self-esteem was the biggest motivation for cosmetic surgery, Dr Tavakoli said.

The Sunday Telegraph understands Dr Tavakoli is not the usual surgeon used by the navy for reconstructive/cosmetic surgery. "I don't see a lot of them (naval officers) because they have their own plastic surgeon," he said. "I know for a fact they have their own surgeon." Last year, a Brisbane surgeon revealed that an army cook had had a taxpayer-funded nose job.

Source




Useless cops

Too many working as bureaucrats

SEVERE staff shortages have left Queensland police officers struggling to respond to potentially life-threatening incidents. A Sunday Mail investigation has found hundreds of calls for police help are still unattended, or incomplete, at the end of shifts state-wide. Even when assistance is provided, it can take hours to arrive.

An inquiry has begun into why police failed to respond to an emergency call-out to a Southport home on the night of September 3, which came three hours before a woman was allegedly stabbed to death by her 16-year-old son at the same Gold Coast address. The Queensland Police Union says critical understaffing is to blame for the tragedy and the dramatic shortfall in frontline officers has become a major problem across the state. The union says 700 staff have been pulled off active duties and diverted into management positions and many officers are leaving the service to pursue other jobs.

The Sunday Mail found:

* Communications co-ordinators are making "life-and-death decisions every day" because there are insufficient resources to cover emergencies.

* Major 24-hour stations were shut down at night last weekend and during the week due to a lack of officers.

* Emergency calls are being downgraded to lower priorities because police don't have the numbers to attend swiftly.

* Lone patrol cars are regularly left to safeguard large metropolitan areas at night.

* Police were so busy on August 31, it took more than 3« hours to get to a Gold Coast woman who was being held by an ex-partner who had bipolar disorder and a history of firearms offences.

* In another recent case where a man known to mental-health authorities was threatening to kill his wife, her boyfriend and himself, police took more than three hours to attend.

* The night of the Southport fatality, there were nine cars on duty, 60 triple-0 calls and 105 jobs needing response. By end of shift there were still 42 jobs incomplete or unattended.

* Two days later, the Gold Coast's afternoon crews received 83 jobs and still had 27 unattended by end of shift.

* Queensland police have no minimum target-response times, unlike ambulance and fire services, or New South Wales police who set their benchmark at responding to 80 per cent of urgent calls within 10 minutes.

The union says the most critical staff shortages are at the Gold Coast, Mackay, Mt Isa, Ipswich and Rockhampton. "The community deserves to know there's a crisis on the streets, there's a crisis in first response," Queensland Police Union acting president Denis Fitzpatrick said. "They need to know that they're going to call police stations and no one's going to answer the phone. "In my view, reported crime is down because there's difficulty getting through to police stations on the phone. "Every day, hundreds of requests for assistance remain unattended at the end of shifts right across Queensland due to poor resourcing in our major population centres."

This week, police sources told The Sunday Mail that Wynnum and Capalaba stations, which both have counters that should be open 24 hours, were shut on some nights after officers called in sick and there was no one to replace them. Calls were diverted to Cleveland, which added extra pressure there, an officer said. "It's a combination of staff shortages, increasing workloads, difficulties with the new computer system and fewer officers wanting to remain on general duties," said a Brisbane police officer.

Opposition police spokesman Rob Messenger said the State Government needed to spend more money on pay and resources for frontline police, and offer greater incentives to officers to stay in general policing. Police Minister Judy Spence defended staff levels, saying Queensland now had a police-to-population ratio of 1:435, which was equal to, or better than, every other state. The Police Service says 8731 of the 9618 officers in the state by June 30 were operational.

But the union says many of those counted as operational are desk-bound administrators. "We call on the Commissioner to reallocate 700 police back into first-response and operational roles," Mr Fitzpatrick said.

Queensland Ambulance officers have a State Government benchmark to respond to Code 1 life-threatening situations in less than 10 minutes, in 68 per cent of cases. Queensland Fire and Rescue Service's benchmark is to arrive at a structural fire within 14 minutes of a triple-0 call to urban and auxiliary stations, in 90 per cent of cases.

A Police Service spokesman said the service provided the "best possible response to calls for service throughout the state, depending on the circumstances and the nature of the incident". Urgent Code 1 and Code 2 jobs in the metropolitan area were monitored by the Brisbane police communications centre and responded to "within a reasonable and appropriate time". It was "not appropriate" to compare the police with ambulance or fire services because calls to police covered a greater range of situations.

But Queensland University of Technology lecturer in justice studies and policing, Dr Colin Thorne, said there should be a minimum response rate to priority calls across all emergency services, including police. "Whether it's in Brisbane or communication centres across the state, for police, for life-threatening cases - as for ambulance officers and fire-and-rescue crews - there should be a benchmark," Dr Thorne said. "People should have an expectation that, when they ring for an emergency response, police arrive within a reasonable timeframe."

Dr Thorne, a Queensland police officer for 20 years until 1991, said that, without a minimum or average response time, it would be hard to monitor how well police were doing. He said more first-response police and 24-hour stations were needed.

