Australian politics backup

Former governor-general Peter Hollingworth faces judgment day over sex abuse crisis

The treatment of Peter Hollingworth has been monstrous. A genuinely holy man has been given great anguish only because he was not politically correct. I did not know him well but I have spoken with him, shaken his hand and observed his joyous leadership of a eucharistic procession. And I have no doubt that he is a genuine Christian, a rarity in the Anglican episcopate.

His offence was to adopt a proper judicial attitude towards a serious accusation against one of of his priests. That was a great secular sin. Accusations of sexual abuse are expected by the Leftist press to be believed without question. In such matters the presumption of innocence is thrown out the window

He was a proper servant of his God in acting as he did. As it says in Deuteronomy 1:17: "Ye shall not respect persons in judgment; but ye shall hear the small as well as the great; ye shall not be afraid of the face of man; for the judgment is God’s"

Time is running out for Peter Hollingworth over the child sex abuse crisis and Beth Heinrich wants him to be judged by his church with a biblical sense of urgency.

The former governor-general’s theological licence to officiate in basic tasks such as delivering sermons and overseeing family church events in the Anglican Diocese of Melbourne has not been renewed but this is only a small part of a much bigger problem he faces.

The Anglican investigative body Kooyoora is inching closer to deciding whether Dr Hollingworth, 87, should be stripped of holy orders – defrocked – after several complaints about his conduct while archbishop of Brisbane in the late 1980s and 90s and his comments as governor-general.

Multiple victims of church abuse – like Ms Heinrich, who was abused at a hostel as a teenager in the 1950s by an Anglican minister – are relentlessly pursuing Dr Hollingworth, her victim impact statement to the inquiry a shattering account of how she was groomed and then abused from the age of 14 in NSW.

Dr Hollingworth’s reputation was battered in 2002 when he suggested Ms Heinrich, at the time of the offending a child at a boarding school, had instigated sex with disgraced Anglican minister Donald Shearman.

Ms Heinrich is preparing to write a book on the intimate details of how she says Dr Hollingworth and others intensified her pain, testing her will to live and destroying her relationship with the church she loved.

“You are looking at me and perhaps I look OK on the outside, but that’s not how I feel,” Ms Heinrich’s statement prepared for the Kooyoora tribunal reads.

“If I allowed myself to be me I would have to start cutting my arms to show people how much I was hurting. I am afraid to be me because it hurts too much. I feel like I am someone else.”

While Dr Hollingworth mulls what logic and fairness suggests must be the looming end of the years-long Kooyoora inquiry, Ms Heinrich wants the elderly bishop held to account for his failures, blasting the prolonged nature of the investigation.

“Of course none of this dragged out drama is necessary,” she writes. “It can easily be solved. He should find the integrity, finally do the right thing and quietly resign.”

Dr Hollingworth was never an abuser, but was exposed falling short of basic community standards in his handling of the crisis.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/former-governorgeneral-peter-hollingworth-faces-judgment-day-over-sex-abuse-crisis/news-story/416eb42309c1cd9972cc4c465dfb00fe

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Judith Durham

She has just passed away, to widespread mourning. She had a wonderful clear voice which I enjoyed too. Below is a tribute to her from Terry Barnes of the Spectator. She was 79, the same age I am now. I am pleased that I seem to have a few years more before I snuff out

Please forgive the indulgence, but I'm still in deep sadness about the death on Friday of Judith Durham. The passing of the voice of The Seekers is, for people my age, the passing of our childhoods, the passing of a more innocent and certain age in Australia: Morningtown Ride was first heard on the wireless by three-year-old me (and my three-year-old now sings it with me); Georgy Girl was in the charts the day I started school. Yet Durham will never get a parliamentary condolence debate, as did a singer I'd never heard of until last week, Archie Roach: she was far too mainstream and Anglo. However, Judith Durham surely will be remembered worldwide long after Roach, and many others of their shared generation, have been forgotten.

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Labor’s Climate Bill is an economic precipice

In what The Australian called a ‘capitulation of the Greens’, the government’s Climate Bill has passed the House of Representatives. Its passage through the Senate is a formality.

With the Bill’s central requirement being that greenhouse gas emissions fall by 43 per cent (from the 2005 base), it amplifies the 28-30 per cent formal reduction level set by the previous Coalition government. In pursuit of decarbonisation to combat a mythical ‘climate crisis’, the Bill is designed to stymie the use of coal and gas. In doing so, it will increase the costs of mining, manufacturing, and other services; it will also increase costs in the farming sector – including by diverting the use of productive agricultural land into a carbon sink.

The so-called capitulation of the Greens stemmed from their apparent acquiescence in the Bill having no ‘climate trigger’ that would block all future coal and gas proposals. ‘We won’t be implementing that policy,’ Mr Albanese told the ABC.

Within days of the Climate Bill’s passage, several pieces of news have placed its attack on the nation’s resource wealth into context.

First, came the news of the bonanza Australia is presently earning from its hydrocarbon exports. Compared to last year, the June 2022 value of coal exports was up 270 per cent and that of gas exports doubled. Presently, coal and gas account for a colossal 43 per cent of the nation’s exports – the things which provide our present living standards.

And, of greater importance to politicians who see the taxes generated by these exports as a vote-buying exercise, it has brought an injection of funds to the Treasury. This is running at $27 billion more than anticipated in April’s pre-election update.

All of this seems to vindicate Mr Albanese’s pledge not to allow his ambitions in catering to the Woke agenda to lead to an adoption of the Greens Full Monty.

But the Greens, Teals, and other economic nihilists are playing a longer game.

Adam Bandt, in ‘capitulating’ to the Climate Bill not formally banning new coal and gas projects, said there were a ‘variety of ways’ the issue of new coal and gas could be addressed, including through the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act.

And so, it came to pass!

By a remarkable coincidence, the day after the Bill’s passage, Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek rejected the Clive Palmer-backed Central Queensland Coal Project claiming it was ‘likely to have unacceptable impacts to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park’. The mine would have seen an annual $8.2bn in export revenues and employ as many as 500 people. Ms Plibersek’s decision serves many purposes: it consolidates Labor’s environmental credentials, offers a trophy to the Greens, and administers a blow to a political enemy. The economic mayhem it will cause is a small price to pay for such prizes!

Ironically, that same day we saw the puncturing of the fraudulent catastrophist claims underpinning the Minister’s decision, namely that global warming and land-based pollutants were wrecking the Great Barrier Reef. Data released by the Australian Institute of Marine Science confirmed the accuracy of measurements and analyses conducted by Dr Peter Ridd. Dr Ridd’s championing of his findings led the Reef scientific community to have him dismissed from his post as a Professor at James Cook University and head of its Marine Geophysical Laboratory.

In its own right, the Climate Bill will impose great damage upon the economy. Tony Abbott is surely correct in saying it will bring a ‘blizzard of litigation’ by environmental groups that will result in many projects failing to get approval and all others paying a greater form of ‘regulatory tax’.

Viv Forbes is also correct in saying that the effects will be compounded by amendments and reinterpretations of dozens of related laws and regulations. Indeed, Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen has already flagged further measures including additional direct subsidies and indirect subsidies from the ‘safeguard mechanism’ (requiring firms to progressively reduce their carbon dioxide emissions) and the fourfold expansion of the transmission system.

But, infected by a mixture of Wokeness and self-interest in regulatory favours the Bill offers, major business bodies applaud the self-sacrifice Australian governments are making on our behalf. To them, it is worth destroying the economy in pursuit of the Shibboleth of Net Zero and Australia’s global leadership in achieving it. Those signing up to support its passage include the Business Council, the Australian Industry Group, the Australian Energy Council, and The Australian Institute of Company Directors.

The mainstream media is largely on board. Most would subscribe to the view expressed by The Australian’s Politics and Investigations editor, Olivia Caisley, who declared ‘our politicians have finally agreed to co-parent the climate’ while regretting that the ALP had not adopted the more extreme policies promoted by the Greens.

Similarly, the Coalition is mainly complicit in the Bill’s goals. One member actually voted for it and senior leader Simon Birmingham would not have been alone in contemplating such action. Only a handful of Coalition politicians including Matt Canavan, Alex Antic, and Colin Boyce have bothered to study the issue, to recognise that Net Zero means net poverty.

Argentina and South Africa are among the economies demonstrating that politics can kill the affluence available from properly managing a richness of resources. Will we awaken before the corrosive effect of the attack on modern technology drives the Australian economy along that same path?

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/08/labors-climate-bill-is-an-economic-precipice/

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Apprentice teachers would earn as they learn under new model being pushed by Universities Australia

Back to the future. In the 19th century teachers learned their craft via apprenticships

Apprentice teachers would earn as they learn while working as classroom assistants under radical training reforms to be driven by the nation’s universities.

As education ministers prepare to meet school leaders and unions on Friday to discuss the dire shortage of teachers, Universities Australia has proposed a shake-up of professional qualifications to give teaching graduates more practical experience.

“We can help create a degree apprenticeship system where, like any other apprenticeship, student teachers have the opportunity to do more training in schools with a job secured at the end of it,’’ Universities Australia chief executive Catriona Jackson said on Sunday.

Longer practical placements for teachers in training, to work as aides and help teachers in classrooms are spelled out in a Universities Australia document prepared for the ministerial summit.

“Students will get more exposure to the classroom and develop practical skills in the workplace together with quality mentoring and coaching,’’ it states.

“Pre-service teachers will be more productive sooner and will contribute to addressing workforce shortages, including by taking on ancillary tasks and freeing up teachers to teach.”

Australia is facing a shortage of 4100 teachers over the next four years, as school student enrolments soar 10 per cent. But school-leavers are shunning a career in teaching, with a 17 per cent slump in the number of university graduates with teaching degrees between 2017 and 2020.

One in eight teachers intends to quit in the next five years and 40 per cent of maths teachers and nearly a third of science teachers are not qualified to teach subjects essential for a hi-tech economy.

The federal government has fast-tracked visas for more than 1000 foreign teachers this year, to plug shortages in Australian schools.

Cutting red tape for teachers to ease their workload, and higher pay rates for top teachers are canvassed in a discussion paper to be put to the state and territory education ministers by federal Education Minister Jason Clare on Friday.

The document says high-school teachers work an average of 45 hours a week, including four hours on administrative tasks.

“How can we reduce administrative burden to give teachers the time to deliver high-quality learning and support for students and their school communities?’’ it states. “What promising approaches to reducing teacher workload could be piloted, such as deploying administrative or support staff more effectively to take on tasks that do not require teaching expertise or qualifications?’’

The document says pay scales that range from about $75,000 for a beginner teacher to $126,000 for a lead teacher fail to reward the most proficient teachers who choose to stay in classrooms.

“Australian teachers begin their career on a competitive salary but pay scales are flatter than in comparable countries and teachers can reach the top pay points within 10 years,’’ it states.

“Australia’s top teacher salary is only 40 per cent higher than the starting salary, significantly below the OECD average of 80 per cent.

“Outside of the national Highly Accomplished and Lead Teacher (HALT) program there are limited career opportunities for teachers to be recognised and remunerated for their expertise, without moving to school leadership or education bureaucracy positions.’’

The federal government will spend $51m for 5000 bursaries to attract high-achieving school students to choose teaching as a career. It will also spend $71.5m over four years to support 1500 qualified professionals with degrees in engineering, science, maths, law or the humanities, to swap their careers for teaching.

Universities Australia hopes to rekindle interest in teaching by replacing its traditional four-year teaching degree with a radical new “degree apprenticeship’’.

“(It is) an approach to teacher education that combines theory and practice in a new way and links education directly to the workforce,’’ its proposal states.

“Degree apprenticeship systems offer schools qualified new teachers and offer students and graduates a pathway to a job.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/apprentice-teachers-would-earn-as-they-learn-under-new-model-being-pushed-by-universities-australia/news-story/182570a71e76e964c69467a6f8a1ad18

Universities set low bar to take subpar students

This is grossly irresponsible. Universities are clearly doing anything to get their numbers up. And it is the poorer and less able students who will be penalized. Many will fail but will still have to pay for their courses. Money for nothing.

There was a much more defensible system in my day. Under the Commonwealth Scholarship Scheme, only the top third of high school passes earned government help

Struggling students who left school at the bottom of the class are being accepted into prestigious university degrees including engineering, architecture and psychology.

Universities made offers to students with Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) scores below 50 – the bottom 10 per cent of high school leavers – for 221 different bachelor degrees this year, placing them at higher risk of failure and financial risk.

The revelation of the low bars being set for academic entry comes as the federal government cracked down on cheating by blocking 40 of the most visited academic cheating websites on Friday.

Federation University Australia, the University of Tasmania, and La Trobe University both accepted students with an ATAR in the 30s – the bottom two per cent of school leavers.

Aspiring teachers can access seven different education degrees with ATAR scores 50 and below, sparking protests from the teachers’ union on Friday.

Australian Education Union president Correna Haythorpe warned that students with an ATAR lower than the average of 70 were likely to fail a teaching degree.

“Low university-entry scores for teaching degrees is a growing concern,’’ she said.

“Evidence suggests that students admitted with low ATARs are likely to be less successful at university and are less likely to complete their course.

“The bar must be raised by setting minimum entry requirements and making teaching a two-year postgraduate degree.’’

A Federation University spokeswoman blamed an “administrative error’’ for admitting a student with an ATAR of 37 to a teaching degree this year.

“We have investigated this matter with the Victorian Teaching Institute, and we are both satisfied that the student is doing well and should be allowed to complete the course,’’ she said.

Alarmingly low academic requirements are revealed in ATAR cut-off scores for university admissions this year, published on the federal government’s Course Seeker website using official data from universities and tertiary admission centres. Starting this year, students who fail to pass at least half their subjects will lose taxpayer subsidies and be forced to pay the full cost of their degree, switch to an easier course or drop out of university.

The federal Education Department said it did not yet know how many students were failing, and losing taxpayer funding, as a result of the former Coalition government’s Job-Ready Graduates legislation that will be reviewed by the new Labor government later this year.

If students fail a course and are kicked out, they will still have to repay the student loans they borrowed through the Higher Education Loan Program (HELP), possibly leaving them with a lifelong debt.

“For a bachelor degree the rule applies if a student does not complete or fails more than 50 per cent of at least eight units until the end of the degree,’’ a spokesperson said.

“If this occurs students lose access to Commonwealth Supported Places (government subsidy) and to HELP. They can regain access by changing to another course that, for example, might better suit them.

“If a student has failed or not completed units because of illness, or other unusual stresses or things out of their control in their life, their university can exempt those units from the rule.’’

Federal Education Department data shows that more than 13,000 students with below-50 ATAR scores applied for university last year, with 55 per cent accepted.

Another 30,000 students applied with ATARs between 50 and 70, with three-quarters accepted, while nearly all the 29,000 applicants with an ATAR above 90 enrolled in a degree.

Of the students with low ATAR scores, 11 per cent were from poorer backgrounds while only 2 per cent were from wealthy families.

Among the highest achievers, 38 per cent were wealthy and 17 per cent were from poorer families.

Higher education policy expert Andrew Norton, professor in the practice of higher education policy at the Centre for Social Research and Methods at the Australian National University, warned that students admitted with low academic results were the most likely to drop out of university.