Source




Fairfax newspapers' Israel coverage panned

THE Australian Jewish News has attacked Fairfax newspapers, accusing them and their Middle East correspondent of anti-Israeli bias. The newspaper yesterday ran a news story, an opinion piece by Labor's Member for Melbourne Ports, Michael Danby, and two cartoons all lambasting Fairfax titles.

"The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald are highly influential newspapers, and their systematic anti-Israel bias has a real effect on public opinion in Australia," Mr Danby writes in AJN. Mr Danby is particularly critical of The Age's editor-in-chief, Briton Andrew Jaspan. "Under its current editor, The Age's liberalism has morphed into a peculiar sort of bitter and twisted extremism, borrowed from UK paper The Guardian."

Mr Danby, who is the only Jewish federal MP, attacks Middle East correspondent Ed O'Loughlin. "There's nothing funny about O'Loughlin's systematic bias against Israel," he says. Jason Koutsoukis, The Sunday Age's Canberra bureau chief, is quoted in the Jewish News pledging to introduce "balanced" coverage when he takes over as Fairfax Media's Middle East correspondent. "There's two sides to every story and I think we've got to tell both sides. Perhaps we've only been telling one side. That's been some of the concerns expressed to me by Jewish community leaders," he is quoted as saying. Koutsoukis last night denied attacking O'Loughlin. "I was not quoted accurately ... and it does not reflect my views."

The editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, Alan Oakley, Jaspan and O'Loughlin did not return calls or emails.

Source




Facebook antisemite out of cricket until 2015

Follow-up to a report here on August 10th. (Scroll down)

THE cricketer who set up a page on a social networking site that sledged the Maccabi Ajax Cricket Club has been suspended from the sport for eight years. Ash Peake, from McKinnon Cricket Club, authored the page "FU Ajax Cricket Club" on Facebook and invited other cricketers from his club and the Beaumaris Cricket Club to to comment on the Jewish team.

A tribunal hearing at the Victorian Turf Cricket Association (VTCA) found Peake guilty of racial vilification and suspended him until the start of the 2015-16 season. Four other players received suspensions ranging from two months to one-and-a-half years at the VTCA tribunal, which was chaired by barrister Tim Walsh.

A sixth player, Beauamris cricketer Alex Strauch, will face the tribunal early next month. He has already issued a public apology and visited the Jewish Holocaust Museum and Research Centre since the incident, which was first reported in the AJN on August 10. Walsh also exonerated McKinnon and Beaumaris of any wrongdoing at a club level.

Maccabi Ajax Cricket Club president Jamie Hyams said that his club is satisfied with the tribunal's decisions. "We regard the sentences as harsh but fair," Hyams said. "They show that the VTCA takes this matter very seriously, and we are very happy with the way both the VTCA and the McKinnon Cricket Club have handled these issues."

When news of the website surfaced, McKinnon immediately suspended several players from pre-season training. But threats of funding cuts from Glen Eira City Council forced the club to expel the men.

Following the tribunal's decision, McKinnon has called on the council to revoke any sanctions against the club, including a stop on construction of training facilities at McKinnon Reserve, the club's home ground. A council spokesman said the matter has been tabled for discussion at a council meeting on Tuesday night.

Hyams said that the players have shown remorse and will be involved in education programs.

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16 September, 2007

Bipartisan recommendation: Degrees first -- before teacher training

ASPIRING high school teachers should have to complete arts or science degrees before undertaking specific studies in education, an inquiry into teaching standards has recommended. The inquiry's report, tabled in Federal Parliament yesterday, also called for more rigorous teaching of literacy and numeracy to trainee teachers at university. It backed offering "incentives" to teachers as part of a broader push to improve their pay and raise entry standards. Education Minister Julie Bishop has been promoting performance-based pay to improve teaching standards in schools.

Teaching education as a compulsory postgraduate course for aspiring secondary-school teachers would be a significant departure from current practice, where many students simply complete a straight bachelor of education.

The bipartisan inquiry by the Senate's employment, education and workplace relations committee was chaired by Victorian Liberal senator Judith Troeth. The committee said many new teachers had "insufficient grounding in the actual subject content they are teaching". "That is, they do not know enough history, have limited appreciation of literature through not reading enough of it, and are ignorant of, and frightened of, mathematics and science," it said. "This has a direct effect on the quality of educational outcomes because it can impede student intellectual growth." [Surprise!]

Senator Troeth, a former teacher, said she had studied history and geography as majors in an arts degree at Melbourne University, as well as a sub-major in English, before going on to complete a specialised diploma in education. She then went to teach Year 11 and 12 English and history and middle school (junior high school) geography. "So often these days, teachers have the general experience of the bachelor of education degree which teaches them the skills of pedagogy but it does not instil the subject disciplines into them," she said. "We feel there should be a movement back to that."

In its report, the committee expressed concerns about weaknesses in the training of teachers. "Some of these may be the consequence of factors outside the control of universities, namely the academic quality of school-leavers wanting to become teachers, although it might be argued that entry levels should be raised to keep out those whose literacy and numeracy are of doubtful standard," it said. Too many students were reaching Year 6 yet remained "functionally illiterate".