He said half the students with an ATAR below 50 would fail to complete their course.

“Often they are equity students admitted under special arrangements,’’ he said. “Nevertheless, they are coming in with what looks like poor academic preparation. “I am concerned that some students will be expose to financial risk because they have a high chance of not completing their degree.’’

The Course Seeker data shows that the University of Tasmania admitted business graduates with an ATAR of 30 this year, while RMIT University set a low threshold of 48.4 for its Bachelor of Psychology.

While the University of NSW accepted only students with an ATAR over 85 for its civil engineering degree, La Trobe University lowered its cut-off to 50.

For an accounting and finance degree, the Australian Catholic University set a cut-off barely below 50, while the University of Tasmania admitted architecture students with an ATAR of just 44.

Federation University Australia this week scrapped its Bachelor of Arts degree, blaming a drop in student enrolments.

“The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has caused a significant decline in international enrolments, and we are now in our third year of declining student enrolments,’’ acting vice-chancellor Wendy Cross said on Friday.

“We have also seen a drop in domestic student enrolments generally due to online learning fatigue that continues to significantly impact the university’s financial position.”

National Tertiary Education Union Victorian assistant secretary Sarah Roberts said an arts degree was a “bedrock offering for all universities’’. “This is a demoralising day for humanities in Victoria (and) a hammer blow for students who live regionally and want to study arts,” she said.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/universities-set-low-bar-to-take-subpar-students/news-story/9691c2f2b30d15c2d783802156705ab4

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Anthony Albanese’s climate politics power play leaves nation in the dark

Anthony Albanese has declared a victory in the decade-old climate change wars with his legislated carbon emissions reduction target but priority is quickly moving from cutting emissions to the other side of the equation: the supply and price of energy.

The political paradigm and reality on climate change has shifted from well-meaning aims to cut carbon emissions to fight global warming to ensuring a reliable and affordable energy supply whether from renewables, coal, gas, oil or nuclear.

The world faces critical fuel shortages and disrupted supply lines because of the Covid-19 pandemic, trade bans, food shortages, economic downturns, Europe’s overly hasty withdrawal from fossil fuels and nuclear energy, an inability of renewable energy to provide reliable power, a fatal over-reliance on Russian gas supplies and Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.

Australia’s abundance of natural resources, geographic advantages, strong economic performance during the pandemic, stable governance, mature transport system and high levels of employment have not prevented the shock of high petrol prices, rocketing inflation, gas and coal shortages, failure of aged coal-fired power stations, electricity brownouts and shutdowns for industry.

Households are “doing it tough” because of these petrol prices, hikes in domestic gas bills and rising electricity charges, and there is little prospect of relief any time soon.

The Prime Minister has repeatedly acknowledged how hard it is for households at a time of high inflation, rising mortgage payments, punishing petrol prices and grocery bills.

Yet the big win for the new Labor government this week was to force the Greens to back off from a more radical agenda of climate change restrictions on industry and gas and coal production, and legislate a target of 43 per cent carbon emissions reductions by 2030. Legislation was not necessary for the target but it provided a political authority and delivered an election promise.

Albanese told parliament: “Passing this legislation sends a great message to the people of Australia that we are taking real action on climate change. That the decade of inaction and denial is over.”

“The Industrial Revolution was based upon fossil fuels. It brought great prosperity. But what we also know is that it is changing our climate.

“What you have is people not quietly, loudly, screaming out for action, saying, ‘Enough is enough’. We need to actually get on with the business of transition, of putting in place structures that will encourage that investment to occur. This is a fulfilment of a core promise that we met at the election of 43 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030, a renewable sector that will grow to 82 per cent of our national energy market by 2030.”

Obviously Albanese was pleased to be able to stare down the Greens and isolate the Coalition on the 43 per cent carbon emissions cut and had a big political win, which led him to claim he’d won the climate change wars.

But not once in the entire speech to parliament did Albanese mention the other side of the climate change equation – the immediate supply of energy and the need for a cut in prices.

Britain, Germany, France, Italy, China and India, as well as a swathe of former eastern bloc European nations are turning back to, or increasing, coal-fired power and reviving stalled nuclear plans to combat the chronic gas and fuel shortages while consciously pausing or simply letting slip restrictions and targets on greenhouse gas emissions.

Even Volodymyr Zelensky directly thanked Australia for its gift of 70,000 tonnes of coal to help war-torn Ukraine’s emergency power generation as the shipment arrived this week via Poland.

What’s more, this week Australia recorded its highest trade surplus in history largely built on coal and gas exports, which could halve the projected $80bn budget deficit.

Albanese was adamant he would not allow the Greens to implement their more radical agenda to ban new coal and gas projects or alter the mechanism by which “Australia’s biggest emitters” will be told how they must reduce their carbon emissions to meet the 43 per cent target.

Yet, Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen had to concede there will be changes to the mechanism, which will be subject of a discussion paper “later in August” and which provides an opportunity for the Greens to meddle.

“We’ll be releasing a discussion paper on the detailed design mechanism on the safeguard mechanism in August, probably. That will be up for consultation. The Greens have indicated they will probably have feedback on that,” Bowen said.

It is the treatment of this mechanism, not nearly as clear as Albanese makes out, that is creating deep concern within the resources sector and the 215 industries and entities subject to the rules.

The threat of technicalities about various types and classes of emissions ruling out new gas and coal projects or even nullifying existing projects is real and yet to be addressed as the government revels in its climate change success.

The other practical area being subsumed by the bigger picture of “Australia not being in the naughty corner” on climate change targets is energy prices:

BEFORE the election Labor promised people would get an average $275-a-year cut in their electricity bills, yet bills are forecast to rise;

DELIBERATELY undermined coal-fired power stations continue to fail and cause power shortages;

DOMESTIC gas shortages are driving up prices and forcing market intervention;

THERE are coal shortages as companies scramble to meet record demand at record prices;

STATE governments continue to ban gas exploration and stop new gas production;

MOTORISTS are paying around $2 a litre for petrol and on September 1 the 22c petrol excise cut is scheduled to end.

These are all immediate pressures on household budgets that have not been addressed as Albanese claims to have won the climate wars and a big political battle.

The Prime Minister was further buoyed by being able to isolate the Coalition on climate change and continue to demonise it as being stuck in the past.

While unable to affect the Labor-Green agenda, Peter Dutton has concentrated on the promises Labor made and the practical outcomes and solutions on the energy supply side in the short and long term.

The Opposition Leader, alert to the potential threat in the implementation of the 43 per cent target, declared: “We have to stick to the facts instead of the emotion on this issue and we’re going to lose industry, there are going to be smelters and others close down under this government, the jobs will go offshore, and the emissions will still go into the air.”

Dutton said Bowen is “leading us down what I think is a very dangerous path at the moment”.

But it was cost-of-living nitty gritty and Labor promises that drove the Coalition parliamentary attack this week, constantly demanding Albanese repeat the promise of a $275-a-year cut in electricity bills.

Steering clear of repeating the promise in parliament, Albanese turned down every opportunity thrust at him by the Coalition and instead dug away at the opposition being irrelevant.

Likewise, when asked whether Labor would extend the petrol excise cut beyond September 1, Treasurer Jim Chalmers didn’t completely rule it out but said such support – at a cost of $3bn for six months – could not go on indefinitely.

As for Dutton’s long-term suggestion of Australia investigating nuclear energy – as it spreads around the word with new technology and an enhanced reputation as being climate-friendly – Albanese dismissed it out of hand with the language and scare campaigns of the 1980s.

Albanese’s big win and week in parliament was all about climate change and carbon emissions but sooner or later he, like the rest of the world, will have to address the immediate supply crunch and rising costs of energy.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/anthony-albaneses-climate-politics-power-play-leaves-nation-in-the-dark/news-story/c6153445be0499ec5c4a98c95c297c1c

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Labor-Greens marriage produces forty new bills!

Viv Forbes

There is an ominous buzz in the new Australian Parliament where Albo and the Greens are planning to pass 40 new bills, quick smart.

Each bill will probably need 100 new regulations and 200 new inspectors, auditors, and enforcers plus many new taxes and fees. They will not deliver ‘Net Zero’ – they are ‘Net Negative’ – but they will divert labour and capital from productive activities to bureaucracies and green energy speculators.

Where are the 40 old bills that Green-Albo will repeal to make room for these 40 wordy additions to Australia’s already overflowing legislative sewer?

We need a new political party dedicated solely to the repeal of costly, destructive, or useless legislation.

Australia has thrived for over 200 years without Green-Albo’s 40 new laws. So they can be safely rejected or repealed and followed out the door by most of the legislation introduced under the baleful gaze of the Green Quad – Gillard, Rudd, Turnbull, and Morrison. A safe policy for the new Repeal Party would be ‘Last in, First Out’.

Not only is it imperative to start the domestic repeal movement, Australia also needs to back out of the international agreements swamp. Top priority here is to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement.

Probably the worst bill in Green-Albo’s legislative avalanche is the Climate Change Bill.

This dreadful piece of legislation gives the government the ability to ‘ratchet up’ green targets without new parliamentary approval, but makes it difficult for future governments to ratchet back these targets when it all goes horribly wrong. This will clutter rural Australia with imported solar panels and windmills, and destroy forests and grasslands with spider-webs of roads and transmission lines. It will make blackouts more likely and destroy any heavy industry we have left.

Filling our cities with electric cars will stress the electricity grid and add greatly to urban fire risks. And in 15 years (or after every cyclone) we will have an enormous problem trying to dispose of the worn-out, non-degradable wind and solar generator debris.

Wind and solar are almost useless without big battery storage. Then there is Turnbull’s Green Elephant, the Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro, which is way behind in time and way ahead in costs.

Australia survived booms and busts, two world wars, and the Great Depression only to see the Builder Generations outvoted by the Spoiled Brat generations – the Teal-tinged Baby Boomers, the Millenniums, Blockade Australia, and the Thunbergs.

Not only have Albo and the Green-Teals captured Australia’s Parliament, they also dominate the school rooms, the education departments, and most of the media. Climate activism is encouraged in schools at the expense of maths, science, and engineering. The Builder Generations are depicted in education propaganda not as wise elders but as ‘Cranky Uncles’.

No wonder we are cranky.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/08/labor-greens-marriage-produces-forty-new-bills/

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Claims by DNA lab ‘untrue’, inquiry

A new public inquiry investigating alleged negligence in testing at the Queensland government’s DNA lab is flagging bombshell findings that lab scientists have been making “untrue” statements to courts, prosecutors and victims of crime since 2018.

The forensic lab, a major focus in The Australian’s Shandee’s Story investigative podcast series about the unsolved 2013 murder of a young woman, has been put on notice by the royal commission-style inquiry that very serious interim findings are looming.

Stakeholders in Queensland’s criminal justice system have been sent a confidential document and asked to reply to the inquiry in one week ahead of possible interim findings about what is shaping as a disaster in forensic science and crime-sample testing.

The document from DNA inquiry head Walter Sofronoff QC revolves around expert witness statements by lab scientists of “insufficient DNA for analysis” and “insufficient DNA for further processing” in relation to thousands of crime samples.

The DNA inquiry, which was set up by Annastacia Palaszczuk in June after months of revelations by The Australian, asked renowned scientist Linzi Wilson-Wilde to report on whether “it is true or untrue” that an evidence sample within a specified range would not yield DNA.

The upper end of the range was 22 human cells which is the detection limit set by the lab to justify further processing. However, fewer than 10 cells can often produce a DNA profile, while the NSW crime lab has a detection limit of 11 cells.

According to the document distributed by the inquiry, Professor Wilson-Wilde stated a full DNA or partial DNA profile could be achieved in the range specified, meaning the statements routinely produced by the lab are “untrue”.

Senior Queensland justice framework stakeholders are now being asked by the inquiry to comment on the possible next steps.

The inquiry faces the challenge of how to deal with thousands of major crimes which may have gone unsolved due to “untrue” lab statements and DNA crime scene samples going untested.

Mr Sofronoff, the newly retired president of Queensland’s Supreme Court of Appeal, also asked key parties to comment on “whether the commission ought to make a recommendation to the effect that the statements of witnesses issued since 2018” (relating to the claims about insufficient DNA) should “be withdrawn”.

In this scenario, there would be a clamour for the re-testing of thousands of DNA samples which the Queensland Health-run lab had not fully tested. Police and prosecutors would be under pressure to try to re-run an unknown number of cases and to run DNA-linked cases for the first time.

In early 2018, the DNA laboratory downgraded its procedures for testing samples from major crime such as murders, rapes, attempted murders and serious assaults, resulting in numerous samples not being fully tested and DNA going undetected.

The reasons for the downgrading are unknown. However, DNA scientist Kirsty Wright has told The Australian she suspected the change was linked to the lab wanting to achieve targets for funding and processing times. Their targets could be achieved by putting fewer samples forward to be fully tested, despite the obvious repercussion that probative evidence would go undetected when many samples were untested.

Dr Wright identified a litany of serious errors and misses in 2021 in the lab’s forensic files connected to testing for offender DNA after the frenzied stabbing murder in Mackay of Shandee Blackburn, who was just 23. After studying hundreds of documents and witness statements, Dr Wright told The Australian’s podcast, Shandee’s Story, that the lab’s performance was so poor it should be immediately “shut down” to stop it failing more victims of crime, the courts and the police.

However, it took a further six months for the Premier and her Health Minister Yvette D’Ath to set up the commission of inquiry.

The inquiry has the power to compel witnesses to give evidence under oath and to subpoena documents from the government lab and other parties. Public hearings are expected to be held in the coming months.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/claims-by-dna-lab-untrue-inquiry/news-story/5f690311ec6b902ac7d35ac639f71440?utm_source=TheAustralian&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorial&utm_content=TATodaysHeadlinesSubAM&net_sub_uid=282998969

Friday, August 05, 2022

Dismantling Australia

The great civilizational success of Australia is a dagger in the heart to the hate-filled:Left and they are determined to destroy it

Back in 2017, the University of Sydney launched a campaign to ‘unlearn’ education. In 2022, the University of Melbourne upped the ante by launching a campaign to unlearn the entire nation. In an extraordinary act of institutional suicide, one of Australia’s most prestigious universities has introduced an initiative titled Undoing Australia.

The enterprise is being run by The Australian Centre, a research unit of the university’s faculty of arts which has set out to prove Australia is an ‘unfinished political project’ that is ‘constructed, contested and refused every day’. Key focus areas include policy, law, education, literature and the media – all picked due to their dubious roots in the ‘colonial nation-state’.

At the heart of the Undoing Australia project is a desire to dismantle the Australian nation-state entirely in order to right past wrongs. The initiative is revolutionary, promoting activism, statue-toppling and the eradication of a positive narrative about Western civilisation from the history books. The political, legal and social framework of our nation must go down in flames before a new, vaguely defined utopia can rise from the ashes to replace it. This message is evident in The Australian Centre’s obsession with white supremacy, white privilege and entrenched racism.

One webinar titled ‘Whiteness in Education’ looks at how ‘whiteness’ is not innate but learned. According to Associate Professor Jessica Gerrard and Dr Sophie Rudolph, ‘the systems of white dominance that operate worldwide are not natural but created and maintained through social and political life’. They advance the argument that education and government are sustaining ‘systems of racial domination’. The authors encourage listeners to grapple with the ‘politics of education’ and reimagine a future ‘thoroughly divested from racism’.

Next is a webinar which asks the weighted question ‘How do we tell the truth about Australia?’ According to Professor Sarah Maddison and Dr Julia Hurst, ‘truth-telling’ by way of ‘truth commissions’ will play a pivotal role in responding to a ‘culture of active silence on colonialism’. The reference to ‘truth-telling’ is puzzling to say the least given most of the University of Melbourne’s postmodernist intellectuals don’t even believe in truth.

This contradiction is openly admitted by the authors who claim that ‘truth-telling rarely lives up to its promise’ and ‘it is not clear that there is a shared understanding of what truth might offer’. On top of this, Victoria, Queensland, Tasmania and the Northern Territory are praised in the webinar for investigating historical and ongoing injustices against indigenous people. All these examples suggest that ‘truth-telling’ is in fact a priority for Australians and ‘colonialism’ a hot topic of discussion in the public sphere.

A third webinar titled ‘Counter-Monuments: Challenging distorted colonial histories’ examines how a culture of silence on colonialism can be combatted by toppling imperial-era statues and building counter-monuments. Indigenous woman Genevieve Grieves and Dr Amy Spiers note that public memorials ‘celebrating imperial conquest’ are now inciting action against ‘racist violence’. They claim white settlers are routinely honoured over indigenous counterparts. Their solution to this inequality is more ‘counter-monuments’ bringing to light the darker aspects of Australian history.

Last but not least is a webinar titled ‘Dismantling Settler Futures’ which looks at how the ‘colonial future’ can be rejected to make way for a new age of indigenous empowerment. Dr Alissa Macoun and Dr Elizabeth Strakosch argue that ‘settler colonial technologies’ operating through Australian indigenous policy are sustaining the ‘settler project’. They decry any non-indigenous claim to ‘sovereign legitimacy’ as ‘violence’. Even ‘decolonising agendas’ are tainted by ‘European understandings of sovereignty’. Given neither author claims indigenous heritage, this naturally raises questions about the legitimacy of their own arguments. For instance, Dr Macoun self-identifies as a ‘white woman’, a fact which could taint her opinions on indigenous matters according to her own logic.

Perhaps the academics behind the Undoing Australia project are forgetting the benefits of the so-called ‘settler project’ which include Western intellectual traditions and Judeo-Christian values. British and European settlers imported democracy, freedom, education, tolerance, welfare and human rights to Australian shores. The campaign to ‘refuse settler futures’ is a campaign to refuse a socio-political system which has brought freedom and prosperity to billions of people across the globe.

Moreover, Professor Maddison and Dr Hurst’s accusation that there is a ‘culture of active silence on colonialism’ in Australia collapses upon examination. In fact, the opposite is true. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Culture is one of the three cross-curriculum priorities taught in all Australian schools from kindergarten to year 10. Most Australian universities have entire departments and multiples policies devoted to educating students about indigenous culture. The so-called ‘culture of active silence’ on indigenous issues is well and truly dead.

Educators involved in the Undoing Australia project who suggest otherwise are weaponising words like ‘truth-telling’ to impute the guilt of historical figures onto current mainstream Australians. They claim that this nation’s institutions are riddled with racism and need to be replaced.

Unfortunately, while there are plenty of criticisms in this webinar series, solutions are few and far between. What is clear is that apologies, reparations and welfare will abound. It will be a world of colonial statue-toppling, indigenous politics, truth commissions and treaty negotiations. The University of Melbourne’s plan to ‘Undo Australia’ is self-destructive, disingenuous and fails to recognise the great achievements of this country. Australia would be better served by its oldest and most prestigious institutions of higher learning if they focused on building up rather than tearing down this nation.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/08/undoing-australia/

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International students are applying for Australian visas in record numbers

Good for university finances

The number of international students applying for visas hit an all-time record in June, giving heart to universities and other education providers who are looking for a strong bounce back in student numbers.

In an update sent to education providers on Monday, the Home Affairs Department said that about 42,700 student visa applications had been lodged in June, in a post-Covid rush to return to Australia.

“This is the largest number of offshore applications received in a single month in the last 10 years,” the department told education providers. Because the number of international students coming to Australia in the past decade is far higher than in earlier decades, the June figure is an all-time record.

The department said that the high numbers seen in June are continuing, with an average of 10,000 student visa applications a week being received during July from offshore applicants. In comparison, only 34,015 student visa applications were received in June 2019, before the pandemic.

International Education Association of Australia CEO Phil Honeywood said the figures showed that demand was recovering “notwithstanding the reputational damage” which Australia had suffered as an education destination during the pandemic.

“This latest data proves there is still a strong appetite to study in Australia,” Mr Honeywood said.

The record number of applications will put even more pressure on the Department of Home Affairs which has struggled to process the volume of student visa applications since borders opened at the end of last year.

In an effort to speed up processing the department has assigned 140 more people to visa processing in its overseas offices since May.

Last week Immigration Minister Andrew Giles said 62,000 student visas had been finalised since the beginning of June but warned that the situation would not change quickly.

“The processing of visas will continue to be a major priority for this government, but reducing the backlog of applications can’t happen overnight,” Mr Giles said.

“People reallocated to dealing with the visa applications on hand need to be trained and skilled before they can go about this important work.”

Currently the international education industry is lagging well behind the boom conditions it experienced pre-Covid, when the value of Australia’s education exports reached a record $40.3 billion in 2019.

The latest student data from the federal Education Department, issued on Monday, said that 171,000 international students had commenced courses in the five months to May this year, 31 per cent less than in the same period of 2019.

Mr Honeywood said it was important to learn from experience as international education recovered from Covid.

“Lessons learnt from the pandemic show that we need to build back better,” he said. “Going forward, the key concerns include visa processing times, motivation of student applicants and diversity of source countries.”

Currently international students have no limit on the hours they work since the Morrison government removed the previous 40 hours per fortnight restriction in an effort to ease labour shortages.

However this has raised concern that international students are being attracted to Australia by the prospect of working to earn money in a high wage economy rather than coming to study.

If the Albanese government does not move to reinstate the work hours restriction there are fears it could damage Australia’s reputation for quality education.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/international-students-are-applying-for-australian-visas-in-record-numbers/news-story/141b8c5dcdc5da1f6396ee6ffa725b9c

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Climate tropes: Don’t be fooled

Judith Sloan

Last week, I wrote about the importance of language as a means of influencing people’s thinking and, indeed, decision-making. When it comes to manipulating language, turning meanings on their head and creating short-hand terms to deride opponents, the Left has won hands down.

I used examples from economics because that’s what I know best. But let’s face it, climate tropes are another outstanding case in which language is constantly used to persuade doubters to change their minds and to bolster the case for action, aka feathering the nests of green rent-seekers.

One example is renewable energy. It’s misleading because it fails to highlight the two key features, its intermittency and its low density relative to fossil fuels. But I guess weather-dependent, unreliable energy just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

It’s worth interrogating some climate tropes because they are important to understanding how well-heeled electors fall for the claims of activists – think here of the good burghers of Kooyong, Wentworth and the like. (To be sure, having lots of assets and high incomes incline these folk to hold post-material, worthy opinions even if they know in their hearts a lot of it is wishful thinking, at best, and complete hogwash, at worst.)

Let’s start with the most fundamental of all climate chestnuts – the science is settled. Any sensible person would immediately smell a rat. What the hell is ‘the science’? There is no such thing as ‘the science’. The very process of scientific discovery means nothing is truly settled. The best scientific approach is to test a refutable hypothesis but most climate science uses black-box, simplified models with untested predictions the main output. When the predictions are back-cast using data that is already in the can, the errors are there for all to see. But for climate scientists, there are always excuses.

(Some of you may have followed the recent ructions in medical science. In the case of the efficacy of antidepressants working to affect serotonin uptake, it turns out that there is no evidence and many millions of prescriptions may have been written for no benefit to patients. Fraud turns out to be the foundation for the incorrect belief – scientific belief – that the build-up of plaque in the brain is the principal cause of dementia. But, hey, the science was settled.)

Another favourite climate platitude is that renewables are cheaper than other forms of electricity generation. A very large number of current Labor ministers fall for this line. The Prime Minister is still banging on about cheaper, more reliable renewable energy and making some ludicrous suggestion that Australia can become a renewable energy superpower – another climate cliché.

Even Defence Minister Richard Marles who is no fool, has fallen into the same trap. ‘We’ve made it very clear we’re going to act on climate change in a way which gets more renewables into the electricity grid. The real thing now is that renewable power is cheap power, and then we’ll see electricity prices come down.’ Here’s the thing, Dick, the wholesale price of electricity in Australia has risen as the proportion of renewables in the grid has risen. In the middle of last decade, the wholesale price was around $70 per megawatt hour; it is now around $350, after a very substantial expansion in renewable energy installations.

Even the green activist regulator, the Australian Energy Market Operator, has conceded that the recent high wholesale electricity prices and convulsions in the National Electricity Market are in part due to the lack of coal-fired generation. That’s right, not having enough coal has been causing problems. The failure to link increases in subsidised renewable energy in the grid – recently, mainly as a result of state government and corporate initiatives – to the exit and unreliability of coal-fired power is a potent reminder of how removed green dreamers are from reality. Why would any rational owner spend money maintaining or extending the life of a 24/7 coal-fired electricity plant when various governments deliberately undercut their business models and gun for their exit?

A dictum frequently used by the climate crowd and associated politicians is ‘international pariah’. Unless Australia signs up to ambitious targets; fully commits to the Paris climate agreement; contributes to the climate fund for developing countries, we risk becoming an ‘international pariah’.

But if you read international media, as I do, there is hardly ever a mention of Australia being an international pariah on climate action. Sure, egg-heads like Alok Sharma, UK parliamentarian and president of Cop 26, and John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, criticise Australia’s emissions reductions. But these men do this for their own self-serving reasons while Canada and New Zealand, whose leaders are fully-signed up climate evangelists, largely escape criticism because they make the right climate sounds even though their emissions reductions are much worse. And do you ever hear Sharma or Kerry, who regularly fly around the world in private jets, criticise China, the world’s largest emitter by far? It’s obvious to any rational person that China has been playing the West like a violin, pretending to be concerned about the climate while cashing in (and cornering the market) on the export of renewable paraphernalia.

Don’t get me on to electric vehicles. The preferred term is Zero Emitting Vehicles, to emphasise their virtue. As if? EVs involve 40 per cent more emissions before they even hit the road. And given that electricity is generated mostly by fossil fuels in almost all countries, it’s a bald-faced lie to call them zero emitting. We are being taken for fools. It’s time to fight back.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/08/climate-tropes/

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Australia Day (dangerous) Melbourne Pride (safe)

Just three days after Daniel Andrews expressed doubts about whether it would be safe to hold an Australia Day Parade, the Victoria Premier has announced a Pride street party.

With Covid still circulating in the community, the government is taking a cautious approach to January 26 Australia Day celebrations.

You might imagine that with the Monkey pox being declared a global emergency and circulating in a very specific community, the government might also take a cautious approach to Gay Pride gatherings.

Not so much.

We are told that associating the Monkey pox with gay men risks creating stigma. This is despite 98 per cent of cases reportedly occurring in gay men presenting at health clinics and the World Health Organisation releasing a specific health warning to the LGBTQ+ community advising them to ‘reduce their sexual partners’.

An LBGTQ+ health advocate quoted last week by SBS said: ‘The virus doesn’t discriminate … this virus could infect anyone.’

Technically, that is true, but in practice there are significant risk factors. There have been almost 20,000 Monkey pox cases worldwide, with around 19,600 of those contracted by ‘men who have sex with other men’ – as the WHO put it.

Accuracy is meant to be crucial for health matters, so why are the media choosing to run with ‘this virus could infect anyone’ as if you might pick it up grocery shopping?

Sure, the Andrews government told children to stay away from playgrounds to avoid catching the Covid, but it hasn’t even thought about restricting high-risk LGBTQ+ events.

While Australia Day festivities are still very much up in the air, a press release from the Premier’s office yesterday enthused:

‘The Andrews Labor Government is throwing a massive summer street party as part of a statewide celebration of our lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and gender diverse, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ+) communities.’ Woohoo! Monkey-Covid for everyone!

The double standard applied by the Labor government is breathtaking.

Remember when two elderly women sitting on a park bench during the Covid pandemic were surrounded by five Victorian police officers anxious to avert a super spreader event?

There are no such concerns with the worldwide Monkey pox outbreak and a Pride street party. Everything is LGBTQ-A-OK in the Republic of Danistan.

The Premier said:

‘The street party will support the Government’s continued efforts to achieve equality for LGBTIQ+ Victorians, by breaking down the stigma and discrimination they continue to face and providing opportunities for rainbow communities to connect and celebrate who they are.’

With the emphasis on ‘breaking down the stigma’, one could be forgiven for asking whether the Andrews government was prioritising ‘Woke’ over public safety.

Mr Andrews tweeted excitedly:

‘It was one of last summer’s best parties – so we’re doing it all again in 2023. Live music and performers are coming together to celebrate pride, love and diversity in Victoria – where equality is non-negotiable.’ The tweet goes on to say, ‘Daniel Andrews invited you’ and asks people to RSVP.

I’m not sure that an invitation from Daniel Andrews is all that appealing. But I digress.

There is another double standard that will not be lost on long suffering Victorians.

Mr Andrews, who created a ‘vaccinated economy’ where the unvaxxed where shut out of employment and commerce, says the street party will demonstrate that in Victoria ‘equality is non-negotiable’.

Tell perfectly healthy Victorians who are unable to work because of their vaccination status that equality in Dan Andrews’ Victoria is ‘non-negotiable’.

And will admission to the LGBTQ+ festival be restricted to those who have had the Monkey pox vaccine? Will LGBTQ+ revellers be forced to show their Monkey pox vaccination status before being granted entry?

Of course not. The Victorian government would never stigmatise anyone, I mean, aside from everyone who dares to exercise their own judgement about medical treatment for their own body.

It’s hard to see any equality at all in Victoria for having one’s vision blocked by very selective applications of the ALP’s version of equality that continually creates division and discrimination.

Fortunately, there is a Victoria state election on November 26. People – gay and straight – who value their liberty will be hoping to party that evening, without Daniel Andrews.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/08/australia-day-dangerous-melbourne-pride-safe/

Thursday, August 04, 2022

Ex-prime minister RIPS into 'fundamentally wrong' Aboriginal Voice to Parliament - and why his opposition is a grim prospect for Anthony Albanese's referendum

Referenda in Australia are normally lost if there is substantial opposition to them so Abbott has just killed Albo's referendum stone dead. Many Australians will rightly be appalled to have racial discrimination enshrined in our constitution

Tony Abbott has argued against the proposed Indigenous Voice to Parliament, claiming the current plan is 'fundamentally wrong' and imploring the Liberal Party to oppose it.

The former Prime Minister voiced his opinion over the issue in a piece he penned for The Australian on Wednesday, saying the body was racially divisive, risked upturning our system of governance, and would do nothing to fix the problems of Aboriginal communities.