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More propaganda from "Lancet"

Fight climate change, cut down on red meat? If you make dozens of unproven and wrong assumptions, what they say is correct

PEOPLE should limit their meat-eating to just one hamburger per person per day to help stave off global warming, according to Australian scientists. That would be their contribution to a proposed 10 per cent cut in global meat consumption by 2050, a goal that would brake greenhouse-gas emissions from agriculture yet also improve health for rich and poor nations alike, it says. The paper has been released online as part of a seminar by the Lancet British medical weekly into the impacts of climate change on global health.

Its authors point out that 22 per cent of the planet's total emissions of greenhouse gases come from agriculture, a tally similar to that of industry and more than that of transport. Livestock production, including transport of livestock and feed, account for nearly 80 per cent of agricultural emissions, mainly in the form of methane, a potent heat-trapping gas.

At present, the global average meat consumption is 100g per person per day, which varies from 200-250g in rich countries to 20-25g in poor countries. The global average should be cut to 90g per day by 2050, with rich nations working to progressively scale down their meat consumption to that level while poor nations would do more to boost their consumption, the authors propose. Not more than 50g per day should come from red meat provided by cattle, sheep, goats and other ruminants.

The authors were led by Anthony McMichael, professor at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University, Canberra.

"Assuming a 40 per cent increase in global population by 2050 and no advance in livestock-related greenhouse gas reduction practices, global meat consumption would have to fall to an average of 90 grammes per day just to stabilise emissions in this sector,'' the paper said.

"A substantial contract in meat consumption in high-income countries should benefit health, mainly by reducing the risk of ... heart disease... obesity, colorectal cancer and, perhaps some other cancers. An increase in the consumption of animal products in low-intake populations, towards the proposed global mean figure, should also benefit health.''

According to a study published in July by Japanese scientists, a kg of beef generates the equivalent of 36.4kg of carbon dioxide, more than the equivalent of driving for three hours while leaving all the lights on back home.

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Doctors for auction in Australia

Yet more of that wonderful government "planning". There are plenty of would be doctors but a very limited number of places in medical schools (Which are all run by Leftist State governments). The result: Much more dangerous circumstances for patients

A CRISIS in public hospital emergency departments has reached the point where they are forced to bid against each other for casual doctors who are already paid as much as triple the award rate. Doctors say patient care is at risk because emergency departments are forced to rely on often inexperienced locums with a "nine-to-five mentality" to plug gaps in the system. The Herald has obtained an email from one large NSW locum agency that describes 26 NSW hospitals as being at crisis point, 21 of them public hospitals, with some unable to fill shifts for senior emergency doctors the next day.

NSW Health estimates it costs $35.2 million more a year for locums than it would for permanent staff, but refuses to fund more permanent senior specialists. Rates for locums generally vary from $90 to $180 an hour depending on experience and type of shift, but can reach $250 for a senior doctor required at the last minute in a regional area or on a public holiday, or when the hospitals bidding against each other push up the price.

The vice-president of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine, Sally McCarthy, said the use of locums was at "phenomenally high levels" and NSW Health did not support more permanent positions. "But the health service is happy to compete against other hospitals for locums, bidding up the price," Dr McCarthy said.

When the Herald contacted heads of emergency departments, they were highly emotional - one even tearful - and some called out of hours or while on holiday to express their frustration and desperation. They all refused to go on the record, fearing repercussions from NSW Health.

On Tuesday, vacancies emailed by Australia Wide Locum Placement included 41 shifts in the emergency department at Nepean Hospital from now to September 25, and 70 shifts at Blue Mountains Hospital to November 30 - 16 of which are in emergency just for this month. Camden Hospital had 85 emergency shifts to fill over the past month, all for senior doctors.

Royal North Shore Hospital needed 20 shifts filled in emergency up to October 14 and Fairfield needed 25 up to the end of next month, 13 of which were for senior emergency doctors to work overnight this month to fill vacancies every few days. Other public hospitals listed as in "crisis" - with shifts needing to be filled within 48 hours - included Concord, Mona Vale, Fairfield, Sutherland, Campbelltown and several regional hospitals.

Locums are often junior doctors, lured by the pay and far less stressful working conditions.

The emergency departments at Camden and Campbelltown hospitals are among the busiest in the state but are understood to have the heaviest use of locums. Of all doctors in Camden's emergency department, about 70 per cent are locums.

The director of Australia Wide Placements, Terry Keenan, said his company would fill "less than half" of the crisis shifts at public hospitals. His agency sought to fill 800 shifts in Sydney public hospitals on any given day. "The demand is enormous," he said. Hospitals are so desperate that they even offer a higher rate than is necessary, he said. "We sometimes get hospitals saying 'we can give up to $140 an hour', and we say we think we can fill it for less." He also said some doctors did not commit to a shift until the last minute, "thinking that if you don't the price might go up".

The use of locums in public hospitals has "increased alarmingly" in recent years, said a NSW Health report published in The Medical Journal of Australia last year. The head of a big Sydney metropolitan emergency department said it spent $1 million on locums last financial year. "It's virtually impossible to check how well they're going to perform, whether they're really as senior as they say they are and whether they can do all they say they can do and . you never have the organisational knowledge or the commitment," he said. "You end up with the more inexperienced, lower-quality employees . we regard it as a bit of a crisis."

A medical registrar at a Sydney public hospital emergency department said the use of locums could be "life-threatening for a patient". "You've got the people who are the least skilled, the least loyal and the least oriented who are the ones that are making more money than even the directors of the department. And you're sending them off to life and death situations." The head of emergency at a big regional hospital said he had to "fight tooth and nail for every doctor" employed there. "They just say no, no money. When you talk about safety they don't want to know about it."

The State Government blamed the doctor shortage on the Federal Government, saying it was not funding enough university places [But the universities are run by STATE governments!]. A spokeswoman for NSW Health said: "Clearly it is better to have full-time medical staff than to rely solely on the use of locums to backfill vacancies," she said.

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The medicalization of misery

By Tanveer Ahmed

As a doctor working in mental health and within the public hospital system, I am a regular witness to those living on the bottom rungs of our society. They are the homeless, the drug addicts and those suffering from severe mental illness. More often than not, they are all three at once. I am struck by their amazing uptake of mental health language. They skilfully weave technical psychiatric language into their reporting of symptoms. As a result, comments such as "I'm pretty sure I'm coming down with a depressive disorder" or "I think I'm developing a personality defect" are not uncommon, even from people with minimal education.

This is in part a reflection of wider society and how the language of human distress has been overtaken by psychological terminology. I hear very few people tell me they are unhappy. They are almost always depressed, even if their life choices or circumstances would be perfectly consistent with them being miserable.

Increasingly they no longer suggest they feel depressed, but that they are getting depression, in the same way we may catch a cold. The consultation then moves to the awkward dance modern therapists play. I become the healer attempting to cure their condition, pretending somehow their malaise is one of biology and not of meaning. The result is that it can blind them to the possibility their actions may have played a role in their problems.

Barely a week goes by when we don't hear of the crisis in mental health. Rising depression, worsening drug and alcohol problems and a strained social sector make us think that despite our stupendous prosperity, we remain in some kind of existential abyss. It is a symptom of the market society and individualism that our grievances must be turned on to the self.

This is in spite of psychiatry remaining a hazy field, an arena where diagnosis and treatment are poorly correlated and where clinical energies focus on symptom relief. It is reflected further in the tremendous amount written about happiness studies. If being dissatisfied with life is pathological and health is a right, the implication is that happiness is also our birthright.

The use of psychiatric terminology is also more and more colloquial. During the Andrew Johns saga and his eventual secular confession, bipolar disorder was used widely in the press as a synonym for erratic behaviour. The former Victorian premier Jeff Kennett, a tireless campaigner in raising awareness for depression, openly admits he uses the term not in its medical context, but as a synonym for emotional distress.

But just like fashion and baby names, language eventually filters down the social ladder. The dominance of mental health language in projecting our distress is of dubious value when applied to the most disadvantaged groups. Indeed, it may be complicit in helping them to maintain lives of dependence and misery, the sick role curing them only of their autonomy and personal responsibility.

Bureau of Statistics figures from 2005 show about a third of the 700,000 people receiving the disability pension have been diagnosed with a mental illness. This is a critical group because the vast majority are young and otherwise physically able. Many could be in the prime of their lives. Forty years ago, fewer than in one in 30 working-age adults relied on welfare payments as the main source of income. The figure today is one in six. In particular, the proportion of the population on the disability support pension has doubled since 1981.

An important player in this debate is the doctor, for they determine if someone meets the criteria for disability. Patients who are on the margin of receiving the pension or Newstart will often ask to receive the pension. The disability pension is more generous than the unemployment benefit and there is little mutual obligation.

The sick role, however, comes with an obligation to seek and comply with treatment. The patient's compliance with treatment is the priority for a doctor. There are many times when giving in to a patient's wishes elsewhere can ensure their compliance with medication. The pension is often one such compromise. The flipside is that 90 per cent of those receiving disability pensions never return to the workforce. This is not a fact well known to professionals determining disability. Colleagues working in mental health were flabbergasted when they heard the figure.

For many on the margins of eligibility, there is an incentive to remain sick. The welfare market operates like any other - a better price will increase demand. This lack of incentive to take a more active role in society can strip them of meaning in their lives and perpetuate what may have started as mild mental illness. A feedback loop of disability, welfare and worsening mental health is created. This is a hidden factor straining both Australia's mental health and welfare systems. They are operating in a kind of pathological symbiosis.

This cycle describes many people who are said to be in a state of deep poverty. They are hardly poor in a historical sense, for they have enough money to eat and are housed, educated and medically treated by the state. In formulating their situation, poverty in this sense is more like a psychological condition than one determined by socioeconomics.