'I'm all in favour of recognising Indigenous people in our Constitution, but not if it means making a race-based body part of our parliament and not if it means changing our system of government,' he began.

Mr Abbott claimed the 'problem' with an Indigenous Voice to Parliament is that it makes 'race an element' in who qualifies to sit on a body which will have broad powers to alter laws.

He also said that it 'changes the way our government works' by replacing or rivalling parliament as the peak body for deciding the nation's laws and regulations.

Added to the potential danger is that the powers of the body will remain undefined leading up to a referendum on whether it should be established, because the government does not want that plebiscite to fail due to disputes over fine detail.

Mr Abbott said that meant the Voice would have 'an unspecified say over unspecified topics with unspecified ramifications'.

Mr Abbott applauded Anthony Albanese for 'wanting to do the right thing by Aboriginal people' but wrote that it was not lack of legislative power that gave rise to the problems that afflict indigenous communities.

'We all lament the ugly fact Indigenous people, on average, die younger and live worse than the rest of us. But it's no mystery why this is so.

'People with much worse educational outcomes, with much lower prospects for employment and living far away from the services most Australians take for granted are always going to have shorter, poorer lives than those in better circumstances.'

Anthony Albanese attended the Garma Festival last weekend, where he revealed the possible question that could be asked in a referendum for a Voice to Parliament. The potential question was: 'Do you support an alteration to the constitution that establishes an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice?'

The early response from the Liberal opposition is that it will broadly support the proposal, but Mr Abbott has implored his former party colleagues in Canberra to oppose it.

Mr Abbott's public opposition to the change would cause some concern among proponents of the Voice, as he had past success at rallying support against a referendum. In 1999, the staunch monarchist led a successful campaign against Australia becoming a republic.

Mr Abbott asserted that close consultation with Indigenous elders and leaders through representative bodies 'has been happening for decades', but enshrining a new body with constitutional power that may override parliament was excessive and dangerous.

'If this body really is, in the Prime Minister's words, to 'end 121 years of Commonwealth governments arrogantly believing they know enough to impose their own solutions on Aboriginal people' it's obviously going to have something approaching a veto over decisions the parliament might otherwise make.'

'How would this additional mechanism improve the final outcome or, indeed, add anything to the 11 Indigenous voices that are already present in the parliament?

'What it would certainly do, though, is make the legislative process more complicated and invite judicial interventions on how much weight might be given to the view of the Voice versus that of the parliament; and on what matters might (or might not) be relating to Indigenous peoples.'

The former Prime Minister said having a rival body to parliament that represented the interests of indigenous people would divide the population on racial grounds rather than bringing them together.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11075021/Tony-Abbott-expresses-concerns-Aboriginal-Voice-Parliament.html

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Freedom of speech for the medical profession is under threat in Australia

No one wants to believe that they have been misled by people in positions of trust.

This is especially true when politicians, health bureaucrats, and regulatory bodies have forced compliance to medical mandates rather than leaving risk as a matter of personal choice. There is growing evidence from around the world that information has been withheld from public view and that doctors have been pressured out of questioning policy and data related to the pandemic.

In 1633, the authorities tried and condemned Galileo Galilei to house arrest, until his death in 1642, for publishing evidence that the planets revolved around the sun. They tried to silence open scientific debate. Ultimately, it didn’t work but did create a lot of suffering and misery for a few brave scientists in the meantime.

This kind of behaviour by powerful bodies is not confined to the past.

The newly formed Australian Medical Professionals Society (AMPS), operating as an alternative to the Australian Medical Association (AMA), is standing up for medical transparency, to protect our patients, and ensure open scientific debate.

Our AMPS members are refusing to be silent, even under threats to our registrations. We are fighting for law reform to provide our patients with evidence-based care rather than uncritical politically driven health practice.

Does the Australian public know that the government regulator, AHPRA, has warned health professionals, including doctors and nurses, not to publicly question government public health directives, including those related to Covid – effectively gagging them? This is done by threatening their registration.

Many have been disciplined or suspended for challenging the public health messaging even if they believed that they had scientific evidence to support their professional view.

The directive states:

‘Any promotion of anti-vaccination statements or health advice which contradicts the best available scientific evidence or seeks to actively undermine the national immunisation campaign (including via social media) is not supported by National Boards and may be in breach of the codes of conduct and subject to investigation and possible regulatory action.’

Brett Simmonds, Pharmacy Board Chair and co-chair of the Forum of NRAS Chairs, said of Covid vaccination programs:

‘National Boards support the vaccination program and encourage all registered health practitioners to get vaccinated unless medically contraindicated.

‘The codes of conduct for each of the registered health professions explain the public health obligations of registered health practitioners, including participating in efforts to promote the health of the community and meeting obligations on disease prevention.

‘There is no place for anti-vaccination messages in professional health practice, and any promotion of anti-vaccination claims including on social media, and advertising may be subject to regulatory action.

‘If you’re a registered health practitioner or student, the best thing to do is to read our joint statement. It explains the National Boards’ expectations of registered health practitioners about receiving, administering, and sharing information about Covid vaccination. It’s important you understand these expectations so that patients and communities are best protected against the novel coronavirus that causes Covid.’

AHPRA chief Martin Fletcher rejected the claim, saying:

‘In essence, AHPRA and National Boards expect health practitioners to use their professional judgment and the best available evidence in practice. This includes when providing information to the public about public health issues such as Covid and vaccination.

‘Any promotion of anti-vaccination statements or health advice that contradicts the best available scientific evidence or seeks to actively undermine the national immunisation campaign (including via social media) is not supported by National Boards.

‘It may be in breach of the codes of conduct and subject to investigation and possible regulatory action.’

It is a statement that appears to confirm, not deny, the complaints of medical professionals.

Never before have government bodies demanded compliance with domestic law that we believe breaches our codes and oaths to ‘first, do no harm’ and ‘I will not use my medical knowledge to violate human rights and civil liberties, even under threat’.

Is it widely known among practitioners and the public that the government changed laws to give manufacturers 6 years to provide comprehensive clinical data on safety and efficacy for provisionally approved Covid treatments?

The comparative lack of vital long-term data (present for other vaccines and medical treatments) is lacking in Covid vaccines – making it difficult to justify statements such as proven safe and effective. ‘Assumed to the best of our knowledge’ would be more accurate.

This problem is highlighted by changing promises related to Covid vaccines, which began as ‘you won’t get sick and it will stop transmission’ but now manufacturers and medical bodies have had to admit, due to overwhelming physical evidence in patients, that Covid vaccines do not stop transmission and many people still get sick and die. These revelations call into question the validity of extraordinary measures placed on people for over two years.

In Australia, we have a serious problem. Government excesses of power created through emergency legislation have been allowed to violate our freedoms and liberties. They were justified by largely unscientific and refutable claims. Fear was wrongly employed by political leaders, who also took steps to keep health advice secret from the public by the re-classifying of National Cabinet after Freedom of Information requests were approved by the court.

Public Health Laws gave Chief Health Officers (CHO) unprecedented powers to do almost anything they thought was reasonable during a pandemic – which can be declared on opinion, not evidence – without having to justify their decisions. They are no better than the authorities in Galileo’s time.

Queensland Doctors are taking the Qld CHO to court to gain access to the scientific evidence used to justify mandates that contradict historical experience and scientific consensus. Public confidence should never be coerced through government-mandated compliance to political directives.

We believe our code of conduct requirements demand we exercise our right to political communication to respectfully debate scientific evidence, risk/benefit analysis of therapeutics, and provide informed consent. But to do so we risk losing everything.

If we are forbidden by the government to adhere to our codes and make our patients our primary concern, then this is the end of medicine and the death of science.

AMPS cannot allow such government intrusion to stand. We are fighting back against new laws recommended by the Queensland government that allow public naming and shaming of doctors under investigation.

‘New legislation introduced in Queensland, the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2022, will greatly enhance the government regulator’s powers for censoring doctors in Queensland,’ said Steven Andrews MP for Marani QLD.

Even the AMA described these new laws as ‘incoherent zealotry’. The cost for patient advocacy will be public humiliation and potentially career-ending reputational damage. With this unchecked power of AHPRA, fear-based compliance to public health directives will become the primary concern of practitioners.

AMPS has been calling for a Royal Commission into the government response to Covid, while advocating strongly for law reform needed now to allow practitioners to advocate for their patients as their primary concern. Click here for more information. We cannot stay silent while adherence to public health messaging becomes the new accepted standard of good medical practice. Our patients, not politicians, are who we serve, no matter the personal cost.

Galileo said, ‘Two truths cannot contradict one another.’ The pressure on medical professionals to hide their true opinions should be rescinded and doctors allowed to openly debate all Covid measures and be able to have all tools at their disposal to treat patients.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/08/the-end-of-medicine/

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Queensland birth certificates changes to recognise trans, gender diverse people coming to parliament

Major changes that would better recognise trans and gender diverse people on Queensland birth certificates are expected to come before parliament later this year.

Attorney-General Shannon Fentiman on Wednesday also confirmed the Palaszczuk government was considering allowing transgender people who have not undergone gender-affirming surgery to change their gender on the certificate.

Reforms to the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act were expected last year however Ms Fentiman told her Budget Estimates hearing that there had been “some further feedback” from LGBTIQA+ stakeholders.

“There is now an exposure draft of the Bill where we are directly consulting with stakeholders and I hope to be able to introduce a Bill in the next few months - certainly before the end of the year,” she said.

The Attorney-General said the key purpose of the Act’s review was to ensure the state’s registration services remained “relevant, responsive and contemporary.”

“And that includes the consideration of arrangements which will allow trans and gender diverse people to have their gender identity accurately reflected in a birth certificate,” she said.

“And I do acknowledge this is such an important issue to many Queenslanders and consideration has been given to reforms that have happened in other states and the reforms as considered will bring Queensland into line with pretty much every other jurisdiction.”

Asked by Greens MP Michael Berkman whether these changes would include removing the surgery provision, Ms Fentiman said the government wanted Queenslanders’ lived identity to match their legal identity.

“Queensland is one of the only jurisdictions in the country that does require people to undergo gender reassignment surgery before changing that on their birth certificates and certainly that is one of the key reforms that we are continuing to consult on for this Bill,” she said.

The Attorney-General also confirmed that consideration was being given to how the Act could better recognise non-binary people as well.

“We are doing a lot of consultation on that issue and we are looking at the reforms in other jurisdictions, particularly Victoria and Tasmania, and that’s the work we’re doing now on the draft Bill, and we are continuing to work with stakeholders on those issues,” she said.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/qld-politics/queensland-birth-certificates-changes-to-recognise-trans-gender-diverse-people-coming-to-parliament/news-story/db53f6f1f13ac12d2245d97fea33ed22

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Justice warriors in the dock

Bettina Arndt

What a nasty shock. Campus administrators in charge of America’s kangaroo courts thought they could get away with running roughshod over the legal rights of young men accused of sexual assault. For years they’ve been doing just that, but now they’ve been put on notice that they might be in the firing line when it comes to legal action against the universities.

A series of judicial decisions have issued a warning to justice warriors who use their positions as campus officials to throw young men under the bus. One example involved officials from Lincoln-Sudbury high school, in Massachusetts, who weren’t happy when an investigation into sexual assault allegations reached inconclusive results. Rather than put this on the record, they revised the report and inserted a finding of guilt.

Campus administrators can no longer assume they can’t be sued for such biased behaviour. Courts are now saying that officials who undermine due process place themselves at risk of the loss of qualified immunity.

The recent legal judgments are part of a welcome trend for judges to disallow immunity defenses in these Title IX lawsuits, leaving campus officials thoroughly exposed.

Australia’s kangaroo courts are run by Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment (SASH) committees that have license to derail the education of accused young men. But some of these officials are now wondering if they too might face legal risks from playing God in these quasi-judicial decision-making bodies.

There’s an interesting little publication called Campus Review that is circulating to over 200,000 people in higher education. Earlier this year, an article appeared entitled Lessons from the sexual assault and harassment committee: what could go wrong?

It was written by Alan Manly, who is CEO of Group Colleges Australia representing the private higher education colleges, and Emeritus professor Greg Whateley, Deputy Vice Chancellor of the group. They wrote of a case involving a doctor from overseas who was helped by my Campus Justice lawyers, where we achieved a settlement from a major university.

The authors point out that in that case, the student moved on – the doctor is now studying for graduate medical entry to work in Australia. But Manly and Whateley ask what would have happened if that student had been well-funded and bent on revenge? The suggestion then is that he might have chosen to target the SASH committee for the appalling way he had been treated. They have great fun spelling out what that might mean for individual committee members:

‘Good practice would suggest that all committee members should seek their own legal advice… Committee members would have to pay for this legal advice. The affidavits would be done and then they would come back for more details, more evidence to support your assertion.

‘More time, more worry, more personal legal expense and you haven’t got to court yet.

‘A few sleepless nights will be had by committee members.’

Imagine the worry of knowing such affidavits could expose potential unfair treatment of an accused student.

No wonder campus officials have been caught out shredding relevant documents, as was revealed in a recent scathing US court decision against Dordt University in Iowa which talked about officials violating ‘community standards of decently, fairness or reasonableness’.

Manly and Whateley first plant the seed of doubt, and then in June follow up with another article that appears to be aimed at the SASH committees: Quasi-judicial committees vs state courts: opinion.

This time they focused on the most famous case in this territory, involving a medical student at the University of Queensland who went to the Supreme Court and successfully argued that universities had no jurisdiction to determine sexual assault cases. Judge Ann Lyons said that the university could not adjudicate criminal matters and was very critical of SASH procedures:

‘It would indeed be a startling result if a committee comprised of academics and students who are not required to have any legal training could decide allegations of a most serious kind without any of the protections of the criminal law.’

Manly and Whateley point out that the SASH committee was named as the second respondent in this case, so when the university lost and had to pay the accused’s costs as well as their own, they were also potentially liable. ‘Members of the Quasi-Judicial Committee may be well advised to review the meaning of the word “quasi” – “having some, but not all of the features of,”’ suggest the authors.

They add:

‘The feature that may be keeping some members of the Quasi-Judiciary Committee awake at night could well be the costs for a hearing in a Supreme Court with lawyers and barristers on full fee.’

The Campus Review authors are clearly stirring the possum, particularly given that such committees are likely to have ‘vicarious liability’, which means the university carries the legal can. But senior lawyers advise me that failure to provide natural justice for the accused person could create a personal liability that won’t always be indemnified by the university. And it is hardly good for career advancement to be the cause of an expensive lawsuit attracting adverse media attention for your employer.

The University of Queensland appealed the Supreme Court decision and won with the judgment stating universities are allowed to deal with sexual misconduct after an offence is proven in criminal court. But it came with a warning for the universities, that they can expect to have their disciplinary decisions subject to judicial scrutiny if they fail to ensure their internal processes are suitable – meaning they must ensure procedural fairness. Here the university’s lawyers, Minter Ellison, outline the implications for the sector.

Critically, the medical student escaped their clutches because he had graduated in the preceding year. The appeal judgment determined students who were no longer enrolled could not be subject to kangaroo courts.