While the middle classes debate their happiness and psychiatry acquires a cultural prestige well beyond its powers, the poor inherit the new straitjacket of psychological language. It not only costs the taxpayer billions of dollars, but encourages recipients to wallow as victims of passive circumstance, stripping their lives of meaning and purpose.

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15 September, 2007

PM plans back to basics for nurse training

JOHN Howard has moved to dramatically overhaul nursing education, with a $170 million plan to build 25 privately operated nursing schools in hospitals. The radical shake-up, which will increase the number of nurses by 500 a year, involves a return to a traditional model of hospital-based training to supplement university-based degrees. The Prime Minister will reveal the plan in Sydney today in the first of a series of back-to-basics policy announcements aimed at battlers, the elderly and the bush, and designed to peg back Labor's huge poll lead.

The plan emerged last night with the news that the Government would also consider reviewing all pensions and offering retirees up to $30,000 in taxpayer-funded bonuses if they returned to work to help ease critical labour shortages.

The policy shifts came as the International Monetary Fund yesterday warned the Government against populist election initiatives, saying there should be no new government spending this year. In its annual review, the IMF praised the federal Government's handling of the economy as world-leading but cautioned against further stimulus to a stretched economy.

Coalition MPs were yesterday regrouping after a week of damaging leadership speculation that had many flirting with the idea ofdumping the Prime Minister and replacing him with Peter Costello. Having discarded the option of leadership change, the Government refocused yesterday, with senior ministers confirming Mr Howard would seek to turn the Labor tide by returning to his electoral roots with a large-scale policy revamp.

The new nursing schools will be modelled on the Government's 24 Australian Vocational Training Colleges, built by the commonwealth but run by community groups working with employers. The trainee nurses will provide immediate relief to hospitals suffering staff shortages. The courses will run for three years and students will emerge with a nationally recognised TAFE qualification - equivalent to university-based study. While they study, the commonwealth will subsidise their wages and also pay bonuses in the middle of their courses and at the end of their studies, to encourage their completion. Doctors, hospital administrators and private hospital employers will have input into the training programs to ensure the nurses emerge with skills sought by their industry.

According to a 2004 Australian Health Workforce Advisory Committee report, Australia will need up to 13,500 new registered nurses each year to meet the demand for nursing services over the next 10 years. In 2004 only 5631 nurses completed their training. Despite the shortfall, 2408 eligible applicants were turned away from university nursing courses last year because there were not enough places.

The Government's move is likely to be welcomed by the medical community because university training is often criticised as producing book-trained nurses with inadequate practical experience. The Government has already raised the plans with some hospitals and its announcement will come as the Australian Nursing Federation launches phase two of a four-week TV advertising campaign outlining the negative impact of the Howard Government's industrial relations laws on nurses working in aged care....

The new Government policy proposals followed heavy pressure from Labor yesterday. Kevin Rudd used parliamentary question time to pepper Mr Howard with questions aimed at convincing voters that the Prime Minister had no new policy ideas.

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A modest proposal: Government-funded health "Trainers" for all

The Fascist writer below recognizes that people mostly ignore "health" messages so "make people behave" is the proposed solution. That people have any right to eat what they want is not recognized. Nor is it recognized that "health" wisdom often goes into reverse.

THE idea that taxpayers should subsidise weight loss programs sparked an outcry this week, but it is the first solid policy proposal we have seen to stem a health problem that is costing Australia billions. It comes on the back of calls for cartoon characters to be banned from food packaging, for a tax to be placed on high sugar breakfast cereals and as some hospitals ban surgery on obese people and smokers. Unlike a weight loss program, none of these proposals does anything to change behaviour. That's why both sides of politics say they are seriously considering the weight loss subsidy.

Sixty per cent of our population is overweight. The problem - in defiance of government advertising campaigns to eat more fruit and vegetables and do more exercise - is, like Australians, only getting bigger.

A study in the Medical Journal of Australia has found these public health messages are being absorbed by the public. But it also found this knowledge does not readily translate into behavioural changes. We know what's good for us - but we won't do it.

Every year our public hospitals treat 500,000 people for preventable illnesses. Every year over 50,000 people die from illnesses caused by their poor lifestyle. It's time we asked whether scarce public health dollars should be spent fixing up health problems that are caused by our own unhealthy habits. We're making the unemployed take some responsibility for the public funding they get by working for the dole. In Aboriginal communities bureaucrats have taken control of welfare payments so they can't be spent on alcohol and drugs. The health system is the next area ripe for the new responsibility agenda.

Why should taxpayers fund repeated heart by-pass operations unless the patient receiving them signs a contract agreeing to give up smoking, do 30 minutes of exercise a day and lose weight? What's the point of the public subsidising diabetes or cholesterol tablets if the patient won't exercise and continues eating fatty foods?

A National Heart Foundation study estimates that seven lifestyle factors - obesity, low fruit and vegetable consumption, tobacco use, alcohol consumption, low physical activity, high cholesterol and high blood pressure - cause 52,738 deaths in Australia every year - 39 per cent of all deaths. If we don't start heeding these public health messages (and it doesn't seem likely we will) that number is bound to get even worse.....

The answers aren't necessarily expensive or difficult. We all know what we've got to do to address these health problems: eat healthier food, eat less food overall, quit smoking, take up regular exercise, and control our alcohol intake. But knowing isn't doing. That's why we need to consider a more interventionist approach to preventive health.

The health fund Australian Health Management, which runs an intensive diet and exercise preventive health program, has found spending $600 a year on a personalised health management program for its chronically ill members saves the fund $1800 a year per person. This health fund has found a much more intensive personalised coaching approach to preventive health does pay off.

Instead of spending millions kitting out our ambulances, hospitals and morgues with beds and stretchers that can cope with the morbidly obese, perhaps we should be spending the money on personal coaches that help the chronically ill reinvent their lifestyles. This health fund shows why a subsidy for weight loss programs is worth a trial. The doctors group proposing the plan wants to keep its costs down to $27 million by restricting it to obese people at risk of a chronic illness . But the extra expense of extending it to all overweight Australians could save us much more than it costs.

Telling people what's good for them hasn't worked. If we want cheaper health insurance and lower taxes, it's time to make people take that 30 minute walk and cut down on their calorie intake.

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Unify health systems to free up $4 billion

A reduction in bureaucracy is a commendable aim but abolishing health bureaucracies altogether would be much better. The many high-quality private hospitals show that no government bureaucracy at all is needed to run hospitals

AN extra $4 billion could be available to spend on patient treatment across Australia if duplication and inefficiency in the health system were fixed. The Australian Institute of Health Policy Studies argues that the nation's health services are not just financially inefficient but they also place Australians in physical danger. "Our healthcare system is unnecessarily dangerous and causes needless deaths and injuries, most of which we never hear about," said Monash University professor of public health Brian Oldenburg, a member of AIHPS. "(And) $4billion could be transferred into treating people without an added cent of taxpayers' money if we improved the productivity of health services."

Professor Oldenburg said there were large differences in healthcare efficiency among the states and territories. "The gap between the most efficient state (South Australia) and the least efficient (the Northern Territory) delivering healthcare (per patient) in public hospitals is 35 per cent."

The AIHPS will today release a paper calling for business to become more involved in efforts to reform the health system. "They are just beginning to realise how important it is to the economy and that the more a consumer spends on health, the less discretionary spending they have elsewhere," Professor Oldenburg told The Australian. As well, he said, "business leaders know how to get things done and that's what we need to have in this debate."

The AIHPS points to a report by the Productivity Commission, released in February last year, that identified billions that could be saved across the health sector. "It's the duplication, the unnecessary tests being conducted. It's no communication between hospitals and doctors on the one hand and community services on the other. It's also people being in hospital when they should be either supported in the community or in the aged care service." Early intervention programs for health problems such as diabetes should also be encouraged, as they had the potential to save thousands of hospital hours.

Despite strong recommendations contained in numerous previous inquiries, virtually none had been acted upon, said Peter Brooks, executive dean of the Health Sciences faculty at Queensland University. "Every opinion poll indicates that health is one of the most important issues for consumers in who wins their vote in federal elections," he said. "It's time for both major political parties to give the public the detail on how they will reform the health system."

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Forced adoption for kids of addicts

THE forced adoption of infants and toddlers should be the first response of child protection authorities dealing with at-risk children whose parents are drug addicts, according to a federal government report. The parliamentary committee on families said children under the age of five whose parents were drug addicts would be better off being permanently adopted out rather than being "shunted" between foster carers. Children adopted under the scheme would never be returned to their parents, even if the parents stopped using drugs, although the proposal would not preclude contact visits, committee chairwoman Bronwyn Bishop said yesterday.

Ms Bishop said making adoption the default response put the onus on parents and departments of community services "to show why adoption shouldn't be an option". Ms Bishop said an "anti-adoption attitude" permeated Australia's child protection bureaucracy and that the report aimed to put the spotlight on the "collateral damage" caused to children by drug use. "There was so much need to look at the rights of the child - not the rights of the mother, not whether giving the child back to the parent is going to help them get better," she said.

Ms Bishop repeated her criticism of the "drug industry" of treatment services, counsellors and research organisations, accusing them of not wanting to put themselves "out of business" by eliminating drug addiction altogether. The "drug industry" had captured the term "harm minimisation" and given it the meaning of "reduction of drug use but not with the aim of having an individual made drug-free". "We find that that's an unacceptable way to go," she said. "The aim should be to make the individual drug-free. We have found those in the drug industry take an amoral stance; they say that by harm minimisation the question of morality is out of the equation and they make no judgment as to whether drugs are good or bad."

The 31 recommendations of the Winning It For The Kids: Protecting Families From Illicit Drugs report include adding controversial detox drug naltrexone to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and cutting funding to organisations that don't aim to make drug users drug-free. It also called for a review of the methadone program and recommended parents be banned from receiving takeaway doses of methadone if they were caring for, or had access to, their children.