The university was clearly not happy, despite this apparent win. The whole saga probably set them back with some hefty legal costs (Minter Ellison doesn’t come cheap), plus they’d attracted negative publicity over the case in the same year as UQ was receiving negative media coverage over legal battles with student activist Drew Pavlou, who had been suspended for calling out the university’s alleged ties to Beijing.

Big wigs at UQ sprang into action and conducted a review of the management of sexual misconduct cases, which decided to rein in the SASH committee, which was now relegated to the role of an advisory committee reporting to the Vice Chancellor. University regulations were reviewed to ensure ‘principles of procedural fairness’ were applied – and many other universities followed suit.

It would not surprise me if there was a more cautious mood in the higher education sector, with only one remaining member left from the original 7-person SASH group at TEQSA, the higher education regulator which pushed universities into setting up kangaroo courts.

The speculation in Campus Review about legal liability for SASH members certainly doesn’t hurt and following a number of recent expensive legal cases and significant compensation payouts, the fervour for witch-hunts against accused male students may be starting to wane.

But there are still examples of dubious university behaviour, like the case involving Andrew, the pharmacy student, which I wrote about in June. According to the Minter Ellison advice, universities are allowed to conduct disciplinary proceedings provided the case has been proved in criminal court. Andrew was found not guilty, so why did the university proceed with their inquiry? And where’s the procedural fairness in withholding his degree to ensure he remained in their clutches rather than allow him to graduate and leave the university?

We are considering our options but would love to find serious legal firepower to take this one on. Our concern is less about compensation than about exposing the inherent inconsistencies in the way the kangaroo courts are operating.

More importantly, there are critical legal issues that deserve a public airing. Like:

In law, sanctions for sexual assault have never included the disqualification of students from the academic success they have achieved.

A criminal conviction is not a bar to studying at university or being granted a degree. How then can universities lawfully withhold degrees from students accused or even convicted of sexual assault?

If an applicant for a job in the public service is found to have a criminal record, this has to be relevant to the actual job before denying the job offer. Similarly, the only misconduct that should disbar a person from their degree is plagiarism or other misbehaviour impinging on their studies.

The entire regulatory apparatus is justified by creating a safe environment for students – but by providing ‘safety’ for one group of students, universities have jeopardised the safety of accused students by using what appear to be unfair procedures which deny their legal rights.

Our universities’ SASH regulations usually deny accused students access to lawyers, let alone the right to cross-examination of witnesses and other basic legal protections which Trump imposed on campus tribunals and Biden now seeks to remove. None of our universities come close to offering the required procedural fairness demanded by the Queensland appeal judgment.

Please spread the word amongst your legal contacts and other heavy hitters who might help us tackle this ongoing injustice. The tide is turning and sooner or later, Australia is going to see a university being held accountable for these witch-hunts. When that time comes – and it’s a question of when, not if – universities will pay a heavy price.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/08/justice-warriors-in-the-dock/

Wednesday, August 03, 2022

Queensland’s Public Trustee agency faces questions over executor charges and allegations of fees for no service

They are a bloodsucking monsters. You will regret any contact with them. They are unscrupulous money grabbers

When Cora Whitfort needed to update her will, she turned to a trusted, century-old institution that makes them for free: Queensland's Public Trustee.

She wanted her estate to be divided equally among her four children and, to ensure it would go smoothly, she altered her previous will to make the Public Trustee her executor.

Cora developed dementia about two years later and when she died, "dementia" was listed on her death certificate.

That meant that the Public Trustee, as the executor, had a legal obligation to make "due enquiries" about Cora's capacity when she made her will back in 2011. 

None of her family could have predicted those enquiries would lead to almost two years of anguish for those left behind and cost the estate more than $20,000.

Her son Chris Whitfort cannot understand why the authority went to such lengths when no-one in the family was disputing the will.

"She had been share trading. She'd been driving a car, her doctor had not taken a licence off her at that time. So, there was nothing that we saw in that period that suggested there was any cognitive degradation," Mr Whitfort told ABC Investigations.

Estates lawyer Lucy McPherson said it should have been resolved much more quickly since the officer who prepared the will told the Public Trustee he would not have done so unless he was satisfied that she had capacity at the time.

"One would expect a little bit of common sense to prevail," Ms McPherson said. "To satisfy that issue of capacity on the death certificate should have taken no more than a couple of hours of additional work."

"You're looking at under $1,000 of additional work."

Crucially, the Public Trustee had received a report early on in its investigations showing that Cora had passed a cognitive test at her doctor's surgery just three weeks before she went to make her will.

Mental assessments and doctor's certificates are often requested by lawyers when an elderly person is making a will to ensure they have capacity. Cora scored 27 out of 30 on her test, indicating normal mental cognition.

The Public Trustee's current CEO, Samay Zhouand, was not in the role at the time but said its lawyers continued to investigate "because they wanted to ensure that there was no other conflicting information".

"The individuals involved can rightly feel frustrated from some of these things. Unfortunately, as a matter of law, the Public Trustee is required to fully inform the court so … [it] is fully informed and satisfied that the person had capacity," Mr Zhouand told 7.30 in his first TV interview.

Ms McPherson said the Public Trustee office's extensive research and fees were unnecessary, and potentially constituted overservicing.

"If all of those who are beneficially entitled to the estate are not agitating the validity of this document, why was it necessary to go to such great lengths? It wasn't necessary at all," she said.

The Public Trustee's lawyers chased down medical records going as far back as 1995.

They also tracked down the clerical worker who had witnessed Cora's signature on the will seven years earlier.

"It was just this merry-go-round looking for information, and they'd get a bit and that wouldn't be enough, and they'd have to get some more, and we never really knew what the end goal was," Mr Whitfort said.

Mr Zhouand said the Public Trustee had to continue investigating because there was an earlier will in which Cora had promised her house to her grandchildren.

However, because that property had been sold, both wills were effectively the same with the entire estate left to her four children, a fact that the Public Trustee itself accepted in its final application to settle the estate.

The estate was finally settled in 2019, almost two years after Cora's death. Chris Whitfort demanded the legal bill and found the estate had been charged $378 per hour for its investigation into his mother's capacity.

"I thought it was mining the estate and doing it properly, legally within the letter of the law," he said. 

The Public Trustee of Queensland is an entirely self-funded authority, receiving nothing from the state government but relying on fees, commissions and taking part of the interest from its clients in order to operate.

Mr Zhouand said: "The fees and charges of the Official Solicitor's office … are comparable to a mid-tier firm."

He also apologised to the family "if the Public Trustee has not met their expectations" and encouraged them to file a complaint.

More here:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-02/queensland-public-trustee-office-faces-questions-over-fees/101262918

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Queensland tourism and hospitality sectors plea for international workers to cover shortage

Queensland industries crippled by a worker shortage have pleaded with the federal government to throw open the border for international workers to provide much-needed employment relief.

The state’s tourism and hospitality sectors were among the hardest hit, with tens of thousands of workers needed to support various industries and many forced to trim operations due to the staffing shortfall.

Industry leaders say they have met with Anthony Albanese’s Home Affairs ministers to ask for an increase to the number of skilled and seasonal workers permitted to enter the country.

But a spokesman for Immigration Minister Andrew Giles said the government is unlikely to pull the trigger until it holds its Jobs and Skills Summit in early September.

The summit aims to “help to shape the future of Australia’s labour market”, according to the federal government, but the Queensland tourism peak body fears the widespread staff shortfall is a crisis in need of urgent relief.

“The challenge that we have is the problem is here, right now,” Queensland Tourism Industry Council chief executive Brett Fraser said. “It’s a problem that we need to address right now.”

The tourism and hospitality sector alone reported more than 5300 vacancies in June, with the industry stripped of its access to holiday visa workers throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, while the number of job advertisements was more than 35 per cent higher compared with June 2021.

“There’s segments of the employment market that just right now aren’t in Australia,” Mr Fraser said. “Getting those visitors back in the country is a really critical part to it.”

Master Builders Australia CEO Denita Wawn says “resolving the people shortage” in the construction industry is the main concern at the moment. “That is really where the crunch is,” she told Sky News Australia. “We desperately need more…
Queensland Hotels Association chief executive Bernie Hogan said jobs that once attracted hundreds of applications are now laying dormant, with the recruiting of chefs “virtually impossible”.

“If you lose a chef, it’s very, very difficult to find a replacement, which means most of them end up closing parts of their business for several days a week,” he said.

Increasing international migration should be “one of the first levers” to help the struggling workforce, according to Chamber of Commerce & Industry Queensland (CCIQ).

Policy and Advocacy manager Cherie Josephson said the Home Affairs department allowing residents from specific countries into Australia to work in industries could be a solution rather than increasing the overall cap for either skilled or seasonal workers.

“But I think when you’ve got worker shortages across a good number of industries, it would make sense to be developing a plan to attract more skilled and seasonal workers into Queensland to address the shortages across multiple industries,” she said.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/business/qld-business/queensland-tourism-and-hospitality-sectors-plea-for-international-workers-to-cover-shortage/news-story/93f166cb182073366ad1cb940cb9c03f

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Teachers to get helping hand preparing for lessons

Teachers will be given curriculum lesson plans, texts and learning materials in a bid to ease the pressure of rising workloads as the profession struggles to find enough time to prepare classes.

The rollout of new resources for NSW public teachers from term 4 comes after a national survey of 5400 primary and high school teachers found 92 per cent said there was inadequate time for their core classroom teaching duties, including critical lesson planning and reviewing students’ work.

Research by the Grattan Institute found 92 per cent of teachers said they don’t have enough time to prepare for effective classroom teaching
Research by the Grattan Institute found 92 per cent of teachers said they don’t have enough time to prepare for effective classroom teachingCREDIT:DEAN SEWELL

NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell said access to a bank of “high-quality, sequenced curriculum resources” would transform education and eliminate the need for teachers to continually reinvent lesson plans. “Teachers have told us that finding or making high-quality resources that align with the curriculum is the number one tax on their time”, she said.

“We’ve listened closely to our teaching staff, developing an online, high-quality, centralised, universally available learning materials they can draw on. This is a game-changer for teachers in NSW.”

She said the resources, which will include step-by-step guides for delivering lessons with videos and other materials, would improve student outcomes.

Recent research by the Grattan Institute revealed 88 per cent of teachers said having access to common units and assessment materials could save three hours each week and avoid having to “re-invent the wheel” by trawling the internet and come up with lesson plans.

It also found teachers could reclaim about two hours a week if extracurricular jobs such as bus duty and assemblies were handled by support staff.

Education program director at the Grattan Institute, Jordana Hunter, said giving teachers access to a suite of curriculum resources could be a “major step forward as teachers wrestle with workloads that have blown out in recent years”.

“It is important to try and reduce administrative load and lesson planning time. There is also evidence that student needs have become more complex,” Hunter said.

Teachers often draw on their own resources, sharing with colleagues, using Google, Pinterest and online marketplaces to buy educational materials, which can cause huge variation between what is taught in schools.

“Provided the resources are easy for teachers to use and can be adapted in the classroom this is a big step forward,” Hunter said.

“The government shouldn’t underestimate the amount of support needed to roll this out. Even high-quality resources can be challenging for teachers to pick up and run with unless they have professional training and learn how to use it effectively.”

Pressure on teachers has grown in the past decade, she said, as more data was collected to track student progress and there was increased emphasis on student assessment.

While some teachers have argued standard curriculum resources encroach on professional freedom, experts say this view is generally held by a minority.

Mitchell said the resources were “not about taking the creativity out of teaching, that’s what our teachers do best”.

“It’s about providing teachers with a basic recipe for student success, while allowing them to contextualise how they use the ingredients to get the best outcomes for their students.”

A NSW Department of Education review of teacher workload of more than 4000 submissions found overwhelming support curriculum resources.

Hunter said there was “major room for improvement in terms of support for teachers to implement the curriculum in the classroom. In the US, UK and Singapore more support is provided.”

In 2014, a UK government working group found teachers were frequently preparing lessons from scratch and searching the internet to find lesson plans. A pilot program was subsequently set up where schools share high-quality curriculum resources with others in their networks.

“Teachers need to focus on the learning needs of the students. The rise of the internet has allowed for a lot more sharing of resources many of which are of highly variable quality. Years ago there were more textbooks in classrooms and many commercial resources are of mixed quality,” Hunter said.

Draft new NSW syllabuses for years 3-10 English and mathematics were released earlier this year, with the English syllabus to put more focus on literacy skills amid concerns, while NSW primary schools will intensify their focus on literacy and numeracy, with the introduction of a new syllabus mandating the use of phonics.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/teachers-to-get-helping-hand-preparing-for-lessons-20220729-p5b5sg.html

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Prices increases are hurting, but the worst is yet to come

Despite widespread angst about the rising cost of living, the hard truth is that it is far from peaking.

The wind and the rain are here, but the real cyclone is due to make landfall from September. That is when many price rises in household bills will really start to bite.

Families will need to have a “spring cyclone plan” to help avoid the worst of it, and that leaves us less than a month to batten down the hatches.

The federal government insists we should expect 22 cents a litre to be tacked on to petrol prices on September 28, when the six-month temporary cut to the fuel excise announced in the March budget ends.

New Zealand recently extended its relief package until January, but there is no sign yet of that happening here.

Fuel prices have finally dropped from record highs, as COVID-19 lockdowns in China cut global demand for oil.

Average petrol prices are now hovering just below $2 a litre so, next month, they should be back up to about $2.20.

There has also been a lot of talk about some of the biggest electricity price increases households have seen, but they have not really hit home yet either.

The reality of energy bills is that most of us pay quarterly, which means that first much larger bill will not likely come until spring. It will include the usual big annual winter heating bill, so look out for a double-shock.

The cost of paying your mortgage has been rising for months, but those on fixed rates are heading towards a cliff.

Most banks have passed on Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) official interest rate increases to their variable-rate mortgage borrowers, who are now paying about an extra $7000 in annual interest on an average loan. And more rate rises are still on the way.

However, the RBA states that the share of borrowers on fixed-rate mortgages increased from 20 per cent at the start of 2020 to a peak of almost 40 per cent in early 2022. So, their mortgage increases – about an extra $20,000 a year on an average loan – will come all at once when their fixed-terms expire.

For the majority, that will be next year, however, for about 10 per cent, it will come in the next few months.

Then there is the price rise many of us may have forgotten – health insurance. Premiums normally rise in April of each year but, this year, they have been deferred by many funds as a pandemic relief measure.

As recently as last week, Bupa deferred its increase again until November, bringing it in line with the rest of the big four providers – HCF, NIB and Medibank/AHM.

However, in September and October, deferred premium increases will kick in at AIA Health, GMHBA, Frank, TUH, Teachers Health, UniHealth and Nurses & Midwives Health, and Peoplecare. So, that is about 10 million people who will see a health insurance price rise averaging 2.7 per cent, or about $126 a year for a family.

Grocery prices are rising fast, too, especially fruit and vegetables – up 5.8 per cent in just three months, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, due to the second round of east-coast floods.