Ross Fitzgerald, who advises the federal and NSW governments on illicit drugs, said he supported the report's effort to focus policy on abstinence rather than controlled or moderate use, but said suggestions such as forced adoption were "absolutely over the top". Despite delivering a minority report, the Labor Party did not issue responses to the individual recommendations, saying only that it would consider them if it formed government.

Brian McConnell, president of Families and Friends for Drug Law Reform, which made a submission to the committee, said the report was a "road map to disaster" that ignored evidence and research. "It is a disgrace that a committee of our national parliament should display the ignorance that it has done and close its mind to science and reason," he said. "The course of the inquiry has been a scandal, with the committee refusing to consider a mountain of scientific evidence that is out there in support of existing drug policy."

Alex Wodak, president of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation and director of the alcohol and drug service at Sydney St Vincent's Hospital, said the report was "very disapointing" because it favoured moralism over science. He said the forced adoption would be "wanton cruelty". [As if the present policy is not!] "It would be totally counterproductive," Dr Wodak said. "Drug users would never go near a doctor or a nurse or a counsellor then because they would be worried that their kids would be taken from them

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14 September, 2007

Foreign doctors 'avoiding security checks'

OVERSEAS trained doctors are avoiding police security checks and assessments of their medical skills because of holes in the system. And more than 1000 doctors employed as trainees in NSW public hospitals are being used to plug workforce gaps before they have been properly trained.

The Joint Parliamentary Committee on Migration last night exposed serious concerns about the scrutiny applied to the 2500 overseas trained doctors entering Australia each year. The committee found hospitals had been using the 457 visa to get doctors into the country quickly because a police security check was not required under this visa. And it called for urgent action to improve both the security and skills checks on doctors entering the country.

Alarm bells were first raised with when Dr Jayant Patel was accused of causing patient deaths in Queensland. Fears grew when the Federal Government this year cancelled the visa of Dr Mohammed Haneef who was related to UK terror suspects. A state and federal plan to improve the checks has foundered because not all states have agreed to them. The parliamentary committee also said the number of occupational overseas trainee doctors employed in NSW hospitals had doubled from 725 to 1326 between 2001 and 2006.

Source




Federal government housing pitch to counter Rudd surge

This should have been done long ago

PETER Costello will attempt to cripple Kevin Rudd's campaign on housing affordability by promising to release large parcels of commonwealth-owned land during the election campaign. Treasurer Peter Costello in Canberra after the decision that he will play a bigger role in the election campaign. The Treasurer has also vowed to defuse Labor's attack on the Government's Work Choices industrial relations laws by convincing Australians concerned about the laws that they have been duped by a union-backed advertising campaign.

Mr Costello outlined his stratgegy in an interview with The Australian last night in which he said the Opposition Leader was beatable, despite his lead in opionion polls, provided he was confronted on policy.

The Labor leader has campaigned hard on industrial relations and on his claim that the Government has been asleep at the wheel while the cost of housing and rental properties had grown out of the reach of many people. Mr Rudd has announced a series of proposals, including grants for councils to meet the cost of housing infrastructure such as sewers, greater rent subsidies for people paying more than 30 per cent of their income in rent and incentives for superannuation companies to invest in affordable rental property.

Asked what he proposed to do to make housing more affordable, Mr Costello stressed that land supply remained the key, rejecting the concept of using tax reform to boost investment in the low-cost housing sector. "If you get further investment into the housing market, you could actually push housing prices up," he said. "You have got to get supply-side measures in place - land." He said he had completed an audit of commonwealth-owned defence and CSIRO land and had indentified "substantial blocks" around cities that he hoped to release soon. "We are now looking at planning and environmental restrictions to see if we can get them on to the market," he said. "We are looking at these blocks to see if we can do our bit. We are appealing to the states to do their bit." Voters could expect to hear more during the election campaign, he said.

The Treasuer said Labor's battle against the Work Choices laws could be countered if the Government concentrated on bridging the gap between union advertising about Work Choices and the actual on-the-ground experience. He said he understood that the man on the street did not want to be ripped off. "I also think the man in the street is much more likely to have a job and a higher wage than under previous systems," Mr Costello said. "There is a conflict between what they are being told to fear and what they are actually experiencing. I think that as time goes by experience will win out over fear."

He also rejected Kevin Rudd's attempt to paint himself as a leader who could end the blame game between states and the commonwealth over services such as health and education. Mr Rudd was attempting to obscure the fact that state Labor governments were responsible for the poor services. Mr Costello said problems in service delivery almost universally originated from areas of state government responsibility, such as hospitals, transport and law and order, while people were satisfied with commonwealth-run services like social security, employment services and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. "Rudd is just patsying for the premiers," he said. "He doesn't want people to think for themselves and contrast the delivery of services by a federal Coalition government and the delivery of services by state Labor governments. If they did they wouldn't want a federal Labor government."

He said the commonwealth had provided the states with the growing revenue from the Goods and Services Tax and that the answer to poor state services was to press the states to use the money more wisely. "It's about $40 billion between them per annum," he said. "We want them to use that revenue to produce good services. If people don't like the state government, instead of getting rid of the federal Government, get rid of the state government."