For a typical household exposed to all of the above price increases, by the time spring blooms, their costs will have climbed as much as $12,000 a year, based on the following estimates:

Mortgage: up $10,000
Fuel: up $1040
Groceries: up $750
Energy: up $300
Health insurance: up $126

Many of us are already changing our spending habits to cut out non-essentials, to prepare for all the cost of living increases still to come. If you are not, now might be a good time to start.

https://www.smh.com.au/money/planning-and-budgeting/prices-increases-are-hurting-but-the-worst-is-yet-to-come-20220802-p5b6hz.html

Tuesday, August 02, 2022

Most interesting: Sea levels fall in Northern Australia

I pointed at the time of the big coral bleaching scare of a few years ago to some Indonesian research which suggested that coral bleaching on the Great Barrier reef was probably caused by low sea levels -- but all Australian sources asserted that global warming caused the bleaching. Sea levels were never mentioned

But we now have below official confirmation that sea levels DID fall around that time and that there was an "unusually EXTREME drop in sea level"

So the great bleaching scare was a crock enabled by a big cover-up

In the summer of 2015-16, one of the most catastrophic mangrove diebacks ever recorded globally occurred in the Gulf of Carpentaria.

Some 40 million mangroves died across more than 2,000 kilometres of coastline, releasing nearly 1 million tonnes of carbon — equivalent to 1,000 jumbo jets flying return from Sydney to Paris.

After six years of searching for answers, scientists have formally identified what is causing the mass destruction. They hope the discovery will help predict and possibly prevent future events.

Mangrove ecologist and senior research scientist at James Cook University (JCU) Norman Duke was behind the discovery.

Dr Duke found that unusually low sea levels caused by severe El Niño events meant mangrove trees "essentially died of thirst".

"The key factor responsible for this catastrophe appears to have been the sudden 40-centimetre drop in sea level that lasted for about six months, coinciding with no rainfall, killing vast areas of mangroves," he said.

Author assisting with data analysis and JCU researcher Adam Canning said the study's evidence for sea-level drop being the cause was found in the discovery of an earlier mass dieback in 1982, observed in satellite imagery.

"The 1982 dieback also coincided with an unusually extreme drop in sea level during another very severe El Niño event. We know from satellite data that the mangroves took at least 15 years to recover from that dieback," Dr Canning said.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-02/mangrove-dieback-gulf-of-carpentaria-scientists-find-cause/101290968

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Enshrined voice for blacks betrays ideals of liberalism

Let’s get straight to the point. A constitutionally enshrined Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voice to parliament is a terrible idea, wrong in principle and harmful in practice.

It contradicts the essence of liberalism. It’s tragic the Liberal Party doesn’t have the strength of intellect or character to oppose it in principle. Liberalism’s great historic idea, which it got from Christianity, is that all people are equal in fundamental status. Liberalism’s defining project over 200 years has been removing race and gender from civic status, from rights and obligations.

This is a magnificent vision. Humanity is utterly distinctive, meaning it has ineradicable human dignity, and utterly universal, meaning every human being is equally endowed with rights and obligations. The state has no business distinguishing one citizen from another by ethnicity, heritage or gender. Yet the voice does exactly that.

Aboriginal Australians were at times brutally mistreated in our history and many have suffered continuing disadvantage. Like most Australians I honour Aboriginal culture. None of that provides any justification for breaching the principle of a colourblind state.

I oppose a constitutionally enshrined voice not because I’m a conservative but because I’m a liberal. It is not that a voice will give Indigenous Australians too many privileges. Rather it contains the message that Aboriginal Australians are fundamentally different from other Australians.

However grandiloquent the rhetoric, or benevolent the platitudes, this is a toxic and dangerous message. It represents a terrible wrong turn in Aboriginal activism towards identity politics, which is destructive anywhere it’s prominent. Identity politics is the enemy of human dignity because, in it, virtue and vice come not from your choices and actions but from your identity, defined by race, gender or other characteristics.

The purpose of identity politics is not to solve a problem but to create permanent rage and dissatisfaction, never more than temporarily assuaged by endless rituals of apology and ideological conformity.

New Country Liberal Party senator Jacinta Price expressed this far more eloquently than I can in her magnificent maiden speech – a kind of Australian Gettysburg Address that should be read by all Australians. She said:

“It would be far more dignifying if we were recognised and respected as individuals in our own right who are not defined by our racial heritage but by the content of our character … It’s time to stop feeding into a narrative that promotes racial divide, a narrative that claims to try to stamp out racism but applies racism in doing so and encourages a racist over reaction.”

Warren Mundine, a former federal government adviser on Indigenous issues and a star Liberal candidate for a winnable seat in the 2019 election, argues a similar case. He tells me:

“I’m a liberal democrat. I love and believe in liberal democracy. The basis of liberal democracy is that everyone is equal before the law. We fought for decades to be treated as equals. Now there is no law that is discriminatory against Aborigines. Some people talk of two sovereignties – how can there be two sovereignties in one country?”

Price made the further point in a television interview that having the voice forever in the Constitution implies that Aborigines will be marginalised forever, for the whole basis of the voice is that parliamentary democracy doesn’t work for Aboriginal Australians. The voice, like all identity politics, is a partial repudiation of parliamentary democracy.

Anthony Albanese could hardly have started better as Prime Minister. His shrewdness and judgment are evident in his advancing the least damaging model possible of a voice, one that is entirely inferior to parliament and can be designed and changed by parliament. Albanese has a shrewd sense of achievable change. It is a very useful set of limitations he has put around his proposal. The best attribute of the voice in Albanese’s model is that it will have no power.

Nonetheless it is still an extremely bad idea in principle. It is also the case that no one can predict what doctrines an activist High Court might dream up in relation to a race-based political institution whose existence is guaranteed in the Constitution.

It will of course be an interesting question whether Albanese can hold the line on his preferred referendum wording. Further, the very limitations that Albanese proposes demonstrate the illogicality and self-contradiction that accompany this damaging proposal at every stage.

The voice proponents claim it is needed so Indigenous Australians can have a say on laws that affect them, as though all Australians do not have that right, and as though mainstream society today is deaf to Aboriginal voices. But at the same time it is proposed that parliament can design, amend and determine the membership, scope, functions and operations of the voice.

Parliament can do all that today if it wants to. So if there really is a practical problem of consultation to be solved, there is no reason to change the Constitution, and thereby change the very nature of citizenship for all Australians. Similarly, while it is certainly true that much policy towards Indigenous Australians has not been successful, it is just not accurate to say Aborigines have not been consulted regarding policies that affect them.

In any policy regarding remote and distinctive communities today, consultation with those communities ought to be a paramount concern for state and federal governments. Consultation in itself doesn’t necessarily solve all problems.

I was working in the Canberra press gallery when a former Aboriginal affairs minister Gerry Hand created the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. The Hawke government held out the same hopes for practical benefit from ATSIC as voice proponents hold out today. ATSIC was a failure. That doesn’t mean something better can’t be tried today. But there is no reason at all for this to go in the Constitution.

Previous Liberal prime ministers ruled out a constitutionally enshrined voice but the Liberal Party never argued the case in a sustained way and continued to lavishly fund pro-voice activities.

Here’s a tip for the Liberal Party: if you don’t enter an argument you can’t win it. When Peter Dutton appointed Julian Leeser, in every way a good person but a committed proponent of the voice, as Indigenous Australians spokesman. I presumed the Liberal Party was preparing a characteristic surrender.

Price’s maiden speech alone probably makes full surrender – that is, formal support for the voice – less likely. Instead the Liberals may adopt a fatuous neutrality, which is just a more ambiguous form of surrender. Thus liberalism declines, one defeat at a time.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/enshrined-voice-betrays-ideals-of-liberalism/news-story/743ddd147a0051bba4316608bb6dacf1

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Pauline Hanson has attacked Greens Senator Lidia Thorpe’s description of the Queen as a “coloniser”, suggesting if she doesn’t like parliament she should stop taking her $211,250 salary.

The One Nation leader has told news.com.au that Ms Thorpe was engaging in “hypocrisy” after she was forced to repeat the oath of allegience, having inserted criticism of the royal family the first time.

“Lidia Thorpe obviously does not take her elected position seriously,” said Ms Hanson.

“She’s filling a position she does not respect, to represent people she obviously despises, in an institution she does not recognise as being legitimate.

“What we saw this morning was a stunning exercise in hypocrisy, made worse by her happily taking $211,000 a year from taxpayers for work she clearly does not intend to do.”

Ms Thorpe, an outspoken Victorian Greens Senator, has previously stated that the Australian parliament has no permission to be here and that her role as an Indigenous woman was to “infiltrate” the Senate.

Asked to recite the oath of allegiance this morning, she marched towards the despatch box with her fist in the air and then stated: “I sovereign, Lidia Thorpe, do solemnly and sincerely swear that I will be faithful and I bear true allegiance to the colonising Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.”

MPs then interjected, warning that “you’re not a senator” if she failed to correctly recite the oath.

“Senator Thorpe, Senator Thorpe, you are required to recite the oath as printed on the card,’’ Senate President Sue Lines said.

Senator Thorpe then took the oath again, mispronouncing heirs as the Queen’s “hairs” and successors.

She later took to Twitter to declare: “Sovereignty never ceded.”

It’s not the first time the Greens Senator has raised concerns about colonisation.

Speaking to ABC radio in June, she argued the Australian flag represents “dispossession, massacre and genocide” and accused the media of pitting her against Liberal Senator Jacinta Price.

“The colonial project came here and murdered our people. I’m sorry we’re not happy about that,” she said.

“If people are going to get a little bit upset along the way, well that’s just part of the truth telling. The truth hurts.”

https://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/politics/scott-morrison-finally-sworn-in-as-an-mp-after-skipping-parliament-for-controversial-japan-trip/news-story/cf63b38d0386107ffa309d82cd9c1118

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Radical fix for Australian teacher shortages: Employ anyone with a degree

I did this over 30 years ago. I wanted to do High School teaching but had at the time "only" an M.A. -- no Diploma of Education. The New South Wales Department of Education gave me the heave-ho but a small regional Catholic school (at Merrylands) gave me a job teaching economics and geography.

Although the school served a very working-class area, my students got outstanding results in their final High School examinations (the Higher School Certificate, which serves as the university entrance examination)

Lawyers, engineers and IT experts would be parachuted into classrooms to address crippling staff shortages under radical reforms that include pay rises of up to 40 per cent for the very best teachers.

The federal government’s Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership has laid out a blueprint for fixing the teacher shortage by recruiting university-educated workers to earn while they learn on the job to teach school students.

The plan includes a six to 12-month “paid internship’’ for career-changers to earn cash while upgrading their credentials with a two-year masters degree in education.

The reform recommendations from AITSL – the nation’s official agency for education quality – will be the focus of an emergency workforce summit with federal Education Minister Jason Clare and his state and territory counterparts next week.

AITSL also wants to improve the quality of university training for teachers.

Mr Clare said ministers would “pick the brains’’ of individual teachers and principals invited to the meeting. “We’ve got a teacher shortage right across the country at the moment,’’ he told federal parliament on Monday.

“There are more kids going to school now than ever before … but there are fewer people going on to university to study teaching.’’

Mr Clare said the number of teachers in training had dropped 16 per cent over the past decade.

“More and more teachers are leaving the profession early, either because they feel burnt out, worn out, or for other reasons’’ he said.

Mr Clare said the federal government was offering bursaries worth up to $40,000 for the “best and brightest’’ school leavers to enrol in a teaching degree.

He said the government’s High Achievers Teachers program would encourage more mid-career professionals to switch to the classroom.

AITSL chief executive Mark Grant said the nation’s top teachers – recognised as “highly accomplished’’ or “lead” teachers – are now being paid up to 10 per cent more than other teachers.

But he said lead teachers overseas were paid up to 40 per cent more than their colleagues, to prevent them quitting the profession for higher-paying jobs in other fields.

Translated to Australia, a 40 per cent pay rise would involve a $50,000 bonus to boost teacher salaries above $175,000. “The biggest influence on student learning is the quality of teaching,’’ Mr Grant told The Australian.

AITSL will propose the higher pay for lead teachers at the ministerial roundtable, which will also include teacher unions as well as Catholic and private school organisations.

The AITSL proposal – including a plan to fast-track other professionals into classroom teaching – is based on its submission to the Productivity Commission’s review of the National School Reform Agreement.

“There is evidence that increasing the level of pay for high-level positions would make the profession more attractive than more expensive generalised pay rises,’’ the submission states.

“Australia is facing a critical shortage of teachers due to a number of factors including growing school enrolments, a drop in the number of individuals enrolled in teaching degrees, an ageing workforce and a percentage of teachers leaving the profession to embark on different careers each year.

“Clear action is needed to ensure that a career in teaching is an attractive one.’’

AITSL notes that only 1025 teachers – or 0.3 per cent of the workforce – have been certified as lead teachers.

Education Minister Jason Clare says he doesn’t want Australia to be a country where life opportunities “depend on…
It recommends that states and territories create more “master teacher’’ roles, modelled on Singapore’s high-performing education system.

“These teachers would retain a significant classroom teaching load, but also be responsible for coaching other teachers to improve practice, supervising pre-service and beginning teachers, and leading initiatives to improve pedagogy within and across schools,’’ it states.

“Their pay should recognise their expertise and reward them for taking leadership roles in the system.’’

AITSL recommends that professionals such as engineers, scientists, lawyers, accountants and IT workers be allowed to work in schools for six to 12 months in paid internships, as part of their two-year master’s degree in education.

“The implementation of paid internships or residencies encourages high-quality candidates to complete an ITE (teaching) qualification, reducing the financial disincentives of undertaking study, including a lack of income,’’ it states.

“At the same time, internships increase the time spent in the classroom prior to full-time employment.

“Structured time spent in the classroom supports the pre-service teachers’ skill development in curriculum delivery and critical skills including classroom management and student engagement.’’

AITSL also wants to set up a national board to review university degrees for student teachers, to ensure “quality and consistency’’ of teacher training.

The AITSL blueprint for reform coincides with action from the NSW government to cut red tape for teachers in the nation’s biggest schooling system.

An extra 200 administrative staff will be sent into schools in term four to relieve teachers of some of the paperwork that principals warn is causing burnout.

NSW will also release high-quality, sequenced curriculum resources to help teachers plan for lessons.

NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet said the biggest tax on teachers’ time was sourcing or producing high-quality teaching resources.

“We want to ease that workload by providing online access to universally available learning curriculum materials they can draw from to free up lesson planning time each week,’’ Mr Perrottet said.

The Australian Primary Principals Association criticised the new national curriculum last week, declaring it was “impossible to teach’’.

The Australian Education Union has also blasted the curriculum, describing teachers’ workload as “excessive, unsustainable and unrealistic’’.

It says the two-year review of the curriculum, which had 20 per cent of its content cut in April, had failed to “declutter’’ the teaching document.

“Feedback from Queensland, which is the only jurisdiction to implement the Australian curriculum in full, suggests that the changes have not succeeded in this aim,’’ the AEU states in its submission to the Productivity Commission.

“The AEU has had numerous reports from teachers in Queensland that they are concerned about the workload implications of implementing the identified curriculum changes, and that there has been very little reduction of the cluttered curriculum, which is unlikely to improve student outcomes’’.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/pay-rise-of-40-per-cent-for-top-teachers-to-be-raised-at-ministers-meeting-to-fix-staff-shortages/news-story/3ebc2072872d9ba251f0e4932bfb2b5f

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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August 1, 2022

Indigenous voice ‘a precondition’ for Closing the Gap: Anthony Albanese

Wotta lotta ... It's fine talk but NOTHING will close the gap. Talk certainly won't. Many governments both State and Federal have tried everything conceivable to equalize black and white living standards but the gaps remain. A bigger police prsesence in Aboriginal communities to protect the women and children would help but that is about all

A voice to parliament is a “precondition” for making Aboriginal communities safer and closing the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, Anthony Albanese says.

After revealing at the weekend his plans for a simple “yes or no” referendum on constitutional enshrinement, the Prime Minister told The Australian a voice would bring an even greater focus to the issues of violence, life expectancy, education and health affecting Indigenous people.

It is the strongest argument Mr Albanese has made to date on the practical need for a voice to improve the wellbeing and safety of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, as critics of the proposal accuse it of being “symbolism.”

One of the nation’s foremost Aboriginal leaders, June Oscar, has backed the Prime Minister and sees the voice to parliament as an issue that women can champion for the sake of their children.

Speaking after the Garma Festival on Sunday, Mr Albanese said he understood concerns that practical outcomes for Aboriginal communities would come second to the voice, but said the referendum was “far from being an either-or proposition.”

“I believe that a voice to parliament and lifting up the status and respect of First Nations communities is a precondition for getting better practical outcomes and closing the gap in all areas,” Mr Albanese told The Australian on Sunday.

“I understand that people have been let down by promises, and that people want more than just symbolism for its own sake.

“There are legitimate concerns about practical reconciliation, and about the need to close the gap whether it be on life expectancy, educational outcomes, living standards, health outcomes – they all need addressing.

“But there will be a greater focus on them when there is a voice to the parliament that has to be listened to.”

A proposed model for the voice overseen by Indigenous academics Marcia Langton and Tom Calma has 24 members, 12 male and 12 female, including at least five people from remote communities.

Dr Oscar said the voice was a chance for Aboriginal women, the backbone of their communities, to “come to the fore”. She hoped non-Indigenous women would help Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women in the yes campaign.

Dr Oscar is a Bunuba woman who led a long battle with bureaucracy to restrict alcohol in the Fitzroy Valley in the far north of Western Australia. She and other Aboriginal women took action in response to alcohol-fuelled violence and record numbers of Aboriginal suicides.

When the last bottle shop in the valley was shut down in 2009, Dr Oscar and other Aboriginal women helped researchers uncover one of the world’s highest rates of foetal alcohol spectrum disorder – permanent brain damage – among local children.

“Everything that we have been able to achieve has been a fight,” Dr Oscar said. “We can’t and we should not have to keep fighting because the fight is exhausting, and it discourages good people from getting involved. It is a struggle to get our issues listened to and acted on – you are dealing with layers and layers of bureaucracy.

“Will the voice provide relief from the fight? If it genuinely engages Aboriginal people in the design of it, I believe it will.”

Dr Oscar said she had more views in common than differences with senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who has indicated she may campaign for a no vote in the referendum. The Coalition parliamentarian from Alice Springs has criticised the voice as symbolism and urged Labor to prioritise the reduction of family violence in Aboriginal communities.

“Our starting points might be different but we want the same things,” Dr Oscar said on Sunday.

Opposition spokesman on Indigenous affairs Julian Leeser supports an enshrined voice and believes its chances of succeeding are higher if a model is settled before a referendum. He has urged Labor to provide more detail soon.

On Sunday, Mr Albanese said he wanted the design of the voice “to be owned by the whole of parliament … There will be more detail in the discussion that will take place to pass the proposal for a referendum to take place.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/indigenous-coice-a-precondition-for-closing-the-gap-anthony-alabanese/news-story/9b76b705057de2fafd6af0dc40d7836a

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Gas price squeeze pushes industry to the brink

A NSW manufacturer said paying emergency rates for wholesale gas has crippled its operations as customers were unwilling to cover extra costs amid an ongoing energy crisis.

Magnesium producer Causmag International, which bought gas from collapsed retailer Weston Energy, is paying four times normal rates five weeks after Weston folded and is unable to secure a market offer from its supplier.

The manufacturer, based in the central NSW town of Young, said it had introduced a surcharge to its customers on magnesium oxide products to help cover the cost of paying $44 a gigajoule for its gas after it was forced to find emergency supplies through the retailer of last resort scheme.

However, less than 10 per cent of clients accepted the charge.

“They are able to source alternative products, including those made overseas in China, without such gas surcharges,” Causmag managing director Aditya Jhunjhunwala said.

“Our customers are unable to oblige us when we are faced with a 350 per cent increase in the price of natural gas. Our customer base built over decades of hard work is slowly getting wiped out.”

Fixing the gas market may involve the federal government playing a role in underwriting volumes through LNG imports, according to UBS, while industry subsidies for large manufacturers could also be on the table.

The Causmag chief said he was still hunting for better gas deals.

UBS lifted its 2022 forecast for east coast contract gas prices on Monday by 14 per cent to $10.20 a gigajoule and expects a further jump by a third to $13.50 a gigajoule by 2025 with new sources of gas supply remaining scarce or very expensive via imported LNG.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/mining-energy/gas-price-squeeze-pushes-industry-to-the-brink/news-story/946cd60fc89f9a86faabeac0f7a94228

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New-age thinking is verging on politically correct bullying, writes Peta Credlin. Football teams should play sport rather than play politics, and a war memorial should honour the dead rather than make political statements

With an NRL team insisting on players wearing LGBTQ pride jerseys last Thursday and Melbourne’s plan for the Shrine of Remembrance to be lit up today in rainbow colours – now abandoned – are you getting the impression that getting on with the job is now playing second fiddle to political virtue signalling?

Add in the Melbourne Lord Mayor Sally Capp, who has now made official a push to junk January 26 as the day we celebrate Australia, and it’s hard to not be disappointed in our so-called leaders who would rather strike a pose than meet their responsibilities.

That’s before we even get to Labor’s new president of the Senate announcing that, because she’s an atheist, the parliamentary day should no longer start with the Lord’s Prayer; although naturally, the acknowledgement of country should stay, even though not all of us are indigenous.

Surely it’s the job of a football team to play sport rather than to play politics; and of a war memorial to honour the dead rather than to make political statements; and of a local government to stick to its job of rates, roads and rubbish — and in Melbourne’s case, clean up a grubby city that’s clogged with useless bike paths and empty offices, rather than show off its political correctness?

But the fact that banks love to advertise that they don’t fund coal mines; and that power companies keep advertising how green they’re going to become; and that even the military stress the importance of climate change, and diversity and inclusion, shows how rampant this new-age thinking, verging on politically correct bullying, has become.

Last week even gay veterans told radio stations that they were embarrassed about the politicisation of the Shrine.

And ultra-woke rugby league bosses had to belatedly acknowledge that Manly’s seven Islander players were within their rights to refuse to wear a Pride jersey at odds with their religious or cultural beliefs — which they might have understood if they had bothered to consult them in the first place.

After Melbourne radio host Neil Mitchell said “no disrespect to the gay community but the rainbow flag can be divisive”, Shrine chief executive Dean Lee questioned “whether the gay pride flag and colours continue to be divisive” because the ADF had accepted gay people since the early ’90s.

But, surely, that’s the point?

With no barriers based on sexuality, why consider splashing a memorial to our war dead with a political statement of equality when that equality has long been enshrined in law?

Sadly, the march of identity politics means that it’s no longer enough to be perfectly accepting of minority rights.

Increasingly, militant minorities are now demanding that their right to be recognised trumps others’ rights to have a different view.

As a nation, we have never been more diverse, yet we’re now constantly lectured about the need to embrace diversity.

We’ve never been more equal but we’re incessantly told we need to divide ourselves over race or sexuality in order to achieve “true” equality.

And we’ve never been more tolerant, yet we demand intolerance in order to prove it.

Instead of being proud of the easygoing, decent and welcoming society we self-evidently are, we’re told to despise ourselves on account of so-called phobias that are not borne out by the everyday lived experience of most Australians.

Last week, millions of Australians who voted to support marriage equality looked at a footy club forcing footballers to wear gay pride jerseys, and lighting up war memorials with rainbow colours as a bridge too far, and the entry of identity politics into places where it wasn’t warranted, or welcome.

Along with a federal government wanting to divide us by race with its proposed indigenous Voice to the parliament, despite a record number of individual indigenous voices in it, there’s a yawning gulf between woke Australia and the rest of us.

Sooner or later, a backlash is coming from good and decent people who have had enough of being told what to say, do and think.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/peta-credlin-relentless-push-for-inclusivity-is-what-divides-us/news-story/8d1bd0a0ae3a809dd1365b62666f3015

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Another statue down? ‘Caucasian male’ statues face cull in Tasmanian premier row

Hobart is poised to tear down the statue of a former premier, while flagging a broader purge, after a report found the city had too many monuments to “Caucasian males”.

The city council has been considering the removal of the large Franklin Square sculpture of William Crowther, a naturalist, surgeon and premier who, in 1869, was accused of severing and stealing the skull from an Aboriginal corpse.

A new council report, to be voted on this week, recommends spending $20,000 to remove the statute to storage, pending finding it another home, and $50,000 on “interpretive elements onsite”.

The report complains there are too many white men memorialised across the city and recommends a new policy be adopted to guide further statue “additions and removals”.

Aboriginal groups welcomed the moves, but some historians expressed concern the council was “opening the floodgates” to revision or erasure of colonial history.

Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania chairman Michael Mansell said removing the Crowther statue was long overdue, but that countenancing later placing it elsewhere was illogical.

“If the reason you’re taking a statue down is because what the person did was so offensive, you couldn’t put it up in any other context because people will remember what that guy stood for,” Mr Mansell said.

He was unaware of any other Hobart statues the Aboriginal community would want removed, but believed further decisions should be based on “balance” and “scale”.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/hobart-poised-to-remove-franklin-square-sculpture-of-former-premier-william-crowther/news-story/dc940d28281bea91a3af2c1bc648cc57

A corrupt corruption watchdog: Former Logan City councillor demands apology over dropped fraud charges that 'destroyed lives'

A former Logan councillor has described how fraud charges laid in the wake of an investigation by Queensland's corruption watchdog destroyed her life and led to a barrage of public abuse.

Trevina Schwarz was one of eight former Logan City councillors who in 2019 were charged with fraud and sacked following a Crime and Corruption Commission (CCC) investigation.

The charges were dropped last year due to insufficient evidence.

Ms Schwarz said the ordeal took a major toll on her family, saying it copped relentless abuse from the public.

"My son was abused in Bunnings and asked to come outside so the fellow could fight him. It really was awful," Ms Schwarz told ABC Radio Brisbane.

"You'd walk in a home where you'd lived for 30 years and people would look at you and point as you were walking down the street.

"You couldn't escape from it. It was on the news, it was on the radio, it was in the papers.

"It absolutely destroyed my life. And the toll that it also takes on your family is huge."

Her comments came after leading Queensland corruption fighter Tony Fitzgerald yesterday handed down a report into how corruption is investigated in the state.

It included a string of recommendations. Among them was the need for the CCC to consult with the state's Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) before laying charges to avoid "unwarranted impact" and to rebuild public confidence.

The report also found the Logan City Council probe damaged the public's perceptions of the CCC.

When Ms Schwarz received a call from the CCC notifying her that the charges had been dropped, she initially "thought it was a hoax".

She said the CCC had failed to comply with its own rules during its investigation of the Logan City Council.

"Although there should be great and high protection for whistleblowers, first and foremost, you need to ensure that those complaints are factually correct and not malicious."

While she is pleased with the recommendations in Mr Fitzgerald's report, Ms Schwarz is hoping for an apology from the state government after cabinet meets on Monday.

"Wrongfully charging us has destroyed our lives, our careers and the reputational harm is irreparable," she said. "We're all disappointed that we have not received an apology, a meaningful apology. That should be forthcoming," Ms Schwarz said.

Former councillors considering legal action

Ms Schwarz also told ABC Radio Brisbane the eight sacked Logan City councillors were considering pursuing compensation from the state government.

"We've all been looking at it with the legal team but we're just not too sure how that's going to go at the moment," she said.

Ms Schwarz said she had been unable to find work since being sacked from the council, despite the charges against her being discontinued.

"You've got all of this this baggage that's sitting on you, that you've been charged with fraud. They're not going to employ you," she said. "The reputational harm is irreparable and the stigma is going to stay."

Ms Schwarz said she would never consider running for council again after the ordeal.

The inquiry's report said it would not revisit or re-litigate the investigation of the Logan council.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk did not comment on whether the former councillors would be issued an apology. "No-one would like to see what happened to those particular councillors happen again," Ms Palaszczuk said. "That report is very clear about a path forward … so we would probably not see the likes of that happening again. That would be my expectation."

When asked about the Logan councillors, Queensland Agricultural and Rural Communities Minister Mark Furner said the cabinet ministers would need to review the report before decisions were made.

"It is important that I, myself, and every other cabinet minister has an appraisal of what the report means and will make a decision based around those outcomes," he said.

"I think there is an opportunity now, where the report will identify significant changes to the way the CCC operates. "We need to work through those changes, what it needs.

"But what we do need is stable leadership in terms of the way the CCC operates into the future with the chair."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-10/logan-city-former-councillor-trevina-schwarz-wants-ccc-apology/101318236

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The authentic Church is not Woke

Matthew Littlefield (Reverend Matthew Littlefield is the pastor of New Beith Baptist Church. He is an ordained Minister in the Baptist Union of Queensland.)

Woke: A collectivist mindset that requires absolute, unquestioning obedience to the current thing, to display that you are a good person.

The Australian Church is having a massive identity crisis.

How should it identify? Should it be a wing of the Greens and put all its resources behind the environmentalist movement? Should it be a wing of the medical industry and act as a wholesaler regurgitator of medical advice? Should it be a wing of the Back Lives Matter movement and lecture its followers and others about a whole host of sins that are imagined by this radical identity group? Should it be the religious and political arm of Critical Race Theory and evaluate itself according to an increasingly depressing checklist of made-up misdemeanours, like some twisted quest to unravel the hidden sins that David might have been referring to (Psalm 19:12)? What should it be?

Much of the modern Church has gotten itself caught between the rambling and shifting priorities of the various causes of the modern progressive movement and in the process, it has forgotten what it was always meant to be: different to the world.

Some fellow pastors and I found ourselves caught in the middle of just this sort of issue last year when we penned an open letter to the Prime Minister called the Ezekiel Declaration.

The intention of this Declaration was to ask the Prime Minister to do more to publicly protect the Church and society from vaccine passports. At the time it was written, they had not yet been enacted in Australia. They had been discussed, the infrastructure was in place to manage them (QR codes), and they had already been put into use in other countries. The writing was on the wall. However, some of our fellow churchmen, from various denominations, took issue with our letter. Their main concerns were that we were criticising a policy that did not yet exist (it came into place about two weeks later), our tone was too aggressive, which is laughable, and thirdly we did not do enough to encourage people to follow the dominant advice at the time and go and get vaccinated.