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Pregnant women with diabetes refused treatment

You can rely on your government to look after you

A Ballarat University study has found some rural doctors are refusing treatment to pregnant women with type one diabetes. Doctors are reportedly worried that rural medical services would be insufficient to deal with diabetic complications during pregnancy.

The seven women interviewed as part of the national study say there's a lack of information on managing blood glucose levels during pregnancy. They say they rely on websites for information.

Ballarat University lecturer, Associate Professor Rosemary King, says the woman are deflated by the attitudes of some health professionals. "Being told that they might miscarry or the baby might die or they might have abnormalities... particularly when you're pregnant or you're wanting to be pregnant you're pretty vulnerable to those sorts of messages," she said. "[The women] really thought that people were being not very helpful and more judgemental and negative than constructive," Associate Professor King said.

She says the results are not surprising given the shortage of specialists in country areas. "We probably need to be thinking about how to have accessible information available both for professionals and for the women... how do we go about sort of finding out what it is that people want to know, how do we make the information available?" she said.

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There is no conspiracy

By Andrew Bolt

MATTHEW Ricketson until last year headed RMIT University's school of journalism, teaching tomorrow's reporters how the media "really" works. Now The Age's media writer, Ricketson is flogging his views to a wider audience of the Left that's always up for conspiracy theories. Last weekend they got fed a ripe one, with Ricketson warning "something is afoot among columnists on Rupert Murdoch's Australian newspapers: "Andrew Bolt of the Herald Sun and, yesterday, Janet Albrechtsen of The Australian, have abandoned their longstanding support for John Howard's prime ministership." Ricketson said: "Other News Limited columnists, such as Paul Kelly, editor-at-large of The Australian, and Steve Lewis of the Herald Sun have already jumped ship".

True enough, several News Ltd columnists - and not a single Fairfax one, strangely - have indeed seen the resignation of John Howard as inevitable and have said so. So, how does Ricketson interpret all this? He suggests only two options, both of which assume Murdoch gave his columnists orders to ditch Howard: "Is Murdoch creating public opinion, as is often alleged, or trying to catch the horse as it bolts from the PM?"

There is, of course, a third and obvious explanation, which Ricketson fails to mention: that Murdoch columnists simply write what they really think, reacting to events that are obvious to anyone with eyes to see and the courage to report. But Ricketson's preference for a conspiracy over reason is rampant among the Left and is even taking hold in the Right, too, as Howard's future now sinks with his polls.

Take Richard Farmer, Labor strategist and writer for an internet gossip site of former Fairfax editor Eric Beecher, who claims: "Murdoch tabloids (are) becoming friendlier to Labor" because "continuing with an anti-Labor campaign dominated by columnists Piers Akerman and Andrew Bolt, only for Labor to still win, would put an end to the illusion of power, which Rupert Murdoch uses to his advantage so ruthlessly".

This theory that Murdoch orders his writers to speak his own mind is peddled by many of the usual suspects, from radical propagandist John Pilger to RMIT's journalism graduates. But here's the hitch: if Murdoch has dictated an anti-Howard line to his columnists, why did two of them, The Australian's Dennis Shanahan and Christopher Pearson, persist this past week in saying Howard should stay? Why was the Daily Telegraph's Piers Akerman - another Murdoch man - on the radio just yesterday, backing Howard and whacking me? Why was his colleague Malcolm Farr counselling Howard to stay? And why did it take until last week for Albrechtsen to argue what I've said for months? Boy, some conspiracy, when half the plotters are attacking the other half.

I know you can't change Ricketson's mind with facts, but I'd love to hear him explain why Murdoch's columnists, allegedly all singing in their master's voice, include such loud Leftists as Jill Singer, Phillip Adams, Paul Syvret, Jim Soorley and NEWS.com.au's Tim Dunlop. Or have him try to work out why I keep fighting our global warming hysteria, when Murdoch says we must give the planet "the benefit of the doubt".

Sorry, Matthew, but Murdoch figured long ago that debate sold papers - and readers were adults with the brains to hear both sides of an argument and decide for themselves. That's why there are more Left-wing columnists on Murdoch's Australian papers than there are Right-wing presenters on the ABC. If Ricketson really has a nose for conspiracy, why won't he sniff at Aunty instead?

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13 September, 2007

"The Never-Never Declaration - An APEC Reality Check"

A press release below from Australian group, "The Carbon Sense Coalition" (info@carbon-sense.com) -- in the wake of the strong climate focus during the recent APEC meeting of heads of government in Sydney

The Carbon Sense Coalition today called for a Royal Commission of Enquiry [an independent but government-funded judicial enquiry with wide powers] into the scientific evidence for man-made climate cvhange. The Chairman of "Carbon Sense", Mr Viv Forbes, said that the Sydney APEC Declaration was a clear signal that most APEC nations are not going to swallow the pseudo-science and economic poison being peddled by Dark Greens from yesterday's states like Europe and New Zealand.

The APEC nations told Australia, as politely as possible "You may commit economic suicide if you wish, but we are not going to put our feet on the sticky paper." This "Never-Never" declaration is a