Many of the leaders or men who criticised us would not have viewed themselves as Woke. However, let’s review what Woke means: It is ‘a collectivist mindset that requires absolute, unquestioning obedience to the current thing, to display that you are a good person’. In other words it is a mindset prone to virtue signalling.

When you take this definition into account, then I think you could say that what they did was Woke. Because those of us who wrote the Declaration did not show absolute, unquestioning obedience to the current thing, we were therefore not good people, or at the very least, we were troublesome people. Therefore, we needed to be rebuked and people needed to be warned not to associate with us. Those churchmen who criticised our efforts made sure that they did signal their virtue on the current thing, which at the time was getting the vaccine and telling everyone to do the same thing. This is, by the above definition, a very clear example of Woke. Even if some of those who participated in that public rebuke were not aware of that.

Those of us who wrote the Declaration and all who signed it (over 26,000 people) took a different approach. We simply wanted to advocate for liberty of conscience. For people to be free to choose, and by free we meant free from all coercion and pressure.

Liberty of conscience is a vital Christian ideal and has had an incredible impact on Western society. From very early on in the Church strong believers have advocated for the right for people to be free to make up their mind on disputable issues. As one church leader said, ‘Conscience is therefore the shield of the human person, the root of all civil liberties, the source of a nation’s happiness.’ Another Christian leader, Vishal Mangalwadi, put it more bluntly, ‘A man without a conscience is a beast.’ To force a person to override their conscience is to break that man in immeasurable ways.

Over the last year or more this kind of coercion, this spirit-breaking coercion, has been reigning supreme in our society and forcing people to choose between sovereignty over their body and their incomes. It has been restricting their ability to move around or leave the country, even going so far as to determine whether they had control over their own health. This was all foreseeable and hence myself, Tim Grant, and Warren McKenzie published an open letter beseeching the Prime Minister to make sure people were not put in this position by government policy.

Of course, for whatever reason, many leaders in the Church felt the need to criticise our approach and to publicly make sure Christians were encouraged to signal their support on the ‘current thing’. They may have seen what they did differently. But what we saw is a Church that had forgotten the vital importance of liberty of conscience. A Church that had forgotten that its role in the world is sometimes to call out tyrants for going too far in what they decree for people. ‘Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow (Isaiah 1:17).’

Many of the responses we got from ordinary people and average Christians told us they saw things as we did. They were just amazed someone was saying it is okay not to get behind the current thing.

This is not just an internal Christian dispute either. The concept of liberty, or freedom, of conscience flowered in the Church and spread to the whole of society and gave birth to many of the grand liberties that we enjoy in the world today.

The freedoms that you and I enjoy are not accidents, they did not appear in a vacuum. Many of them came from the heart of the gospel itself, which says for example: your body was bought for a price, the price Jesus paid, therefore, God is Lord of the body, not the government, not the state. What a liberating idea! This idea changed our culture from one where slave owners could do whatever they wanted with the bodies of their slaves, into a culture where slavery itself is now anathema. You all, believers or not, have benefited from this Christian principle.

Tim and I were so shocked at the Church’s lack of advocacy on this issue that we decided to write an entire book about it, titled: DEFENDING CONSCIENCE: How Baptists Reminded the World to Defy Tyranny. As Baptist ministers we are well aware of how this concept of freedom of conscience became a part of the Western legal system. Namely, because it originally came out of the Baptist emphasis on how the Church should relate to both the government and to their fellow churchmen and women.

In our view, so much of the Church has gotten caught up in modern agendas and causes, that it has forgotten its wonderful legacy of bringing positive change into society. Maybe some of our critics might see what they did differently. They are welcome to expand on why they did what they did. But in our view, the most important thing in the last couple of years has not been signalling agreement with the current thing. It has been to make sure we did not forget who we are supposed to be just because we are in a time of crisis.

This is a common problem today, and there are many ways in which the culture would like to dictate to Christians about how we should apply our principles. This pressure comes from inside and outside the church, because there is a general, and in some cases wilful, ignorance of what Christians believe and why. (I discussed this on a panel with Bernie Finn, Alexandra Marshall, and Dave Pellowe on this week’s episode of Pellowe Talk, which you can view here).

Principles are not just meant for the easy times, but for the times when they are hard to apply, because it is costly. We believed last year that our society forgot itself in a time of great anxiety, and maybe some elements of the Church did too. You might see it differently. But if you want to hear our detailed view you can pick up a copy of Defending Conscience. It has been published by Locke Press and is available now.

Many people today have a distaste for the modern church because it feels like just another wing of the progressive party. The Good News is not very much at all of the larger Church is focused on signalling their virtue on the current thing. Many of us are pushing back, some of us even loudly.

The authentic Church is not woke.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/08/the-authentic-church-is-not-woke/

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Tata Steel warns of no choice but to turn to Russian coking coal if Australian supply dwindles

One of the world’s biggest steelmakers will tell the Queensland government a failure to develop new coking coal supplies will inevitably lead Indian producers to buy cheaper supplies from Russia despite sanctions on Moscow.

Tata Steel, which has vowed to stop trading with Russia, will use a meeting with the Palaszczuk government to say the state could double its coking coal exports to India over the next decade to meet surging demand for steel.

However, a failure to bring on new volumes of coal will inevitably result in other Indian steelmakers opting to buy cheaper Russian volumes, meaning Australia misses out on an extra $4bn in annual export revenues from one of its largest trading partners.

“The alternative to Australian coal is Russian coal. I know currently Russia is geopolitically not the best place to buy coal from, but going forward that is an option that Indian companies have,” Tata Steel chief executive TV Narendran told The Australian.

“Tomorrow I have meetings with the Queensland government to look at what we can do together with the mining industry in Australia and the steel industry in India to build a deeper relationship and to increase trade. It‘s about how does the government and industry work together to expand,” said Mr Narendran.

“Metallurgical coal is going to be operating for quite some time to come, particularly in India. I think … the conversation with the government is more about how can we plan better for growth.”

The meeting comes at a sensitive time for the Queensland government, after being slammed by producers for introducing a major windfall royalty tax, prompting warnings that investment in the coal sector could be slashed.

Approvals for new coal mines have also emerged as test for both state and federal governments as pressure grows to limit fossil fuel expansions in Australia.

India has controversially maintained economic relations with Russia despite its invasion of Ukraine in February and increased its imports of coal from Russia in July due to the cut-price supplies on offer during the war.

Tata Steel relied on Queensland for 60 per cent of its coking coal needs, representing a $4.3bn trade between the two countries, and said there was a huge opportunity for the state’s miners if they were able to boost supplies.

“Indian steel consumption or production is going to double in the next 10 years, which means there’s an opportunity for Australia to double its exports of coking coal shipments to India over the next 10 years,” Mr Narendran told The Australian.

“So there‘s a great opportunity for the metallurgical coal industry in Australia to invest and grow in free markets like India.”

The Tata boss, visiting Brisbane for the first time since before the Covid-19 pandemic, said India’s trade with Russia initially started after wild weather in 2019 cut Australia’s exports of the steelmaking material.

“Last time, it was more about how can we have more reliability in terms of supply and what can we tap into to help that context because at that specific point we have variables – that if the supplier is not reliable and India is so dependent on Australian coal – that India will be forced to look at alternate options,” he said.

“Honestly at that time, there was an active movement in India both from the government and industry to look at Russian coal. And in fact that‘s how the Russian coal trade started three of four years back, because supplies from Australia were a bit erratic. And the Russians are offering good quality PCI coal from Vladivostok in the eastern side of Russia. It was easier to get coals from them. So that was the genesis of the Russia idea.”

Russia produces about 75 million tonnes of metallurgical coal a year, according to recent Macquarie figures, and about 360 million tonnes of thermal coal. About 40 per cent of its coking coal is sent into export markets, along with just under half of its thermal coal production.

Its decision to invade Ukraine has again redrawn trade routes and further boosted soaring prices and competition for supplies, including among some of Australia’s oldest customers in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/steel-major-warns-of-no-choice-but-to-turn-to-russian-coking-coal-if-queensland-supply-dwindles/news-story/2a1e755b266fb6ed998f76ed253541f1

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The Greens are the biggest threat to reconciliation

What do senators Pauline Hanson and Lidia Thorpe have in common? Not a lot it would seem although both routinely engage in haughty displays, dog-and-pony shows in the Senate chamber. But there is one issue that unites them. They are both opposed to the constitutional recognition of First Australians.

In May 2017, 250 delegates from the 100-plus indigenous nations gathered at Uluru for the National Constitution Convention. It was the largest assembly of First Nations leaders in recorded Australian history and at the end of it came the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

The Uluru Statement is a 440-word invitation from First Australians for us all to join them on a journey of reconciliation. It was presented to the then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and then Opposition leader, Bill Shorten in traditional artistic form.

The statement, in part, reads:

We call for the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution.

Makarrata is the culmination of our agenda: the coming together after a struggle. It captures our aspirations for a fair and truthful relationship with the people of Australia and a better future for our children based on justice and self-determination.

We seek a Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history.

In 1967 we were counted, in 2017 we seek to be heard. We leave base camp and start our trek across this vast country. We invite you to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future.

The Makarrata Commission is sometimes loosely associated with a treaty, but it is more than that. Makarrata is a word from the Yolngu language in northeast Arnhem Land that has many layered meanings, but in the context of the Uluru Statement, it is a meeting or meetings where a negotiated settlement is reached through truth telling.

Voice. Treaty. Truth.

As the delegates met at Uluru to prepare a united message, seven of them walked out in a huff. They appeared before the media later that day. They were all from New South Wales and Victoria. One of them, Lidia Thorpe, then a Greens candidate for the Victorian Legislative Assembly in the seat of Northcote said, “We as sovereign First Nations people reject constitutional recognition. We do not recognise occupying power or their sovereignty, because it serves to disempower, and takes away our voice.

“We need to protect and preserve our sovereignty. “We demand a sovereign treaty with an independent sovereign treaty commission, and appropriate funds allocated.”

The Referendum Council in Uluru acknowledged the process was a difficult one but continued on. Anangu delegate and Uluru resident, Alison Hunt reminded the assembly that the conference was being held on sacred land, “where you are talking and standing on, and visitors need to understand that.

“We have to be united,” she said.

The Australian Greens were the first political party to endorse the Uluru Statement from the Heart. But in 2020 when Lidia Thorpe filled the casual vacancy left by former party leader, Richard di Natale, that changed.

In election mode at the National Press Club in April, Greens leader Adam Bandt, a white Australian lawyer turned politician, determined the sequence must be altered. Not voice, treaty and truth but truth, treaty and voice.

“If we really want success to happen,” Bandt said at the NPC. “It’s a mistake to do it in any other order. We need to do it in that order where we tell the truth, then strike a treaty, and that will put us in the best position for reforms like the Voice to succeed.”

That remark is the very definition of paternalism, up-ending an agreement made by the overwhelming majority of Australia’s indigenous leaders, seeking to impose the narrow view of an absolute minority.

With Thorpe as the deputy leader of the party in the Senate, there has been another element to the party’s factional colour chart of red greens and blue greens. Now there is the group led by Thorpe known colloquially as “Blak Greens.”

The Greens’ shift came amid allegations of bullying and harassment of a number of its indigenous members who wanted to stay true to the Uluru Statement. In an op-ed for Nine Media published in the wake of Bandt’s NPC address, James Blackwell, a Wiradjuri man and researcher at Australian National University, wrote that followers of the Uluru Statement were no longer welcome in the Greens.

Blackwell claimed he had suffered bullying and harassment from senior party members including preselected federal candidates and this led him to resign his membership of the party.

The Chief Executive Officer of the Victorian Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation, Jill Gallagher, AO, a Gunditjmara woman also resigned from the party believing, “the Greens had no right to reorder the sequence of the Uluru Statement.”

As Indigenous Minister Linda Burney has said repeatedly, a great deal of community consultation is required before a referendum question goes before the parliament but the greatest threat to a successful referendum leading to an Indigenous voice comes from the Left.

The question is, when the parliament considers and votes on the wording of the referendum question, will Lidia Thorpe and Pauline Hanson be voting as one in an attempt to reject it in the Senate? Adam Bandt has said he won’t block the legislation but the party’s position on the Uluru Statement has swung wildly in the space of five years.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/the-greens-are-the-biggest-threat-to-reconciliation/news-story/d0f0c31665c793da27274490ec8469c9

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Grievance politics will never reconcile

It serves a useful purpose for the aggrieved

Andrew L. Urban

Recognition, reconciliation, closing the gap, a Voice … all bundled into a grievance package squeezing the guilt out of contemporary Australia.

That’s how it looks to a migrant of 56 years, some of whose journalism took him to the red centre of Australia for face-to-face interviews with Aboriginal artists. Later, face-to-face interviews with Aboriginals in film and theatre. More recently, face-to-face interviews with reformed and reforming Aboriginals in the cities for the virtual mentoring project What Makes A Man A Man.

These experiences are not unique. Most Australians interact with Aboriginals almost every day, some in professional settings, some in the trades, and some in the community. One of my most recent articles was about the Aboriginal man languishing in a South Australian prison for almost 40 years for a murder conviction that has the characteristics of a miscarriage of justice. (No shortage of white Australians in this category, either.)

To this migrant, Aboriginal Australians have always seemed recognised, and fully integrated. Australian society has evolved and matured; the past was another country, as it were. This new country provides vast resources for health care to everyone, black or white, saving babies from early death, curing sickness, filling teeth, and mending broken bones for all.

As well, I have seen this new country offer abject apologies (plural) for the wrongs of the colonial past. None of those apologies have been accepted, as I noted in my Spectator Australia September 2017 cover story Apology Unaccepted.

After all the apologies and ‘sorry’ days, I asked, ‘Where was the day that marked that vital, redemptive response to “sorry”, the sign that the “sorry” was heard and accepted, that those wrongs, while never forgotten, would now be laid to rest and “forgiven”?’

That’s what reconciliation looks like. That’s how it could be achieved. Overnight. Would the Voice voice that acceptance?

Relatively few in the Indigenous community count garish angry activists, such as Senator Lidia Thorpe, among their number. It seems to me these are often the same people who demand reconciliation while simultaneously refusing to reconcile. They do so while exaggerating or misplacing the disadvantage they claim all Aboriginals suffer. How often do the loudest city-based activists visit a remote community and listen to the women there? How do they propose to help stop the daily domestic violence, child sexual abuse, alcoholism, and the failure of remote education?

The acclaimed Hannah Arendt wrote about this subject, and more recently Douglas Murray quoted her in his book The Madness of Crowds, in the chapter titled Forgiveness:

‘In the case of the worst historical wrongs the victims and perpetrators die out – the one who gave offence and the person to whom offence was done. Some descendants may remember for a time. But as the insult and grievance fade from generation to generation those who hold on to this grievance are often regarded as displaying not sensitivity or honour but belligerence.’

Exhibit A: Lidia Thorpe.

The well-meaning nature of Australians has been milked dry over the years, of goodwill, vast and benign resources, and the actual, ‘living the reconciliation’ experience with Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders.

Outsiders (eg migrants) often see a situation or social construct more clearly than those who are born into it. So excuse me, but that is my observation

https://spectator.com.au/2022/08/grievance-politics-will-never-reconcile/